Independence Day buffet

You still gotta eat, am I right?

• The spread, the Wildcat and the triple option – it’s all the same to the NFL, I guess.  Falcons coach Mike Smith doesn’t like all that newfangled craziness:  “I hope it doesn’t go as wild as it does in college,” Smith said. “Even though many teams are doing it with nonquarterbacks, spread offense is the prevalent offense in college. It can go a number of different directions. It’s option football. It’s ability to space and have four wide receivers and two running backs. It does create different scenarios than we are used to in the NFL.”
• Meet the invisible man of the Tennessee assistant coaching staff.
• Israel Troupe’s four career catches currently ranks third on the Georgia receiving corps list.
• Maybe there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this story, but it sure is getting repeated a lot lately.
• Video games killed the college football star.

Merry Independence Day!

This has nothing to do with the Founding Fathers, but I just want to say how grateful I am to live in a country where freedom of the press allows once callow young men to reflect back on their shortcomings and provide us with some insight as to their hard won wisdom.

Thus, from the July 1 edition of The Northside Neighbor comes this retrospective on the currently unemployed (at least football-wise) Reggie Ball:

He would never lead Tech to a win over Georgia.  In his four games against the Bulldogs, Ball threw for 418 yards, completing 45 of 104 passes, which throwing for just one touchdown and five interceptions, resulting in a 0-4 record against the rivals in Athens.

“To be honest, I never really knew what happened,” Ball said.

We’d already figured that out, but thanks for that anyway, Dog.

God bless the First Amendment.

Bowling for dollars

I know this is unlikely to change any minds, but here are some quotes of interest from the guys running the Sun, Holiday and Poinsettia Bowls regarding the debate about you-know-what:

Bernie Olivas, executive director of the Sun Bowl, said the bowl is the biggest event – of any kind – in El Paso every year.

“If there’s no bowl game here,” he said, “the hotels are empty between Christmas and New Year’s.”

Bruce Binkowski, executive director of the San Diego Bowl Association that operates the Holiday and Poinsettia bowls, said the association’s mission is to “fill hotel rooms.”

“We run the bowl for the benefit of San Diego,” he said.

Both Olivas and Binkowski said adopting a playoff format would damage the current bowl system. They said the bowls are made up of a weeklong series of events, and making them part of a playoff would seriously hurt their ability to generate revenue for their communities.

“In a playoff system, teams would show up the day before the game, play the next day and leave,” Olivas said. “If your bowl is part of the playoff, there will be no events, no festivities leading up to the game.

“Those events are a big part of the reason bowl games exist. To have a playoff would jeopardize that.”

Binkowski said a playoff also would affect attendance at the games. In an eight-team playoff format, for example, fans of the two finalists likely would be expected to travel long distances to fill 50,000- to 60,000-seat stadiums for three games, as opposed to just one game under the current bowl format.

“I don’t think they would travel from week to week,” Binkowski said, “especially on short notice and in these economic times.”

Fox concurs. He said Alamo Bowl week (right after Christmas) was the slowest tourism week of the year in San Antonio before creation of the bowl.

“Now it’s the busiest,” he said, “because of the game.”

Yeah, I know, nothing to be concerned about with a four-team playoff.

Just remember that there are a lot of turfs being defended in this battle.

This is your brain on football.

Chris Brown has a post up at Smart Football entitled “Football, decision making and the brain” that makes you wonder what goes through the heads of people who handle talent evaluation.  In his piece, he links to a New York Times article about the Mannings and the Wonderlic test that contains one of my favorite quotes of all time from Wonderlic himself:  ”Why in the world would you want to know how smart a football player is?”

And this also:

… Eli Manning’s score was so high that when I mentioned it to Charlie Wonderlic, he suggested I recheck my facts and said, ”There’s not a job on the planet that requires a person to score at that level.”

That’s the NFL for you.  It’s similar to this absurd fixation on 40-yard dash times.  How often does your average lineman run forty yards at a stretch in a game?  Personnel guys get lost in the trees of these idealized stats and lose sight of the forest of whether a kid is a good football player sometimes.

Of course, if you’re trying to figure out why your recruits are wearing their underwear on the outside, maybe you need to cling to those stats.  Any port in a storm…

Committed to looking around, for some reason

Any idea what this is all about?

Five-star athlete Matt Elam of Dwyer (West Palm Beach, Fla.) told Rivals.com on Monday he is still committed to Florida, but he plans to take official visits. Elam said Georgia, Alabama, West Virginia and Virginia Tech are possible destinations.

“I’m still committed to Florida,” Elam said. “I’m just looking around to see something different in case something goes down and I can’t go to Florida anymore. I’ve heard a lot about coaching changes and things like that, and I haven’t visited any other places but Florida. I want to look at other places and give other people a chance.”

