“Tradition left college football long ago.”

You can dismiss the messenger, or pooh-pooh the message, but this Jeff Schultz column is a checklist of what college football will look at weighing with regards to the regular season if and when (“if”, heh) the postseason expands.

And before you say, “Schultz wants ’em to stop at eight”, keep in mind that he’s proposing they dump conference championship games and up to two regular season games.  Every regular season game you eliminate adds another weekly round to the playoffs.  My math may be rusty, but I think that would get you to sixteen teams in a playoff with room to spare.

It wouldn’t be a college football playoff expansion story without Bill Hancock.

What can I say?  The man delivers.

“Every year is going to be different. Football seasons are like snowflakes, they’re all different,” College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said. “Next year we’ll be standing here talking about some other way it fell out. And that’s great.”

“When we started the playoff, people said this will grow to the game. I said, `This game is already off the charts in popularity,’ ” Hancock added. “But we have proven that this college football tree can grow. Indeed, grow to the sky.”

Snowflakes and trees.  They are so going to eight.  At least.

The Get It Over With Bowl

Oh, what might have been.

A couple of years ago, a Georgia-TCU bowl matchup would have been Sports and Grits‘ wet dream.  Now?  It’s just two teams playing out the string.

Motivation level: Eh. After going 3-3 down the stretch and needing a field goal at the buzzer to avoid an upset at Kentucky, Georgia wants to put Smart’s debut season in the rear-view mirror so it can focus on what it hopes will be a brighter future under its new coach. This will not be an exciting bowl season for a team that sat at No. 9 in the Associated Press Top 25 early in the fall.

Motivation level: The Horned Frogs just need to turn the page on this season. They backed into bowl season with four losses in six games to finish 6-6. TCU needs a bowl win to avoid a third losing season in the past 19 years, so it’s got that to motivate it through December — and much of its roster returns in 2017.

I can’t wait for McGarity and Smart to push ticket sales by telling the fan base it needs to show up in Memphis to impress recruits.

On the bright side, it’s another noon start, so it’s not like we’ll have to break any viewing habits.

They said, they said.

Talk about your meteor pissing match — Dabo and Boom (“obviously, there was a racial slur”) argue about insults being tossed by Clemson players before their game without having any direct knowledge of whether or not that occurred.

(No) mo’ money

College football is broke.  The state of Louisiana is broke.  LSU is broke.

So it makes complete sense that Dave Aranda is now the highest paid assistant in college football.

Gee, it’s almost as if somebody’s lying to us.

Death, taxes and…

… Tommy Tuberville bailing on a program he swore he’d never leave.

It doesn’t seem to have sat well with his now former employer, either.

There is a punchline, and it’s definitely worth a chuckle.

Tuberville recently said he hoped to become an athletic director once he got out of coaching.

Maybe he can hire the next Tommy Tuberville.

Today, in who cares

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  the one unalloyed success of the CFP is to make moments like this one completely irrelevant.

Statement from Arkansas on Virginia Tech being left off Bret Bielema's coaches poll ballot. pic.twitter.com/dOXUMafTb7

— Barrett Sallee 🇺🇸 (@BarrettSallee) December 5, 2016

That Bert’s embarrassed is a nice bonus, though.