Maybe they should call it Stealth and Conditioning.

I swear, there are times I think if it were up to Coach Tereshinski, nobody would know his part of the staff at Georgia even exists.  It’s gotten almost zero attention, but they’ve just made a new hire.

Justin Lovett was named Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach at the University of Georgia in June 2012 after serving for the previous two seasons as a strength and conditioning assistant on the Denver Broncos’ staff.

That completes a drastic reordering of Georgia’s strength and conditioning staff under Tereshinski.  No more graduate assistants; no more former players there to serve as role models for the current student-athletes.  I suspect there’s no more Van Halanger-ish feel-goodism, either.

Whether all these changes pay off is the $64,000 question.  We’ll find out soon enough.

Speaking truth to greed

I ❤ Paul Rhoads.  Sure, he may have coached at Auburn, but he left… and he makes sense with this:

“Once we open up this door, the flood gates open up to a certain level. As soon as you start four, there is going to be a group that will start pushing for eight. Then, they’ll start pushing for 16. We’re not going to be able to stop that,” said Iowa State coach Paul Rhoads. “And the more you do that, the more the bowls get weakened, the more the experience gets taken away from players, the less relevance you have to every Saturday.

“Every game is important, and game day in college football is second to none.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

He’s not alone in that sentiment.  The results of an American Football Coaches Association survey show pretty overwhelming opposition to a college football playoff.  (Although note that 9% of ’em prefer a 24-school playoff, if it comes to that.) That makes for an interesting contrast with their basketball brethren, some of whom haven’t met a playoff large enough to suit them yet.

Folks at the bowls not considered top tier sound a little nervous, too.  Even Mike Slive concedes they have some reason to worry.

While Slive said the intention is to enhance bowl exposure for league teams, even he can’t be positive it won’t have an opposite effect to some degree.

And that could have a domino effect. Depending on how the system is rearranged, many bowls might have to battle to stay relevant. Take the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, which since 2010 has had the third or fourth selection from the Pac-12 and fifth or sixth from the Big 12. That’s where the Champions Bowl and a four-team playoff could become factors.

If the Sugar or Fiesta Bowl — where the SEC and Big 12 champs currently go, respectively, if not in the BCS title game — become part of the playoff rotation or a permanent part of the new SEC-Big 12 agreement, how will that affect the selection process for other bowls tied to those conferences?

“It could (have a negative impact) but not necessarily,” Slive said. “It really depends a little bit more on how the BCS plays out.”

The general impression you get is that while they know what direction the car is pointed in (Wetzel:  “The No. 1 reason that they’re expanding, and it’s the No. 1 reason anything changes in America, is money…”), nobody really can say for sure where it’s going to stop.  Quite the business plan, no?

Welcome to the SEC, brothers.

Lots of good tidbits from this Jon Solomon piece on the practical issues facing Missouri and Texas A&M on their transition to their new conference (and, yes, before you ask, the financial chart has the data backwards).  Here are a few:

• In Year 1, Texas A&M plays every football national title winner dating back to 2006 (Florida, LSU, Alabama and Auburn).
• Texas A&M hasn’t had a defensive lineman drafted by the NFL since 2008, and Missouri’s last one came in 2009. Since 2010, every current SEC team except Vanderbilt has had at least one defensive lineman drafted. The three-year average is 2.3 per team, including four each by Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
• Forty-three percent of Missouri’s roster comes Missouri. That’s a state from which the original 12 SEC members have only eight players in 2012. The state of Texas, home of Missouri’s No. 1 alumni base (Dallas), makes up 31 percent of the Tigers’ roster.
• Missouri has one ex-SEC assistant: co-offensive line coach Josh Henson, LSU’s recruiting coordinator from 2005 to 2008. Texas A&M’s only assistant with SEC ties is defensive line coach Terry Price, who worked at Ole Miss and Auburn from 1995 to 2011.

And if you want to know why both schools are going to have to start coming east to recruit in the SEC, look no further than this chart.

HOME STATES OF SEC
FOOTBALL SCHOOLS

Traditional 12 schools combined
Georgia — 18 percent
Florida — 13 percent
Alabama — 11 percent
Louisiana — 10 percent
Mississippi — 9 percent
Tennessee — 7 percent
South Carolina — 6 percent
Texas — 5 percent
Arkansas — 4 percent
Kentucky — 3 percent
North Carolina — 2 percent
Ohio — 2 percent
California — 2 percent
Maryland — 1 percent
Oklahoma — 1 percent
Missouri — 1 percent
New Jersey — 1 percent
Illinois — 1 percent

You gotta go where the players are.  It’s interesting to note that Gary Pinkel seems more intent on recruiting Georgia and Florida than Kevin Sumlin does.  Sumlin is putting together a helluva class right now, so maybe continuing to focus on Texas works for him.