Sunday morning buffet

Grab a plate and indulge yourself.

• Ted Roof is planning on running more of the same, except he’ll be doing it with Tech’s 3-4 personnel.  It’s Mike Bobo’s wet dream.
• Alabama public officials get the best of both worlds – no season ticket expenses and no secondary market premium prices, either.  Nice work if you can get it.  (And no, I doubt Alabama is only place where this happens.)
• Trust us, Jesus wants you to use this deer antler shit.
• One thing about any possible Big 12-SEC scheduling partnership – if you’re Mike Slive, it’s a nice negotiating tactic to throw out as an alternative to a ninth conference game.
• Okay, so now Junior admits he made mistakes at Tennessee.  Was that part of the plan?
• Seth Emerson looks at the recruiting services’ rankings systems and thinks the stars are aligning more properly.
• “LSU is known nationally as a football team, not as an institution of higher learning.”

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The politics of brain injuries

This piece on Steve Largent and the concussion debate is profoundly saddening.  Largent spent some time as a Republican congressman, so it should come as no surprise that he’s a little Randian on the matter:

“If studies come out and show that playing football is detrimental to your health for the long term, even for the short term, I think that’s up to the players then to make the decision about whether they’re going to play or not play,” Largent said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Peter Cook for “Capitol Gains,” which airs Feb. 2.

“They should be armed with all of the latest statistics and information and research,” added Largent, who now represents the nation’s wireless industry as president of CTIA- The Wireless Association. “We don’t need the government telling people what they can and can’t do.”

Some of that is no doubt a knee-jerk reaction to Obama’s recent comments on the matter and some of it’s a downright naive assessment of the NFL’s readiness to take charge and make things right.   (Does anybody think Goodell would give a rat’s ass about the problem if it wasn’t for the threat of multiple lawsuits?  And last time I checked, Steve, a court ruling is the government telling people what they can and can’t do.)

But that’s not the depressing part.  This is.

Largent said he had multiple concussions throughout college and his NFL career, including one during his next-to-last season in which he was knocked unconscious before hitting the ground.

Largent said he’s “really curious” about the impact of concussions on NFL players and is currently participating in a study at the University of North Carolina. Largent also had a stroke at the age of 50 that he says the experts he’s consulted believe isn’t connected to his NFL career.

Largent considers himself fortunate to still be in relatively good health, running five or six miles every other day and playing tennis two to three times a week. Largent also said he remains the NFL’s “biggest fan,” despite lingering concerns about the head injuries he suffered as a player.

“The more studies that come out that talk about concussions and so forth, it makes me wonder,” Largent said. “I wonder, more importantly than the stroke, the impact that concussions have had on my life, particularly as I get older.”

Wow.  Does Largent think he was armed with all the latest research to make an informed decision at the time?  Of course he wasn’t, because it wasn’t an area of major concern then.  But now he trusts the NFL to make an honest effort to do so?  If that’s right, it’s only because it’s been pushed from outside.

Obama wasn’t threatening to seek legislation if the NCAA didn’t move forward on the issue.  But he was expressing a concern that enough wasn’t being done to provide player safety and that the NCAA needed to get off its ass and take charge or risk having others take control of the issue away from it.  If that’s government telling people what to do, maybe the NCAA needs to hear more of it.

“I think the people of Texas want a game, and we’re trying to get them one.”

Ah, yes… the great American tradition of state legislators stepping in where ADs fear to tread is alive and well.

If it passes, I wonder how those dudes will feel about the law the first time it costs one of those schools a shot at the new playoff.

“I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son…”

Something tells me that Mark Emmert doesn’t have time for the shit President Obama is laying down in this interview:

… if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.

I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.  [Emphasis added.]

And that’s probably a mistake.  You may disagree with the man’s politics, but it’s hard to deny that Obama’s good at reading public sentiment.  This concussion thing is moving fast – or at least faster than people like Emmert are. You ignore subtle warnings like that at your own risk.  And the risk the NCAA and the colleges run is that they may be one big tragedy away (like, say, a death on the field) from having control of player safety taken away from them.

Unfortunately, if there’s one thing the NCAA isn’t good at, it’s being proactive.

The last Te’o joke I’ll tell.

Sorry, but this is too good to pass up.

(via)

Musburger gets it on: the game sucked, but the girlfriend was hot.

