“I don’t think it’s fair.”

LSU’s athletic director, unhappy that eleven of his peers are in favor of retaining permanent opponents from the other division on the schedule, actually said this about the subject:  “I think people have voted in the best interests of their schools and not the league.”

Unlike him, of course.

Come on in, the water’s fine.

The more I read about Missouri’s Gary Pinkel, the more I’m impressed with him.  It’s clear he and his staff have already put a lot of thought into preparing for their program’s entry into the SEC (it helps that he’s not stepping into a new situation, as Kevin Sumlin is at Texas A&M).  That thinking isn’t just about schemes and personnel matchups.  It extends to recruiting, too.

Georgia’s going to be rubbing elbows with the new kid on the block.

… Pinkel said the main areas of importance outside of the Tigers’ home state are Dallas and Atlanta. The good thing for Pinkel and his staff is that it’s only about an hour longer drive to Atlanta compared to Dallas. It still accounts for 10-plus hours on the road, but if you’re going to take the time to head to Dallas, you might as well make it out to the hub of the South.

And for Pinkel, it’s well worth it.

“If you look at statistics and analysis of BCS players, they come out of the metroplex around Dallas and then you look at the greater Atlanta area,” he said. “The parallels are staggering between those two cities. They produce a lot of athletes.”

The good news, at least in the short term, is that Missouri’s staff has little experience recruiting Georgia.  The bad news is that over time, Pinkel’s got a solid track record of building recruiting pipelines to Missouri – his first roster had around 10 or 11 players from Texas and now has more than 30.

Steele on South Carolina

Surprisingly, he’s a little down on the ‘Cocks, ranking them 23rd.  Honestly, it’s a little hard to see why, at least from a talent standpoint.  But I’m wondering if he sees SC’s 2011 season as a bit of an overachievement, based on a few items he mentions:

• Garcia, in 2009, was the first and only of Spurrier’s South Carolina quarterbacks to start for an entire season.
• Last year, South Carolina started out 7-1 and ranked #10 but hadn’t scored first in any of the 8 games.
• Last season marked only the third time in 118 years that the Gamecocks recorded double-digit wins.

Add to that SC only returns 11 starters and you may have an explanation for his ranking.  If Lattimore’s healthy, I think Steele’s on the low side there.

18,026.

It’s funny to see a long article about how Georgia’s administrators are worried about student turnout at football games that doesn’t contain a single mention of this year’s home schedule.

“The question out there is, ‘Does this guy get it?'”

This article argues that Notre Dame needs someone who’s as great a politician as he is a head coach.  It’s clear the Irish need something:

… The Irish have yet to win a single BCS game since its inception, they haven’t lost fewer than three games since the 1993 season, and they’ve cycled through five different coaches since Holtz, if you include the one who fudged his résumé and never coached a single game. They never connected with Bob Davie, they lost patience with Tyrone Willingham after three seasons, and they grew tired of Charlie Weis’s self-involved bluster after five mediocre campaigns.

And now they are starting to wonder about Brian Kelly, an Irish Catholic boy from Boston who arrived with high hopes. But after a pair of rickety 8-5 seasons, Kelly has yet to cultivate the kind of belief that Parseghian did in his first few months…

Yeah, that’s some résumé.  Yet Notre Dame football remains relevant on a national level, as witnessed by its role in the post-BCS discussion.  Maybe wanting to believe is a belief in and of itself.