Is this a case of kicking the tires, a reaction to negative recruiting or is something going on in Gainesville we haven’t heard about?  In any event, I can’t imagine the Gator staff is too thrilled about it.

Pat Dye doesn’t think the NCAA is man enough.

The Sporting News interviewed three former coaches whose programs ran afoul of the NCAA about the recently imposed FSU and Alabama penalties (which both schools are appealing, mind you).

Here’s what Mr. Dye had to say about those wussies.

“There’s no question it has changed. I don’t know about Florida State, but the thing with the Alabama case is that they didn’t really significantly hurt the program. They didn’t punish them very much. In the past, the school had to pay for their mistakes. This is not going to affect (Alabama) in terms of winning games.”

Go ahead, make his day.

My perception of Matt Hinton is that for a full-throated supporter of a D-1 football playoff, he’s been quite rational about recognizing the flaws and limits associated with it.  So I’ve always assumed that his support for political hacks like Shurtleff and Barton as they showboat on the issue has been tinged with a little tongue-in-cheekiness.

But I’m not so sure about his latest post on the subject.

BCS apologists — and sometimes critics, or mere observers — like to point out that, whatever its flaws, at least the Series is obviously better than the mishmash of split champions and frustrating conference tie-ins that preceded it. So heinous was the old way of doing postseason business that Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman, new chairman of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, possibly feeling the heat emanating from Congress again this week, trotted out its corpse during a local interview as the ultimate warning to BCS critics:

What I think most people don’t understand is that the alternative to the current system is not a playoff. The alternative to the BCS is going back to our traditional relationship with our bowl partners.

Oooh, you’re scaring us, Dr. Perlman. Run for your lives — it’s the ghost of Robbie Bosco!

Of course, this is an idle threat: The BCS, or whatever it morphs into under external pressure, isn’t going anywhere…

And this is an idle threat because… why, exactly?  If anything, it seems to me to be an easy task to carry out, it ends the antitrust posturing from pols like Hatch and Shurtleff and it has the likely added benefit of concentrating the wealth even more strongly in the hands of the BCS conferences (well, that’s a benefit for the BCS conferences, anyway).

This is where I think playoff supporters are on thin ice in this debate.  It’s very easy to focus on what I call the competition side of this – making sure that every deserving school has the chance to play for an MNC – and downplay the economic side, the side that pushes for a redistribution of the wealth that college football generates.  You can satisfy the former with a small scale playoff; you can’t satisfy the latter without an extended playoff controlled by the NCAA or some similar entity making sure that the moneys are spread more broadly throughout D-1.  And an extended playoff is death to pretty much everything that makes college football unique.

It’s shortsighted to brush off the financial considerations here.  Next week’s hearings are being conducted by the Senate Antitrust Committee.  Whether it matters to its members or not, antitrust law isn’t about whether Utah gets to play in a title game.  It’s about business practices, monopolies and money.

Ultimately, guys like Jim Delany don’t care nearly as much about Utah playing in that title game – and don’t forget that there’s nothing in the current BCS formula that prevents that from happening – as they do about having their conferences’ revenue streams reduced.  That’s what’s at stake with these antitrust threats and that’s why I don’t think the Harvey Perlmans of the college football world should be so easily dismissed when they promise to defend their turf.

That’s why I don’t get Hinton’s blithe dismissal of Perlman.  (I also don’t get why he blithely dismisses the one true improvement the BCS has wrought, namely, that it’s impossible for a clearly unqualified team to sneak into an MNC, as BYU did in 1984, but that’s a discussion for another blog post.)  These guys are gonna fight like hell to hang on to every last cent.  We all know they’re greedy bastards.  That’s what greedy bastards do.

Orrin Hatch knows that.  That’s why he he says in his Sports Illustrated piece that:

If “those with the power to reform the system” don’t do so voluntarily, Hatch writes, then “legislation may be required to ensure that all colleges and universities receive an equal opportunity.”

So if you’re a playoff proponent and a fan of a BCS conference school (which I think covers most of my readers), forget about political philosophy, forget about competition, but ask yourself this simple question instead:  how much money am I willing to see my school give up in order to have a playoff? Because if guys like Hatch are willing to push hard enough, that may be the choice you wind up with.

Thursday morning buffet

Gearing up for the extended weekend:

• Brian Cook does that oversigning harangue he does so well.  Relax, ‘Bama fans – it’s not your school that Cook blasts.  (That doesn’t stop Capstone Report from firing back, though.)
• Rex Robinson is looking for a few good stories.
• Say it ain’t so, Jim Bob. (h/t Team Speed Kills)
• So much for “I heard it on the Internet, so it must be true.”
• I don’t know what saddens me more about this story – that a Vandy recruit got into trouble with the law, or that, assuming it’s serious enough, the SEC could be deprived of a certain entry on the “Best Names in College Football” list. (h/t Chris Low)
• Jerry’s getting nervous about Auburn’s dwindling numbers at linebacker.  Having gone through that last year, we feel your pain, brother.

