Blair Walsh’s funky funk

In case you were wondering…

BS: What happened in your senior year? (Walsh missed 14 of 35 field-goal attempts in his final season at Georgia.)

BW: I just started pushing a little bit. I missed early on in the season. I was 2 for 4 after the first two games, and I hadn’t been like that ever. It killed me that I wasn’t helping my team like I knew I had been in the previous years. I over-analyzed and got myself into a funk and was in and out of it all year.

I guess I made a bad call on that whole mental toughness thing.

Somebody on that coaching staff needs to figure out how to communicate with kickers, though.  Not every kid can run on automatic pilot.

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Nick’s for nine.

There were rumors that last week in Destin Nick Saban was strongly pushing the SEC to adopt a nine-game conference schedule.  Today, he came out of the closet about that.

But for the first time publicly Wednesday, Saban indicated that he would like to see the league go to a nine-game schedule, even if it means Alabama backing away from nonconference games such as the Sept. 1 opener against Michigan in the Dallas area.

“I’m satisified with what everybody determined, but in all honesty, I was for playing more games,” Saban said …

He was fair enough to acknowledge that some schools, unlike Alabama, have in state rivals from other conferences, but it’s hard to argue with his logic about expanding the conference schedule:  “When you increase the size of the league by 15 percent, you’ve almost got to play more games to get a true indication of who’s the best team in the league…”

If the choice is between bolstering conference identity or polishing up the resume for the postseason, I know which side I’m choosing.  Too bad the ADs and the coaches see it differently.

Don’t hate the chicken sandwich because the conference is pretty.

This is what somebody with no soul sounds like.

… I was excited by the mere prospect of sober Chik-Fil-A consumption (I’d had it a couple times while drunk in Florida).

I went to the mall, ordered the chicken sandwich combo, took a seat, took a bite. It’s a chicken sandwich with pickles. That’s it. There is absolutely nothing special about it whatsoever. It’s a bit dry, actually. A bit stale. The breading was KFC-level mediocre.

“KFC-level”?  This aggression will not stand, man.

Secession was wrong and so is this:

Also, congrats, SEC fans: In your reflexive need to react against carpetbagger Yankees with torches and pitchforks, you just inadvertently stuck up for the BCS and placed Jim Delany — JIM DELANY, PEOPLE — on the side of Dan Wetzel and the other BCS antagonists. He might be the defender of the Rose Bowl, but you have become the defenders of a status quo that everyone uniformly hates.

We’re the defenders of the status quo?  You must have us confused with somebody else.

Once more, the world was spinning in greased grooves.

With all the uncertainty and mucking around with scheduling we’ve seen in the past few post-expansion months, at least nobody’s screwed with this.

Florida will face Georgia at 3:30 on Saturday, Oct. 27, in Jacksonville, CBS and the Southeastern Conference announced today. It marks the 10th consecutive season that the two SEC East rivals will meet in front of a national audience on CBS.

Ahhhh.

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UPDATE:  More of CBS’ scheduling picks here.

And now… here’s Mikey!

If there’s anyone you’d pick to claim that he was for an SEC-owned network all along, it would be Georgia’s illustrious president – and you would be right.

“We’re strong enough in the marketplace that I have long advocated for an arrangement [in which] we look for a media partner where we would own at least 51 percent of the deal and create a network,” Adams said. “I raised that issue when we did the last TV deal [in 2008], but I was a minority view at the time.”

Now, though, it’s probably full speed ahead with an SEC Network launch.  The money and the ego-stroking to come will be nice benefits, to be sure, but there’s always something extra when you’re Michael Adams.

Adams said he would favor an arrangement where a sports media partner “can do the technical work and let us provide the product. There’s both, I think, more money and more editorial control if you do those things.”  [Emphasis added.]

Of course.

The schedule loves me! It really, really loves me!

You should probably categorize this as one of those things you see posted in June, but this list of point spreads for every 2012 SEC game has gotten some attention on the Intertubes.

If the favorites won every game as expected, here’s how the final conference standings would look:

EAST
Georgia 7-1
South Carolina 6-2
Florida 5-3
Tennessee 4-4
Missouri 2-6
Vanderbilt 2-6
Kentucky 0-8

WEST
LSU 8-0
Alabama 7-1
Mississippi State 5-3
Auburn 4-4
Arkansas 4-4
Texas A&M 2-6
Ole Miss 0-8

Of course I’d take that.  But there are a few head scratchers as you go down the list of games.  Florida at Tennessee is a pick ’em, yet the Vols are double-digit underdogs to both Georgia and South Carolina, while the Gators are just a slight dog in Jax and are favored to beat the ‘Cocks by four.

Auburn is getting 7.5 when it hosts LSU and Arkansas is a 3.5 point underdog in its home game against LSU, but Auburn is favored by one when Arkansas comes calling.  And Auburn is a slight underdog at home against Georgia, although recent trends would suggest that’s a pretty safe call.

It’s not going to be a fun year for Ole Miss, going by these spreads.  The Rebel Black Bears are +31 against LSU, +30 against Alabama, +24.5 against Georgia and +23 against Arkansas.

But, yeah, bottom line, it confirms that the schedule is good news for the Dawgs.