Aaron Murray does not blame Mike Bobo.

Really.

“A lot of people give Coach Bobo a lot of [grief] for playcalling, but we were scoring over 30 points a game mostly, and a lot of the time we weren’t executing it,” Murray said. “If fans could only go back and know what we were looking at when we were watching film, they would see that Coach Bobo did a great job putting us in a great position to make plays and score points and we just weren’t executing when we needed to.”

Yeah, there’s a lot of happy talk in that article, but I’m encouraged to see that Murray is aware he has to improve his footwork.  (Contrary to what Low suggests, it wasn’t that hard to see when Murray struggled with his mechanics last year.)  That being said, it’s not just about drills.  It’s about Murray being able to trust his offensive line and backs to keep pressure off him long enough to get off a properly thrown pass.  That’s a level of trust that won’t be easy to build quickly.

Then again, I don’t know what you do with this Coxian comment:

“I don’t know what my problem is. I really just enjoy contact. I grew up playing defense so I kind of miss the whole hitting and stuff like that, so it’s kind of hard for me. But I definitely think it’s something I need to work on this offseason.”

Do you ever think Mark Richt gets frustrated?  I think Mark Richt gets frustrated.

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Shit my commissioners say.

Afternoon, campers.  Can you guess what today’s BCS buzzword is?

“Any improvements we can make in terms of transparency will be welcomed by everybody,” ACC commissioner John Swofford said following Wednesday’s meeting here.

“Transparency is something we would like to see happen down the road,” SEC commissioner Mike Slive said.

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick added that the need for greater transparency has been “uniformly embraced.” Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said the topic frequently surfaced in the most recent BCS meeting.

“Whatever we do,” Scott said, “that’s what we’ll aim for.”

Oh, yeah.  Such solemn pronouncements, from a group that:

• has allowed five of the six gurus running computer formulas which the BCS rankings have been partly based on to keep those formulas private – even from the BCS folks themselves;
• has allowed the Coaches Poll which the BCS rankings have been partly based on to maintain all of its results in private until the regular season is over; and
• is now considering the use of a selection committee to decide playoff eligibility, even though the one used for basketball is conducted privately and Jim Delany admits there’s no way for one to be conducted without it being at least partly away from the public eye.

Other than that, these guys are totally down with that transparency thing.

Most of this crap never was that hard to fix in the first place.  If the computer guys won’t disclose their formulas, hire ones who will.  It’s not like there’s a shortage of smart stat geeks out there.  If the coaches won’t vote publicly, dump ’em from the BCS calculations.  They (or the SIDs who actually vote) won’t be missed.  The reason it hasn’t been fixed is because the grand poobahs aren’t nearly as committed to transparency as they’d like you to believe.

Now we’re supposed to think they’ve found religion?  Please.  If they vote to use a selection committee, keep Delany’s word salad in mind.

“You can’t have an absolute in this area,” Delany said. “You’re going to have to have your deliberations, and they’re going to be had in a place and in a way that allows people to be candid and not held captive to every word that’s said. There are levels of transparency, but when you look at what we have now, we can compare it to what could be.”

In other words, instead of inefficiently lobbying in public for one of my schools to be included in a playoff field, now I’ll be able to arm twist a small group in private.  Levels, for the win!

This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let’s not bicker and argue over who beat who.

I love a good rivalry as much as the next guy, but I’ve got to admit the idea of stooping to this level would never occur to me.

(h/t Parrish Walton)

You don’t have to be a cynic to follow the postseason negotiations. But it helps.

“I am shocked, shocked to find that disagreement is
going on in here!”

Two things about this news:

Brace yourselves, but industry sources say the new playoff format for college football might not be adopted until perhaps September, because the 12 members of the presidential oversight committee will have only four hours on June 26 in Washington, D.C., to digest, consider and approve one of the options handed them by the 11 conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director.

I’m told by an industry source that the Pac-12 and Big Ten feel that the SEC and Big 12 may be trying to “railroad through” a four-team tournament, when the former two conferences are advocating a plus-one idea after the existing bowl games. “This thing is very fluid,” he said. “These men are looking at this as their legacy.”

1. Notice he didn’t say which September.
2. Can we please stop with the “legacy” bullshit?  This is nothing but a money grab, plain and simple.  If five years from now these guys become convinced there’s a more profitable route, they’ll crumple their legacy into a small paper ball and toss it in the trash can.

Once upon a time, good nonconference schedules roamed the earth.

One of the more frequent objections you hear about going to a nine-game conference schedule is how that makes scheduling major non-conference games more difficult.  As Greg McGarity put it,

“I mean, who knows,” he said. “In our former models before expansion, yes, that was something we wanted to do, was periodically play another non-conference game against a team like Clemson, like Ohio State. But now with the dynamics shifting you really don’t know right now.”

What I love most about that quote is the use of the word “periodically”.  Folks like McGarity have moved the scheduling goalposts so much over the last decade or so that we’ve forgotten how things were not too long before then.

In 1983, just 29 short years ago, Alabama’s nonconference football schedule included Penn State, Georgia Tech, Boston College and Southern Miss.

That same year, OU’s nonconference schedule included Ohio State, Texas and Stanford. UCLA’s included Georgia, Nebraska and Brigham Young.

In 1983, Southern Cal played Florida, Notre Dame and South Carolina. Washington played Michigan and LSU. Nebraska played Penn State and UCLA.

Now, granted, that was the era of six conference games.  But there was nothing stopping ADs from scheduling tons of cupcakes back then, either.  They just tended not to do so.   Even Vince Dooley managed to put together a ’83 OOC schedule of UCLA, Clemson, South Carolina and Georgia Tech.   As Tramel’s list sadly shows, that’s not a virtue anymore for most schools.  (And let me say that as a Georgia season ticket holder, I’m damned jealous of Michigan State fans right now.)

It’s just going to get worse as the fallout from realignment grows.  What’s the next step past periodically?  Infrequently?  Sporadically?  Occasionally?  Almost never?  How about “when I feel like it”?

Just because they lost by an average of four TDs a game doesn’t mean it was so bad.

Pete Fiutak has one of the more curious defenses of Auburn’s 2011 season I’ve seen:

While 8-5 might seem like a dud of a campaign coming off a championship, the losses came to ACC champion Clemson, Arkansas, LSU and Georgia on the road and at home to Alabama. There might not have been five more forgivable losses in college football, even if all of them were ugly blowouts.

Spoken by someone who sounds like he didn’t watch a single one of those games.  It’s one thing for Auburn to lose, even big; it’s another to look totally outclassed repeatedly.  Yeah, those personnel losses were considerable, but still…

I’m not even sure I’d call the Clemson game a blowout.  Auburn wound up gaining almost seven yards per play on offense, but the defense couldn’t get off the field (Clemson ran 92 plays to Auburn’s 63).  But those other four?  Man, Auburn stunk up the joint.  Here’s the spread on average yards per play in those games:

• Arkansas:  -1.41
• LSU:  -2.38
• Georgia:  -3.08
• Alabama:  -4.29

That’s a pretty disturbing trend line if you’re Gene Chizik.  As far as forgiveness goes, I don’t think Ted Roof received any.