Somebody else can take the next lawsuit.

NCAA announces it will not enter into a new contract for the license of its name and logo for the EA Sports NCAA Football video game when the current one expires next year.

Stephen Garcia’s concern

This. Is. Awesome.

I wonder what mr eric hyman is gonna do about ole johnny football…..I WONDER

— Stephen Garcia (@StephenGarcia) July 17, 2013

Easy answer:  If he’s consistent, Hyman will give Manziel at least four or five more chances before booting him for good.

(via)

Hey, what’s the rush?

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and apparently neither is the SEC’s 2014 football schedule.

It’s his ability to plan for the long term that makes Mike Slive a paragon among conference commissioners.

Why should the coaches have all the fun?

Conflicts of interest have been one of the more enduring features of the Coaches Poll, so why should we be the least bit surprised if the new, improved College Football Playoff ponders going down the same road?

Current athletic directors will be used on the committee, an industry source told Sporting News Wednesday – a direct reversal from public statements made in May by CFP executive director Bill Hancock.

It now appears as the though the selection committee will consist of one athletic director from each of the five power conferences, former coaches and players and possibly former media members.

Gee, a backtrack from a Bill Hancock statement… that’s different.

This is about protecting the money trail.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Those of you who still think the playoffs are about settling things on the field, you may think you’re romantics, but there’s a more accurate term to describe you.  You’re suckers.

Oh, and this:

While current polls won’t be used in the process, there is concern among some in the working CFP group that failing to release a weekly ranking will allow the Associated Press and coaches polls – two polls that had defined the game for decades – to direct the narrative and therefore minimize the CFP poll.

Har de har har.  My bet is that transparency will be the next backtrack and they’ll tell the coaches to bring the Coaches Poll to an end.  Bonus points if Hancock hints that it’s necessary to do that to kill the perception of bias and conflicts of interest.  It’s for the good of the game, you know.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode, PAWWWLLL.

While we’re on the subject of Johnny Football, this may be the greatest moment in the annals of lack of self-awareness I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading:

This afternoon, Finebaum returned to ESPNU’s coverage of SEC Media Days and suggested that Manziel has “jumped the shark.”

Just like Johnny Football

The thing is, Finebaum is the guy driving the boat.  And it’s his employer’s boat.

Threepeat

Since he’s about to be pushed aside by All Things Manziel, I wanted to get in one last Jadeveon Clowney quote:

“I don’t understand this SEC stuff anyways,” Clowney said Tuesday as SEC Media Days got underway at the Wynfrey Hotel. “Beat them and they still go to the SEC championship. We know we can get beat them. God, it irks me. … We’ve just got to pull it out this year.”

It’s tough grasping the natural order of things sometimes.  It’s almost at a point where I’d enjoy Carolina winning the game and getting shut out of Atlanta for the third straight year, just to get another irked quote.  Unfortunately with the scheduling shoe on the other foot this time, I don’t think the Dawgs are going to have that luxury.  Game two’s gonna be a biggie.  They’ll have to risk irking Clowney in a different way.

“If I was Bob, I would say the same thing.”

Boom, who’s coached in both conferences, had this to say about the recent spate of Big 12 braggadocio about the SEC:

But Muschamp, who led the Gators to an 11-2 record last season, made it clear that he sees a fundamental difference between the pass-happy Big 12 and the more physical nature of the SEC, the league that has produced the last seven BCS national champions. That difference, said Muschamp, makes it difficult for finesse teams to match up against SEC foes that feature a downhill, two-back running game.

In the SEC, that is the majority of the title contenders.

“The thing about our league that I think is a little different is you have to prepare for the two-back set. You can’t do that in a week,” Muschamp said. “That’s a physical style of play. You’ve got to understand how to fit the power, the counter, the direct runs, the north and south runs, which are an issue if you haven’t done it and your guys aren’t used to it. I think you saw us wear some people down last year because of our physical style of play.”

In the Big 12, where the majority of teams rely on one-back spread offenses, the power running game is less prevalent. Wide-open passing games keep “constant pressure on the defense” and create plenty of headaches, Muschamp said. But they make for an easier weekly defensive adjustment than a power running game, in Muschamp’s estimation, if that is not a team’s base offense.

I do think we’re at a point now where there is more offensive diversity in the SEC than there is in the Big 12.  Some of that, ironically, is due to the SEC being a bigger conference.  (It’s ironic because Stoops’ argument that his conference is better balanced than the SEC gets its strength from the fact that it has four fewer teams.)  There’s also some irony in that two SEC teams – Kentucky and Texas A&M – are running spread attack offenses straight out of the Big 12 from where their coaches came.

I don’t know if that alone makes the SEC the better conference, but I do agree that it poses a bigger challenge for SEC defensive coordinators over the length of a season.  Of course, that’s not exactly an entirely new observation.

Gutenberg, Einstein and Slive

NCAA, you’ve been warned.  Per Mr. Conventional Wisdom, Mike Slive is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it much longer.

And then he said this: “In recent conversations with my commissioner colleagues, there appears to be a willingness to support a meaningful solution to this important change.”

Translation: All of the schools playing big boy football are on this train and it is getting ready to leave the station. We would like for the NCAA to be on board. But if we have to, we will leave without you.

Don’t snicker.  Barnhart is a pretty reliable pipeline from the SEC office.  I’d say the odds of a new powerhouse division within the NCAA grow stronger almost daily.

The key to predicting disappointment is to keep raising the bar.

Russ Mitchell, you may recall, is the CFN writer who predicted that Mark Richt would get canned in the middle of the 2011 season, then repeated his call for Richt’s departure after last season’s debacle in Columbia.  Last I checked, Richt is still manning an office in Butts-Mehre after winning the SEC East in both of those seasons.  So Mitchell’s got his work cut out for him as a fortune-teller.

It looks like he’s elected to go subtle this go ’round with his Georgia preview.

The season will be a success if … Georgia wins the national championship. Winning the SEC title is a must to take that next step, but going 12-1 with an SEC Champion t-shirt won’t cut it. If you’re an elite SEC team, you win the national title or you don’t.

Well, gawsh.  I guess there’s only one elite SEC team a year.

Just curious how many of you out there agree with that and would consider winning an SEC title “not cutting it”.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see another national title in my lifetime as much as the next person, but I can’t say I wouldn’t take a great deal of pleasure in walking out of the Dome after a win there.  (It sure felt good the last two times I experienced that.  Still does, for that matter.)

Anyway, I do wonder if Mitchell would actually go there again if Georgia lost a national title game.  I sort of doubt it, but, then again, it’s not as if he’s been reluctant to call for Richt’s head in the midst of double-digit win seasons.