Raises for everybody!

Dan Mullen has a lifetime winning percentage of .597.  He has never won a division title, let alone a conference title.

His pay bump was just announced.  Mullen’s financial package will be $4 million this season and will average $4.275 million over the next four years.

At about $7 million a year, Nick Saban is starting to look like a bargain.  The weird thing is, at this rate, pretty soon Mark Richt is going to look like a bargain.

 

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It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Welp, this hasn’t ended well.

A recruit’s decision not to enroll at LSU after signing a financial aid agreement has the football program in some hot water.

LSU is banned from signing early enrollee recruits to financial aid agreements for the next two years, and the program will be stripped of 10 percent of its recruiting evaluation days in 2015, according to public records obtained by The Advocate.

The penalties, handed down by the Southeastern Conference and reported by the school Feb. 3, stem from a violation that occurred this fall involving an unnamed recruit.

The recruit signed a financial aid agreement with LSU intending to enroll early in January, but he decided not to enroll at the school. That makes at least some of LSU’s unlimited contact with the prospect illegal.

That’s per our good friends at the NCAA.

A financial aid agreement doesn’t bind the player to that particular school like a National Letter of Intent does, but it affords coaches of that school unlimited contact with the signee — contact that would normally be considered against NCAA rules.

The NCAA modified the financial aid agreement (FAA) in April. It continued to allowed schools “relaxed recruiting rules” for prospects who signed an financial aid agreement, but it also warned schools that they could be penalized for recruiting violations if that prospect did not eventually enroll in that school.

Les can’t say he wasn’t warned, either.

David Womack, Matt Womack’s father, told The Clarion-Ledger in the fall that LSU coaches were not planning to contact his son on an unlimited basis because Matt wasn’t completely firm on enrolling early or on his commitment to LSU.

“LSU is not using (the FAA) because if Matt was to change his mind they would have to report it,” David Womack told The Clarion-Ledger.

Makes you wonder if Georgia has thought about that in the case of Roquan Smith, no?

Take a chance: early 2016 all-name candidate

It turns out there’s a kid in the next recruiting class named Chauncey Gardner and he’s interested in Georgia (he has an offer).

If he winds up in Athens, I’d like to watch.

Do nerds deserve a second chance?

My only question after reading this:  does Auburn have a computer engineering school?

The suspend isn’t killing me.

Here’s what an NFL coach had to say about his impression of Todd Gurley at the Combine:

“He is a natural leader. Of course, we’ve all seen him play. But he is better in person than anything I’ve seen or read from afar. That kind of person stands out. Some team is going to rightly give him every chance to get well and be as great as he can be.”

Yeah, that whole autograph thing really seems to have set him back at the next level.

The NFL doesn’t care about players making money – at least if it’s not on the NFL’s own dime.  Manziel was a first-round pick.  If not for the injury, Gurley would be a slam dunk first-rounder, too.  (He may still wind up there, even so.)  The pros just care if you can play.  Which is why the Gurleys and Manziels of the college football world get paid under the table.  Talk about your vicious circle.  Good luck with that, NCAA.

Thursday morning buffet

Perhaps you’ll find something nourishing here.

• SOD taught personal hygiene; Butch has his “Fourth-and-1”.  At Tennessee, they’re always learnin’.
• Vanderbilt is experimenting with GPS in players’ shoulder pads.  (No, it’s not to find them if they get lost on the playing field.)
• Mark Weiszer has a list of the new faces on Georgia’s support staff.
• Todd Gurley’s 2014 season:  In 2014, 61.9 percent of his rushing yards came after contact. He fumbled just three times in 510 carries.
• Don Leebern, friend to the beer drinker.
• “The Gators haven’t had a receiver sniff first- or second-team All-SEC honors from the coaches since Percy Harvin in 2008.”  When people tell you Florida’s offensive personnel don’t live up to the program’s recruiting reputation, this is the kind of stuff they’re talking about.
• Great line from Thomas Brown:  “He still looks good, so he still got it,” Holyfield said. “He says he’s got two more quarters in him.”
• Here’s a look at offensive efficiency trends in the SEC.
• The conclusion to the Silas Nacita affair:  “The bottom line is that I broke the rules.”

