Who’re you gonna believe, me or those lying phone records?

Although I suppose Aggie conspiracy theorists could claim all this proves is that Mark Richt’s cell phone never left the Athens area during the first week of December.

Don’t forget who said “I love you” first.

Just so we’re clear on the Tater Tot to Akron story about which of the two is the more desperate:

According to the source, Bowden reached out to Akron.

And this is pure comedy gold.

… Landing Bowden is a coup for the Mid-American Conference school and gives Akron a high-profile football coach second only to Ohio State’s Urban Meyer in the state.

The punchline is that’s after a former Akron player/coach turned down the school’s offer.

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Could Georgia/South Carolina game be on the move?

This is all still little more than fog and mirrors, but here’s a rumor Phil Kornblut is passing along (h/t Jim from Duluth):

According to a source familiar with Georgia’s tentative 2012 schedule, the Bulldogs will play at Missouri in their SEC opener in the second week of the season.  And the annual showdown with the Gamecocks, this season set for Columbia, will be played the first week in October.

If true, that could be a CBS game, one would think.  Thank goodness it’s a little cooler by then.

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UPDATE:  Paul Westerdawg passes on what he’s heard.  The surprise is ‘Bama staying on the schedule (at home, no less) and Ole Miss dropping off.

We’d be happy to keep ’em all in Athens next year.

Can somebody put this NFL scouting director in touch with all of Georgia’s juniors pondering their NFL draft status?

Pundits say the darndest things.

Hey, whadooyano – Pat Dooley’s puzzled by something.

It's funny how Mark Richt is being praised for paying coaches out of his own pocket and Galen Hall was fired at UF for doing the same thing.

— Pat Dooley (@pat_dooley) December 21, 2011

Hmm, he, ha… let’s see if the New York Times can help.

Galen Hall resigned as football coach at the University of Florida today amid charges that he made unauthorized payments to a player and to his assistant coaches in violation of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, the university’s interim president said.

Hall’s replacement will be Florida’s defensive coordinator, Gary Darnell, said the interim president, Robert Bryan.

”We made this move because the man violated his contract and committed major violations of N.C.A.A. rules,” Bryan said at a news conference. ”We cannot allow him to coach.”

Bryan said he accepted the resignation effective immediately, citing payments allegedly made by Hall to a player in 1987 and unauthorized salary supplements to assistant coaches in 1986-88.

So, skipping past the technicality that Hall resigned as opposed to being fired (although that was obviously in the cards), what you had there was a coach accused of making payments to a player and unauthorized payments to coaches.

Richt, however, made no player payments.  And at least some of the payments to coaches weren’t unauthorized.

In each case,the payments were not considered against NCAA rules because they were done with the knowledge of the athletic administration, according to the report.

Of course, the real issue in all this, as no doubt Dooley fully knows, is the setting that Hall was operating in.  At that time, the Florida program was reeling because of Hall’s predecessor (and former boss), Charley Pell.

After the 1982 season, the NCAA began an investigation into possible rule violations by Pell and his staff at Florida, for which he took full responsibility in August 1984. Pell originally asked to be allowed to resign at the end of the 1984 season, but when the NCAA announced that Florida was alleged to have committed 107 major infractions, university president Marshall Criser fired Pell after three games. He was succeeded by his offensive coordinator, Galen Hall.^[8] Hall and the 1984 Gators won Florida’s first-ever Southeastern Conference (SEC) football championship, but the SEC university presidents voted to vacate the Gators’ 1984 SEC title after the season was over. In January 1985, after it was ultimately determined that Pell and the Gators coaching staff had actually committed fifty-nine infractions, the NCAA placed Florida on two years’ probation and banned the Gators from bowl games and live television in 1985 and 1986. The NCAA also reduced the Gators’ football scholarships by twenty over three years.^[2] The loss of scholarships proved to be the most crippling sanction in the long-term; with a depleted roster, the Gators did not win more than seven games from 1986 to 1989.^[9]

So could you argue that Hall was scapegoated by the Florida administration for the sins of others?  Yeah, probably.  But that doesn’t make a comparison between Hall and Richt anything more than a false equivalence.  It just means the Gators did a crappy job monitoring their football program in the ’80s.

The further adventures of I Blame Bobo

This is really more a question for the naysayers, but in evaluating Bobo’s performance as an offensive coordinator this season, does context matter?

This truly is a defensive league (five teams rank in the top 10 nationally). SEC offenses didn’t end the regular season well, with five teams — Florida, Tennessee, Auburn, Ole Miss and Kentucky — finishing with offenses that ranked higher than 100th nationally. Only three teams — Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia — ranked in the top 50, and were the only SEC teams to average more than 400 yards of total offense per game.  [Emphasis added.]

His point about the SEC being a defensive conference could be made even more strongly.  The top four teams nationally in total defense were all from the SEC, and only two SEC teams were in the lower half of all D-1 teams in that statistical category.

So how much credit should Bobo get for Georgia’s offensive performance in that setting?