Well, if Les Miles thinks it’s a good idea…

He’s on board with Spurrier’s division record only proposal.

“I want the schedule to be fair and I want it to give everybody the same opportunity,” Miles said today in Birmingham at a luncheon for the Changed Lives Christian Center. “I’m for the Western Division deciding the Western Division champion and the Eastern Division deciding the Eastern Division champion.”

He doesn’t like playing Florida.

I swear, the coaches don’t want to play nine conference games and they don’t want to play tough cross- divisional games.  How ’bout we let them play twelve games against Sun Belt and MAC teams and then vote on which teams they think are best suited for the SECCG?

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Athlon isn’t impressed with Les Miles’ dietary habits.

Of all the reasons to downgrade The Hat in this ranking of SEC coaches, this strikes me as a trifle strange:

However, he has also developed another reputation based on bizarre eating habits…

Granted, that’s not the only criticism lodged his way, but to use that as a shortcoming to rank Miles below a coach who’s never beaten him (Mullen) and has only lost one less game in three years than Miles has in seven seems like a stretch.

If Lester gives up grass, do you think Athlon will move him up on the list?

Saturday morning buffet

Get off your motorcycle and grab a plate.

• Yes, Georgia may oversign in 2013.
• There are times when Les Miles really should STFU.  This is one of them.
• Pete Fiutak turns in the dumbest column on l’affaire Petrino you’re going to read.
• One reason it’s not just Petrino’s problem, Pete, is because he managed to draw state employees into his attempt to keep a lid on the mess.
• And Chris Low suggests that one path Arkansas could take with this would be to redraw Petrino’s contract, as Tennessee did with Bruce Pearl.  That actually makes a good deal of sense.
• Were Petrino to be dismissed, here’s one list of potential candidates.  I confess Tuberville never occurred to me, but I could see him making inquiries.
• You’ve got to give Vanderbilt credit for trying to light a fire under its fan base.
• Detroit Lions fans reminisce about Adam Krohn’s prediction about Matt Stafford’s pro career.
• Rocky Top Talk ponders how things could be dangerous in Knoxville this season.
• As slogans go, I guess this is better than “Win one for the Tater Tot”.  But not by much.
• A week before the spring game, there are still lots of questions in Athens.

“We at the Big Ten don’t want to be like the SEC—in any way, shape or form.”

Hell has truly frozen over.  In a mere two months, Bret Bielema and Mark Dantonio have managed to accomplish something that never happened in five years in the SEC – make me side with Urban Meyer.  Bielema, in fact, is so upset over Meyer’s recruiting tactics that his mommy is going to the principal his athletic director is going to the conference commissioner about it.

Just so we’re clear: Bielema wasn’t talking about winning national championships. He was talking about Meyer’s recruiting tactics—and how after a little more than two months on the job, Meyer already is getting under the skin of his colleagues.

Just how much, you ask? Bielema, whose teams have won more games than any other Big Ten team in his six seasons in Madison, says Badgers athletic director Barry Alvarez will speak Friday with Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany about Meyer’s recruiting methods during the league’s athletic director meetings in Chicago.

During his National Signing Day press conference, Bielema hinted that Meyer was using “illegal” recruiting practices. He said as much again Thursday when contacted by Sporting News, and without getting into specifics offered this:

“I called Urban and we spoke about it,” Bielema said. “We talked about it, and he said it would stop and it did. I’ll let our commissioner deal with anything else. That’s not who we are (in the Big Ten). We settle things among ourselves as coaches.”

The big complaint?  That Meyer won’t adhere to the Big Ten’s “gentlemen’s agreement”.

Wisconsin’s Bret Bielema thinks otherwise: he thinks that the Big Ten should adhere to a gentlemen’s agreement that, according to Bielema, has defined the conference’s recruiting efforts for generations. At its core, this agreement makes verbal commits — that’s a non-binding, unofficial commitment, by the way — out of bounds for any coach working within the conference.

How quaint.   How irrelevant.

What does a Big Ten coach do when one of his verbal commitments gets flipped by a coach from another conference?  Hold his breath until his face turns blue?  Does Bielema really think Delany is going to order Meyer to stop talking to recruits who have given verbal commitments to other Big Ten schools?  (My prediction:  watch for Big Ten coaches to lead a push for an early signing period.)

Whining about Urban Meyer is a bad move.  It’s a sign of weakness.  Hint to Bielema:  if you’ve got to whine about something related to recruiting, save it for an 18-year old who has a hard time making up his mind.  That’s the way we roll in the SEC, bitch.

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UPDATE:  Game on.

Meyer reportedly fired back while at the Ohio High School coaches clinic on Friday morning.

“You’re pissed because we went after a committed guy? Guess what, we got 9 guys who better go do it again,” said Meyer. “Do it a little harder next time.”

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UPDATE #2:  Barry Alvarez to Bret Bielema:  Shut up, boy.

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UPDATE #3:  The Big Ten’s most useless athletic director chimes in.

