My kinda Dawg

After all the malaise and uncertainty about their play that we’ve heard from several members of the defense, leave it to Jeff Owens, who’s elected to return to Athens next year (yay!), to restore the proper tone to the discussion.

“We lost to Tech,” he said. “Can’t leave having lost to Tech.”

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UPDATE: David Hale adds the cherry on top of the sundae with this bit of news from Owens:

— While Owens said he’s excited about the opportunity, he also wanted to get a commitment from his line coach, Rodney Garner, who has been rumored as a candidate for new Auburn coach Gene Chizik’s staff.

“I told him what I was going to do, and I asked him what he was going to do,” Owens said. “He said he’s staying.”

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When you think about it, it’s even worse.

From The Wiz today:

… The average length of a game has been shortened by 12 minutes and the number of plays is down 8.69 from 2007. Scoring has also decreased by 2.59 points a game.

• Georgia defensive scoring in 2007:  20.2 points per game.
• Georgia defensive scoring in 2008:  25.6 points per game.

I believe the scientific term for that is “bucking a trend”.

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UPDATE: You read quotes like this and it’s hard to blame all of Georgia’s defensive woes this year on scheme.

“I really don’t know what happened,” defensive tackle Corvey Irvin said. “I’m still asking myself that today how that happened. I guess we just lost our composure, lost our swagger against the run, and that kicked us in the butt.”

Explanations are hard to come by for the Bulldogs, who had taken pride in a defense designed to make the opponent one-dimensional.

It wasn’t about a change in philosophy or an injury to a key player, defensive end Rod Battle said. One week, his team was superb at stopping the run, and the next, they weren’t.

“I can’t really point to one thing,” Battle said. “It’s just football, I guess. Sometimes you’re successful at something, and people pick up on what you’re doing and switch what they’re doing. You get spells of being successful and unsuccessful.”

Georgia, home of the ” hell if I know” defense.

Auburn laughs at your concern over losing streaks.

That ten game losing streak that Gene Chizik carries into his new job?  As pointed out at The Sports Economist, there’s precedent for Auburn hiring head coaches on the down slide:

… More stunning, though, is a coach “moving up” in the coaching world after losing his last 10 games. I wondered, has anybody even come close to that. Lacking Elias Sports Bureau’s data, I racked my brain and asked some others. The closest that anyone (Dennis Wilson) could come up with was Dennis Green in moving from Northwestern to Stanford. In his last two seasons at NU, Green went 2-9 and 3-8 while losing his last five games; however, the move from NU to Stanford pales next to the ISU-AU jump if measured by metrics like attendance or football revenues. Tommy Tubberville lost his last 3 games at Ole Miss as part of a 6-5 season before moving to Auburn, so maybe the AD took the booster’s advice and “doubled down” — if Tubberville could have good success coming in with a 3 loss streak, think what could happen after a 10 loss streak!

I guess we’ll know what to look for in case Chizik doesn’t pan out.

Mumme Poll postseason formatting

After mulling things over, including a lot of very good suggestions in the comments to my last post on the Mumme Poll, here’s what I’m leaning towards doing:

1. There will be a final Mumme Poll for which the voting will take place after the BCS title game has been played.
2. Just as the Coaches Poll does, we will recognize the BCS title game winner as the undisputed MNC.
3. That means that the final ballot will be comprised of eleven, not twelve teams.  We’ll vote for a top four and then the remaining seven top schools.
4. Anyone that’s been counted as a voter in any Mumme Poll this season is eligible to vote in the postseason Mumme Poll.

My reasoning is pretty simple here.  First, I think we’ve already shown with the regular season results that approval voting is something that should be seriously considered as a means of reducing at least the appearance of bias and conflicts of interest in the voting by the coaches.  I don’t think the postseason ballot is going to make any difference on this.

So what I’m left with is one aesthetic issue and one issue related to the experiment.  With regard to the former, I don’t like the idea of having a tie for the number one slot at season’s end and I suspect that would be likely to happen, given the probability that the winners of at least three of the BCS games will appear on everyone’s ballots.

Speaking of ties, that leads into the second issue.  I’d like to see if expanding the voting pool lessens the number of ties in the balloting (also, though not as important, I’m curious to see if it has the effect of expanding the number of teams receiving votes), which is why I’d like to encourage those that missed a vote to jump back in again.  (Although I suppose by that reasoning, you could make an argument that I should let anyone vote who wants to participate.)

Let me know what you think about this.  Bowl season kicks off on Saturday, and there is one ranked team in the action (#16 BYU), so I’d like to say at this point that unless I receive some very strong feedback to the contrary before then, what you see above are the ground rules we’ll be going by to finish out this season.