We’re not at peak Chubb yet…

… but we’re inching closer.

Beer, with a twist

Per SB Nation’s Ohio State website, “After an evidently successful pilot program selling beer on only the suite level of Ohio Stadium, Ohio State stadium operations and athletics announced Wednesday that beer would be available stadium wide at fall football games during the 2016 season.”

Here’s the neat trick.

Per Ohio State release: Beer sales stadium-wide in 2016, money will fund two full-time positions in the OSU police department.

— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) June 8, 2016

One can only imagine Jimmy Williamson’s reaction if they ever tried that in Sanford Stadium.

Paying for performance, or money to burn?

If accurate, this is what passes for strategic thinking at Butts-Mehre.

Georgia will not be making a change with its head baseball coach this year

I know and understand why the thought will perturb many out there. Me? I have no dog, or dawg in this fight as the case may be, but as one of only three reporters who covered the team on a regular basis this past spring, here are my thoughts.

First off, there was no way AD Greg McGarity was going to make a change this soon. The reason? Head coach Scott Stricklin has a six-year contract that pays him $600,000 per year and McGarity is simply not going to let him go after just three seasons. While I know that doesn’t sit well with some, that’s just the way it is.

That said, it’s certainly understandable why UGA baseball fans are upset. They can’t be blamed in the least.

When Stricklin arrived he promised to take UGA back to the next level when it comes to its baseball program. So far, his three years in Athens have resulted in three straight sub-500 campaigns.

That’s not good.

Now this ain’t all on McGarity.  We all know what is a priority for the folks behind the scene writing the checks.  Nevertheless, it’s highly amusing to see McGarity, who stroked a $4 million buyout check to Mark Richt without batting an eye, choking on the thought of paying less than half of that to a coach who has yet to post a winning record in Athens.  Especially since it’s football that pays Stricklin’s salary, just like it did Richt’s.  Then, again, of the two, it’s Stricklin who’s the McGarity hire.

The reserve fund works in mysterious ways, my friends.  And that’s why I remain a skeptic about whether we can have nice things from Athens.

Bert, magnanimous

Shorter Bret Bielema:  of all the former assistant coaches who have worked for me, Jim Chaney and Sam Pittman are certainly two of them.

“From king status to mildly hot seat”

Bill Connelly’s Georgia Tech preview is a treat.  Trust me on this.

Well… okay, if you want a little taste, here’s the conclusion:

Rinse, repeat. Georgia Tech should have a good offense and a defense that can’t make enough plays. We’ve seen this episode before. But hey, that’s still better than last year’s episode.

In other words, when you’re 3-9, you’re likely to have nowhere to go but up.  It doesn’t take a genius for that.

Hines Ward still has a dream.

I love the guy, but I’m not sure I see how this comes together.

“I’m dead serious. I want to coach at Georgia,” Ward told DawgNation. “I’ve expressed that to Kirby. I haven’t had any talk with him about what all goes into it, but I think I’ve put it out there. I’m serious. I want to give back to my alma mater.”

Ward first discussed the possibility of coaching for the Bulldogs in a December appearance on the Paul Finebaum Show. Speaking from the College Football Hall of Fame on Tuesday — he was in attendance for the Positive Athlete Georgia Scholarship Awards, an organization he helped found that promotes positivity in youth and high school sports — the former athlete went into more detail about what motivates him to want to be involved at UGA.

“Sometimes I get upset. I see kids leave the state of Georgia (during recruiting season) to go play for other teams. I knew if I walked into that room, there’s no way that kid’s leaving the state of Georgia,” Ward said.

Great sentiment, but recruiting is more than just walking into a room once to seal a deal.  Especially the way Smart’s got things running these days.  Hines has star power out the wazoo, but does he really have the desire to put the time in that it would take?

The NFL doesn’t like the spread of the spread.

Pity the poor oligarchs.

Even if a spring league did nothing more than expedite the development of a handful of quarterbacks, helping them go from marginal prospects to winning NFL passers, that alone would be a boon. There are simply not enough reps to go around, not enough opportunities to actually get them on the field in anything approximating a game situation, and with fewer and fewer college programs running traditional pro-style offenses, the problem appears to be growing.

Oh, noes!

“I don’t know why it hasn’t happened to this point. I think the league wants to do it. There must be something blocking it. There must be some factors that are keeping it from going in that direction, because I’ve never heard anybody say they don’t want to do it. So I think you’d have to ask the higher-ups in the league really what’s holding it up.”

