You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Todd Grantham has begun tinkering.

Todd Grantham says moving Alec Ogletree to ILB moves him closer to the ball and allows him to make more plays. Jarvis Jones moves to OLB

— Marc Weiszer (@marcweiszer) March 3, 2011

Seth Emerson has more details.

Bottom line – this year’s defense looks to be getting faster.

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There they go again.

Getting my hopes up with offseason conditioning talk…

Cornerback Brandon Boykin said the nutrition changes are already having an affect.

“Oh yeah big time. I’ve felt it myself. I just feel like I can go a lot longer,” Boykin said. “My endurance is a lot longer in the workouts, and I don’t feel tired. And a lot of that has to do with what you eat.”

And more from Boykin:

UGA CB Brandon Boykin on strength/nutrition changes: “I think when y’all see us in uniform next week you’ll be able to tell the difference.”

— Seth Emerson (@SethEmerson) March 3, 2011

Touched by a sleazebag

With Scott Moore’s revelation/accusation/confirmation/fictionalization that it was Florida’s Urban Meyer who was man who blew the whistle on Cecil Newton, maybe it’s time to speculate on which SEC schools won’t have their names dragged into the mud in connection with Cam Newton’s recruitment.

I got dibs on Vandy.

When saying “I’m sorry” isn’t enough.

Chip Towers has more on the South Carolina recruiting snafu story he’s been diligently following.  I thought the Wall Street Journal story made Spurrier look bad, but what Towers puts out makes the OBC look even worse.

Josh Kendall, who covers South Carolina football for The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., reported in a story that was published on Wednesday that Montgomery’s coach at South Lake High, has declared that the Gamecocks’ coaches are “no longer welcome” at the school.

“I cannot look a kid and their parent in the face and say you can trust what a University of South Carolina coach says,” South Lake coach Walter Banks told Kendall.

… I’ll summarize some of the high points:

• Coach Steve Spurrier makes his most direct statements to date on these two players specifically and admits that he and his staff probably didn’t handle the situation as well as they should have. “Walter had a tough time of it and, maybe if I was a high school coach, I would have a tough time with it, too,” he said of the South Lake coach.
• Kendall’s story corroborates my reports that the players were not informed they would not be allowed to sign with the Gamecocks until Feb. 1, the day before national signing day. That’s what I was told by Mauldin and Maynard Jackson coach Eric Williams. “Our mistake was maybe not alerting these two young men,” Spurrier told The State. “I think on [Feb. 1] we alerted both of them, talked to them and said ‘Hey, I’m sorry. This is where we are. We got all these other commitments.’ We didn’t like doing this.”
• Spurrier also reveals that he sent both players a letter of apology and that “we are still looking at them as if they had signed.” In fact, he said the Gamecocks still intend to bring them in. He says that if four of South Carolina’s current signees fail to qualify, Montgomery will be allowed to enroll. Mauldin, the story indicates, would be next in line.

In the legal profession, that smells an awful lot like what we refer to as an admission of guilt.  And it’s bullshit if Spurrier is attempting to imply that he and his staff woke up on February 1st and suddenly discovered in a panic that they had a big numbers problem.  No head coach at a major football program is that inept.  Not only that, it contradicts the story told to Chris Low that Mauldin was kept informed throughout the recruiting period that his chances were shaky.  A more direct person would call that story a lie.

So, yeah, if I were a high school football coach, I’d have a tough time with it, too, hoss.

This is a story to watch as the numbers in this Gamecock class start to sort out.  It’ll be interesting to see what Montgomery and Mauldin eventually decide to do.  And how Spurrier will try to spin it all.

Gatorwhipped

Can you imagine the Florida press reacting in such a laid back manner if Corch Meyers had decided to close spring practice to the media?

And Muschamp hasn’t even had to mention Seat 37F.

Now this is how you do it.

SEC, take note.

The Pac-12’s recently announced initiative to improve its football officiating includes the removal of 11 officials who worked games a year ago, the conference confirmed Wednesday.

Mike Pereira, named last month the Pac-12’s interim coordinator of football officiating, said there will be 16 new officials in the conference next year, hired away from the Big 12, Mountain West and WAC to replace those who were dismissed (along with the 11 who weren’t invited back, another retired).

It’s not that hard to improve the quality of officiating.  If you want to, anyway.

