Jim Tressel wants to be compared to Alabama.

Jim Tressel’s decided he’s not going down without a fight.

.. There’s a new twist to the story. Sitting beside Tressel will be Gene Marsh, a former chairman of the infractions committee, from the Birmingham law firm Lightfoot, Franklin & White.

Marsh confirmed Friday he has represented Tressel for a couple of weeks and will be in Indianapolis at the hearing. When it comes to defending yourself against the NCAA, hiring Marsh represents bringing out the big guns.

Marsh certainly knows his way around the process.  He’s got a tough row to hoe, but he’s already formulating strategies to save his client.

… Tressel’s known offense would get many coaches fired by now if he hadn’t won six straight Big Ten titles. SI.com reported that in the past 81 infractions cases involving coaches or administrators accused of the unethical conduct bylaw charged against Tressel, 78 of those people quit or were fired.

Marsh’s strategy in part focuses on what he says is Tressel’s positive track record.

“Obviously, the track record should matter because some people’s track records are good and some people’s track records are bad,” Marsh said Friday. “I was on the committee for nine years. All I can say is it always mattered to me.”

But Marsh doesn’t want to talk too much about Tressel’s past.  That’s why he’s going to invoke the Alabama Defense.

“Any program that’s big is going to have issues,” Marsh said Friday. “All you have to do is look at Tuscaloosa. If you’re in this business, you’re going to have issues.”

You’ve gotta admit, it’s not like he’s the first one to have thought of it.  Maybe Marsh can call Phil Fulmer as a character witness.

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Emmert’s BFFs

Mark Emmert’s trying to be one of the cool kids.

… Emmert’s efforts to appropriately penalize offenders are important, and his moves toward organizational transparency will help the NCAA’s image. Emmert even has a Facebook page, where he addresses agency matters. He’s got more than a thousand “likes.”

I wonder if Cecil Newton is one of them.

Exception to the rule

Matthew Smith runs an analysis of turnover margin for 2010 teams and finds just about what you’d expect:

… Does turnover margin really have a legitimate predictive value for the next year?

The answer is yes. Turnover margin has meaningful predictive value. The reason for this is twofold: first, that turnover improvement very strongly correlates to record improvement; and second, that the turnover margin from one year generally has a very small correlation with the turnover margin for the next year…

As to his first point, he looked at the ten teams which improved their turnover margins the most from 2009 to 2010.  The results were significant.

Nine of the ten improved their record. Six of the ten improved by 4+ wins. And in case you’re wondering, it was a similar story with those who improved by 12 turnovers (OK St, Illinois, and Mizzou all materially improved their records as well).

Only one of the ten failed to improve.  (You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?)  The only team on his list which didn’t win more games in 2010 was the team with the second greatest improvement (+26!) in all of D-1 football, our beloved Georgia Bulldogs.

As to his second point, I have no idea if that’s good news or bad for this year’s Dawgs.  But I think I’ll keep the regression-to-the-mean talk to a minimum this go ’round.