“… but I don’t think you can assume that the stadium’s going to fill itself.”

As UT grapples with attendance problems at Neyland Stadium, at least you can say the athletic department hasn’t stooped to the level of “four tickets, four hot dogs, four Cokes”.

Yet.

Butch Jones, number four with a bullet

It may surprise you to learn there is scientific proof that Butch Jones has been one of the very best coaches in college football over the past two seasons.  It’s based on a study that I mentioned in passing a little while ago.  It’s a study that’s gotten some criticism, not just at Football Study Hall, but here, too.

He’s right that it’s strange to hear Chou tout ypp as some sort of new thing.  Steele, for one, has been on top of that measurement for sometime now.  And the interesting thing about that, if you read what Steele posted at the link, is that he doesn’t use ypp as some sort of absolute measure of offensive and defensive efficiency, but rather as a predictor of future performance.  And that may have something to do with a point made in the FSH post I linked to:

In sports, a useful metric reflects the skill of a player or team. A skill should be repeatable over the course of the season and less subject to the vagaries of luck.

To determine whether a metric reflects a skill, it is common to look at the correlation between its early and late season values. If the correlation is weak, then this metric regresses to the mean. Randomness plays a large role in its value. If the correlation is strong, this metric represents a skill that persists throughout the season.

For example, consider forcing turnovers in football. While many people think this is a defensive skill, early season turnovers have almost no correlation with late season turnovers. There is a lot of randomness in forcing turnovers, and good handicappers have used this for years to predict the outcome of football games.

To illustrate, here are Chou’s ten most efficient teams of 2012:  Alabama, Notre Dame, Florida, Kansas State, Stanford, Georgia, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Oregon State.  With two exceptions, all of those schools finished in the top thirty in turnover margin – and only one of those others (TAMU) finished with a negative turnover margin for the season.

Now it’s true that Chou maintains a significant correlation with his measurement and winning percentage, but I’m not sure how meaningful that may be, at least to the extent Chou maintains it can be relied upon.  (See page 11 at the link.)

All of which is my windy way of saying that I’d like to withdraw my earlier snark on this and transfer it to Butch Jones’ first season in Knoxville, where it belongs.

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Another GTP milestone

Some time during the night, GTP enjoyed its 15 millionth visit.  It could be argued that’s proof some of us need a life (probably starting with yours truly), but all I can say is thanks very much for continuing to show up here.

Recruiter, heal thyself.

Mike Farrell has a suggestion for all those coaches complaining about recruits exercising the small bit of freedom and leverage they have with a school before signing a NLI de-committing:

“Move the written offer date up to Sept. 1 of freshman year and I guarantee there will be a lot less kids with offers, and committing, and de-commiting,” he said. “Kids are smarter than they are given credit for, and when the offers used to be in writing before their junior year, they would wait for Sept. 1. If they didn’t get a written offer, they would be asking why not.

“Kids could press the schools and the schools could only dodge the question for a limited amount of time. I am not blaming the kids or the schools now because they are all playing by the rules but that is the problem — the process is broken and it needs to start holding someone accountable.

“Kids are kids, so the NCAA needs to make the schools accountable,” Farrell said. “If programs knew they would have to put an offer in writing when a kid was a freshman, they would be more careful on who they were recruiting and it would slow the process back down to a more controlled situation.”

That’s not such a bad idea.  It’s not as good as Andy Staples’ suggestion, but at least it’s a start.  Which means it’s got no chance of ever seeing the light of day as a concrete rule.

No Seat 37F for this guy!

This piece is the journalistic – using the term in its loosest sense – equivalent of Leave Britney Alone.  (NSFW, in case you’ve never heard it.)

Think I’m kidding?  Check out this overwrought passage:

No, Meyer’s “crime” in this saga isn’t this pretense by the media that he was too lenient with Hernandez and other players at Florida. His crime is that he is now the head football coach at Ohio State, and it looks for all the world like Meyer has the Buckeyes poised for a lengthy period of dominance not just in the Big Ten, but nationally.

And that, as we have learned since January of 2001 when Tressel was hired at Ohio State, is completely unacceptable in the eyes of the media.

So now, we are to believe that Urban Meyer is to Hernandez what Dr. Frankenstein was to his monster, that Meyer is solely responsible for creating a soulless being, then knowingly and callously foisting this creature onto an unsuspecting public.

And now it is Meyer who is facing the angry torch-bearing mobs of the media, demanding justice for alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by someone else.

This is all so predictable: The media is going to see who got away with what under Meyer at Florida, then see who is getting away with what under Meyer at Ohio State.

Not that the media actually cares about finding criminals on campuses — they could do this at every school in the country — they just don’t like the marriage of Urban Meyer and Ohio State. That’s a monster that needs to be eradicated from the face of college football.

I’d love for somebody to get him to read this embarrassing POS out loud.  I bet his voice quivers.

What’s better than winning the Heisman Trophy?

Why, winning one for which you don’t spend any money to promote, of course.

I swear, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Greg McGarity goes through the Sanford Stadium stands a couple of hours after a game looking for loose change.