Don’t make him come down here and say it to your face.

Jarvis is watching.

Jordan Jenkins doesn’t have a sack yet this season, and Jarvis Jones has noticed. The two-time All-American, now a Pittsburgh Steelers rookie, sent Jenkins a text recently telling him to get his “stuff” together. Except Jones used another word for “stuff.”

“I laughed at that – I liked it,” Jenkins said.

Oh, sure, you laugh now, Jordan.  It won’t be so funny when he hops a plane, bursts into your bedroom and rousts you from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, demanding to know why you didn’t take him at his word.

Just kidding.  I think.  I mean, why take a chance?

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How ballistic would our fan base be if Mack Brown were the head coach?

Considering the reactions I saw here from some after the Dawgs lost a close opening game on the road, I’m afraid WordPress’ servers would melt down if Dawgnation had to deal with something like this:

Even Mack Brown isn’t afraid to have a good laugh about Texas’ run defense.

“Kansas State will run the option,” Brown said Monday. “I told our defense this morning, if they didn’t run it, they’ll put it in. My gosh, we’ve got to stop it.”

Haw, haw!

And remember, unlike a certain head coach I can think of, Mack’s got a national title and another title game appearance in the last decade on his resume.  So how bat shit insane do you think it would get?

In case you missed it…

No, we’re not imagining things.

Led by eight senior QBs, the SEC is second nationally in scoring in 2013. The 35.54 scoring average so far is highest since '92 expansion.

— Chuck Dunlap (@SEC_Chuck) September 17, 2013

“That dude is a beast. If only you would have seen him in camp.”

I love it when the Johnson Doctrine fails.  And this is shaping up as my all time favorite example.

If every quarterback is above average, then no defense is. Or something like that.

Bernie follows up on yesterday’s post here about SEC defenses and quarterbacks with a look at the current passer ratings of every quarterback Georgia faces this season.  Remarkably (insert disclaimer about small sample size here), there’s not a number lower than 138.1 on his list.

Why is that remarkable?  Well, when the NCAA adopted the metric in 1980, based on data from the previous fifteen seasons, the numeric goal was to make the average QB rating 100.  Rule changes and offensive philosophies having significantly changed in the period since then have seen the average adjust up to 130, approximately.  In other words, you can say that if those numbers roughly hold up (I know, I know), Georgia won’t defend a single below average passer this season.

The bottom line here is that we’ve never seen an era in college football with a passing game as robust as we’re seeing now.  And my guess is that with the new targeting rule, the trend line will continue to climb.

Today’s Freudian slip

North Texas head coach Dan McCarney served as Florida’s defensive line coach under Corch before landing his current gig.  Pondering this week’s game against Georgia, he waxed nostalgic about the good ol’ days:

“I would sure like to bring some of those draft picks we had at Florida to the hotel with me this week,” McCarney said Monday.

There you go!  Draft ’em and sign ’em, Gators.

Too bad, so sad

Mark Emmert wants you to know he’s not blind.  He knows about the money.

“(There’s) enormous tension right now that’s growing between the collegiate model and the commercial model,” said Emmert, who spoke as part of Marquette’s “On the Issues” forum. “And, by the way, this is nothing new. This tension has been going on forever and ever. It has gotten greater now because the magnitude of dollars has gotten really, really large.”

“The most valuable (television) products are things you have to watch in real time, and that’s sports and ‘Dancing with the Stars,'” he added. “So we’re seeing an explosion in the value of sports media properties and that’s injected a lot of revenue into sports. … That’s led to a lot of the discussion. This whole notion of, first and foremost, treating student-athletes in fair fashion while still maintaining the student-athlete, is at the core of all of this.”

Don’t you just love the artificial distinction between “the collegiate model and the commercial model”?  Why, for a second there, you’d almost think nobody in the college world was getting paid.

That’s almost as good as the conceit that you can’t be a student-athlete and receive compensation – whether from the schools, or from outside sources – at the same time, even though every student-athlete on scholarship is getting just that (and Emmert’s pushing to allow a stipend on top of that).

But the man has a talk to the hand solution for those kids who can’t believe they’re getting a fair shake.

One way to address that would be by allowing athletes to turn pro straight out of high school, Emmert said, something the NBA and NFL don’t allow. Other professions don’t impose an “artificial juncture,” he said, noting that ballet dancers don’t have to take a detour to college before joining a troupe. He also pointed to baseball’s two-track model.

Players can turn pro out of high school. If they choose to go to college, however, they must stay until after their third year or they turn 21.

“It’s a dynamic tension that we really need to work on because it’s at heart of part of what (we’re) talking about here,” he said. “Why would we want to force someone to go to school when they really don’t want to be there? But if you’re going to come to us, you’re going to be a student.”

Yes, you get right on that, Mark.  Because I’m sure the NFL and NBA will be quite receptive to your pitch that they should share some of their hard-earned dollars with the players so your constituents won’t have to.

The man is either cynical or stupid.  You pick.

Georgia-LSU, too tempting to pass up

I thought it was likely CBS would grab next week’s Georgia-LSU match as its 3:30 game of the week, and it has.  The pairing of two top ten teams (barring an upset this week) was bound to be attractive.  But there’s another selling point.

CBS has selected the LSU-Georgia game for its featured broadcast that day, and the game will kick off shortly after 3:30 p.m.

The fast start by Ole Miss, which just won at Texas, increased the chances that CBS might want the Rebels’ visit to No. 1 Alabama. But the network evidently preferred what seems likely to be a matchup of top-10 teams, as well as the return of LSU quarterback Zach Mettenberger to Athens.

Mettenberger was dismissed from Georgia before the 2010 season. He transferred to a junior college and then LSU, where he is currently in his second year as the starter.

Oh, yeah, the Mettster.  The prodigal son’s return home should give Uncle Verne and Tracy plenty of fodder to fill the dead air time with during the broadcast.  Look on the bright side – at least it should cut down the Manziel chatter.