Not gonna do it; wouldn’t be prudent.

Damon Evans had this to say in today’s Athens Banner-Herald about Thursday night football between the hedges:

A pair of SEC matchups – LSU-Mississippi State and Kentucky-South Carolina – are on ESPN’s Thursday night schedule this year.

Don’t expect to see Georgia showing up on the slate any time soon.

“As long as I’m the athletic director here, we won’t have Thursday night football, plain and simple,” athletic director Damon Evans told the University Council’s Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics last month.

Thursday night games are worth an extra $500,000 per school, Evans said, but also mean more class time missed for players, thousands of students out late on a week night and the campus disrupted by fans streaming into town early to tailgate.

“We don’t want to have a negative impact on this campus,” Evans said.

Sounds pretty emphatic to me… of course, when you run a $20+ million dollar surplus each year, you can afford to take a few stands like this.

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Playoff envy and jealousy: from the “I wish I’d written that” department

College Football Resource takes on Tater Tot, in what is clearly not a fair fight, with this wonderful post that should be read in its entirety.

This is the best part:

Any move towards a playoff only further weakens the very fundamentals of college football: a robust regular season punctuated with postseason pageantry.  Our game is about celebration more than it is elimination.  [Emphasis added.] It is at its heart a regional game, punctuated with highly dramatic intersectional affairs.  At its heart it is about the week-to-week drama more than who is left standing at the end.

And his conclusion ought to be tattooed on the forehead of UF Prez Bernie Machen (by the way, Mr. Tot, if you’re going to quote someone approvingly, you might try to spell his name correctly) :

Any move towards a playoff is inevitably destructive instead of constructive.  Look at the movement now, chastising the Rose Bowl.  Clearly emotion has overcome rational thought.  Emotion makes bad policy…playoffs are bad policy, and they threaten much of what is so fundamental to the college football game as we have for so long known it.

Well played, CFR, well played.

Science marches onward.

It may not serve as broad based a need as this, but the Quicker Kicker still sounds like a pretty cool invention.

(courtesy MICHAEL PEREZ / Inquirer Staff Photographer)

Derrick Zoch – U Penn placekicker, Wharton management major, inventor, Renaissance man – had this to say about the Quicker Kicker:

“Why not make him a kicker?” he asked in his pitch to the judges. “He’s not going to get hurt.”

As profound advice, that ranks right up there with what a certain Zen philosopher from a few decades ago said…

“Grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.”

(h/t The Wizard of Odds)