Father knows best.

This is awesome.

Mike Leach's lawyer tells @finebaum that Craig James called Tx Tech coaches from ESPN booth DURING GAMES, telling them to play son Adam.—
Mark Nagi (@MarkNagi) January 25, 2012

Phone records, please.  I sure hope this sucker gets to court soon.

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“There’s nothing special about being 6-6.”

Put me firmly in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp on this:

There is “growing support” among conference commissioners, athletic directors and bowl officials to increase the difficulty of becoming bowl eligible by requiring teams to have seven victories, or a winning record, when the new BCS cycle begins in 2014, multiple sources have told CBSSports.com. The seven-win requirement would also mean a handful of bowls likely would be discontinued because there would not be enough eligible teams to fill all of the current 70 berths. In the past two years alone, 27 teams with 6-6 records were needed to fill all the bowl slots, meaning nearly 20 percent of the bowl field didn’t have a winning record.

They’re going to take 13-14 schools a year out of the bowl mix?  What’ll that do to the number of games?

If the winning record requirement did pass, bowl sources estimated up to 12 of the current 35 bowls could be “lopped off.”

That’s a lot of lopping.  And begs the question of who’s gonna get lopped.

… Which would go by the wayside? That would not be an easy decision, especially since a number of conferences initially created these bowls to guarantee their teams would have one to play in. ESPN also has created and runs seven bowls that the network utilizes as programming. Even though they have hosted a number of 6-6 teams, it’s doubtful ESPN would willingly discontinue any of them.

Yeah, that sounds like a problem to me, too.  Let’s see where all this tough talk leads when the WWL is faced with finding something else to schedule in late December.

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UPDATE:  One downside to higher bowl standards…

But it’s a bad idea. For one simple reason. Raising the bowl requirement would be one more reason for teams to dumb down their regular-season schedules. One more reason to schedule three or four cupcakes in non-conference, then take your chances within the league.

It would be used as further justification to keep the SEC schedules at eight games, too.

Déjà vu on the Plains?

With one caveat, I think Jerry Hinnen’s on to something with this:

… VanGorder is a legitimate smash hire, one probably on par with Malzahn’s. But that’s for reasons that I don’t think had that much to do with his NFL employment or even NFL success; BVG coached some truly fantastic defenses at Georgia, one of which helped get the Dawgs within one ill-timed loss of a national title. Even in the David Greene heyday, Richt’s best teams were defined more by their D than their O, and VanGorder was the guy who was building those D’s. If 2009 and 2010 Auburn were teams constructed around Malzahn and what he could with an offense, 2012 and forward are going to be the same for VanGorder.

This is another reason I’m not sweating Loeffler’s hire, despite being opposed on a theoretical level; with BVG in the fold, the Auburn offense likely won’t have to set the world on fire to win games…

Assuming that the 2012 BVG model is the same one we saw here in his Georgia heyday, we may be looking at an old, familiar situation to our west soon.

Non-pay to play

Wow.  I’m touched by my own naiveté this morning.  I have to admit this never dawned on me before:

A common misconception is that walk-ons are treated in a significantly different way than scholarship student-athletes. By and large rules apply the same to a student-athlete on a full grant-in-aid and a student-athlete paying his or her own freight to go to school. In general, this works out well for walk-ons.

But when a walk-on decides to possibly transfer and wants to talk to other schools, it should not necessarily be so. To have any degree of control over a student-athlete’s movements (even the tiny amount below), an institution should have to invest directly in his or her education. A walk-on should not require any permission to talk to schools or transfer anywhere. An institution maintains the ability to offer a walk-on a scholarship for the next term or year, provided the institution has scholarship money available.

In other words, a walk-on student-athlete who wants to transfer to another D-1 school and play there is bound by the same transfer rules as a kid on full scholarship.  So if a coach wants to screw with the star of his scout team, he can do so with impunity.  Just another example of the NCAA looking out for… oh, screw it.

Now that I think about it, I’m surprised that I was surprised by that.

SEC roster management, baybee!

Matt Hinton makes a pretty good case that Junior is about to import some lessons he learned on the job in Knoxville into Pac-12 Land.

It’s all part of the plan.

If you prick Nick Saban, does he not bleed?

Justin Taylor’s coach hears from Saban’s sensitive side:

Did Saban mention anything about the public reaction to the situation?

“Yes. He said he caught a lot of flack for it and took a lot of criticism. He wasn’t mad at Justin for anything. He said stuff like this is just the nature of the beast. That’s really all that was said about it.”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that sensitive.

Seriously, though, read the rest of the Q&A and tell me if you see anything there that amounts to a binding commitment on Saban’s part to sign Taylor next season.  I didn’t see word one about anything being put in writing and it sure sounds like there’s a huge back door if the kid’s knee doesn’t ever pass the smell test.

That all being said, it sounds like Taylor is certain about what he wants and he can’t complain at this point about not knowing the lay of the land.  More power to him and I hope it works out for the best.