2009 Steele is out. Life is good.

I know it’s a sad commentary on my pathetic life, but my face sure had a huge grin on it when I picked up Steele’s 2009 College Football Preview yesterday.

Not the one with this ugly cover, though.

Only one more year of the GPOOE

No, mine has a nice shot of A. J. Green going up and grabbing a pass.

I’ll dribble a few informational tidbits out over the next few days because it’s too much fun not to.  But you should go out and make one of these your own, you know.

Anyway, we’ll start with a trivia question inspired by the cover of my mag.  A. J. Green is the first freshman to lead the SEC in ypg receiving since…?  [Warning:  answer is sorta depressing if you’re a Georgia fan.]

Sunday morning buffet

Wash your hands, grab a plate…

• If Bernie Machen thinks Urban Meyer should be the SEC’s highest paid head coach, but Les Miles has an escalator clause in his contract making him the highest paid head coach, how’s that gonna work out?
• Rex Robinson offers some advice for the beleaguered Georgia kicking game.
• Pretty much any opinion piece on the BCS that cites Joe Barton favorably is going to sound stupid, and this one is no exception.
• I guess the NCAA is worried about somebody throwing a fantasy football game now.
• “Though it’s obvious Kiffin has few friends among SEC coaches — he didn’t stay and eat lunch in the meeting room with his fellow coaches and didn’t converse with them in the halls during meeting breaks — he doesn’t seem to care.” No shit, Sherlock.
• Think the folks at Mississippi State are thrilled about the new SEC TV contracts?  Put it this way:  this year’s distribution from the conference is almost one-third of the school’s total athletic budget.
• So, the GPOOE™ had front row seats at a NBA playoff game.  What the author fails to account for is that Tebow was probably invited to attend as a back up physician for one of the teams.  You never know when some player might need an emergency circumcision.  What I want to know is what’s the deal with all of those wrist bands?
• Bobby Johnson meets Steve Martin.  What took ’em so long?

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UPDATE: An Orlando Sentinel blog reports that the GPOOE™ was booed when his mug appeared on the Jumbotron. (h/t The Wiz)

“The average amount distributed to each school was $11.1 million.”

Another year, another record payday for the members of the Southeastern Conference.

… The Southeastern Conference will distribute approximately $132.5 million to the 12 league institutions in the revenue sharing plan for the 2008-2009 fiscal year, which ends Aug. 31, 2009, according to league commissioner Mike Slive.

The $132.5 million is the highest total ever distributed in SEC history and represents a 4.0 percent increase from the $127.6 million distributed to the schools in 2007-2008.

That doesn’t include the $11.6 million that individual schools got to retain from bowl revenue.

It’s the breakdown of that $132.5 million that’s most interesting.

Broken down by categories and rounded off, the $132.5 million was derived from $52 million from football television, $25.4 million from bowls, $14.3 million from the SEC Football Championship, $13.6 million from basketball television, $4.1 million from the SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament and $23.1 million from NCAA Championships.

By my math, SEC schools pocketed close to $92 million from football and just about $41 million from basketball.  The football TV revenue alone was $10 million more than the total basketball money.

I’ll refrain from the regular season/postseason comments here.  But make sure you look at where the money in each sport was derived.

Saturday funnies

Here are a couple of chucklers for you this morning.

First, I haven’t commented on Bobby Lowder stepping down as head of Colonial Bank because, quite frankly, I don’t know how much of a difference that makes in his current level of influence at Auburn.

That being said, JCCW’s Jerry links to this Jay Tate blog post that contains one of the funniest understatements I’ve ever seen.

Speaking of Lowder, Tate offers this epitaph.

Sure, he meddled in some stuff. So what?

Indeed.  Jetgate and screwing with the school’s accreditation – no big deals, right?

Makes you wonder what Tate would sound like passing judgment on Bernie Madoff (Sure, he swindled some people.  So what?) or Rod Blagojevich (Sure, he prostituted his public office.  So what?)