Dude, shit like that costs money.  Money the league has never had to spend before because the college game’s been so accommodating.  Now that it’s not so much, NFL teams are having to spend money and resources in different ways.

As for the players, the state of offensive line play has been driving coaches bonkers, with all the spread formations being used in college sending many of these youngsters to the pros without the fundamentals once taken for granted, and coaches believe a league like this could greatly hasten that learning curve.

And this offseason proved more than ever how scarce quarterbacks are, with ineffective starters like Sam Bradford getting $18 million a season and a bidding war erupting over Brock Osweiler, who played middling football this season in his first seven career starts, lost his job before the playoffs to a decaying Peyton Manning and then still received $38 million guaranteed.

Damn, that’s gotta suck.

Conference USA, putting the not into have not

Holy declining television revenues, Batman!

The value of Conference USA’s television contracts has eroded even more than earlier reports indicated.

The league will receive about $2.8 million in TV revenue in 2016-2017 from four broadcast networks, according to documents The Virginian-Pilot obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

That’s about $200,000 for each school, according to notes Old Dominion officials received during C-USA’s spring meetings last month.

It represents a steep decline from the $15.4 million, or about $1.1 million per school, to be distributed this year.

To put that in some sort of perspective, $1.1 million wouldn’t even cover Georgia’s football recruiting budget… in 2o15.  $200k is what Georgia drops on support staff when Kirby wakes up in the morning and decides he needs a few more bodies to watch tape and send texts to recruits.

The bigger picture is hardly less disheartening for C-USA.

The league’s TV revenue has now fallen to among the lowest in the Football Bowl Subdivision, which continues to see a canyon-like widening in the financial gap between the haves and have-nots.

The SEC, at the top of the food chain, made $476 million in TV, bowl and NCAA tournament money in 2014-2015, with each school getting about $34 million. Among the Power 5 conferences, the ACC came in fifth, at $22.1 million per school.

In all, documents indicate that C-USA schools will split about $20.5 million in revenue from the league, including NCAA basketball tournament money. That’s down from the projected $34.4 million to be distributed this year.

The main thing propping up the revenues is football playoff money.

While SEC coaches are tooling around in exotic cars, C-USA coaches will be asked to meet by teleconference rather than in person.

Looks like they’re gonna need a bigger cupcake game payout.

Georgia’s biggest problem on offense? Ask ESPN.

ESPN’s crack stats team wants you to know that this is, according to them, Georgia’s most daunting metric:

Quarterback play: Former Georgia quarterback Aaron Murray left Athens in 2013 as the SEC’s career leader in completions, passing touchdowns, passing yards and total offense. In the two seasons since, the Dawgs have struggled to find Murray’s replacement. Georgia averaged 192.5 pass yards per game the past two seasons, which ranks 11th in the SEC and 79 YPG fewer than in the four seasons with Murray. Freshman Jacob Eason, the No. 13 overall player and No. 1 quarterback in the 2016 ESPN 300, might be leaned on early in his career to rejuvenate the Bulldogs’ passing offense. Matthew Stafford is the only Georgia quarterback commit ranked higher than Eason in the ESPN 300 era (since 2006).

Not trying to be one here… okay, maybe I am, but the year after Aaron Murray left saw Georgia average more than 41 points per game, good for first in the conference and eighth nationally.  I’m pretty confident that the only folks who saw that production as daunting were opposing defensive coordinators.

Yeah, things fell of the table last season, but I’d be willing to bet there’s more than enough blame to go around for that than just struggling to find a decent quarterback.

Bottom line, give me a full slate at tailback, some decent offensive line work and an offensive coordinator who’s at least competent and the passing yardage should take care of itself.  But thanks for the warning, ESPN.

Huntley Johnson is still on the mother.

Florida’s suspended wide receiver Antonio Callaway continues his long journey back into the light.

Suspended Florida receiver Antonio Callaway moved closer to playing for the Gators this fall, as the school is now allowing him to take classes and work out at the team’s facilities.

Callaway was suspended by the school in January for violating the university’s code of conduct policy. He remains suspended from the team.

Gainesville attorney Huntley Johnson issued a statement on Callaway’s behalf announcing the changes in the wide receiver’s status.

“We are working through the process that the University has in place to reach a final resolution in this matter,” Johnson wrote. “There will be no further comment at that this time.”

That is the sound a lawyer makes when he’s fairly confident where things will wind up.

There are probably a few folks in Waco and Knoxville who wish Johnson had a multi-state practice.