The worst thing about the BCS

Even Condi Rice is an upgrade over this.

First thing I always do this week

… is check the weather.  Next Saturday in Jacksonville is looking mild and wet. There’s even a chance of a thunderstorm.  (That’s all the Dawgs and Gators have been missing this season, a game delayed by lightning.)  I have no clue which team gets a break with inclement weather.  The more relevant question is whether rain increases the chance for injuries.  Not that either team needs any more help in that department.

Everyone’s favorite player

Yesterday started out as a wet dream for the Hutson Mason aficionados in our midst, with three SEC East teams starting backup quarterbacks. (You could argue that on a normal team, Justin Worley would be a backup, too. But I digress.)  So how’d they do?  Not that well.  Maty Mauk was the best of the bunch, but he completed less than 50% of his throws, threw a pick, and, well, lost.  Facing a shutout, Spurrier pulled Dylan Thompson in favor of a gimpy Connor Shaw, who rallied his team for a dramatic overtime victory.  Patton Robinette threw a pick-six en route to a Texas A&M rout.

Believe it or not, coaches want to win.  There’s usually a good reason the second-stringer is the one carrying the clipboard.

How ’bout that newfangled SEC parity?

After those Tennessee and Vanderbilt wins, you couldn’t turn to a media site covering college football without tripping over some resident pundit’s proclamation that we were witnessing the remaking of the order of the SEC. Even Mike Slive chirped in about that.

So how did the new kidz do this week?  Welp, the Commodores traveled to College Station, went +2 in turnover margin, recovered an onside kick (and dodged a bullet on a successive onside kick that went out-of-bounds), forced turnovers on four straight possessions by a Texas A&M team that started a Johnny Manziel who obviously wasn’t 100% healthy… and lost by 32.  Tennessee looked outclassed literally from the opening kickoff in this year’s version of the third Saturday in October (who was that red team?).  Same old, same old, in other words.

The reality is that this story was way overblown.  There is some newfound parity in the West, but it’s at the margins.  TAMU isn’t as good this year because its defense has taken a step back.  Auburn is the most improved team in the conference because Gene Chizik turned out to be the head coach we all thought he was when he came from Iowa State.  And Hugh Freeze with that excellent recruiting class has given Ole Miss a puncher’s chance in every game it plays.  But the big picture hasn’t changed.  LSU is the LSU we expect under Les – great when they put their minds to it.  Alabama is just great, period.

The story in the East isn’t that there’s a new sheriff or two in town.  It’s that two of the old sheriffs got the crap beat out of them in a bar fight and are in recovery mode.  You’d think everyone would have figured out that health is the name of the game in this division after watching Missouri’s return behind a healthy, experienced group this season.  If every team in the East were as healthy as the Tigers, does anyone honestly think the division would look like this today?

Some random national title ramblings

One good thing about Dawgless Saturdays in the fall is that I get a chance to watch a lot more of what other teams are doing.  One impression I got flipping channels is that Jimbo Fisher has done at FSU what all the Saban disciples endlessly blather about:  build a program in His image.  The ‘Noles are deep and well-coached.  Both their win and Alabama’s were the kind of effortless, soul-crushing beatdown of mediocre opponents you expect to see from top five teams.  Boring, even.  (I don’t blame ‘Bama fans for leaving early, by the way. How many handoffs in a blow out can you watch?)

Oregon, by comparison, is intriguing.  The Ducks run a different scheme, but basically they’re Texas A&M with a defense.  UCLA has a legit defense, too, and did a good job holding Oregon to 14 points in the first half.  But the dam broke in the second half as Oregon rolled to a 28-point win and 555 yards of offense, 200 yards more than UCLA’s defense had yielded on average going in.  Pretty damned impressive.

As long as two of those three teams go undefeated, I’m officially on the Ohio State win out bandwagon now.  I would love to watch Corch lobby all his buddies in the media if his undefeated team looked like it was coming up short in the BCS rankings. (He’s already started with the how great two-loss Wisconsin is talk.) And I’d expect the Big Ten coaches’ votes in the last Coaches Poll to be epic. Fun stuff.

I haz a sad for Aaron Murray.

So in the midst of watching all these talented SEC quarterbacks having  great days yesterday, a thought comes to me.  Alabama, Texas A&M, South Carolina, even Missouri – they’ve got all that skill position talent to throw to and hand the ball off to.  Could anybody blame Aaron Murray for looking skywards last night and wondering, “why me, Lord”?

Where there’s life, there’s hope.

The SEC East is a tough neighborhood, Mizzou.

It’s also a mess, which is the best thing Georgia could get right now.

Now just go to Jacksonville and win, Dawgs.

Stirring the pot on a Friday afternoon

I have no idea whether this guy knows what he’s talking about, but I figure anybody asking the musical question “How many times is UGA going to lose key player after key player before we stop attributing it to just ‘bad luck’?” deserves your attention.  Particularly this:

… So the UGA administration ditched Van Halanger and instead of hiring a qualified strength and conditioning coach, promoted Tereshinski in-house to director when he wouldn’t have even been looked at as an ASSISTANT based on his lack of appropriate education and/or certifications related to S&C. So now you have a guy running the strength and conditioning program with no background in exercise science/physiology, whose assistants are more educated than he is in proper S&C programming and protocols, and whom have to shut up and do what they’re told because he’s running the program. They brought over John Thomas from Penn State who is a “Master-level strength coach” as deemed by the CSCCa and has to work as an assistant under Tereshinski.

Can anyone with some expertise in the area or more direct B-M knowledge than I have (which is next to none, by the way) opine whether he’s speaking truth or just blowing hot air/wildly speculating?

The further adventures of “We’re prepared to take this all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to.”

Looks like Donald Remy and the NCAA are on the road to doing just that.

A federal judge on Friday denied motions from the NCAA and other defendants to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit pertaining to the use of college athletes’ names and likenesses.

The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, sets the stage for another key ruling that is pending in the case – whether to certify the case as a class action.

Wilken ruled none of the three arguments that the NCAA offered for dismissal “provides grounds for dismissing Plaintiffs’ claims at this stage.”

Obviously, Jim Delany was not as persuasive as he thought he was.

Today’s episode of fun with numbers

Three random things I came across on the Intertubes I thought were share-worthy:

• One of the hardest things about coming up with meaningful football stats is how to measure offensive line play.  So I read this post of Bill C.’s with great interest.  Georgia ranks 92nd in something defined as “Percentage of runs where the running back is tackled at or behind the line of scrimmage.”  Think the offensive line misses Gurley much?
• Bill’s partner in crime, Brian Fremeau, has his week 8 FEI ratings out and Georgia fares better than you might suspect.  But it’s his unit rankings for the Dawgs that made me nod my head in agreement:  5th in offense, 42nd in defense and 99th in special teams.
• And this is just mind-blowing:  “5 Games with at least 500 yards for total offense for Texas A&M QB Johnny Manziel after he compiled 502 against Auburn last week. There have been 14 games in which an SEC player has accounted for at least 500 yards of total offense, and Manziel is the only one to do it more than once. Manziel has played in 20 collegiate games.”