Speaking of public office, the Los Angeles Times’ Chris Dufresne has done us all a service by assembling some choice quotes from Rep. Joe Barton’s recent grandstanding hearings on the BCS (h/t The Wiz).  Call it Joe’s Greatest Hits.  This exchange is my favorite:

… Swofford on the extra game: “What that did was actually open up access.”

Barton to panel: “Open up access?…Does that make sense what he just said?”

Boise State Athletic Director Gene Bleymaier: “Mr. Chairman, yes it does. It did provide more access.”

As I like to say, my friends, America is a great country.  Where else can clueless people find the rich opportunities we generously offer them?

One step ahead of the game

Check out this fascinating little bit of information Barnhart dishes out today at his blog:

Over the course of the week I found out that there is an interesting little nugget in the new BCS contract with ESPN, which will begin after the 2010 regular season.

In past contracts if the Rose Bowl lost one of its traditional partners, the Big Ten or Pac-10 champ, to the BCS championship game, it could simply fill with another Big Ten or Pac-10 team that qualified. That’s how a 9-3 Illinois team got to Pasadena two years ago.

But in the new contract, I’m told, there is an interesting clause: The first time in the deal that the Rose loses one of its champions to the BCS title game, that opening will be automatically filled by a Coalition (non-BCS conference) team if one has qualified. [Emphasis added.]

Yeah, I’d say that’s interesting.  It could placate ESPN’s viewers by avoiding a weak matchup (USC vs. Illinois, anyone?) and as Barnhart notes,

Should the BCS get sued and hauled back before Congress, it is another way it can counter the claim that the Coalition schools don’t have enough access.

What I’d like to know is whether the BCS boys thought this up themselves or whether it was imposed on them by Disney.  Because either ESPN/ABC is getting scary enough to threaten the Rose Bowl and pull it off, or the BCS suits are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for.

Michael Adams wants a shoe deal for himself.

You know, any SEC meeting wouldn’t be complete without some pompous comment from our favorite school president.

In response to Mike Slive’s effort to make the football coaches cool down the sniping amongst themselves, it’s not enough for Michael Adams to simply make a supporting statement.  Nah, he’s got to bring a little of that special edge, that special way of letting everyone know that he’s an underappreciated treasure.

So, we get this.

“The last time I looked all of these people still work for the presidents although they make about five times what the presidents do,” Adams said.

Cry me a river, sporto.  That really chaps your ass, doesn’t it?

Blogger Anonymous

Kyle King has an interesting post up about whether posting under a pseudonym undermines a blogger’s credibility.

Not surprisingly, Kyle, who forthrightly posts under his given name, believes that it behooves the blogosphere to champion accountability if it wants to be taken truly seriously.  At the same time, he’s fair enough to note that his partner in crime posts under a nom de plume, although I’m not sure if Kyle caught the irony in this remark:

It seems to me, though, that the better bet is that the blogosphere will be taken more seriously as we continue to augment the openness and accountability of the process. Paul Westerdawg said it best: “Transparency and disclosure is a better policy in everything not involving national security and comments about your wife’s butt size.”

Of course, if Paul has had his last name legally changed to “Westerdawg”, I take that observation back.

As you can tell (or at least I hope you can tell), I blog anonymously, mainly because over the years I’ve seen certain behavior on message boards that’s made me somewhat nervous.  Maybe it’s an overreaction, but so be it.  What I’m genuinely curious about is whether that affects your perceptions of what I write.

Me, I can see the point Kyle is making depending upon the content being presented.  If this were a blog that spent a good deal of bandwidth discussing what purported to be inside information about the Georgia program, then, yes, I can certainly appreciate that knowing something about the blogger posting the information would matter.

But that’s not what you read here.  I’m posting opinion and analysis from the perspective of someone who very clearly claims to be as unofficial as it gets.  And for that, I would think that the quality of the content matters a lot more than identity in terms of judging the credibility of what gets posted.

Put it this way:  would you think any less of the typical Terence Moore column if he’d posted under a pseudonym?

