Oink, oink, baby.

Proving that nothing succeeds like excess, ladies and gentlemen, I present the Bacon Explosion:

… This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers.

Here’s what it looks like, all 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat worth.

Mmmmmm... bacon (photo courtesy Don Ipock for The New York Times)

Holy mother of crap.   I better get an invite from the first of you who serves it at an Athens tailgate this year, damn it.

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Clinton Durst, road kill

Over at The Joe Cribbs Car Wash, Jerry ponders the departure of Auburn’s punter from last year and comes to the same conclusion that the tree trimmer in Better Off Dead reached:  Now that’s a real shame when folks be throwin’ away a perfectly good white boy like that.

I ♥ Joe Cox.

Is this a great quote, or what?

Cox on bringing in more WR talent…
“It would be great to get somebody else in, but like this past week when Cameron Kenney was in, I had watched film on him and seen what he can do, but obviously he had already known where he wanted to go. I’m not going to be the guy that tries to be all in someone’s ear and say you should come here because, and I told him that. We did the meet and greet and all that, and once it got down to it and we started talking about the whole recruiting process, I told him, if this place doesn’t sell itself to you, obviously it’s not the place you want to be. I shouldn’t have to sit here and beg you to come here or say it’s so much fun here because the players do this. I said, if it doesn’t sell itself to you with the coaches and everything around you, if you don’t just get that feel, you should probably be somewhere else. We’re looking for guys that want to play for Georgia, that want to be Bulldogs, that love it here as soon as they set foot on campus. That’s the type of guys we want, and hopefully we can get a few more to come through the door.”

Damn straight.

Deep breaths, people.

It’s the last week of January, and that can only mean one thing for college football fans – recruiting anxiety.  That’s right, it’s that time of year when normally sane people irrationally fret over the decision making process employed by a few dozen seventeen and eighteen year old kids (not exactly an age known for rational behavior, to make things even crazier).

Go to the Georgia message boards, and you’ll get more than a light taste of this.  All those open slots!  All those uncommitted kids still taking visits!  They’re not coming!  The sky is falling!  Bad season means bad recruiting class!  Repent, the end is near!

Never mind that Rivals and Scout both have Georgia’s current batch of commits ranked in their top ten.  Hell, what do they know?  Georgia’s not filling needs!  Besides, everyone knows that this five star kid was a flop and that four star kid never started.  Yada, yada yada…

I don’t have all the answers to all that, but I offer this post from Doc Saturday as a sort of virtual Prozac to all you worriers.  It’s an antidote to the can’t-see-the-forest angst that consumes many of us at this time of year.  Essentially, things boil down to this:  as a general rule, programs that recruit well will see that reflected in their winning percentages.

Hinton matched up Rivals recruiting rankings for all D-1 colleges against their respective winning percentages and concluded…

Teams that brought in an annual 400-1,000-point advantage over their opponent on any given weekend won two-thirds of the time last year, by 10 points per game; teams that “out-recruited” the opposing sideline by at least 5,000 points from 2004-08 won a whopping three-fourths of the time, by more than two touchdowns. In other words, for every Oregon State over USC and Ole Miss over Florida, there were three cases of Oklahoma over Baylor, LSU over Mississippi State and Ohio State over Northwestern. But you knew that.

So the rankings are definitely not precise enough to predict the national championship (or, unless you’re talking about USC, even most conference championships). But they are especially good at grouping programs into classes that tend to hold up over time. They establish the ceiling and floor of a program’s potential: If your team isn’t a top-10 recruiter over at least a three or four-year period, it’s not going to be carrying off any crystal footballs, either.

There’s a reason schools are paying people like Ed Orgeron and Trooper Taylor ridiculous sums of money, and it’s not because of sartorial excellence or their mastery of public etiquette.  It’s because they sign talent.  And all things being equal, over the long haul, more talent is better than less talent.

There’s plenty of stuff to get exceedingly worked up about at Georgia (see my previous post for an example of that).  This year’s recruiting class?  Not so much.

Well, damn… and well, damn!

It looks like the Georgia quarterbacks have been unleashed on the media this week.  There are all sorts of quotes from Cox, Mettenberger and Murray (where’s Logan Gray?) popping up.

The stunner – unfortunately, in a negative way – comes from Mettenberger, who, though a freshman, spent a considerable amount of time around the team last year and had this to say comparing the mindset of last year’s squad to his current teammates:

Mettenberger on what has surprised him so far…
“Last year I was around a lot, and the leadership wasn’t too great last year. I’ve been here three weeks and I can already tell that the leadership and the seniors, they want to win a championship again. They want an SEC championship. They want a spot to play for the national title. So far, the leadership has been outstanding in my opinion.”

Wow.  Add to that David Hale’s editorial comment…

(NOTE #2: For those of you who are on the “We’re better off with guys who aren’t overly concerned with their NFL futures” bandwagon, pay close attention to the last quote from Mettenberger. It’s extremely telling. And so you know the context, Mettenberger said he was on campus at least 25 times last season, showing up as early as 5 a.m. to be around for practices, etc.)

… and I’m simply floored.  And curious as to how much of this the coaches observed.  And if the coaches were aware of it, what, if anything, they tried to do to right the ship.  And how frustrated they became over it.  And… well, you get the idea.

I’m not really sure there’s much you can do about something like this, especially once you’re into the season.  Nor is it fair to say this is a problem unique to Georgia.  Hearken back to the quote from Urban Meyer prior to last season, in which he claimed to know that his ’07 team wasn’t going to be as successful because of selfishness and a lack of maturity, for evidence of that.

On the other side of the coin, maybe there is something to that old saw about addition by subtraction.  One thing’s for sure, if Joe Cox doesn’t succeed this year, it won’t be because he isn’t prepared.

… The two freshmen and sophomore quarterback Logan Gray bring their thick playbooks to position meetings and have pen and paper at the ready, trying to learn the numerous intricacies of the Bulldogs’ offense.

Cox needs no such materials.

“Joe just walks in with nothing. He knows everything like the back of his hand,” Mettenberger said.

“He doesn’t need anything,” Murray laughed. “He’s telling us what to write in our notebooks.”