Mommy, make the bad schools share!

Boy, this is subtle.

In a meeting with the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle, Tilman Fertitta, chairman of UH’s Board of Regents, suggested that the Texas state legislature should pressure and/or threaten the Big 12 into giving UH a spot in the conference.  And by suggested I mean he just flat-out said it.

“Put pressure on the presidents; say, ‘If you don’t do this, we’re not going to fund you for this,’” Fertitta said of the state legislature’s role in meeting his goal. “It’s just the way it is. That’s the way to do it. …

“Be a big boy, step up and put this school that has almost 50,000 students and is so high-profile, has so many of the top schools in the United States, it’s a tier one university — we belong in the Big 12. We’re a big, major school with an unbelievable history in athletics and academia.”

The Texas legislature can’t even get Texas and Texas A&M on the same field anymore, but it’s gonna wade into this?  Sure it will.

Perhaps if ol’ Tilman availed himself of his school’s resources and learned that more Big 12 schools are located outside the state of Texas than inside he wouldn’t sound like such a dope.

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“All the freshmen should be redshirted.”

If you feel so strongly about this, Big Ten schools, go right ahead.  Don’t wait on the other P5 conferences.  I guarantee you’ll never sign a big time basketball recruit again, and you probably won’t do a whole lot better on the football front.

Maybe you could broadcast a freshman academics show on the Big Ten Network.  I bet the ratings would be boffo.

“You have to have one because everyone else has one.”

I’ve had a few email questions about the plans for the IPF, specifically about the cost and location.  The former is somewhat related to the latter, in that there are demolition and moving expenses to be factored into the equation.  But I think Bill King hits the nail on the head with regard to why they seem set on the Hoke Smith Annex as the site.

The $30 million price tag, to be paid for in part with fund-raising from private donors, is twice what McGarity had previously estimated last fall. Of course, the facility probably could be built out on Milledge at much less cost and without having to tear anything down, but Richt doesn’t like the idea of having to bus the players to and from that location, plus it’s out of sight of the main campus and thus would not provide the recruiting pop that they’re going for.

And, basically, that’s the only real reason this facility is finally getting built at all — because, as defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt pointed out last fall in some embarrassingly public lobbying on the subject, other schools are citing Georgia’s lack of an indoor facility in their recruiting pitches. And, with Florida planning on opening its indoor facility this coming season, UGA is the only SEC school without one.

That’s really all there is.  An IPF isn’t a burning necessity from an infrastructure standpoint.  When you think about it, it’s a luxury that isn’t called for but a few times a year.  But from a negative recruiting standpoint?  Take it from Steve Spurrier, it matters.

… But, as South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier said when Clemson was boasting about its new indoor facility, “I think we practiced indoors two to three days last year. That’s all. … But it’s good to have one. … And, really, you have one because everyone else has one.”

And it’s feasible to blow a lot of money on it because you don’t have to pay your labor force much.  The irony is that’s the same folks Georgia wants to impress with the new facility.  Funny how that works, no?

Back to the Dome, again.

Georgia will play North Carolina in the 2016 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game, on Saturday, September 3rd.

All I have to say is that I hope like hell they don’t bring those uniforms back:

Jason Getz / AJC File

Ugh.

Sometimes, the customer is right.

Brian Cook’s remarkable obituary for the sad, sorry Dave Brandon era at Michigan is definitely worth your time to read, but there’s one part in particular I want to highlight.

If Dave Brandon’s off-the-wall head coaching choice had turned out to be Nick Saban 2.0, fans would have allowed Brandon to ritually flay them on the Diag if he so desired.

But you know who isn’t being chased out of his job? Jeremy Foley. The guy who hired Ron Zook and Will Muschamp. Florida football is currently at an unwatchable nadir, just like Michigan, and Florida fans got a ‘Bama acolyte with three reasonably successful years at Colorado State with a high chance of failure. Dan Mullen is not the next guy because he doesn’t get along with the AD. Foley’s pursuit of Jim McElwain was hilariously public, committing Florida to a middling hire with a huge buyout by ignoring realities of the Flight Aware era. Florida fans are not marching on the president’s house in protest of this fact. At most they grumble a bit.

Why? Well, hiring coaches is hard. Foley’s had some successes; he’s had some failures. But one thing he has not done is drag a proud institution through a cycle of blame, incompetence, and recrimination. One day after Treon Harris came off the bench to beat Tennessee, he was the subject of a sexual assault investigation. Florida delayed its Monday press conference, released a forthright, transparent statement, and kept everyone up to date as the investigation progressed. There were no explosive revelations five days later. Nor were there marches.

That takes a special kind of incompetence, the kind of incompetence it takes to get run out of town on a rail as an athletic director. I cannot recall another incident like it. In this, at least, Brandon’s certainty that he is a unique individual is correct.

