Just wait ’til next year.

There’s one more tool at Nick Saban’s disposal in fitting the greatest recruiting class evah onto the ‘Bama roster:  greyshirting.

… Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban said Thursday he didn’t “have any surprises” among 23 signees who enrolled at UA for the first summer session, but the process of sorting out future numbers hasn’t been settled.

“We’ll probably have a couple more enroll next semester,” Saban said. “We’ll make the decision in August as to who comes to camp and who waits until January to come to school and see how all that works out. It hasn’t worked out yet.”

Fear not, Tide faithful, it will.

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Big Ten Network: peace breaks out with Comcast.

For all intents and purposes, the war between the Big Ten Network and Comcast Cable is over (h/t The Wizard of Odds). And while the BTN didn’t get everything it demanded, it did pretty damned well.

… The BTN completed the deal without caving on its central demand: that the channel be placed on expanded basic, rather than a sports tier, in the eight-state footprint. Only Philadelphia will be excluded.

Comcast can eventually move the channel to a more exclusive digital level of service in some systems.

The network’s initial asking price was $1.10 per month per subscriber. Even with Comcast paying 70 to 80 cents, as sources indicated, that represents a massive cash influx.

I suspect that Commissioner Slive and his bosses are looking this development over very carefully… and pretty happily, too.

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UPDATE: Kevin at Fanblogs doesn’t think it’s such a great deal for the BTN.

Hell, yes, I cheated.

The Birmingham News ranks the SEC athletic programs on an all-time basis in this article (h/t The Wizard of Odds), which contains one helluva quote from former Florida (and Clemmins) head coach Charlie Pell:

“Did I violate some rules? Yes,” Pell told the NBC news program “Dateline” in 1995. “Does that make me a cheater? If it does, yes I am. There wasn’t room for anything but winning. Nothing. Winning was the sole obsession, to a fault.”

The question left unanswered by that quote is whether his reputation proceeded him when Florida gave him the head coaching job.

(By the way, if you’re interested, here’s how the program rankings were determined.)

The blogosphere and the space/time continuum

Man, the blogosphere is weirding me out this morning. Man.

• Looking back. HeismanPundit, complete with snappy new blog design, reflects on history to tell his critics they were FOS. (Although he concedes his ’05 call of Boise State over Georgia was “rather foolhardy”.) Too bad his comments section didn’t survive the redo. On the bright side, HP has buried the hatchet with the SEC.
• The here and the now. Matt over at Statistically Speaking takes a look at the upcoming ACC season. His sleeper pick: Georgia Tech.
• He has seen the future… and it is different. The Orlando Sentinel’s Tim Stephens looks at all the current business trends pushing at college football – all of which boil down to how can the BCS schools make more money and keep it? – and reinvents D-1 football as we know it. Notre Dame in the Pac-10, er… Pac-16? His best line is about the MAC, which, after he virtually blows up at least four conferences, doesn’t make a single change: It will survive the czar’s conference tinkering in the way the cockroach will survive nuclear winter.