“There are still things that are worth playing for.”

Don’t laugh as you read this – this year’s Cap One Bowl is a big game for Georgia.  Lose to Nebraska and all that momentum that’s been building since the Cocktail Party – even through the SECCG loss – dissipates like a fart in the wind.

On paper, Georgia is the better team.  But as we’ve seen with this program, paper isn’t what bowl games are won on.  They’re won on being the more motivated squad.  That’s Mark Richt’s Job One over the next three weeks.  The good news is that he sounds aware of it.

“I will be challenging our leadership to finish better than we did a year ago and to solidify the job that they’ve done, because I think they’ve done an outstanding job to this point. I think they need to put an exclamation point on it or at least finish strong in a manner worthy of the way they led the entire offseason from January until now. That will be a big part of it.”

The Alabama game was both a blessing and a curse.  It let these players and coaches know that the program once again had the mental and emotional backbone to stand up and play an Alabama group that’s been the class of college football over the past four years to a virtual dead heat.  But the way that game ended had to take some wind out of their sales sails. Somehow, they’ve all got to find a way to put the disappointment behind them – easier said than done, I know – and recognize what they’ve got left to play for in the bowl game.

Win it, and win it convincingly, and you can point to yourself as a legitimate, elite program.  You’re back.  In that sense, it’s the bookend to the 2006 Sugar Bowl loss, when we first started getting a real vibe that there was slippage under Richt.  Lose this game, or even win a sloppy struggle and that message is muddied at best and disregarded at worst.

“Me, personally, I just want to win a bowl game,” Murray said with a laugh. “I haven’t won one as a starter, so I know I’m going to be working extremely hard to win this game. And this senior class has just meant so much for this program, for bringing us back to where Georgia needs to be. I know myself and all the other underclassmen want to send them off on the right note.”

Said senior linebacker Christian Robinson: “Yeah, we were five yards away from being somewhere else. But let’s not show that we’re not worthy of it by not finishing.”

It’s a big game.

Advertisement

I want my BTN.

Perhaps we’re about to find out if Jim Delany is a much a marketing genius as he thinks he is.

The fact that Maryland and Rutgers are joining the Big Ten Conference doesn’t guarantee that their games will be on the Big Ten Network. In fact, several of their games may not be available locally at all — TV or broadband — when they kick off their Big Ten seasons in 2014.

Maryland and Rutgers face the possibility of having at least two football games and at least 15 basketball games go untelevised locally when they join the conference in a year and a half.

That’s because the Big Ten Conference is looking into a strategy that could keep all Maryland and Rutgers games — encompassing all sports — off of the Big Ten Network unless local distributors place the channel on an expanded basic tier. The Big Ten used that strategy successfully in Nebraska last year when the Cornhuskers joined the conference, and the conference is expected to use it again in 2014 when Maryland and Rutgers join.

That’s a strategy built on the premise that people in the New York and Washington, DC markets are as passionate about seeing a couple of college football games a year that ESPN passed on as people in Nebraska are.  Does that make sense to you?

A penny saved is a penny not spent.

Once again, the Georgia football program is highly profitable.

MOST-PROFITABLE FOOTBALL PROGRAMS

The University of Texas football program in 2011-12 generated the most revenue and highest profit among all programs, according to NCAA data. The numbers, in millions:

School	Rev.	Exp.	Profit
Texas	$103.8	$25.9	$77.9
Michigan	$85.2	$23.6	$61.6
Georgia	$75.0	$22.7	$52.3
Florida	$74.1	$23.1	$51.1
Alabama	$82.0	$36.9	$45.1
LSU	$68.8	$24.1	$44.8
Auburn	$77.2	$33.3	$43.8
Notre Dame	$69.0	$25.8	$43.2
Arkansas	$64.2	$24.3	$39.9
Nebraska	$55.1	$18.7	$36.4

There’s an interesting correlation mentioned in the article:  “It should come as no surprise that the top revenue producers also led the FBS in average attendance in 2011. The top 10 programs in attendance also fell within the top 25 in revenue.”  Keep watering down those home schedules, boys.

Get after her ass.

We all have our ways of coping with grief.  And that SECCG loss was brutal.  Just ask Jana Annette Lawrence.

An intoxicated Georgia Bulldog fan allegedly wreaked havoc at two Dacula restaurants Saturday, groping, licking and flashing fellow patrons before being arrested.

A Gwinnett County police officer was called to the El Jinete restaurant on Liam Avenue at about 7:15 p.m. Saturday, about the time Georgia and Alabama’s SEC football championship game was winding down. Jana Annette Lawrence, 46, had already been kicked out of the establishment, police said, and had left quite an impression.

Inspiration for the header:

By the time authorities arrived, Lawrence was already being removed from Friends, the sports bar next door.

Friends’ owner told police that Lawrence had sat down at the bar with “her butt exposed.” When she was told to leave, she allegedly “pulled her pants down further.”

There’s a Finebaum segment hiding in there somewhere, I suspect.

***********************************************************************************

UPDATE:  Evidently this wasn’t Jana’s first rodeo.  Holy crap.

They’ll do it every time.

Roger Goodell’s got a fever.  And the only cure is more settling it on the field.

Do we want to see .500 teams (or worse) regularly granted entrance into the NFL playoffs?

Commissioner Roger Goodell revealed Wednesday that the league’s competition committee will explore expanding the postseason field, and that could mean a heaping helping of mediocrity on wild-card weekend.

“We’ll look at probably 14 or 16 teams,” he said.

Assuming that means adhering to the familiar conference structure, the New York Jets (6-7) would currently qualify for the Super Bowl tournament if the field was increased from 12 to 16 participants.

If the idea was applied to the 2011 season, three additional 8-8 teams would have made the cut (the 8-8 Denver Broncos won the AFC West last year).

The point isn’t that the NFL is just like college football, so don’t bother to waste my time going there in the comments.  The point is that playoffs exist for one purpose.  As long as those at the top can generate more revenue with playoff expansion, they’ll keep going back to the well.  All the logic in the world against doing so means nothing.

Of course, I guess it’s possible that the people in charge of college football are less greedy and more fan-sensitive than their peers in every other sport organized for profit on the planet.  Perhaps they’ve just been really good at hiding that for the past few years.  We’ll check back in on that after they’ve gone to an eight-team format.