Why they pay him the big bucks.

Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby made about $2.5 million in total compensation last year.  The amount of money doesn’t really bother me;  in the context of what CEOs make these days, that amount doesn’t strike me as being out of line for someone running an operation that’s returning almost $20 million a year to each of his bosses.

But I do have a question.  What’s he being paid for?  He’s running a sports league.  His job requires that he manage the organization of the conference, but, let’s face it, what he’s being paid for is to maximize that revenue stream.  That’s what the TV contracts, conference expansion and input into the CFP are all about (okay, maybe he didn’t do such a bang up job in the last department).

You know what Bowlsby isn’t paid for?  He’s not paid for academics.  He doesn’t teach.  He doesn’t set curriculums.  He doesn’t decide what priorities a given member school sets in how it allocates its academic budget, even. Nor does he lobby a state government or a board of regents for resources.

He runs a sports league.  He cuts deals to make money.  That’s basically it.

So why does anyone care what the likes of Bob Bowlsby or Jim Delany has to say about the academic experience of freshman athletes?  The answer is, that’s only relevant in so far as how it affects their primary responsibility. It’s a means to an end, nothing more.

KISS in the Schottenheimer era

One comment that’s emerging pretty consistently from Georgia’s new offensive coaches is the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra.  Here’s Rob Sale on that:

Sale admits that his job is to basically not mess up what took place this past season, when Chubb rushed for 1,547 yards and 7.1 yards per carry.

“The philosophy is play-action and that everything we do has to tie in,” Sale said. “We have to believe in the same principles of covering up the down linemen, knocking them off the ball and let great running backs be great running backs. It’s a pretty simple concept.”

It also has the benefit of having worked well over the past few seasons.

I know this started with Richt and his shopping list of what he wanted from Bobo’s successor.  But it’s good that everyone appears to be on the same page with the boss’ wants.  It’s one thing to keep it simple.  It’s another to get an almost entirely new offensive staff rowing in the same direction from the start.  The task of finding a new quarterback to run the show is a big enough chore.  There’s no need to complicate that with a big change in scheme.

The new law of coverage?

Ian Boyd has an interesting post up about pass coverage in this new era of offense.  It boils down to one rule for him:

You have to have three good coverage players on the field to survive against the better passing teams.

Now I would come back and argue that there’s more than one way to skin that particular cat, but Boyd has an answer for some of that, too.

In the modern era teams can often get by while just having solid players along the DL but there’s no escaping your doom if you don’t have some good players in the defensive backfield. An opponent will get their good receivers and passing game fixed on your poor DB play, run the ball well enough to keep you from diverting resources, and shred you.

Try to blitz them and you can just exacerbate the issue by short-manning the coverage against quick game staples that QBs can execute in their sleep. Unless you have players that can hold up long enough to take away the quick throws and buy an extra second for the blitzers, yes the rule of three makes for a better blitzing team.

Most opponents don’t stack their two best receivers on the outside, 2014 West Virginia excepted, but will often put their 2nd best or even best receiver in the slot where they can counter-balance the outside receiver and help a team execute a quick passing game to march down the field.

How many college defenses these days can put three good secondary coverage guys out there?  (And if you’re Georgia, how many great in state defensive backs are there in a recruiting class?)

It would be nice to have them, but I think a top flight defensive coordinator gets paid the big bucks to figure out ways to hamstring a passing attack even when he doesn’t have the numbers.  Or he has to manufacture the numbers.

When a team can match up with the offense’s top three receivers with solid to good coverage players, it really complicates things and can send a collegiate QB to a dark place, mentally. Some teams will do this with tight pattern-matching, most all are trying to do it by recruiting and developing as many good coverage players as possible, and perhaps more will try to match cross-trained receiving studs with cross-trained secondaries and “Ace” DBs.

Kinda sounds like what Pruitt’s up to.

In the end, it all comes back to something we’ve heard every DC at Georgia say.  You’ve got to confuse the quarterback just enough.

That’s where Boyd winds up, too.

At the end of the day, defenses that want to survive in the modern game will have to get back on the offensive and attack the quarterback’s ability to quickly deliver the ball to open targets by either observing the rule of three or finding another cheat.

Ain’t no cheat like a monster pass rush.