Best “worst” list article ever

Jon Solomon is my new hero.

Rogers Redding has a dream.

Sure, he’s full of shit, but it’s a dream nevertheless.

And you have to like this line of defense if his officials don’t get the call right.

“It’s really up to the players,” Redding says. “If they do what they’re supposed to do, we won’t have a problem. If they make the choice they should make and that the coaches want to make, there won’t be an issue. But there will be somebody. They’re teenagers, for goodness sake.”

At least that’s an excuse for the kids.  What’s his when his refs completely blow a call?

Middle of the pack looks better dressed in orange.

Last year, as I’m sure you’ll recall, the Orlando Sentinel tagged Georgia as the 64th ranked program in its preseason rankings.  64 out of 120 is pretty much mediocre by definition.

So this year, here’s what the Sentinel has to say about Tennessee in conclusion:

Outlook: Although Tennessee is expected to improve in Dooley’s second season, a tough schedule that includes trips to Florida, Alabama and Arkansas could make it difficult for the Vols to better last year’s 6-7 mark.

Smells about the same to me.  The punchline?  That’s good enough for a ranking of 49 this year.  Has the overall state of college football declined that precipitously in one season?  Or is this just a case of grade inflation?

Cheating, pushing the envelope and competitive advantage

John Infante, in one of the more depressing posts I’ve read lately, explores the question of whether a coach needs to cheat to win.

There are a couple of reasons it’s a downer.  First, Infante’s main point is that it’s hard to measure a correlation between cheating and success because we lack adequate tools.  You can point to the edges…

We can start the long process of answering this question at the two extremes. Using the strictest definition of “cheating” we have, the vacating of a national title, the answer in the two revenue sports is promising. Not until USC’s 2004 BCS and AP national titles were vacated had a football or men’s basketball championship been vacated. By the NCAA’s own definition, all the other championships are clean.

On the other end of the spectrum, we can ask how many championships were won by programs that do not have even the hint of impropriety. Put another way, how many national championships in football and men’s basketball were won by programs with no major violations? As you might guess, the answer here is a bit less encouraging:

• Men’s Basketball: 8/73 titles – Georgetown, Holy Cross, Loyola (Chicago), Marquette, Oklahoma State (2), Stanford, Wyoming
• Football: 4/89 titles (Poll Era) – Penn State (2), BYU (2)

… but the points in between are hard to figure out.

And that’s one reason the NCAA struggles so much with rules violators.  As Infante puts it,

The trouble with the NCAA’s technical and intricate rule book is that you also lose some of the correlation between cheating and competitive success. If a coach makes a hundred or so impermissible phone calls to a couple dozen prospects over the course of two-four years, how much a competitive advantage was gained? Even more significant violations have questionable true competitive impact. USC argued, quite logically, that extra benefits received by a student-athlete after enrollment do not lead to a competitive advantage since they do not induce her to attend or stay at USC or make him play better.

Sometimes logic sucks.  But here’s the thing – if we’re having that much trouble investigating and responding to actions which clearly violate established rules, how much harder is it to resolve oversigning (or, if you prefer Slive’s euphemism, “roster management”) issues which don’t?

Stopped clock gets the time right.

Gregg Doyel may be a card-carrying member of the doucheoisie, but he sure nails this.

College football abides.  Which is one big reason I love it so.