Rise and shine, campers. It’s the start of another work week.
- It sounds like Junior’s gonna revolutionize Alabama’s offense. Right.
- I think people have taken Spurrier’s comment last week about Tennessee wanting to keep the rivalry game with Alabama out of context. It’s not so much a shot at UT as it is wondering why the Vols wouldn’t want to have more of a scheduling mix with weaker programs in the West.
- Five of the top ten spring game attendance marks came from SEC schools.
- This had to suck: Ralph Friedgen missed the Rutgers spring game while passing a kidney stone on Saturday.
- Should Alabama host Georgia in 2016, the two teams would not be scheduled to play again in Tuscaloosa until 2028.
- Speaking of the Great Scheduling Compromise, Nick Saban called it a week ago: “I think there’s a little bit more support for staying with an eight-game schedule and everybody playing a ninth opponent that’s in the five major conferences.”
- Now it’s the NFL that’s got a top official willing to consider a developmental league.
- LSU beat writer sympathizes with Joe Alleva’s fairness whine, suggests moving “Alabama and Auburn to the SEC East and put newcomer Missouri in the West, where it geographically belongs (along with Vanderbilt or Kentucky)”. Hey, if by “fair” you mean making life easier for LSU, that’s fair.
- Quarterbacks coach Terry Shea, who ran Aaron Murray’s Pro Day and helped Griffin, Sam Bradford and Matt Stafford prepare for their drafts, thinks Murray most closely compares to Stafford: “But Aaron can drive the ball, and he might even be more advanced than Matthew was because he’s had four years of great SEC football…”
Get The Picture 
Where’s Tech on the top 25 spring game list?
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Lots of creative accounting on those spring game attendance numbers.
Auburn’s number and its picture don’t match.
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How dare you question Auburn’s integrity by suggesting they are fudging their numbers!
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Murray and Stafford. Can we get some love for Mike Bobo here?
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Good point, and Greene/Shock were pretty potent too. I don’t think AM’s arm is in Stafford’s league but he has other qualities to offset that, particularly accuracy on the deep throws.
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Other qualities That run against uT and the TD against Auburn in the waning minutes against Auburn are a few. Hard to put a price tag on heart and you can’t coach courage. And Murray has both of those.
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And staying in the KY game after being injured. My fave, if the NFL doesn’t work, would love to see him standing on our sideline. Young man has it all.
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I don’t think that’s right about the scheduling. The current model that we’ll keep does not include home and home for the rotator. So you play those other teams more regularly, just not in consecutive years. The schedule will look something like:
2014 – at Arkansas
2015 – texas a & m
2016 – at bama
2017 – msu
2018 – at ole miss
2019 – at lsu
2020 – Arkansas
2021 – at texas a & m
2022 – bama
2023 – at msu
2024 – ole miss
Problem is that there’s no way to avoid that back to back yr every 6 years where there are 2 road games or 2 home games of the rotator consecutively. All teams will have the same problem, which means we could see auburn coming to Athens 2 yrs in a row and returning the favor every 6 yrs.
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One thing you can count on is the SEC office giving its in-state teams the best possible scheduling scenario.
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It’s no use gnashing teeth over schedules 5 years out. If we’ve learned anything it’s (a) the way scheduling is done will change and (b) it will probably be because TV wants a 9th game OR because the SEC expanded again and has divided up into 4 divisions with a 2 game playoff for the SEC championship…the latter would ironically make scheduling easier b/c you’d only have 4 teams that would ‘have’ to play each other.
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Junior’s job trajectory:
1) Win press conferences.
2) Lose games.
3) Lose press conferences.
4) Use family network to land prime gig.
5) Repeat.
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Over the last four years, I never thought to myself, “Aaron Murray just doesn’t have the arm strength to make that throw.” I get it that he can’t throw the ball through a brick wall, but I don’t remember seeing very many brick walls on football fields. He ran a pro-style offense very effectively, he made the NFL back-shoulder throw seem easy, and he can push the ball down the field. I’m not saying he’s the next Drew Brees, but I have a helluva lot more faith in what he can do on the football field than Blake Bortles.
I don’t get these NFL types. They’ll take a guy who has the size but didn’t really produce in college, thinking they can transform him into something magnificent… even though there is not one example of that happening in the last 20 years. Yet, they continue doing the same thing and getting the same results.
Look at the elite QB’s over the last decade. They all had some knock on them coming out of college. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Philip Rivers, Drew Brees. They have all been highly productive in the NFL despite their height or their mechanical oddity or their inability to run a 40 in under 6 seconds or their less-than-elite arm strength. Meanwhile, Ryan Leaf is in jail, Jamarcus Russell weighs 400 lbs, Michael Vick spent some time in prison and couldn’t stay healthy or hit a ten-yard hitch before prison, etc. The closest thing to a physical tools guy being made into a QB is Cam Newton, and I think the jury is still out on how good he will end up.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t fix stupid. So why does the NFL continue to value height (and only a couple of inches at that) over the ability to break down and/or manage a game? This whole process is just stupid.
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This. Great post. Just another reason I’m not in love with the NFL.
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+1.
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Murray’s arm has improved every year, especially the last two, which is a great credit to him and his work ethic. When he first came to Athens, I didn’t think he had an NFL arm.
But after last year’s LSU game, there was no doubt left about it. He made several throws in that game that were ‘Staffordesque’, meaning throws that only a half-dozen or so NFL QB’s can make.
The contrast of Murray’s arm strength, from the time he arrived 5 years ago until now, is striking. Just remarkable. That is not an issue at all, and he proved it several weeks ago in the wind.
~~~
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LOL, I remember that throw he had in his very first game, it was against La Tech or UL-Lafayette, but he was trying to just throw it deep out of the endzone from about 40 yards out and it fluttered right into a defender’s hands (fortunately he dropped it), barely even getting into the endzone. I remember thinking “Oh no, he has no arm strength, he can’t throw it over 40 yards in the air!” Fortunately that throw turned out to be a fluke. He did still need to work on arm strength but that throw must have just slipped or something. I was legitimately worried for a minute there though. 🙂
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He was also 19 years old then, Rev. Being 23 is a whole different thing.
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He developed strong mechanics over his time in Athens. That clearly helped his ability across the board. He couldn’t make the back shoulder throw (not the fade) as a freshman, but no one was better at it the last 2 1/2 years than #11.
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I wonder what happened? Saban wanted 9 conference games each year. I thought y’all said Saban rules college football? How dare the SEC not do what Saban decreed!
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Fixated much?
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It’s an eleventh dimensional trap involving fourth dimensional time orchestrated by Slive as decreed by Saban.
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Bingo, there we go, I knew it was coming.
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My gosh, LSU, grow a pair.
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