If you’re an AD and make mistakes – and let’s face it, even the best ADs are human – own up to them.  You work at a public institution and you answer, at least in part, to a fan base that you raise money from, and, accordingly, expects some answers about how you operate.  Winning at a very high level quiets the questioning.  Arrogance when your program isn’t all that is a path for, well, eventually being run out of town on a rail.

Looking at the roster

UGASports.com has an updated Scholarship Distribution Sheet posted here.  A few things of note:

• Georgia is currently over the 85-man scholarship limit.  I know we all expect the usual forms of attrition to rear their ugly little heads in the offseason, but barring some really crazy stuff, the program should enter the season in good shape in this department.  I’ll say it again – if Mark Richt has put his roster management ineptitude behind him for good, that’s an enormous positive development for Georgia football.
• There are only eighteen seniors out of the 88 total on scholarship.  And I don’t see too many juniors on that list leaving early.  So from the current vantage point, it looks like they’ll be focusing on quality over quantity in the 2016 class.
• There are no senior running backs, although Keith Marshall is a junior whom nobody could blame for departing if he makes a full recovery this season.  But knowing that you’ve got some real studs at the position who will be back after this season has to be a real comfort.  Thomas Brown is walking into a nice situation, that’s for sure.
• On the other hand, job one for Bryan McClendon is developing some real depth this season.  Georgia only has two senior wide receivers, but they’re Mitchell and Scott-Wesley.
• Man, the defensive line needed the talent infusion from the 2015 class badly.  Tracy Rocker has his work cut out for him.  There are going to be some young ‘uns in the two deep, that’s for sure.
• On the other hand, I kinda like the quarterback class spacing.

For now, Bill Hancock gets to take a victory lap.

Color me a little surprised, but it sounds like Roger Goodell has blinked first about the potential conflict between the CFP and further NFL postseason expansion.

Support has eroded for a proposal to expand the NFL playoff field from 12 to 14 teams, to the point that the measure no longer is viewed as likely to be enacted for the 2015 season…

… Several of those with knowledge of the league’s internal deliberations said Wednesday there also are concerns about a Monday night playoff game potentially conflicting with college football’s new playoffs.

When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addressed the expanded-playoffs proposal during his annual state-of-the-league news conference two days before the Super Bowl, he did not offer an endorsement.

“There are positives to it,” Goodell said then. “But there are concerns as well, among them being the risk of diluting our regular season and conflicting with college football in January.”

Now, I don’t want this to sound like it’s etched in stone, because if you look closely, the real reason the brakes have been applied is that the NFL is uncertain about how much money the networks are willing to pony up for the extra product at this moment.  When it comes to money, the NFL hates uncertainty.

But still, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a plus for the college football suits, who get to crow that Goodell acknowledges their interests.  That’s unusual.  We’ll see how long it lasts.

Sale’s pitch

Rob Sale hasn’t been at Georgia very long, but one thing is already clear:  when it comes to talking to the media, he’s no Stacy Searels.  Searels, you may recall, was famously silent when it came to his job.

Sale, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have a problem letting folks know what he’s up to.

His hire at Georgia was well-received, but the salary Sale will be paid raised a stir of sorts in the coaching community.
“I’m sure it will,” Sale said.

He’ll be making $400,000, which is $100,000 more than Will Friend made as offensive line coach and run game coordinator before leaving for Colorado State.

“I can’t really worry about the stir,” said Sale, who interviewed last year at LSU. “I had a chance for this one and obviously I did a good enough job. People on the staff trusted me and I’m going to do a good job. I’m going to grind my tail off in recruiting. I can’t worry about what people think about the salary. That’s not my job. I’m just going to earn every penny of it.”

Confident sucker.  Of course, in the end, I doubt any of us really care whether the offensive line coach lets us in, as long as his charges are out there kicking some ass.  Fortunately, that seems to be the kind of player Sale is looking for.

Sale says he looks for players with measurables. An ideal guard or center is 6-foot-5 or 6-4.

“You can be 6-3 ½, long-limbed, play powerful and be efficient in the inside and your tackles need to be longer-limbed guys,” Sale said. “At Alabama, your Chance Warmack’s, (Anthony) Steen’s of the world, they were 6-2 and some change, right at 6-3, but they could bend and they could knock somebody right off the football.”

Making the move to recruit for Georgia after doing it for McNeese State isn’t as big a transition as you might expect.
“I was at Alabama for five years so I know what they look like,” Sale said. “I know what them suckers look like. I know what bending ankles can look like. I know what the size of somebody’s body looks like. I know how they’re supposed to look. It’s all relative. It really is.”

Sounds like we might be in for a fun ride here.

Musical palate cleanser, word association edition

Upon reading that Chuks Amaechi’s first name is Nigerian for “only God knows”, this was the first thing that jumped into my head:

If Brian Wilson never wrote another song besides “God Only Knows”, he’d still be a genius.