Monday afternoon brunch

Here are a few tasty morsels to tempt you:

• Chris Low breaks down the individual statistical leaders in SEC games only from last season.  Joe Cox, baby!  (And no, he didn’t lead the conference in interceptions in those games.)
• And I thought college football is a civil right.
• I think what PlayoffPAC sees as a bug we see as a feature.  (h/t Doc Saturday)
• The upside of scheduling cupcakes at Penn State.
• Here’s the first review I’ve seen of Michael Lewis’ new book, which should be a great read (even though it’s not about a sports-related subject).
• Seantrel Henderson’s dad announces he’s ready to go play for Junior.  (But note this caveat Bruce Feldman posted on his Twitter feed – Key thing about whether Seantrel Henderson signs a LOI this week: If it was just a financial aid agreement, it wouldn’t bind him to #USC.)

Advertisement

More Attacks of the Fired Coaches

Jim Leavitt sues USF for $7 million plus.

The real March madness: SEC spring practice questions

Sorry, couldn’t resist the header.

Anyway, there are a couple of good spring practice previews (good because neither makes predictions) out this morning worth a look:  one in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and one at Rivals.com.

From this early vantage point, the SEC looks more wide open than it has for a while.  I think there are a few reasons for that:

1. The quarterbacks. Jay Greeson notes that “More than half of the league has some sort of questions around the quarterback position, and that figures to be job No. 1 for just about every team in the SEC not named Alabama, Arkansas, LSU and South Carolina.” Well, yeah, but even at those four places it’s not like any school is returning a Heisman Trophy candidate.  When the top returning player at the position, statistically speaking at least, is someone whose coach regrets not being able to yank from a game last season when he played poorly, that doesn’t speak too well of the talent pool.
2. Losses at the big boys. Yes, I agree that Saban and Meyer are the top coaches in the conferences and their squads have plenty of talent.  But any way you look at it, the Tide has to replace nine starters on defense and has to break in a new place kicker, while Florida has to replace the SEC’s player of the decade, along with a few other kids who are likely to be high picks in the next NFL draft.  I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it won’t be easy, either.  Or at least not as easy as supporters of both programs would have you think.
3. Righting the ship at LSU and Georgia. There’s no denying the slippage that’s occurred at both schools in the past two seasons.  And in both cases, it’s hard to blame that on a lack of talent.  Is the coaching focus back this year?
4. The middle tier muddle. It’s hard to say if there’s a school ready to emerge from the middle of the conference pack.  On paper, you can make a case that South Carolina should, but this is South Carolina we’re talking about.  Tennessee looks too talent-deficient to contend.  Auburn’s got some momentum and a soft schedule, but that defense looks a little shaky from here.  Ditto for Arkansas, except you can discard the “a little” qualifier.

And of course, none of this takes in the kids that won’t be suiting up until fall practice (who knows how much impact Marcus Lattimore winds up having this season?).

What you y’all see as the biggest questions in the conference right now?

About Alabama and that schedule…

Over at CFN, Barrett Sallee makes a point about the SEC looking at making changes to several schools’ schedules so that Alabama faces less teams coming off bye weeks that’s been nagging at the back of my head since I first heard about it:

You can’t please all 12 teams all the time. If Alabama’s succeeds in getting certain games moved, get ready for this to be a recurring theme each off-season. With Lane Kiffin now out of the conference, I suppose this off-season has been a bit quiet. But four or five teams complaining to the league office about their schedule isn’t the kind of drama that the conference needs. Altering the schedule this late in the year, especially considering some fans have already made preliminary plans, is a slippery slope that the SEC should avoid at all costs.

True ‘dat.

Look, stuff like this comes up almost on an annual basis.  Tennessee played a schedule a couple of seasons ago that saw it face every division rival save Vandy coming off of a bye week.  Hell, last season Vanderbilt didn’t even have a bye week.

This has the potential to set a very bad precedent.