Go, Gator! And go, Urban Meyers!

Merciful God in Heaven, this is cringe inducing:

Nice threads, girl.  You should have gone all out and donned some jorts while you were at it, though.

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The value of precedent

Tony Barnhart’s college football blog is back, larger than ever.  Today’s post is pretty much an exercise in catch up, which is what you’d expect.

But there is one little gem in there.  Barnhart holds out the prospect of hope to FSU on that school’s appeal to the NCAA of having wins stripped from its overall record due to academic fraud.  Based on what, you might ask?

Based on Georgia Tech’s cheatin’.

Florida State is going to appeal this part of the NCAA’s ruling and I believe the school will prevail because there is a precedent. In 2006 Georgia Tech won an appeal on an academic fraud case claiming the penalty of vacating football victories was excessive and inconsistent with previous cases of this kind. The appeals committee agreed.

Maybe Diddy’ll send Tech a thank-you note.

A reason for optimism in Columbia

This will be the first spring practice in three tries that Stephen Garcia isn’t suspended from.

“We’ve even got our own toilets.”

If you haven’t followed ACC basketball over the past few decades, I can’t even begin to tell you how stunning this news is:

… This may be March Madness, but the struggling economy has clearly taken a toll on attendance at most league tournaments. The ACC sold tickets to the general public for the first time since 1966. [Empahsis added.]

ACC tourney tickets once upon a time were the hardest tickets in sports.  You had to be extremely well connected to get a hold of some, or a very lucky student.  Now sold to anyone – wow, what a comedown.

I’m sure that will get spun as a direct casualty of the recession, but we aren’t exactly undergoing the first economic downturn in forty three years.  (And don’t forget the big arena excuse, except more tickets have been sold previously.)

What we’re witnessing with this is the end product of greed due to expansion of the conference plus the ongoing erosion of meaning for everything that goes on in college basketball before March Madness.   North Carolina is a #1 seed in the NCAA playoffs, and it didn’t even win the ACC championship.  Back in my day, that would have been complete heresy.  Now, it’s how things roll with an expanded tourney.

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UPDATE: “Damn it, I love college basketball.” (h/t Chuck Westbrook)

Hookin’ up

When you stop to think about it, this was practically inevitable.

“I had a chance to visit Lane Kiffin’s staff recently, and that group is unbelievable,” Lemming said of the Vols’ first-year head coach. “It’s a relentless group, and they’ve raised the bar in terms of what other SEC schools are doing with throwing money at top recruiters.”

Tom Lemming and Junior.  Ugh.  I get the shivers just thinking about it.