Finebaum and the coaches

Paul Finebaum has his semi-annual review/ranking of the SEC coaches up, and, frankly, I can’t grasp his logic, at least after #1.

Here’s how he ranks the HCs:

1. Spurrier
2. Saban
3. Meyer
4. Tuberville
5. Fulmer
6. Richt
7. Miles
8. Nutt
9. Brooks
10. Johnson
11. Orgeron
12. Croom

He says it’s “not necessarily” a reprise of the last season, but more a “complete analysis” of where the coaches stand.  Ho-kay, but Saban at #2?  He’s hasn’t coached a down of football in college in a couple of years, he’s not the coaching innovator that Spurrier is and he won at a school that has a tremendous recruiting base (see #7 on the list).  Basically, other than being a highly paid hard ass and drawing 92,000 fans to a spring game, what’s on his resume right now that Urban Meyer can’t top?

And Richt at #6, behind Fulmer?  Because MR is another coach who needs a big year after last year’s “clunker”?  Georgia, in MR’s clunker year, went 9-4;  UT came off a 5-6 season in ’05.  Is this based on anything more that Tennessee winning in Athens last year?  It’s hard to point objectively to anything else.

And if someone can explain why he ranks Orgeron ahead of Croom, given his descriptions of each, I’d like to hear it.  That’s not to say that the ranking is wrong, just that it doesn’t jibe with what he wrote.

Strange list.

A couple of Georgia notes

You know fall practice is almost upon us when Larry Munson starts officially worrying about the upcoming season:

“We don’t have any linebackers,” he lamented. “We just have the one [Brandon Miller] that’s disappointed them all along. He’s the only one that’s played. The defensive line is riddled. The offensive line is just not there. We had to go out and get junior college kids. The secondary is gone. Your punter is gone and your holder and your snapper are gone and all those little ol’ things.

“And, as usual, we’re going to have guys out for probation or suspensions or whatever the first two games, two of our biggest games of the year. We’ve really lost a lot of players. Our young quarterback [Matthew Stafford] is going to have to really play good for us. He may have to carry us on his back.”

The holder and snapper are gone?  They’re doomed, I say, doomed.

Meanwhile, Mike Bobo may not have been the offensive coordinator (in the real sense of the term) for long, but he’s already displaying admirable survival skills.

If Georgia football coach Mark Richt has any desire of reclaiming his play-calling responsibilities, he can forget about it.

Offensive coordinator Mike Bobo, who called the plays in last season’s wins over Georgia Tech in Athens and Virginia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, has changed the playbook’s terminology. Richt admitted this moments before addressing Friday’s massive gathering at the Southeastern Conference’s Media Days, and he did so while smiling.

“I did the same thing to Coach (Bobby) Bowden when I was at Florida State,” Richt said. “I changed everything so he didn’t know how to call it, and I knew he wouldn’t be calling it.”

I thought we already settled this.

(photo courtesy BBC)

Gawd Almighty, people! We already know that Les Miles is a doofus. Is it really necessary to write an entire article in The Los Angeles Times in response that really does nothing more than show your own asses?

Why does the SEC do it?

Why can’t it just shut up and play?

Answer: It can’t help itself.

The SEC still can’t get over Auburn going undefeated in 2004 and having to watch USC and Oklahoma play for the BCS title.

It still can’t stand the fact LSU had to share the national title with USC in 2003.

The SEC’s status as the nation’s preeminent college football conference — rarely argued by anyone — is only demeaned by the league’s seemingly insatiable need to tell everyone about it.

Waaaah.

Speaking of ass showing, HeismanPundit chimes in with a hard hitting exposé of Pete Fiutak’s SEC preview at College Football News. Check it out:

CFN’s Pete Fiutak is, apparently, hooked up to an IV of SEC-is-awesome Kool-Aid as he manages to fit every one of the conference’s talking points in the first couple graphs of this preview.

No one can deny it’s the best conference going at the moment. No one can deny that the overall speed and talent level is tremendous. The weekly drama is unparalleled, thanks to so many good match-ups, and the overall competition is so tough that it’s just about impossible to get through unscathed. So after the way Florida blew up Ohio State to win the national title, will the conference start to get every benefit of the doubt? It should.

Yeah, because, ya know, there is sooooo much talk out there in the media about how the SEC sucks and is overrated. How the heck did Florida manage to win a title, anyway, playing in such a little-hyped league?

The best part of HP’s debunking is when he makes a list of the number of unbeated, untied (in conference) teams by conference since ’92, when the SEC went to a conference championship game, sees the Big East and ACC at the top by a healthy margin and tries to downplay that fact by noting that “(t)he Big East and ACC are skewed slightly by the dominance of FSU and Miami.” Well, duh.

Kinda like USC and the Pac-10 these days.

You have to give HP credit, perverse though it may be, when it comes to his world view about the SEC and Pac-10. His thinking may be muddled, but he’s not afraid to dive back into the pool.