An alternate history of the national title game

This paragraph from Mike Bianchi’s latest paean to Coach Boom…

Florida’s offense ranked 103rd in the nation, but still UF was miraculously in the running to play in the national championship game until the final weekend of the regular season when Notre Dame beat Southern Cal.

… got me to thinking.  What if Notre Dame had screwed the pooch and lost to Southern Cal and then Georgia had found a way to score at the end of the SECCG to beat Alabama?  Would we have seen a Cocktail Party rematch for the national title?  And if so, how many talking heads would have exploded over it?

Just as a refresher, here’s what last season’s Week 14 standings looked like.  Hard for me to see how Georgia would have finished lower than second with an SEC title, so the question is whether any other one-loss school would have jumped Florida (or, I suppose, whether the Irish would have stayed ahead of the Gators).  After all the talk about Florida’s resume, it would have been tough to deny UF, but maybe there would have been enough negative reaction to a rematch repeat to screw the Gators’ chances.

What do you think the reaction to such a rematch would have been like?

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John McCain wants to get all mavericky on bundling.

I don’t think this is going to sit well at all with the guys running football networks.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is working on legislation that would pressure cable and satellite TV providers to allow their customers to pick and choose the channels they pay for, his office confirmed on Wednesday.

Consumers have long complained about the rising costs of cable TV packages and having to pay for dozens or even hundreds of channels just to gain access to the few that they watch.

But McCain’s legislation, which he is expected to introduce in the coming days, will likely face furious opposition from both the TV broadcasters and cable providers.

‘Ya think?  That would make for a very bad hair day for Jim Delany.  But that’s not all.

In addition to pressuring cable providers to offer channels a la carte, McCain’s new bill would bar TV networks from bundling their broadcast stations with cable channels they own during negotiations with the cable companies, according to industry sources. So for example, the Disney Company, which owns both ABC and ESPN, could not force a cable provider to pay for ESPN in order to carry ABC.

Ouch.  You can’t do that to the World Wide Leader!

The NFL is going to go ape shit over this, assuming it ever makes it out of committee to achieve Defcon 1 status, so I doubt it ever gets close to being a real threat.  But it sure would make for some great grandstanding if it ever did.  Not that senators go in for that kind of thing.

Please proceed, Commissioner.

This should be fun.

An attorney helping to represent former and current college football and men’s basketball players in an anti-trust lawsuit told USA TODAY Sports a U.S. magistrate judge is allowing their legal team to take depositions from a college president and two conference commissioners who had made statements in the case saying that some schools and conferences might exit Division I or the Football Bowl Subdivision because of the financial and legal burden that would result from needing to share revenue with football and men’s basketball players.

Speaking after a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins on Wednesday in San Francisco, plaintiffs’ attorney Renae Steiner said Cousins allowed depositions of Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone and Fresno State president John Welty.

Big Jim gets to elaborate on the Division III future of the Big Ten.  That should help with recruiting immensely.

That noise you hear in the background is Mike Slive snickering over how Delany let himself get put in this position.

“The NCAA has said it does not exploit current or former athletes.”

The steady drip, drip, drip in the O’Bannon case continues apace.  I don’t think this is something the NCAA wants to have the public hear as the class certification hearing approaches:

College sports video games were designed to replicate actual players without using their names, a former Electronic Arts Sports executive producer said in his deposition as part of the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit.

Jeremy Strauser, who worked at EA from 1995 until 2011, testified last December that computer-game avatars were linked to specific player identifying numbers and biographical information, such as team depth charts, was used to make the game realistic.

“We generally tried to make the players perform as their real life counterparts, short of their name and likeness,” Strauser testified.

They all knew what they were doing with these games.  Either the NCAA can make itself look sillier by insisting otherwise, or it can start blaming EA for what happened.  My money’s on both.

Sure, the hours are long. But at least the results don’t matter.

Brent Pease got a raise.  Let me repeat that, in italics.  Brent Pease got a raise.

Brent Pease is now making $590,000 a year.  That is more than Mike Bobo makes.  Let me repeat that, in italics.  Brent Pease is now making $590,000 a year.  That is more than Mike Bobo makes.  (Somewhere, Greg McGarity high-fives himself.)

This is Brent Pease’s current resume:

In 2012, UF finished 103rd in total offense (334.4 yards per game) and 76th in scoring offense (26.5 points per game).  The season before Pease’s arrival, the Gators finished 105th (328.7 ypg) and 71st (25.5 ppg) in those two categories, respectively.

I guess compared to Charlie Weis, that makes Pease a real bargain.

And Pease gets a bonus just for sticking around.  As Woody Allen said…

The running backs coach got an extension, but no raise.  I bet he’s wondering what he’s got to do better.

Yes, there’s a ridiculous amount of money swimming around SEC athletics.  What’s your point?