Love the sinner, hate the sin.

If you want a perfect encapsulation of what generates Tebow fatigue, here’s something treacly from Ivan Maisel, who should know better, about a reason to cast a first place Heisman vote for the GPOOE™.

Why Tebow should win: If you like your history served sunny side up, there could be no worthier player to join Archie Griffin as a two-time Heisman winner. Tebow has represented the best that college football can offer for four years. Florida stayed at No. 1 until nearly the end of this season and goes into the Sugar Bowl at No. 5 in large part via Tebow’s will and positive thinking.

His NFL career can’t start soon enough for me.

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Holding it together in Athens

A few thoughts come to mind after reading David Hale’s article about how the Georgia staff is reaching out to recruits to keep the waters calm until the new coaches are in place.

1. Rodney Garner’s professionalism. We know he’s ambitious (not that that’s a bad thing).  But he’s not letting his personal feelings interfere with his primary responsibility right now of keeping things together.  Yes, he has a good product to push, but he’s still got to make the effort.
2. Mark Richt’s demeanor. His program is in a state of flux, but he’s still the man.  And from what it sounds like, that carries a lot of weight.
3. Maybe the Internet has its uses after all. You see the usual brickbats fly all the time against message board posters and bloggers about how negative rumors can hurt the program, but Garner offers something of a reverse with this thought:  “I think with the media, those rumors were out there all year,” Garner said. “I don’t know how shocked everyone was. The kids initially asked about it, but a lot of that was stirred by people calling them, asking what they thought.”
4. Scheme, shmeem. There doesn’t seem to be too much worry about how a new DC might be expected to deploy his players.

“Schematically, everyone now is so versatile. We’re a 4-3 base under Coach VanGorder and Coach Martinez, but we did some 3-4 stuff,” Garner said. “We did multiple stuff. I think whomever or whatever coach or system goes, I think the personnel, the nucleus is here. You may have to go out and tweak it here or there if you change it a whole lot. We’re pretty versatile as is, so the guys are feeling fine.”

But they’re settling it on the field!

You work your butt off to sponsor a true national title game, you have the benefit of exciting semi-finals going for you, and this is your reward:

Montana’s 24-17 win Saturday over visiting Appalachian State in a second-half snowstorm provided a riveting finish, but it cost the city of Chattanooga more than $1 million.

The Football Championship Subdivision finalists are set for Friday night with Montana and Villanova, a combination that will travel the fewest fans since the title game came to Finley Stadium in 1997…

The point isn’t that this delegitimizes the 1-AA title game, but that slapping a playoff label on a postseason format in and of itself doesn’t automatically translate into greater riches.

Postseason game sponsors are rational actors who aren’t in the business of setting up money losing matchups.  Rail against that as much as you’d like, but if a sponsor is obligated to hand out $30 million+ to a couple of schools, it’s going to make an effort to arrange for a game that gives it the best shot it can get to cover the numbers first.  It’ll worry about the quality of the participants later. That’s how crudely capitalism works sometimes.

Meanwhile, back at Congress – a bleg

This Arizona Daily Star editorial is fairly standard stock – college football is broken and is in need of reform, etc. – but there’s one little blurb tossed in there that made me sit up and pay attention.

… another congressional committee is examining whether to give college athletics an anti-trust exemption so universities can regulate coaching salaries.

That’s the first I’ve heard of that.  And that has the potential to be far bigger than anything Joe Barton is currently monkeying around with.  I’ve posted before that I think that’s the deal with the Devil that the big conferences would be more than willing to make:  the trade of a true national football playoff, with all the bells and whistles, in return for complete freedom to fix salaries and control the product without any further threat of antitrust violations.

But like I said, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.  Do any of you readers know anything about this, such as which committee is looking at this and who the congressional sponsors of it are?  I’d sure like to find out more about its future.

The Kelly aftermath – is there a fix?

A couple of interesting suggestions to the NCAA made in this article for you to ponder, in the wake of Brian Kelly hustling off to South Bend:

… The NCAA, which never has been shy about establishing rules, needs two more of them.

Rule One: No school shall contact a coach about a job opening if that coach still has a game remaining on his team’s schedule. No sit-down interviews, no phone calls, no contact whatsoever. If it’s determined that contact has been made, the school in search of the coach is put on probation and loses five scholarships, or 10 scholarships, or whatever the fair penalty is for defying the law.

Rule Two: Put off the national letter-of-intent day – the next one is scheduled for February 3, 2010 – by three weeks, so schools in search of a new coach aren’t forced to act quickly or else lose valuable time on the recruiting trail. Kelly, for instance, had no choice: If he isn’t amenable to the offer he got last week, Notre Dame immediately executes Plan B because the race is on for elite high school prospects.

So delay the race. Delay it for three weeks. The awful trauma of putting off the national letter-of-inent (sic) day until Feb. 24 would be more than offset by allowing coaches of bowl-bound teams to conduct unfinished business.

I’m not sure if the first of those is legal, but the second sounds sensible on its face, although I would expect to hear complaints from coaches who will have to hold their verbal commitments together for a longer period of time.