This is why we shouldn’t put too much weight on those post-spring depth charts.

Seth Emerson writes a few hundred words on the current state of Georgia’s offensive line and the right tackle position in particular, complete with quotes from Friend, without a single mention of Xzavier Ward.

Amateurs, beware: professionalism doesn’t pay.

One of the O’Bannon defendants thinks you need to start wondering what all the fuss is about.

One of the most popular proposals for paying college athletes involves giving players a share of the revenue from jersey sales. After all, the athletic department must be making millions off all those jerseys you see people wearing on game day, right? And the only explanation for a fan wearing a No. 2 Texas A&M jersey is because they want to wear Johnny Manziel‘s number, right?

What if I told you Texas A&M made just $59,690 on jersey sales for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2013?

That’s correct. The Texas A&M athletic department received just $59,690 for jersey sales last year, Heisman Trophy winner and all. That number isn’t just football, either. It includes basketball, baseball, cycling and all other jersey sales. Collegiate Licensing Company handles the licensing for Texas A&M and does not break jersey revenue down by sport or by number in its schools reports. That means we don’t know how much revenue was generated from football jerseys or the No. 2 worn by Heisman Trophy winner Manziel.

The bottom line is that athletic departments aren’t getting rich off jersey sales…

If you skip past the obvious, what took ’em so long, question, there’s another question that quickly follows:  who says the schools are any good at this marketing stuff in the first place?  After all, they’re the same bunch that took decades to figure out that instead of paying athletic equipment suppliers, you could get them to pay you for promoting their products.

Maybe what CLC’s really concerned about is that if Manziel could negotiate on his own, he’d wind up with more than 10% of the profits.  For some, amateurism is damned good for business.

Advertisement

Where the buck stops on the d-line

Looks like I got my question about who’s responsible for the in-game defensive line rotation answered:

Grantham said the defensive staff talks about a plan for playing guys during the week before a game. That could be that a player gets 30 snaps a game, or another will be in on first and second downs and yet another will go in on third down.

The actual substitutions are made on gamedays by the defensive line coach.

“We have a plan but he executes that plan. That’s one of his job descriptions,” Grantham said. “To me, that’s a game within the game. You’ve got to mix and match. … If you micromanage, you’re hurting your team, you hurt your unit in more than just that area. When I did it [most recently as line coach with the Dallas Cowboys], that was a part of the game and you’ve got to manage.”

In other words, the responsibility is shared in that a plan is formulated that the position coach is supposed to follow.  So if Geathers and Jenkins seem to have gotten worn down in the second half last year, you can’t lay all that on Garner, unless you think he was insubordinate and refused to follow the staff plan.

And judging from this comment from Grantham…

“You’ve also got to have guys that you trust, too, so it’s two-fold. You’re not going to put a guy in the game that you don’t feel is ready. You’ve got to say how many available guys do you have? I control that. That’s me. I do that. Then the coach is going to do what we decide as a staff. My philosophy is you play a lot of guys, but you’ve got to have guys you feel you can depend upon to do that.”

… that seems unlikely.

Which makes the big question about this year’s defensive line pretty obvious.  How many guys on the d-line does Grantham trust?

That dadgum selection committee

Once upon a time, Bobby Bowden wanted to serve on the new college football playoff selection committee.  He doesn’t anymore and he’s refreshingly honest about one reason why.

Bowden also feared the possibility of bias toward a particular school or region in the selection process.

“If I was voting, and a team from the West Coast was (undefeated) and a team from Georgia was (undefeated), I’m going to go with the Georgia team because I know their coaches, I know their players, I know their people,” Bowden said. “Somehow, you’ve got to get the human element out of it.”

Good luck with that.  If you’ll recall, the track record with the BCS was the exact opposite of Bowden’s sentiment.  Every time the rankings came up with a result that struck people the wrong way, the response was to reduce the computer element in the calculations.  And now we’ll get a committee of human beings complete with agendas and biases, however much they’ll deny it.

Then again, I’m sure Phil Fulmer would do a fine job serving.  He’s a fair man.  If anything goes wrong, it’ll probably be because they didn’t explain the parameters carefully enough to him.

“Yes, the money is important.”

Georgia Southern’s president wants us to believe that the cupcakes are in it for more than just the money.  It’s a special opportunity.

“But what is more important is the opportunity our students get to perform on a national stage. When we went to Alabama [in 2011], our football players played in that incredible setting. Our band had the opportunity to march on that field. Our fans got to tailgate on that campus. You can’t put a dollar figure on that kind of experience.”

Gee, that sounds so great, you wonder if Alabama might ask for a refund of half the $400,000 it paid to get GSU to visit in the first place.

In fairness, he actually comes off sounding pretty reasonable if you read the entirety of Barnhart’s piece.  GSU’s in a tough spot.  It’s spending a ton of money to upgrade as it moves to D-1 play, in hopes of bigger travel payouts.  But if the haves separate into a new super division that’s structured to play all its games within, that’s going to leave the Eagles holding a fairly costly bag.

Over the radar

I don’t know if it’s a measurement of respect for the closeness of last year’s SECCG, how loaded Georgia appears to be on offense, or what, but one thing’s sure:  the Dawgs aren’t sneaking up on anybody this season.