If they gave out Darwin Awards for crime, this would win.

Arkansas’ Jeremy Sprinkle is suspended for trying to shoplift from Belk at the Belk Bowl where the bowl gift is a gift card to Belk.

— SportsChannel8 (@SportsChannel8) December 29, 2016

There are no words.

When you’re your own Second Chance U

Mississippi State finally gets around to dismissing a player after his third arrest in a month.

Man, bowl prep must have been a real distraction, Coach Mullen.

Life after the crayon box

Jeb Blazevich haz a sad.

Jeb Blazevich searched his memory, but he couldn’t quite remember when and how he heard the news two years ago. Yes, his offensive coordinator leaving was a big deal, but at the time it didn’t seem like a seismic, far-reaching event. Georgia was coming off another record-setting offensive year, there was talent all around, and even Mike Bobo told everyone on the way out that his team would be just fine.

There was no reason for Blazevich and other Georgia players to think anything else.

“They said we had the best offense in Georgia history my freshman year,” recalled Blazevich, now a junior tight end, on a year when Georgia scored the most points in school history. “I said, well shoot we’ll break it again next year.”

Blazevich laughed.

“It’s interesting how naïve I was, I guess,” he said.

The struggles since then of Georgia’s once-mighty offense have cost one head coach his job, resulted in wholesale turnover on the offensive coaching staff, and generally been a source of constant consternation among the fan base.

If Georgia doesn’t score 40 points in Friday’s Liberty Bowl, it will be the first season in 16 years that the Bulldogs haven’t reached 40 in a single game. After setting records in Bobo’s final few seasons, the numbers have cratered the past two years under Brian Schottenheimer and Jim Chaney: The Bulldogs enter the bowl game ranked 89^th nationally in total offense and 104^th in scoring, and will need to score 40 points to avoid the lowest scoring output for a Georgia team since the schedule expanded to 12 games.

Now I’m sad.

Seth Emerson does a good job of cataloguing the reasons for Georgia’s offensive decline.  Two of those in particular caught my eye.

One is the blocking scheme, which we’ve discussed before.  There has been a change of approach from Sale to Pittman.

Sam Pittman, the respected line coach hired by Smart, instituted a scheme predicated on blockers moving forward. Rob Sale, the line coach last year, focused more on a “lateral” technique, according to lineman Dyshon Sims.

“It’s the same concept, but every position coach teaches it different,” said Sims, a junior this year. “And I think as you happen to do the lateral stuff last year and then trying to transform it into going straight downhill took some time for us getting some used to. But I think now that we’re comfortable with that scheme it’s going to be a lot better.”

Sims was asked what the biggest challenge was with the change.

“Just not getting into the old system anymore,” he said. Because you train yourself into trying to do that for so long, for over a year, and then you have to change everything, pretty much. So sometimes you can find yourself going into the old stuff a lot.”

Brandon Kublanow, a starter the past three years, also acknowledged that you sometimes “fall back on habits”, but you have to use practice to avoid that.

“I think every offensive line coach will tell you they have their own style, what kind of footwork they want, what kind of steps they want, how far the steps will be,” Kublanow said. “So everyone’s different. New year, new coach, so a lot of different things.”

Old habits die hard.  (Although that doesn’t explain Catalina’s struggles.)

Two, transitions have been a way of life for three seasons now.

There’s a reason that Blazevich, Chubb and the other soon-to-be seniors are looking forward to next year: Continuity.

“This’ll be the first time I had a strength coach and offensive coordinator both coming back,” Blazevich said. “So just to have that consistency. I mean, I don’t even know what it’s like. Just to take that next step, because everything’s always been intro.”

Not only have there been three coordinators the past three years – four if you count John Lilly’s successful play-calling stints in the two bowls – but there have been three offensive line coaches, three running backs coaches, three receivers coaches, and three strength and conditioning coordiantors.

“The consistency of ‘This is how it’s going to be, this is how it was, now everybody’s on board and everybody knows,’” Blazevich said. “It’s not, ‘Oh we need to figure out this offense, we need to figure out this weight training.’ Now it is what it is and we can just go.”

Chubb echoed that.

