Of all the coaches he knows, Edsall’s one of them.

You know the old story about the guy who tries to set a friend up on a blind date and in response to a question about… ah… her physical attributes, responds along the lines of “she’s got a great personality”?

That’s how Maryland’s president describes Randy Edsall.

… When Loh was asked directly what he thought about the job Edsall had done so far, there was a long pause. A very long pause. Long enough for me to recite half the alphabet.

“Well, he’s our coach,” Loh said finally. “And, uh, I think he has some very, very positive qualities…”

Hubba hubba.  Winning a bunch of football games had better be one of those pretty soon, I suspect.

A silly millimeter longer

Malcolm Mitchell goes all “put me in, Coach!”:

Mitchell on playing both sides of the ball …

“I will put in the work to make sure I can physically withstand it all.”

Asked about Champ Bailey playing 100 snaps in a game …

“I want 101.”

I’m thinking about stealing something.

No, not hash browns.  Rather, a neat idea that Brian Cook is exploring at his blog.

This message board post gave me an idea: this blog should create an e-HOF for Michigan athlete in the sports it covers. Retiring numbers is something that people do 30 years down the road, and probably never in football; legends patches will be issued to like six people. There should be an intermediate ground. Now is the time to create plaques.

What do you think about a Georgia version of this here at GTP?  And what sort of ground rules do you think would be appropriate for it?  Let me know in the comments.

To get you in the mood, Paul Myerberg looks at the Hall of Fame credentials for this guy:

“We lack the appropriate culture here for an SEC football school.”

You probably weren’t expecting to hear that from the student representative on the Athletic Board and director of athletic affairs for Student Government Association at Georgia.  Here’s why he said it:

Sanford Stadium has seats for approximately 18,000 students, Ellenberg said — an increase from 15,000 several years ago. At the Auburn game, which had the highest attendance of any home game of last year, 3,000 of those seats were left empty. At the lowest-attended game, against Coastal Carolina University, 10,000 seats were empty.

That doesn’t bode well for this year’s exciting slate of home games, does it?

Other students who don’t attend might sign up for tickets to “keep all their options open,” but when “we don’t have very exciting games,” they choose to tailgate or watch the game at home instead, he said.

Nope, it doesn’t.  And what should be particularly worrisome to the school is that these are your prospective season ticket purchasers in a decade or two.  If you’re not getting them in the habit of attending now, what makes you think they’re going to feel differently when they’re asked to pony up to the Hartman Fund down the road?

Thursday morning buffet

Rise and shine, campers.

• Looking to learn a little about Georgia’s first SEC opponent this coming season?  Seth Emerson gets some answers out of a Missouri beat writer for you.
• Speaking of Missouri, Gary Pinkel is a little bit of a dreamer.
• No doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that no progress was made yesterday on the SEC scheduling front.
• You know, this might work:  “Greg McGarity suggested last week on Barnhart and Durham on WQXI 790 The Zone in Atlanta that the conference could play six divisional games, one permanent cross-division game and then rotate single cross-division games on a six-year cycle.”  It has the virtue of saving the big rivalry games.  As for the rest, TV would be fine with it, even if it’s not any better for the fans attending games.
• Alamo Bowl official thinks there’s nothing wrong with bowl ratings that the calendar and avoiding a rematch in the title game can’t fix.
• What is it with Texas Tech head coaches and lawsuits?
• Given that Obama has reiterated his support for a college football playoff, I guess we can expect the Republican party to come out strongly against it any minute now.
• Here’s a little something I bet you didn’t know about the Butler family:  “Dad was called ‘Butthead,’ ” the younger Butler said, with obvious pride. “Everybody just calls me ‘Butt.’ I don’t know what the deal is with that. But it’s just Butt for me.”  Beavis was already taken, I suppose.

Dan Wetzel and the intellectual consistency of playoffs

Honestly, I don’t know what it is about Dan Wetzel’s particular form of playoff monomania that drives me so batty, but there it is.

His latest outburst is a criticism of Larry Scott’s conference champs-only plus-one proposal.  This literally made my jaw drop:

Scott’s instincts aren’t completely off; deemphasizing flawed, groupthink-powered polls and mathematically unsound computer formulas is an admirable goal. The only reason polls (25 teams deep) are used is because college football still believes there was validity to something invented by some sportswriters in the 1930s.

It was a just a promotional tool then (try comparing teams in the pre-TV era). It should’ve remained that way. It never should’ve been used on an official level.

The computers were brought in to partially take subjectivity out of the equation. The formulas were bastardized, however, by PC decisions such prohibiting margin of victory.

At its core, this is the intellectual inconsistency that plagues college football, one that Scott reasonably wants to escape.

The problem is obvious: Rewarding only conference champs would be intellectually consistent only if all conferences were competitively consistent.

They aren’t even close to that. Plus they shift on an annual basis. Decades and decades of history in every sport says that there are years the second-best team in one conference or division is superior to a champion of another conference or division.

It’s not that I disagree with any of that.  I think an objective, conference champs-only playoff format should be what D-1 winds up with once they get realignment out of their system and consolidate the division around 64 to 80 teams, but right now, it would lead to as many new problems as it would solve.

No, what drives me crazy here is Wetzel arguing that with a straight face after previously pitching a 16-team playoff with a 6-6 Sun Belt champion in it based on this appealing rationale:

… While no one would argue that the Sun Belt champ is one of the top 16 teams in the country, its presence is paramount to maintaining the integrity and relevancy of the regular season. Teams that put together exceptional season deserve to be rewarded. If you just take the top eight or 16 teams and match them up on a neutral field then there is no advantage to being No. 1 rather than No. 16.

The way to reward the best teams is two-fold. First is providing home-field advantage to the higher-seeded team until the title game (more on this later).

The second is by giving an easier first-round opponent – in this case No. 1 seed Auburn would play No. 16 Florida International. Earning a top two or three seed most years would present a school a de facto bye into the second round.  FIU isn’t in the tournament to win the title – they won’t – but to make the regular season matter more.  [Emphasis added.]

Intellectual consistency?  Pot, meet kettle.