… The overhaul of officiating came at the urging of conference commissioner Larry Scott, who took over on July 1, 2009.

“It’s a huge culture change, and there has not been this type of turnover in officials probably in a long time,” Pereira said.

He said the changes come as part of what is “a new accountability and a new emphasis on training that I think is good for officiating, period.”

Kudos to Larry Scott and his conference.  You’ve come a long way from Verle Sorgen, baby.

By the way, Pereira is only working with the Pac-12 on an interim basis through next season.  Mike Slive, are you paying attention?

Georgia Tech and the 140 Rule, a cautionary tale

No, not this one.

With the SEC meetings in June on the horizon and the topic of oversigning at or near the topic of the agenda, perhaps Mike Slive and the Athletic Directors of the SEC should use the oversigning time machine and rewind the clock back to the SEC meetings of 1964.  That was the year Georgia Tech took a stand against the practice of oversigning and eventually left the conference because it would not change its recruiting rules to prevent the abuses taking place relative to signing more players than there was room for, which subsequently led to players being run off the team and out of school.

This one.

… If Dodd could have predicted the future, one could argue that he never would have pulled Georgia Tech out of the SEC. The years that followed as an independent were mostly lean ones for Georgia Tech. From 1964 to 1982, Georgia Tech’s football record was 104-100-5. Compare that to Tech’s SEC football record of 206-110-12 from 1933 to 1963. As an independent, Georgia Tech saw its facilities become worn and outdated, surpassed in size and quality by most of its Southern competitors.

Georgia Tech would officially begin competing in the ACC in 1983. As a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Tech’s athletic fortunes rose again. With victories and championships in a variety of sports have come financial contributions and greatly improved facilities.

Arguably, the level of national prestige that Tech football enjoyed as a member in the SEC has never returned. Even with all its current success, here’s a startling comparison. In 1963, the enrollment at Georgia Tech was about 6,300 students, and there were roughly 50,000 living alumni. In 2011, the enrollment at Georgia Tech is more than 20,000, and there are more than 120,000 living alumni. Atlanta’s metro population has more than tripled. Yet Georgia Tech’s average football attendance for 2010 was less than it was in 1963.

Georgia Tech athletics forever changed on Jan. 24, 1964.

Some observations…

• Tech’s arrogance was its downfall.  It wasn’t just the stance it took with regard to demanding that the rest of the conference bend to its position or else, it was reflected in the way it handled scheduling western schools and an overall attitude that the conference needed Tech more than vice versa.
• Contrary to what Joshua asserts, Dodd wasn’t seeking to ban oversigning so much as getting the conference to commit to making every school treat its student athletes with scholarships in a way consistent with the honorable stance he took on signees:  “We’d live with 10 boys a year, 20, 30, 40, 50, we don’t give a damn how many boys you let us take.  But don’t tell us we gotta run ’em off.” Georgia Tech wasn’t pushing for a tougher signing cap.  It wanted the existing cap abolished.  (That’s why Bear Bryant sided with Dodd in the first vote.  Nick Saban would no doubt approve.)
• Which gets back to another point I’ve made:  oversigning and running scholarship athletes off are two different issues.  If the SEC agreed to impose a hard signing cap tomorrow and nothing else, it wouldn’t change what some coaches now do to open roster slots.  It would simply accelerate the timing of those moves.  If you don’t want schools to run kids off, you’ve got two choices.  You can go Dodd’s route and remove the cap altogether, or you can make scholarships four-year commitments.  My guess is that neither is palatable to most schools in the SEC (although I think Richt could happily live with the latter).
• I don’t think you’ll ever again see an SEC school, no matter how strongly it might feel about an issue like this, threaten to leave the conference without having an escape plan in place first.  And in this day and age, how easy would that be to pull off without letting anyone know?

This would be funnier if it weren’t so pathetic.

Mark Emmert selflessly wants to offer his services to help create a D-1 football playoff – but only if he’s asked nicely.

“If the leadership of those universities … want to move in that direction, then the NCAA knows how to run championships and we’d be happy to help,” Emmert said while speaking at the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge, of which he was a member while serving as LSU’s chancellor from 1999-2004.

This from a man who’s apparently clueless about how much he’s already got on his plate that’s being handled ineffectively.  Like this minor detail:

Now one of his immediate challenges is ensuring the NCAA maintains credibility with the public.

Maintains?  More like rebuilds.