13 is “the right number.”

The College Football Playoff Committee has announced its selection criteria.  A drum roll, please:

The five criteria include:

1. Conference championships won
2. Strength of schedule
3. Head-to-head competition
4. Comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory)
5. Other relevant factors such as key injuries that may have affected a team’s performance during the season or likely would affect its postseason performance.

My first thought is that they just put Notre Dame behind the eight-ball, as well as Herbie’s old Michigan-Ohio State rematch wet dream.  It’s also probably not good news for 2011 Alabama.

My second thought is that they’re full of shit about ignoring margin of victory.  They’re only human and as much as they may try to deny it, they’ll notice.

But it’s number five that really intrigues me.  A team with a superstar player that makes its way through the season top rated, only to see the superstar get injured in, say, a conference championship game that it wins could be penalized for the injury?  Is that the new “settling it on the field”?  Yeah, that’s gonna go over swimmingly.

Oh, “the committee will meet four times during the college football season and release rankings every other week starting in mid-October, College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said.”  ESPN is already wetting its pants in anticipation over the new material for its pinheads to bloviate about.

I’m beginning to suspect there’s a plot to make the public dislike the new format more than the BCS, so they can shrug and have Hancock go out and reassure us all they’ll get it right with the next expansion.

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Generous to a fault

Patrick Garbin notes that this year’s Georgia team pretty much stinks on ice when it comes to defensive yards per point.

Although defensive YPP primarily and obviously concerns defensive play, as I’ve mentioned before, the ratio is a reflection of the entire team: the offense giving opponents good field position, unfavorable turnover and penalty margins, poor special teams play, bad coaching calls, etc.  Simply put, it’s a measurement of how hard a team makes its opposition “work” to score points.  The lower the defensive YPP, the worse.  The worse of the worse in the country entering this week:

114. California- 11.86
115. Georgia- 11.851
116. New Mexico St.- 11.846
117. UNLV- 11.80
118. Western Michigan- 11.69
119. Eastern Michigan- 11.58
120. Purdue- 11.03
121. Florida Int’l- 10.54
122. SMU- 10.32
123. Southern Miss- 10.21

That shouldn’t be a surprise.  And it’s truly been a team effort, as these stats show.

• Georgia is 85th in opponent plays of 20 or more yards.
• Georgia is 90th in opponent kickoff returns of 30 or more yards.
• Georgia is 106th in turnover margin.
• Georgia is 98th in blocked kicks allowed.
• Georgia is 120th in blocked punts allowed.
• Georgia is 104th in kickoff return defense.

Add it all up and you’ve got a team that’s giving its opponents better field position, more opportunities to score on special teams and defense and too many big plays.

It’s almost remarkable with the schedule and the injuries that Georgia sits 4-2 right now.  Seriously.

Of all 123 FBS schools, the Bulldogs are eighth from the bottom in defensive YPP, or one of the most generous in the nation this season in just giving away points to their opponents.  Besides being charitable, what else do the 10 teams above have in common?  For the most part, they’re big losers.  Excluding Georgia, the nine others have combined to win just 9 of 53 games.

Notably, the FBS teams currently with the highest defensive YPP: in order, Louisville, Alabama, Oregon, Florida State, and Clemson — all with defensive YPPs of greater than 21.3.  What they have in common is that they’re big winners.  In fact, they’re such winners, they haven’t lost a single game combined, recording a perfect 29-0 record…

What that tells you is how potent the offense has been through the first six games.  And that it’s a little scary to consider where things go if the offense can’t keep carrying the load because of the injuries and things don’t get straightened out elsewhere.

“We’ll see Saturday.”

I see the coaches have entered the coy phase of player management.  Hey, if that fosters competition and makes for better play, I’m all for it.  If it’s about taking their minds off the problems they’ve seen, I understand it.

If it’s about having a little fun with the media and fan base, let’s hope they’re as amusing after Saturday’s game in Nashville.

Objectivity is just a state of mind.

Wrap your brain around this comment from Stanford’s David Shaw:

“The one thing that I’ll say, and not that everybody needs to be a former coach or whatever, is I I would love for them to be able to watch the games and watch the teams and have discussions amongst themselves about who does what better than who else,” Shaw said. “Because it can’t come down to rankings, it can’t come down to stats, it can’t come down to things that come off a computer because otherwise we’ll just have a computer instead of a committee. There has to be some objective conversations about which are truly the four best teams.”

Here’s how Bobby Bowden describes taking an objective position:

What we won’t know until next January is whether the sitting athletic directors from the five major conferences, who called most of the shots in past BCS incarnations, will wield undue influence over this one.

”That’s another place I have problems,” Bowden noted. ”It’s just human nature to favor your team or your conference. If I were voting and it came down between Georgia and UCLA, I won’t lie, I’d vote for Georgia. I know the Georgia coach. He used to coach for me.”

Eh, what am I worrying about – it’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a sixteen-team playoff format.

Nah, you keep it.

I know it’s puerile to laugh at this, but I can’t help it.

“It was learned that the victim was walking her dog when she was approached by a black male who asked her if he could borrow a pen,” states the affidavit of the Sept. 17 incident. “The victim went into her apartment to get an ink pen and when she came back outside, the black male was (performing a lewd act) in front of her apartment. The black male then asked the victim if she would want the pen back.”

Metoyer is currently not with the football team, as head coach Bob Stoops and wide receivers coach Jay Norvell had both said earlier this month that Metoyer was taking care of personal business off the field.

“Taking care of personal business”?  Isn’t that what got him into trouble in the first place?

You know what they say about punters…

If you have two punters, it means you don’t have any.