A brief primer on the other story from the title game, in the form of five questions:

• Was Katherine Webb’s presence at the title game noteworthy?  As an Auburn student rooting for her Alabama quarterback boyfriend, sure.
• Was there anything wrong with commenting on Webb’s appearance?  She’s a former Miss Alabama.  It’s kind of hard not to notice.  Herbstreit’s “A J’s doing some things right” comment struck the correct, brief and witty tone about that.
• Was Musburger’s commentary too pervy?  Put it this way:  spoken while knocking back a couple of cold ones with the guys in private, nobody cares.  It’s just typical horndog talk.  But coming from a 70-something dispensing love advice to the teenaged forlorn during a football broadcast heard by millions, yeah, it was cringeworthy.
• Given ESPN’s firing of Ron Franklin for a couple of sexist comments, was the network a bit hypocritical issuing this lame-ass apology for Musburger’s comments?  Do I really even need to answer that question?
• Was this inevitable?  Sadly, yes.

As for this, just shoot me.

***************************************************************************************************

UPDATE:  Mr. Conventional Wisdom gets the penultimate observation…

I still don't get Musburger controversy. If Katherine Webb doesn't have a problem with Brent why should anyone else? Brent is good guy.—
Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) January 09, 2013

… but it’s Josh Kendall for the win.

You mean Katherine Webb is not upset at Musburger for increasing her name recognition at least 100 fold? I'm shocked.—
Josh Kendall (@JoshatTheState) January 09, 2013

On being a little bit pregnant

Am I the only one who finds this amusing?

In denying the state’s request to dismiss the lawsuit by the NBA, NHL, NFL, Major League Baseball and the NCAA, U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp agreed that they have standing to file the suit because expanding legal sports betting to New Jersey would negatively affect perception of their games.

In his ruling, Shipp cited studies offered by the leagues that showed fans’ negative attitudes toward game-fixing and sports gambling.

…

Stacey Osburn, director of public and media relations for the NCAA, said the association was “pleased with the court’s ruling. The NCAA has long maintained that sports wagering threatens the well-being of student-athletes and the integrity of college sports.”

Aside from the legal wagering on college sports in four states and the illegal wagering that goes on every place else, they may have a point.

If it were illegal to post a spread on a college football game, ESPN’s viewership on Thursday nights would be nonexistent for much of the time.

Politics, college football and strange bedfellows

Ed Kilgore sent me to this new PPP Georgia survey, which asked the following musical question:

Q14 Do you consider yourself to be a Georgia or
Georgia Tech fan, or are you not a fan of either
school?

Survey says…

Georgia 40%
…………………………………………………..
Georgia Tech 17%
…………………………………………..
Not a fan of either school
43%

If you crawl into the weeds a little bit by checking out the crosstabs, you’ll see that major party political affiliation didn’t matter – both Democrats and Republicans favor Georgia over Tech.  The only political group that favored Tech was the one composed of people who voted third party or couldn’t remember who they voted for in the last presidential election.  Which makes complete sense, when you think about it.

Friday morning buffet

A little heavy on the SECCG servings, but I doubt you’ll mind.

• Scarbinsky points out that most SEC title games haven’t been particularly close.
• NCAA gives Georgia Tech a waiver so the Jackets can fight for the right to go 6-8.
• CFN goes with the upset tomorrow.
• As expected, Junior throws Daddy under the bus, which is kind of ironic since Daddy was the bus that got the Laner on the gravy train to start with.
• I’d like to know who said this and why:  “This will not be the same Georgia team in this game,” said one SEC coach.
• You gotta love the BCA’s grading system:  “Texas A&M, even though it hired Sumlin, was the only FBS school to receive an F because it did not participate in the study.”
• Too bad Alabama doesn’t blitz much.
• Gentry Estes, who has a unique perspective after spending the past few seasons as a beat writer in Tuscaloosa and Athens, compares the personalities of Nick Saban and Mark Richt in this story.

Wednesday morning buffet

Let’s clear the decks with some tasty hump day nourishment:

• Ole Miss hasn’t beaten a team with a winning record this season, but CFN says that’s about to change this Saturday in Athens… because the Dawgs didn’t lose to Kentucky.
• Mark Shurtleff surrenders; Bill Hancock yawns.
• Florida feels good about its defensive showing against Georgia.  It should.
• You want Georgia to be more like Alabama?  Here’s one way that’s happening.
• Coaches Hot Seat Blog does a best of Erk post.
• Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze on Richt: “You kind of find yourself pulling for him when you’re not playing him.”
• The Rebel Black Bears play fast on offense, and some Dawg defenders see Nick Saban’s point about that.  But not Christian Robinson:  “If they’re beating us, then we need to figure out a way to stop it,” Robinson said. “That’s not a safety issue. That’s a defensive issue.”
• The NCAA announces its new enforcement structure, with an emphasis on “conduct breaches that seriously undermine or threaten the integrity of the NCAA Constitution”.  The most interesting development is that head coaches will be presumed guilty – “if a violation occurs, the head coach is presumed responsible, and if he or she can’t overcome that presumption, charges will be forthcoming.”  No doubt JoePa is turning over in his grave.