Poor, poor pitiful SEC

I’ll say one thing – you pay head coaches in this conference top dollar, you get world class-level whining from them.

Don’t be telling Mark Richt who his starting quarterback is.

Tell me this doesn’t sound like Irritated Richt:

I heard from way too many people at SEC Media Days last week about David Pollack’s proclamation on ESPN that he expects Greyson Lambert to be the Bulldogs’ starting quarterback when they open the season Sept. 5 against Louisiana-Monroe. It was relayed to me as if Pollack had some inside knowledge to that effect.

I didn’t hear Pollack’s comments myself and I couldn’t find a video, audio recording or a direct quote as to exactly what he said. I even reached out to the folks at ESPN for clarification, which they were unable to provide before this writing.

But I can tell you with no uncertainty — it’s a guess.

As coach Mark Richt said himself upon hearing Pollack’s thoughts, “he’s probably got a 33 percent chance of being right.”

“Does he know? I don’t know how he would know,” Richt said when asked about Pollack’s prediction on 680 The Fan’s “Chuck & Chernoff” radio show. “I think the reason David is doing what he’s doing is he’s never had a problem just spewing stuff out. So we’ll see. … If it turns out to be Greyson I’m sure he’ll be pounding his chest about it.”

Mark Richt dissing one of the Davids?  I think Uncle Verne’s just been handed his first talking point for the Georgia-Vanderbilt broadcast.

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“So we all are excited about that.”

You know the story of how the classic definition of chutzpah is someone who kills his parents and then begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan?

Well, Ray Watts is that kid.

Steve Patterson’s gonna Steve Patterson.

Shorter Texas AD:  Sure, being a dick is a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Tuesday morning buffet

A few tasty morsels I scrounged up for your morning enjoyment:

• While some of this piece by Dean Legge is over the top, it’s worth reading to the end for the comparison between Mark Richt’s Georgia career and the first fourteen seasons of Vince Dooley’s.
• The NCAA, bastion of amateurism, announces it will give $18.9 million to schools to help pay for cost of attendance stipends.  That should make for some fun questioning in somebody’s antitrust case.
• Seven Georgia players are named to the media’s preseason All-SEC teams.
• Between the academic fraud scandal and this, North Carolina’s on quite the roll.
• Phil Steele looks at how often underdogs win outright.
• And Dave Bartoo looks at teams’ starting position in 2014.  Georgia did well there.
• Did you know that the Carter-Floyd-Jenkins trio had a nickname?  I didn’t.
• Dennis Franchione makes the curious comment that “scholarships used to be equal”.  From a marginal cost standpoint, I agree, but I suspect those who like to trumpet how scholarships are full-blown compensation for student-athletes might not.
• Nice job in the ACC media guide by some disgruntled human being.

It’s the CFP’s world, and we’re just living in it.

For those of you who want to believe that playoff expansion will have little or no effect on college football, please consider the following tidbits:

• Gary Pinkel thinks that if Notre Dame wants to play in the postseason, it should be made to join a conference first.
• Bob Bowlsby admits that if the Big 12 gets shut out of the playoffs for the second season in a row, it would have to reconsider its current 10-school, round robin, no championship game approach to the regular season.
• John Swofford’s perfect world has an eight-team college football playoff in it.
• And while we’re on the subject of perfect worlds, here’s Hugh Freeze’s version:  “Let’s only play 11 games, no league title game & have 8 playoff teams”

And that’s just what’s dropped in the last day or so.  Give ’em time, folks.  They’re just getting warmed up.

Now, granted, these people don’t have any real power, like conference commissioners…er, wait… Aw, the hell, with this – we’re going to see the postseason expand until TV doesn’t want to pay any more.  Get used to the idea.

And if you think it’s gonna stop at eight, I have some marvelous investment opportunities I’d love to discuss with you.

Mark Richt has time for that shit.

I’m sure most of you have seen this by now:

Look, Ma, I'm on TV https://t.co/Q5xReEnCbb

— FootballScoop Staff (@FootballScoop) July 20, 2015

Tell me, is that the look of a man who’s sweating being on a hot seat?  Just wonderin’.

Pete Carroll, Nick Saban and the art of skinning cats

I’ve started reading Chris Brown’s new book, The Art of Smart Football, (more on that in a later post, once I’m finished reading it).  The first chapter is devoted to Pete Carroll and his evolution as one of the best defensive minds in football.

Chris notes that one thing Carroll has added to his repertoire is mixing in some two-gap defensive line tricks to his base 4-3 Under, which is based on aggressive one-gap line play.  Carroll’s done that to allow his defense to gain numbers elsewhere to counter the increased threat of quarterbacks running spread-option plays.  That in turn has led to him deploying a variety of types of personnel to gain flexibility.

It’s something he learned while at Southern Cal.  Here’s what Chris quotes about that.

“That really came out of my time at SC,” Carroll told Seahawks.com.  “We forced [young players] to play, in essence.  And then we discovered if we asked them to do things they could do uniquely well, that they could elevate faster and find their confidence sooner.”

Compare that to what Nick Saban had to say about how he’s had to adapt to the challenge of defending hurry-up offenses in college.

“The biggest effect is pace of play and how it’s affected the whole game,” Saban said. “I’m not saying this in a negative way, because there are more points and it’s more exciting. There are a lot of good things about the way college football has evolved. But from a defensive perspective, you can’t play specialty defense, you can’t play substitution defense, so you really have to recruit more players who can play every down. You can’t recruit specialty players.”

So one coach has chosen to go in the direction of greater specialization and the other in the direction opposite.  That’s not to say either is incorrect, of course.  Both are two of the best defensive minds in the game (with due apologies to Gus and Boom, heh), although you could argue that Carroll is trending a little better than Saban of late, I guess.  I just find it more than a little interesting to see the conclusions they draw from strategizing against modern offenses.

I admit I can’t help but wonder what kind of impact Saban’s approach has on Alabama’s recruiting now, though.  One of the huge advantages Saban enjoys with managing an 85-man college roster is the ability of carrying specialty players on it. It will be interesting to see how giving up that advantage plays out over the next few seasons.