Ask not what the BCS can do for you, ask what you can do to the BCS.

Senator Orrin Hatch, mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore, is firing with both barrels:  July 7th hearings on the BCS in front of the Senate Antitrust Committee on which he sits and a “Why I Fight” piece he wrote that appears in today’s Sports Illustrated.

He sounds pretty fired up.

Hatch notes the sentiment for a college football playoff and writes that “almost anything would be better” than what the BCS has in place now.

Hmmm… I wonder if that would include ditching the BCS in its entirety and going back to the old system.  Hey, that did get dear ‘ol BYU a national championship in 1984!

Nah, probably not.  Because as much as he keeps talking about playing for the title, he keeps looking at all that money.

“Every team from a preferred conference automatically receives a share from an enormous pot of revenue generated by the BCS, even if they fail to win a single game,” Hatch wrote. “On the other hand, teams from the less favored conferences are guaranteed to receive a much smaller share, no matter how many games they win.”

And that, my friends, ain’t right.  If those heartless commie bastards that run the BCS won’t voluntarily share the wealth, well, then, by God, good conservatives like Orrin Hatch will just have to do something about that.

If “those with the power to reform the system” don’t do so voluntarily, Hatch writes, then “legislation may be required to ensure that all colleges and universities receive an equal opportunity.”

All I can say is that it’s a damned shame the BCS doesn’t control Wall Street.   Or the health insurance companies.

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UPDATE: Judging from this, I’m sure the WAC would like to see Senator Hatch move things along.

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UPDATE #2: This is a fun read.  Especially this part:

That’s been the problem all along. The BCS system is the natural outgrowth of college athletics’ essential stance to the outside world — one hand outstretched to hold the cash, one hand held aloft with the middle finger prominent.

Even the fight against the BCS, feeble though it’s been, has been fought by Orrin Hatch, the senior senator from Rice-Eccles Stadium, solely because his state school, Utah, was the latest one to get jobbed by the system. Otherwise, he’d be a loyal Republican and defend the BCS’ right to strangle the competition as part of doing business in a capitalist system.

If Hatch were serious, he’d actually be trying to strip college athletics of its power to hide behind the tax laws, or force it to be run as a separate entity outside the protection of the university, or find other ways to slap the system out of its institutional and extra-ethical arrogance.

But no, he just wants his favorite school to be a greater beneficiary of the currently corrupt system, and so does Calhoun. In other words, the Mountain West folks are not reformers, they’re just failed candidates without the throw-weight or interest to help overthrow the system. They just want their place at the trough.

Some strategery stuff

A couple of unrelated pieces caught my eye.

First, there’s an article posted at OrlandoSentinel.com that, misleading headline set aside, explores how the NFL is adapting spread and single wing features that have proven successful on the college level to its own game.  The hero worship of Meyer is overdone, and the author muddies the waters with regard to the spread and the wildcat, but there’s a lot of good stuff there.  And Meyer, to his credit, is an interesting read when it comes to x’s and o’s.

He really nails the dilemma the pros face when they look at deploying their quarterbacks as runners.

… That’s why Meyer thinks White could be a game-changer in the pros; not only a different sort of weapon at quarterback, but one in a very different place relative to quarterbacks and the salary cap.

“Everybody’s concern is the guy is making $27.8 million,” Meyer said, referring to a typical franchise NFL quarterback. “Are you really willing to get him hit like that?”

Meyer hopped off his couch and stood in the middle of his office, assuming the bent throwing position a quarterback works from in the pocket. It’s in that position, he reminded, that quarterbacks like Brady and Carson Palmer have suffered devastating, season-ending injuries the last few years, as defenders rolled into a lead leg that was planted to throw the ball.

Elsewhere, I’m sure that many of you have read this depressing post by a Navy blogger regarding Paul Johnson’s offense by now.  It’s depressing because it uses much from last year’s Georgia-Georgia Tech game to illustrate its points.  Chris at Smart Football distills things down even further by noting that a lot of Johnson’s genius is related to his skill as a playcaller.

I’m not going to argue against that – the tape doesn’t lie, you know – but it’s only fair to point out that this was an offense that sputtered on occasion last season, including the game it played after it faced Georgia.  I’ll be interested to see what Chris has to say in a promised future post about defending Johnson’s flexbone, but all things being equal, give me a dominant defensive line that can penetrate, affect the offense’s rhythm and pound a running quarterback, and I’ll take my chances.

Come to think about it, that worked pretty well against Florida in 2007, too, so maybe this stuff does tie together more than I thought.