The trouble with mixed marriages

Imagine what she might have done if the Gators had lost. (h/t The Wizard of Odds)

Apparently a gator bites harder than a bulldog. Police say a couple in Neptune Beach (you were expecting anywhere other than northern Florida) got into a fight during Florida’s blowout of Georgia on Saturday. When he got his bags and tried to leave, she did what any self-respecting UF fan would: she bit him. Not gave him the tired old Gator Chomp gesture, but actually bit him. On the freaking thigh.

The look of love

You know the punchline to this story.  Police said both Hairston and her husband appeared to be under the influence of alcohol when the incident took place.

Surprise, surprise.

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Change we can wait for

Stewart Mandel looks at the scant number of minority head coaches at D-1 schools, sees it dwindling even further at season’s end… and basically says there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

… Unfortunately, the only sure-fire way to increase the number of black coaches is for the current ones to keep winning. That’s an entirely unfair brand of pressure to put on the shoulders of any coach.

So, basically, life’s a bitch, fellas.  Deal with it.

And the fault for this, dear Brutus, lies not with the current crop of decision makers, which Mandel assures us is “progressive” in nature, but with the troglodytes of twenty five years ago.

… their predecessors of 20 to 25 years ago were not, which is right around the time the typical, 40-something head coaching candidate of today would have needed to enter the profession. At that time, black people had little reason to believe a career in coaching would pay off for them, which likely caused a whole bunch of potentially promising coaches to choose another field. Hence, today’s pool remains predominately white.

In other words, it’s nobody’s fault now.  How convenient for everyone.  What’s really interesting about Mandel’s analysis of this is that he dismisses the possibility of college football’s administrators adopting an approach similar to the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview – but not necessarily offer the job – minority applicants for a head coaching job.  That’s because any shortcomings lie not with the decision makers, but the applicants.  So while Mandel thinks it’s reasonable to ask a school to be more inclusive in its hiring approach, “…you can’t force a school hire to a black coach if it doesn’t truly believe him to be the best candidate.”

Assuming for the sake of argument that such is always a coldly rational, fairly weighed decision (now there’s a hell of an assumption), it still misses the point.  Mandel rather conveniently doesn’t explain why the NFL has been more successful, at least from a pure percentage standpoint, in hiring minority head coaches than have college football athletic directors (or the Bobby Lowders behind the throne).  Were NFL owners/general managers more enlightened twenty five years ago than their college counterparts?

Tell your statistics to shut up.

The always excellent cfbstats.com site tells us something we really didn’t need to hear about:

… In Florida’s 49-10 rout of Georgia, one of Florida’s 3rd-quarter drives that helped blow the game open started at Georgia’s one yard line, and another started at Georgia’s ten yard line. Both drives were set up by Georgia turnovers.

So far this season, eleven teams have started two drives inside the opponent’s ten yard line during a game, and they are 10-1 in those games. On drives that start from the opponent’s ten yard line to the one yard line, teams score a touchdown 81.8% of the time, and kick a field goal 10.7% of the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…

What I learned last night.

With regard to Utah, it’s all about survive and advance, baby.  Whipped in yardage, looking like they’d get blown out of their stadium in the first quarter, the Utes hung on, watched TCU clang two field goal attempts that would have put the game away and cobbled together a last minute drive that won it.  If they get by BYU, they’re BCS bound.

Nice blackout, too.

As for Virginia Tech, I’ve decided there’s one rule of thumb in the ACC this year:  always bet on the ranked team to lose.

Seriously, I think this blog post sums up the current state of the ACC.  Except there’s probably a better label for the first group than “Tier 1”.  Like “these schools suck marginally less than the rest of the conference”.