This statement from Ohio State AD Gene Smith was released by the school early afternoon on Friday:

“I am disappointed that negative references have been made about our football coaches and particularly head coach Urban Meyer regarding recruiting. In our league appropriate protocol, if you have concerns, is to share those concerns with your athletic director. Then your athletic director will make the determination on the appropriate communications from that point forward. The athletic directors in our league are professionals and communicate with each other extremely well. Urban Meyer and his staff have had a compliance conscience since they’ve arrived.”

Pretty rich, coming from Jim Tressel’s enabler.

“Nice hat.”

Les Miles, livin’ large at the Heisman ceremonies:

Does Georgia have the horses?, part four

Sorry, but with LSU looking at a possible undefeated season which would include SEC and national titles, I can’t help but revisit Heisman/College Football Pundit’s spectacularly wrong assessment of Les Miles as the worst college football head coach in America.

1. Les Miles, LSU — You could put a potted plant on the sideline at Tiger Stadium and get the same results Miles has gotten for LSU.  And there would probably be better clock management.  Selling his soul to the devil in exchange for wins in close games puts him over the top here.

What makes that especially delicious is that the potted plant’s success this season is significantly attributable to one of the smartest moves of his coaching career, ditching offensive coordinator Gary Crowton and his complexity-for-complexity’s sake system for a much simpler power football scheme.  LSU has an identity on offense.  It doesn’t screw up as much as it used to.  And it’s become a much more efficient scorer.

It’s a contrarian approach in a college football world of spread attacks.  And in the land of defenses built to stop the spread, the power football offense can be king.

Which is why we Georgia fans need to be careful as we beat our chests saying things like LSU hasn’t faced a balanced team like the Dawgs this season.  Because the truth is that Georgia hasn’t seen an offense like LSU’s this season either.  (The closest was probably South Carolina’s, but even there, the Gamecocks ran a zone-blocking scheme and not the straight ahead power stuff we’ll see Saturday.)

As a certain head coach we know puts it,

“Their goal is not to trick anybody,” said Georgia coach Mark Richt, whose team will face the Tigers this weekend in the SEC championship game. “Their goal is to line up and play real sound football in all three phases and basically physically maul you — wear you down and wear you out, make you quit. They’ve been able to do it most every game they’ve played.”

They’ve got the big, physical line and the deep backfield to do that.  But they’ve got other personnel that contribute to that, as well.  Rueben Randle will be the best receiver on the field tomorrow (even if Georgia gets the edge in receiving based on depth); he’s the most formidable wideout the Dawgs have seen since Alshon Jeffrey.  Both of LSU’s quarterbacks complete a higher percentage of their passes than does Aaron Murray and while they’ve combined to throw 13 less touchdowns than Murray, they’ve also combined to have a better TD/INT ratio than he does.

And don’t sleep on Jordan Jefferson’s ability to run.  He’s LSU’s fourth leading rusher.  Against Arkansas, they used the option brilliantly during the early part of the game when he couldn’t get untracked throwing the ball.

These guys don’t screw up much on offense.  Their job is to wait for the other team to do that and then capitalize.  And then pound the other team’s defense into the dust.  They’re damned good at it.

There’s only so much Todd Grantham can control.  If Georgia’s offense and special teams commit their share of errors, it’s going to put an enormous amount of pressure on the defense.  That didn’t work out so well in the fourth quarter of the South Carolina game when Lattimore took charge and never let go.  But if the Dawgs can stay away from making mistakes, LSU may indeed find out about what that balance we’ve been bragging about means.

One thing’s for certain, though.  It’s final exam time for those vaunted changes in the Strength & Conditioning program.  Strap it on, boys, and show us they’re for real.

“Not many.”

Les Miles has really honed his stand up routine.

“Not many.”, posted with vodpod

Gators and hoisted petards

For obvious reasons, this was my favorite play from last weekend.

The SEC would be a shabbier place without Les Miles in it.

“If they serve beer in Tiger Stadium, I fear that the upper decks might not hold it.”

Les Miles, in response to the obvious question spurred by beer sales in West Virginia’s stadium:

“I certainly want to be politically correct and not be against serving beer in Tiger Stadium. Certainly the athletic director and the chancellor would have to make that decision. But I promise you, we would enjoy playing in front of a Tiger Stadium that occasionally had a beer.”

I’m glad to live in a country where it’s considered politically correct to serve beer at a college football game.

(h/t Andy Hutchins)

Sometimes they make it so easy.

I’ve been waiting for Elkon to fire a certain shot in Heisman Pundit’s direction after I heard the results from the LSU-Oregon game.

Bang.

So let me get this straight.  The fourth-best coach in college football took his team to a quasi-neutral site to play the worst coach in college football.  The worst coach, a guy who delegates a lot to his coordinators, came into the game with his offensive coordinator just having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.  His starting quarterback was suspended for his active participation in a bar fight.  So what happens?  LSU 40 Oregon 27.  It’s just amazing that LSU keeps winning games against quality opponents despite the fact that they have a coach who is worse than Ron Zook, worse than the Queen of England, and worse than Mike Locksley.