The field it’s really being settled on.

Cardinals-Panthers averaged 21.678 million viewers on ESPN yesterday. Rose Bowl had 28.164 million viewers; Sugar Bowl had 28.271 million.

— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) January 4, 2015

You can almost hear Delany and Slive cackling over that, can’t you?

Today’s flavor of the day

Lotta buzz surrounding Stanford OC Mike Bloomgren’s name right now as a candidate to succeed Mike Bobo.  MaconDawg gives you plenty of poop about Bloomgren here.  As he notes, Bloomgren checks plenty of boxes for Mark Richt.

That being said, one thing that does concern me about him is that Stanford hasn’t exactly been a scoring juggernaut under his direction.  You have to go back to 2011 to find a year in which the Cardinal offense scored at a higher rate than Georgia did. (2011 predates Bloomgren.)  As MaconDawg puts it,

The one question mark with Bloomgren is an important one: the production of his Stanford offenses. In 2013 they were 9th in the Pac-12 in total offense and 7th in scoring offense. 2014, with injuries and attrition up front, was significantly worse. Bloomgren would be the ultimate just dessert for Bulldog fans who have shrieked that the raw number of points on the scoreboard doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s every reason to believe that the Red and Black would score fewer points under Bloomgren than they did under Mike Bobo. But if the Bulldog defense is allowed to stay fresh because the offense is chewing up clock and controlling field position, people might not complain. Well, they will, but at least they’ll be complaining about something different.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t teach a new Dawg old tricks.  But Bloomgren sounds like a guy who would come in with a different offensive philosophy than we’ve been used to seeing lately.

There is one potential upside to the hire MaconDawg doesn’t mention that I find intriguing, though.  If Bloomgren were to be named offensive coordinator/offensive line coach – and I’m totally speculating here – nothing would stop Richt from naming himself quarterbacks coach and hiring a dedicated special teams coordinator, would it?  Talk about checking the fan base’s boxes…

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UPDATE:  Emerson has a few more names that may be in the mix.

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