The further adventures of “I heard it on the Internet, so it must be true.”

That legitimate reporters spent time, effort and energy running this nonsense down is a sad commentary on our times.  Journalism, ftw!

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If compiling coaches hot seat lists is right, then I wanna be wrong.

I know he meant well, but all cocknfire’s exercise here did was to remind me of how worthless all these coaches hot seat lists really are.

First, unless it’s based on data coming directly from the decision maker(s), a hot seat list is little more than meaningless speculation.  After the ’97 season, Jim Donnan got an under the table raise from Michael Adams; by 2000, he was gone, because Adams was unhappy about a three-game losing streak to Georgia Tech, despite the fact that Donnan kept winning at least eight times a season.  Who saw that coming?  (I’m not even sure Adams did until the very end.)

Second, sometimes there’s more to an evaluation of a coach’s longevity than wins and losses.  The perceived heat on Mark Richt after his two bad seasons was likely mitigated by the football program’s continued financial success.

Third, at its heart, the whole hot seat thing is too damned arbitrary to be useful.  It’s not exactly hard to come up with a standard that could make any coach come up short.  Could anybody in the SEC survive an Edwin Edwards test?  What coach could get away with shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die?  (Well, maybe Saban, if he did it to ease an oversigning logjam… ah, probably not.)  I keed, but the point is, in a conference where a coach got fired two seasons after winning a national title, there’s always something freakish that could happen at any given time.  So why bother worrying about it?  Best keep this stuff where it belongs, in a Bleacher Report slide show.

When the blogging gets tough, the tough get going.

It’s funny, but I met Kyle King in a professional context within a day or two of reading his blog for the first time.  At some point while we were working on a transaction, the subject of Georgia football came up (that’s not nearly as unusual as you might think in my work) and Kyle let on that he was a blogger.  I told him that I’d read his work and enjoyed it; he seemed pleased by that and in fact mentioned it on his blog a couple of days later.

It turned out that he was one of the inspirations I had in starting a blog of my own.  I figured that if one married, practicing lawyer could start a fan blog centered on Georgia athletics, so could I.  I was right, luckily.

It’s a lot of fun getting a blog like this, or one that’s turned into Dawg Sports, going.  It’s also a lot of hard work.  That’s not what makes fan blogging tough, though.  It’s when what you’re doing feels like hard work that you’ve got a problem.  So even though I’m not there, I certainly understand where Kyle is coming from with his announcement that he intends to withdraw from blogging in the next few weeks.

I just want to take a moment to thank him for what he’s done and wish him the best on where he’s going.

Thursday lunch buffet

A little later than usual, but still plenty to nosh on:

• If Auburn loses to LSU this Saturday, it’ll be the Tigers’ first 0-2 conference start since 1980.
• Pinkel vs. Finebaum.  You know who I’m rooting for.
• Meet the new playoff selection committee, same as the old playoff selection committee.
• They sure are turning over some interesting rocks in the O’Bannon litigation.
• The SEC prepares to get even further in bed with ESPN.
• Georgia’s offense is off to a good start.
• Ben Dukes thinks there’s too much clutter in the Dawgosphere.
• Believe it or not, the SEC is not college football’s worst coaching graveyard right now.

Monday morning buffet

College football nourishment to start your week.

• Reading between the lines, it seems that CBS is less enthused about the SEC’s new TV deals than Mike Slive is.
• Never give up, Mark Bradley.  Never.
• Good on ‘ya, Troy Calhoun.  Every coach voting should be doing that.
• No, this isn’t the header for a Bleacher Report post.  But it feels like one.
• Some Georgia fans are worried that Missouri fans may be too nice for the SEC.
• The Big Ten’s bad week is summarized here.
• Arkansas fans know whom to blame for the disastrous loss to UL-M.
• A study suggests that any school that sees a jump of five wins or more in a season from its football program reaps big gains in donations and the quality of incoming students.
• Noted truth teller Chuck Oliver suggests that the Auburn coaches have settled on a strategy of letting Kiehl Frazier take his lumps in hopes of getting better.  Occam’s Razor suggests that Clint Moseley’s shoulder problems are very, very severe.
• More touchback percentage data.
• Erk Russell to the big screen.  I wonder how they tell the part about Georgia screwing up his hire after Dooley resigned.

The least I could do.

After Bill Connelly was so gracious to spend time over here answering your questions about Missouri, I could hardly turn down his request for a few answers, could I?

And if Bill is still having trouble getting used to his new conference digs…

(By the way, it still feels really weird being an official conference rival of UGa. A lot of my favorite bloggers either went to the school or talk about it a lot, and I have read/enjoyed their work for years without ever thinking about how it connected to Mizzou. Every time the Senator talks about Mizzou, my first response is “Why is he talking about us? Oh, right.” I’ll get used to this eventually. Anyway.)

… maybe you should pay Rock M Nation a visit and welcome everyone there to the neighborhood.

This summer’s football read

It’s no secret how much regard I have for Chris Brown and his blog Smart Football.  I read a lot of folks who blog, but there are few of whom I’d describe their work as essential.  Chris is that good.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that he’s publishing a book that I expect will be terrific.

You can get all the info about it here; for ten bucks (less if you use the coupon code he’s furnished), it’ll be a steal. I’m getting my copy in a week or so and will offer a review, if you need further convincing.

Why I ♥ the Intertubes.

Travis fisks Bill King’s latest AJ-C effort at trolling the gullible masses post so I don’t have to.

Do programs get the fan base they deserve?  I hope not.

Friday morning buffet

You’re about to survive another working week, so dig in.

• I’m looking forward to seeing Ray Drew at the G-Day game.
• Georgia is getting better national title odds than any SEC teams not named Alabama or LSU.
• No Pac-12 team will play in one of those neutral site openers unless all broadcast rights are given to the conference.
• Aaron Murray believes he’s at his best when he’s having fun playing.
• But he’s not happy Malcolm Mitchell is on defense this spring.
• I’m sorry to see this news.
• Michael Carvell actually wanted to know if SOD ever thought about hiring his dad to recruit for Tennessee.  Jeebus.
• As a prediction, it’s not that interesting, but as a reflection of conventional wisdom it might be:  CFN picks Georgia to go on a winning streak against Florida.
• Urban Meyer employs the Johnson Doctrine.  It works.

Your double dose of “I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true”.

I don’t even have to say take these with a grain (actually, more like a small stone) of salt, do I?

• Georgia Tech blog reports that the Big Ten is prepared to throw “$25-30 million” at a school that can’t fill a 50,000-seat football stadium consistently to get it to jump conferences.
• There’s a reason I avoid Bleacher Report like the plague, but this excerpt pulled me back in, damn it.  This post is so lame they should pay you to read it.