I guess it beats Shreveport.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought this came straight out of The Onion.

Because college football’s Power Five conferences prefer to play each other in bowl games, the smaller conferences are exploring opportunities to create additional bowl games next season, sources said.

As many as nine locations are under consideration to begin bowl games in 2014, according to sources: Miami, Orlando, Little Rock, Ark.; Boca Raton, Fla.; Montgomery, Ala.; Los Angeles; Ireland; Dubai and either Toronto or Nassau, the Bahamas.

How many folks in Dubai you figure would attend a MAC-Sun Belt matchup in mid-December?  Not that ESPN wouldn’t be happy to broadcast it…

Georgia’s preseason consensus

Over at Football Study Hall, kleph gathered up a bunch of magazines (Athlon Sports, Lindy’s Sports, The Sporting News and Phil Steele, to be exact), looked at their top 25 lists and their All-American teams and then crunched them all together to get a general picture of where they have things in the preseason.

Georgia finished seventh, behind three other SEC teams, including South Carolina in the East.  Alabama was the #1 pick; every magazine has the Tide listed at the top.

Meanwhile, Chase Stuart took the point spreads the Golden Nugget published last week and ran them through his SRS ratings to get a top 25 based on those.

We don’t have a full slate of games, but we do have at least 1 game for 83 different teams. Theoretically, this is different than using actual game results: one game can be enough to come up with Vegas’ implied rating for the team. That’s because once we’re confident in Oklahoma’s rating, Tulsa being 18-point underdogs in Norman gives us a good estimate for how Vegas views Tulsa. I assigned 3 points to the road team in each game in coming up with the implied SRS ratings. For example, Arizona is an 11-point favorite on the road against California. So for that game, we assume Vegas believes the Wildcats are 14 points better than the Golden Bears; if we do this for each of the other 247 games, and then iterate the results hundreds of times, we can come up with a set of power ratings.

My impression when I saw the spreads was that Vegas likes the Dawgs (if you remember, Georgia is currently favored in every regular season game).  Stuart’s math backs that up, as Georgia is ranked fifth in the implied SRS ratings.  (Bama and Texas A&M are the SEC teams ranked higher.)  He’s got this to say about it:

Another team Vegas is pretty high on is Georgia. The Bulldogs return Aaron Murray, the quarterback who finished atop my 2012 passer rankings. Last December, I argued against Georgia on the basis of a (for the SEC) creampuff schedule; this year, it makes sense to assign Georgia a high rating but a low ranking. In addition to division games against Florida and South Carolina, the Bulldogs get LSU from the West and face Clemson out of conference. And then in Atlanta, they’d still need to beat the West champion (presumably Alabama, A&M, or LSU). Georgia may be good, but they have a tough road to get to the BCS title game.

Sounds about right.

“ … I am not trying to be cute. I am just trying to adhere to my agreement with the sheriff.”

One of the conditions of tree-killer Harvey Updyke’s probation, which began yesterday, is that he is prohibited from speaking with the media.  So I guess this is just good timing:

The day before Harvey Updyke Jr. was released from jail, the 64-year-old talked with sports radio show host Paul Finebaum in an informal meeting at the Lee County jail.

Finebaum confirmed Monday he had met with Updyke for about 45 minutes Sunday, though he declined to discuss the specifics of the conversation.

Maybe he’s become Harvey’s spiritual adviser.

The rising cost of fandom

I don’t know if you caught the informal survey Jon Solomon posted last week in anticipation of the SEC’s pledge to conduct its own surveys of the conference’s fan base, but the results were posted yesterday, and if the sample size he got is representative (almost five thousand people responded), I’d say Mike Slive has something to worry about.

As Solomon summarizes,

The overwhelming response: It’s the cost, stupid. Eighty-three percent said they believe average fans have been priced out of attending college football games. More than half of the respondents said they are attending games less frequently than five years ago.

The really troubling part, if you’re an AD, is that 61% of the respondents still prefer attending the games.  In other words, a lot of people aren’t staying home because of bathroom convenience, comfortable seating and listening to Verne and Gary bloviate.  They’re simply tired of having their wallets hoovered.  And this is in the land where college football is nigh on to a religious experience.

So, with all the new TV revenue flowing into school coffers, what do you think the chances are that schools might show some pricing sensitivity to their fan bases?  Yeah, me neither.  They’ll probably just figure they can charge more for the privilege of subscribing to the SEC Network, since it’s not like these folks have anywhere else to go.

Zero tolerance

Here’s a helluva quote:

“You have to know that, man, early in the season if you face Georgia you’re going to face them the last couple of years half cocked and not at full strength,” said ESPN analyst Kevin Carter, a former Florida defensive lineman…

And here’s another one, from He Who Won’t Be Missed:

Federal law continues to ban marijuana use, but since that NCAA study, voters in Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana last year. Such changes in society haven’t moved outgoing UGA president Michael Adams to move to change policy at the university.

“We’re not in Colorado, we’re not in California, we’re not in Oregon,” Adams said earlier this spring. “We’re in Georgia. When I took this job, I agreed to uphold the laws of the state of Georgia. I’ve tried to do that. And I happen to think in Georgia in this case is a better law for the health of society. … I think we have a sound policy.”

Okay, fine.  A question, though – if this is about upholding Georgia law, then why has Georgia pushed for a uniform drug penalty approach across the entire SEC?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.  We Georgia fans already know that virtue is its own reward.