Touch of class

Not much to add to this gesture…

Thanks @CoachSumlin for the letter. Much respect to you and your program. Good luck in the bowl game pic.twitter.com/ATdwf3qXWV

— Aaron Murray (@aaronmurray11) December 20, 2013

Well, except, I don’t know about you, but that one letter impresses me a helluva lot more with its author than the guys you hear about who send 155 in one day to a recruit.

One last thing about the Terry move

Seth’s got a good piece on the coaches’ reactions to Tramel Terry becoming a safety.  Bobo discusses what they saw when he was recruited, Ball plays the good soldier – admittedly, he’s got experience now – and Grantham’s predictably excited (although Lakatos is playing it cool).

Grantham claims that Terry’s got a shot at playing next season, something I’m a bit skeptical about, but he does make a noteworthy point that may bear remembering next August:

“He can also catch the ball. That creates turnovers,” Grantham said. “That’s something that we had really been good at up until this year, and a guy like that can really make some plays for you.”

He’ll whiff on a few plays because of inexperience, but it’s not exactly as if he’s alone in that department.  If he’s got the ball skills to make some interceptions, that may give him a leg up on a group that only had five picks total this season, with no individual having more than one.  You get the feeling that’s a big consideration for Grantham.

Friday morning buffet

The buffet line be open.

• If nothing else, the Gator Bowl will feature two good running backs.
• And with eleven tackles against the Cornhuskers, Ramik Wilson would surpass Thomas Davis (138 in 2003) for the Bulldogs’ most in the Mark Richt era.
• Why do I have the feeling that one day we’re going to look back at the 2013 season and wonder what all the A.J. McCarron hype was about?
• Patrick Garbin compares Martinez and Grantham and declares a plague upon both their houses.
• Here’s a statistical approach to finding a replacement for Mack Brown.  Good luck with that.
• John Theus, speaking the obvious:  “I really need to step it up and hopefully I can get good offseason work in.”
• Chase Garnham was sufficiently convinced that Vanderbilt wouldn’t let him play unless he signed a consent form giving the school permission to use his name, image and likeness, that under advice of counsel he signed it “with a note at the bottom of the form expressing my understanding that I had to sign the form in order to play, not just to be eligible.”  Amateurism, you’re the best.
• If next year’s offensive backfield is too crowded, J.J. Green is more than willing to take his 5’9″ talent to cornerback.
• Is Christian LeMay gone?

Amateurism is good for business.

You will be shocked, shocked to learn that the Big Ten Network has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the O’Bannon case supporting the NCAA’s assertion that if players are paid, the news is doomed.

Tremble as you read this:

“The right of a television network or newspaper to televise or report on matters of public interest — whether a basketball game, a parade, a natural disaster, a march on Washington, or a government shutdown — are fundamental to the existence of a free press,” the broadcasters wrote. “If Plaintiffs are allowed to proceed with their claims in this case, the news media will be substantially constrained from televising and reporting newsworthy events, and the public will be deprived of vital, necessary, constitutionally-protected news reporting.”

Okay, I might be willing to admit that the Big Ten title game was close to a natural disaster… ah, hell, I can’t even work up the energy to do a proper snark here.  The Big Ten Network isn’t the news media; it’s an entertainment arm of a large college conference generating significant amounts of revenue that Jim Delany, its programming director, doesn’t want to share with student-athletes.

The attempt to wrap that with a First Amendment bow is nothing more than him pissing down your leg and telling you it’s raining buckets.