But maybe I’m wrong about this.  I’d like to know what you think.  Would GTP have more credibility in your minds if I posted under my actual name?

Oh-ver-ray-ted!

That HeismanPundit fellow, what a card…

He’s posted his list of the most overrated head coaches in college football. After sticking up the usual carefully phrased disclaimer (Note: This list does NOT mean these coaches all suck…for the most part), throwing in a few guys past their primes like Bowden and Erickson and taking a gratuitous shot at Junior, he gives us Tressel and Miles at #2 and #3 with explanations like “sure, they’re successful, and sure, they recruit well, but…”

And that’s fine to an extent, but my only question here is, if that’s your frame of reference, why isn’t Pete Carroll on that list?  Has anyone accumulated more talent this decade than he has?  Has any program dominated its conference more in the past seven years than USC?  And what’s he got to show for it over the last four years?

Oh yeah, in asking all that, I don’t mean to say that Pete Carroll sucks.  Really I don’t.

My school’s wins can beat up your school’s stats.

I took a look at this Rivals piece because the teaser mentioned Oklahoma State and I thought I might learn something about Georgia’s first opponent this season.  Instead, I got one treated to one of those exercises in which somebody throws out a bunch of statistics to make it look like some profound point is being made, when in reality there isn’t much there there.

I mean, here’s the deal:

A year ago, Rivals.com looked at how schools and conferences produced players in certain offensive benchmarks – 1,000-yard rushers, 3,000-yard passers and 1,000-yard receivers – in the BCS era.

What do these individual milestones mean for a program or a conference?

After reading the whole article, I haven’t the foggiest clue.  And it doesn’t sound like the author has much of one either.

… Then again, hitting those numbers might mean nothing at all. National champion Florida and undefeated Utah didn’t have any players reach those milestones. And based solely on these numbers, the SEC was nearly as unimpressive as the ACC: four 1,000-yard rushers, no 1,000-yard receivers and a 3,000-yard passer.

While these numbers don’t guarantee wins or losses, they can tell us about how consistently teams can mix and match its key players over a period of time.

So, in essence, if a program produces a bunch of 3,000-yard passers, that means… it’s good at producing 3,000-yard passers?  Ho-kay.  Thanks for that.

Keep in mind that this article is entitled “Milestones help gauge a program’s success”.  All we have to do now is define “success”.  Compare these two fun factoids from the article:

… the Razorbacks, Alabama and Mississippi State are the only schools in the SEC without a 3,000-yard passer in their histories.

How good was Georgia‘s backfield last season? Matthew Stafford and Knowshon Moreno were the school’s first 3,000-yard passing/1,000-yard rushing tandem. Moreno was the first Bulldog to top 1,000 yards in consecutive seasons since Herschel Walker in 1980-82.

Which school do you think had the most success last year, Georgia or Alabama?

The Pac-10 wants more cupcakes on the menu.

One of the best things the Pac-10 has going for it is the round-robin schedule – every school in the conference plays every other school in the conference, so you know who your champ is without a championship game, no muss, no bother (unless there’s a three-way tie for first).  It’s clean, it results in the conference typically having a strong strength of schedule rating and it cuts down on having to spend money lining up non-conference opponents.

So, naturally, there’s talk about discontinuing it.

In an informal poll conducted by the Pac-10 blog, conference coaches voted 6-4 in favor of ending round-robin conference scheduling and reverting back to an eight-game slate, which was how things were before a 12th game was added in 2006.

That’s about how a straw poll went in May during the Pac-10 meetings in Phoenix, and feelings were strong enough against the nine-game conference schedule that the athletic directors will review the issue during their June meetings in San Francisco.

The vote mostly split like the current conference standings, with the top-half teams favoring nine games and the bottom half teams wanting to go back to eight.

There’s a good reason for that. Nine conference games insures five conference teams will lose an extra game every season, which could be the difference between earning bowl eligibility or not.

There’s your Exhibit “A” for why there are too many bowl games.