“Coach Grantham? I think Coach Franklin’s looking for Josh Dawson.”

Looks like the stage for this year’s post-Vanderbilt game scene is already being set:

Franklin tells crowd at VU student center that commits who decommitted (i.e. Josh Dawson) were "not men of honor" and "not men of integrity"

— Jeff Lockridge (@jefflockridge) February 2, 2012

(h/t MrSEC.com)

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There… that wasn’t so hard now, was it?

The fourteen-school ACC announces that it will go to a nine-game conference schedule, beginning in 2014.

Mike Slive, take notes.

Thanks for having my back, coach., ctd.

Today, I doubt too many players are willing to run through brick walls for Darius Philon’s coach.

… The day after signing day, the day after Stevenson told Press-Register columnist Mike Herndon that Philon felt like “he had the world snatched from up under him” and alluded to a numbers crunch at Alabama, the Vigor coach made it clear he wasn’t about to clarify anything.

“What I said, I probably said prematurely,” Stevenson said.

OK. Now what’s his perspective on what happened?

“I don’t have a perspective,” he said.

On signing day, two of Philon’s teammates said Alabama had asked him to delay his enrollment until January, a practice known as grayshirting. One teammate said Alabama made that request last week.

Could Stevenson explain when Alabama asked Philon to grayshirt?

“I can’t tell you that,” the coach said.

Why not?

“That’s his personal business. It’s not my business. It’s not my personal business.”

But Philon is one of his players.

“It’s not my child.”

Now that’s some fear.  The power that Nick Saban wields in the state of Alabama is staggering.

If you want the job done right…

Forget the main story here (h/t Jim from Duluth) – Vince Dooley still can’t get over Michael Adams, surprise, surprise – and skip down to the footnote at the end:

(One footnote for the record: I covered the Jan Kemp trial and remember people criticizing UGA’s law school when Jan Kemp won her case.

What many people apparently didn’t know was that the lawyer for the university defendants was a Mercer graduate, hired by Georgia’s Attorney General.

Jan Kemp’s two attorneys were UGA grads, one a former scholarship athlete in golf, and one taught at UGA’s law school.

As my English teacher wife would say, “Now, that’s irony.”)

Yes, indeedy.

The dumbassery, it burns.

Jeebus, fellas.

Georgia wide receiver Sanford Seay is expected to be dismissed from the team this morning, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

Seay is accused of stealing money from another student in a university dorm room. It is believed that criminal charges will not be filed in the case.

Atlanta Fox 5 is also reporting that cornerback Nick Marshall will also be dismissed for the incident.

If a theft falls and no one gets charged with a crime, does it make a Fulmer Cup score?

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UPDATE:  And then there were three.

Cornerback Nick Marshall, cornerback Chris Sanders and receiver Sanford Seay have been dismissed from Georgia’s football team for violating team rules.

“It’s a privilege to play college football and to be a part of this team and University,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said in a university release. “Along with that privilege comes certain responsibilities. Mistakes were made and part of our job is helping them learn from mistakes. Going forward, we are committed to assisting them find opportunities where they can continue their education.”

So much for secondary depth this season.

Friday morning buffet

If you’re not too stuffed from signing day, dig in.

• College football attendance figures set a new high last season.
• C. M. Newton says, “We should not let TV be the total driving force.”  Good luck with that one.
• Kendrell Bell isn’t happy with Jim Donnan.
• If they ever give out an award for different ways to earn a secondary recruiting violation, Mark Richt is going to rule.
• Further proof that panicky ADs have stupid ideas.
• Andy Staples has a great look at Vanderbilt’s signing day.   It’s a shame that James Franklin feels a need to go out of his way to prove he can be as big an ass as anyone, because you’d like to root for him otherwise.
• Here’s a withering look at Tennessee’s new class and what it says about SOD.
• Auburn says it gave multi-year scholarships to this year’s class, although at least initially, nobody told Gene Chizik about it.

“We at the Big Ten don’t want to be like the SEC—in any way, shape or form.”

Hell has truly frozen over.  In a mere two months, Bret Bielema and Mark Dantonio have managed to accomplish something that never happened in five years in the SEC – make me side with Urban Meyer.  Bielema, in fact, is so upset over Meyer’s recruiting tactics that his mommy is going to the principal his athletic director is going to the conference commissioner about it.

Just so we’re clear: Bielema wasn’t talking about winning national championships. He was talking about Meyer’s recruiting tactics—and how after a little more than two months on the job, Meyer already is getting under the skin of his colleagues.

Just how much, you ask? Bielema, whose teams have won more games than any other Big Ten team in his six seasons in Madison, says Badgers athletic director Barry Alvarez will speak Friday with Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany about Meyer’s recruiting methods during the league’s athletic director meetings in Chicago.

During his National Signing Day press conference, Bielema hinted that Meyer was using “illegal” recruiting practices. He said as much again Thursday when contacted by Sporting News, and without getting into specifics offered this:

“I called Urban and we spoke about it,” Bielema said. “We talked about it, and he said it would stop and it did. I’ll let our commissioner deal with anything else. That’s not who we are (in the Big Ten). We settle things among ourselves as coaches.”

The big complaint?  That Meyer won’t adhere to the Big Ten’s “gentlemen’s agreement”.

Wisconsin’s Bret Bielema thinks otherwise: he thinks that the Big Ten should adhere to a gentlemen’s agreement that, according to Bielema, has defined the conference’s recruiting efforts for generations. At its core, this agreement makes verbal commits — that’s a non-binding, unofficial commitment, by the way — out of bounds for any coach working within the conference.

How quaint.   How irrelevant.

What does a Big Ten coach do when one of his verbal commitments gets flipped by a coach from another conference?  Hold his breath until his face turns blue?  Does Bielema really think Delany is going to order Meyer to stop talking to recruits who have given verbal commitments to other Big Ten schools?  (My prediction:  watch for Big Ten coaches to lead a push for an early signing period.)

Whining about Urban Meyer is a bad move.  It’s a sign of weakness.  Hint to Bielema:  if you’ve got to whine about something related to recruiting, save it for an 18-year old who has a hard time making up his mind.  That’s the way we roll in the SEC, bitch.

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UPDATE:  Game on.

Meyer reportedly fired back while at the Ohio High School coaches clinic on Friday morning.

“You’re pissed because we went after a committed guy? Guess what, we got 9 guys who better go do it again,” said Meyer. “Do it a little harder next time.”

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UPDATE #2:  Barry Alvarez to Bret Bielema:  Shut up, boy.

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UPDATE #3:  The Big Ten’s most useless athletic director chimes in.

This statement from Ohio State AD Gene Smith was released by the school early afternoon on Friday:

“I am disappointed that negative references have been made about our football coaches and particularly head coach Urban Meyer regarding recruiting. In our league appropriate protocol, if you have concerns, is to share those concerns with your athletic director. Then your athletic director will make the determination on the appropriate communications from that point forward. The athletic directors in our league are professionals and communicate with each other extremely well. Urban Meyer and his staff have had a compliance conscience since they’ve arrived.”

Pretty rich, coming from Jim Tressel’s enabler.