“… Everybody has certain things they’re better at than others.”

Remember back in the day when a constant line of criticism about the way Mark Richt ran his program was that he was handling both head coach and offensive coordinator duties?  “Too much on his plate,” the grumbling went.  “Almost no other school does it,” the wise heads allowed.

Welp, would you believe at present there are thirty-two FBS head coaches who also handle coordinator duties?  Morons. Don’t they know any better?

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“Who doesn’t want more money?”

Count me in the “if it walks like a duck…” school of thought camp.  So when I hear folks talk like this…

“Any little money will be nice,” said Georgia senior offensive tackle Kolton Houston. “There are spots throughout my college career that you definitely have to be like, ‘Do I go put gas money in my car or do I go eat dinner somewhere?’ That’s definitely going to make things a lot easier.”

… or this…

Bulldogs outside linebacker Jordan Jenkins said he’s “happy” to get his stipend.

“I’m hoping it’s a decent amount so I can get some new clothes instead of waiting for the holidays and waiting for mom and dad to get me some new outfits,” he said.

… or this…

Arkansas coach Bret Bielema thinks his staff needs to keep an eye out on of how players handle their money.

“You give a young man 18, 19, 20, 21 with a little bit of pocket change, with a lot of money to make bad decisions, things can go sideways in a New York minute,” he said. “So you got a kid that’s never had $1,000 in his pocket, and all of a sudden he’s got $2,000, that’s dangerous. That leads to dumb decisions. I think we have to monitor that as coaches and be aware of that.”

… or this…

“As a freshman, if you start saving, you can have a large sum of money saved,” Theus said. “Some guys like to spend their money. Some guys have the things they like, watches or whatever it may be. They might to choose to spend it on that. But coach Richt is going to educate the guys and try to make them realize this is money they can save.”

… as far as I’m concerned, they can skip the euphemisms.  Student-athletes are getting paid, period.  And plenty of schools are falling all over themselves to pay the kids as much as they can.

Surprisingly, the world as we know it isn’t ending.  We haven’t heard so much as a peep lately out of Jim Delany about his plans to take the Big Ten to Division III.

So as amateurism is getting nibbled around the edges to death, how many of you are giving up on college football now?

When a regular season feature becomes a bug

Berry Tramel explores ten reasons for the Big 12’s apparent decline in this piece.  From the point of view of somebody who thinks playing a round robin schedule is the best way for a conference to determine its champion, for me, this sucks to read:

… The 10-school format makes for a great regular season, but it comes at a two-fold cost. The nine-game conference schedule makes it difficult for a team to go through the conference unscathed, and no conference championship game puts the Big 12 at a decided disadvantage with its four chief competitors, all of whom play that 13th game.

Playoff expansion will force the regular season to become ever more cookie cutter, as conferences will have little choice but to mold themselves into vehicles that have the best chance of delivering their teams to the postseason.  And given that no matter what they do, there are still only so many slots, it’s pretty obvious where things are headed.

Life in the last decade of the SEC

Matt Melton manages to throw a boatload of trivia into one long paragraph.

… And speaking of divisional crowns, in just three seasons of play in the SEC, Missouri has already won twice as many SEC East titles as Kentucky, South Carolina, and Vanderbilt combined. In the SEC Championship Game itself, the west has reeled off six consecutive victories (with five coming by at least 17 points). Before we close this chapter of Statistically Speaking, I will leave you with what I feel is an extraordinary piece of statistical minutia regarding the SEC. Since 2005, every SEC team (including newbies Missouri and Texas A&M) has had at least one season with at least four conference wins and one season with at least five conference losses (i.e. a .500 conference record and a losing conference record).

As Matt says, make of that what you will.

It could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The New York Times has a pretty good story about Nick Saban’s flirtation with Texas from a couple of years ago.  The amazing thing to me is the number of people associated with the Longhorns program who managed to delude themselves into thinking Jimmy Sexton was being something other than Jimmy Sexton.

Enter the biggest dick in college football.

In November, Steve Patterson, the former president and general manager of the N.B.A.’s Portland Trail Blazers, became the university’s athletic director, replacing Dodds. Patterson was tasked with cleaning up the mess at Texas, something he would soon begin to do. Of course, he had come to Texas well after the Sexton call with Tom Hicks and Hall. It wasn’t too long after Patterson had taken the job at Texas that Sexton called him, too.

Patterson says he believes he knew what Sexton was up to. “I’ve known Jimmy for 30 years,” he says. “I told him if he wanted to come here and drink bourbon and eat barbecue and talk about Saban, that’d be fine. But I told him not to come here if he just wanted to get Saban an extension and a raise at Alabama, which I thought was his intention all along.

“Of course, Jimmy took great affront to that, which is fine. He was just doing his job. But that was the end of the conversation. I never talked to Saban and we never made an offer.”

Which is a crying shame, if for no other reason than it would have been a gas to hear Saban’s reaction to being required to pay for his meals.

Assessing Pruitt’s impact

One gratifying thing I’ve found about blogging is that if I wait long enough, eventually somebody comes along to do the heavy lifting for me.

Such is the story with this excellent post over at GloryUGA.com, exploring how much of an impact Jeremy Pruitt had on Georgia’s defense last season.  The stats make a pretty compelling case that when Pruitt said before the season that his two main goals were to increase takeaways and limit big plays, he meant it.

And while the run defense was disappointing in key games, it wasn’t a complete disaster.

Heck, even in the one area in which we took a significant statistical step backwards – rushing defense – we weren’t really THAT bad outside of two anomalous performances.  Those dreadful performances happened and they cannot be ignored, however neither can the fact that we held 8 of our 11 other opponents under their season rushing averages or the fact that without those two embarrassing efforts we were essentially a top 20 rush defense.

All this from a guy who had to install a new defensive scheme and work with a secondary that was depleted from a talent standpoint.  Imagine what he might be able to do with a defense that has a year’s experience with his system under its belt and a rising amount of quality depth.

“I have no clue how to handle it.”

We are about a week from the O’Bannon ruling taking effect, and the list of questions that several athletic directors in Power Five conferences told Jon Solomon they still have about what the decision means if it holds boggles the mind.

* How does O’Bannon, which only addresses football and men’s basketball players, affect Title IX? If female athletes don’t get paid, are universities setting themselves up for Title IX litigation? Some ADs are prepared to provide men and women with an equal amount due to public backlash and legal concerns.

* Are walk-on players required to receive cost of attendance and/or deferred licensing money? Wilken used the term “recruit” — for instance, no school can offer a recruit more licensing money than any other recruit in the same class on the same team — but the word “recruit” could mean walk-ons based on NCAA definitions.

* Is the deferred money taxable income? It’s possible athletes would have to pay taxes for each year they’re credited with the new money, even though based on Wilken’s injunction they wouldn’t pocket the cash until they have stopped playing college sports.

* Where is the deferred money — perhaps $5,000 per year — housed until a player’s eligibility expires? Do schools create a trust fund? Do they store the money in their private athletic foundations? Is that permissible under varying state laws?

* Do schools write the deferred money offers into financial aid agreements starting Aug. 1? What if a school offers $5,000 a year to a recruit who accepts the deal and O’Bannon later gets overturned? Does the player still get the $5,000 even if the money conflicts with NCAA rules?

Pardon my French, but what the fuck have these people been doing for the last six months?  Mind you, these athletic directors get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run their operations.  To be scratching your butt waiting for the answers to appear like the tablets on Mount Sinai ain’t exactly the kind of leadership you’re being paid for, fellas.  But it’s probably the kind of leadership present-day college athletics deserves.