Tuesday morning buffet

The pickings aren’t as slim as they were over the holiday weekend, fortunately.

• I love ledes like this:  “If the college football preseason magazines are correct, this will be another tough year for Georgia fans.” They weren’t so hot with their Georgia predictions last year, were they?
• I get the impression that Paul Finebaum doesn’t have much regard for Urban Meyer.
• Matt Hayes ranks the conferences based on their non-c0nference scheduling.  He makes an interesting point about the Pac-10:  “Two reasons the Pac-10 is annually the best in nonconference scheduling: television money and exposure. The Pac-10 doesn’t have a CBS-type deal like the SEC, or an ESPN-type deal like the Big Ten, where the conference is given prime television spots and celebrated on a weekly basis.” Does that mean if the new commissioner manages to swing a lucrative TV contract – surely the top item on his agenda, I would think – that the quality of the Pac-10’s OOC opponents will drop?
• Michael Elkon’s been in search of a new unified theory about college football since the demise of his last one, and he may be on to something with this:  Negative Grohmentum.  Gratuitous shots at Al Groh and confessions of maintaining a Steele archive are always going to get favorable attention from me, but the stats he compiles don’t lie.  I would add one more factor to his reasoning, though.  Except perhaps early in their careers, the elite coaches (who tend not to get canned) find it tougher to win those awards, because the level of excellence they maintain comes to be expected.
• If, relatively speaking, you think Georgia’s gone above and beyond the call with its non-conference scheduling over the past four seasons, fanblogs.com’s Ben Prather would agree with you.