“I think it has been overlooked. You can get by with it one year, but then the next year you change, and it kind of gets complicated,” Chubb said. “Hopefully we can get some kind of stability here and make things better.”

Yeah, I can see how that would lead to a bit of a mess.

Both points lend themselves to an argument that there is reason to be optimistic about improvement on the offensive side of the ball next season, but that’s something that remains to be seen, obviously.  It’s also probably the strongest reason for giving Chaney another year.

Purely as an aside, boy, does this comment come off vastly different in hindsight:

Obviously Mike did great things here,” Schottenheimer said when he was introduced at Georgia. “He will do great things at Colorado State. I’m not gonna try to be Mike, certainly…”

Mission accomplished.

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There was a little debate in the nature of he said, he said about the mid-season meeting Chubb and Michel had with their offensive coordinator.  Was it much like the initial version of the players walking in with something between a complaint or a demand, or was it a more benign meeting of the minds?  Here’s how Chaney described it:

… He also spoke about juniors Nick Chubb and Sony Michel coming to talk to him during the season and telling him “you’re doing too much, give (us) the ball.” Chaney appreciated their feedback and thought it was productive.

I can’t help but wonder if, say, Aaron Murray or Todd Gurley ever marched into Mike Bobo’s office with a message of “you’re doing too much, give (us) the ball.”  Eh, if they ever tried, they probably got distracted by Bobo’s box of crayons before they got too far.

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UPDATE:  More here on the meeting.

One thing I can say about Jim Chaney is that he sure is a modest son of a gun.

“You mean compete for a junior varsity championship?”

I wonder if the people advocating the creation of a playoff specifically for the Group of 5 schools understand the ramifications of that move, because it seems to me that about five minutes after the announcement of its creation, you’d see the P5 conferences split off the division in a state of total glee.  Although I’m sure they’d wish the small fry the best of luck in their new venture as they closed the door behind them.

There is wisdom in the saying that half a loaf is better than none.  Even if the reality is more like a tenth of a loaf, it’s still a pretty big slice of bread compared to what they’d be baking on their own.

Oh, why not: first thoughts about the Liberty Bowl

For reals, I’ve tried to make an effort to do a little research this week about the game with TCU.  I’ve looked at stats, checked out the occasional position match ups story, pondered a few keys to the game, but it’s all been for naught, I’m afraid.

Face it, we’re looking at two teams wrapping up disappointing seasons.  Each does some things well and some things not so well.  That’s not much to go on, and the line, which is about a point in Georgia’s favor, reflects that.

If you’ve watched much of this bowl season so far, it’s reinforced the guiding principle that the team that shows up more motivated to win generally does so.  Is that Georgia?  Is that TCU?  Your guess is as good as mine.

Honestly, as of right now, that’s all I’ve got.  Although 8-5 sure sounds a lot better than 7-6.

Coaching against the Death Star

I would really love to hear any SEC athletic director who canned a head football coach over the last two or three seasons coherently explain his plan to win a conference title.  Because “unfathomable” isn’t just a word to describe Alabama’s dominance right now; it’s a way of life.

Mike Slive’s mixed legacy

In noting the decline of the SEC over the past few seasons, Bill Connelly wonders if that can be attributed to a run of boring coach hires.  With all due respect to Brother Bill, I’d like to suggest another culprit:  the conference is more mediocre lately because it has more mediocre teams than before.

If you stayed up last night, you learned that in losing to Kansas State, Texas A&M managed to finish 8-5 for the third straight season.  The Aggies’ cumulative conference record over that period is 11-13.  Subtract Johnny Manziel from the equation and this program has been the poster child for mediocrity during its time in its new home.  Kevin Sumlin, by the way, makes a cool $5 million a year for that kind of production.

Then there’s the SEC East’s contribution, Missouri.  To their credit, the Tigers have a pair of division titles to their name, thanks to Georgia imploding due to injuries in 2013 and just imploding generally on the field in Jacksonville the next year.  (The luster of those finishes was substantially dimmed by consecutive blow outs in the conference championship games.)  Hard times have followed in the two seasons since then, as Mizzou has failed to reach bowl eligibility in either and has a whopping total of two conference wins to its name over that time.

To put it mildly, neither has brought much in the way of prowess to the table of late.  (Don’t waste your time pointing to other sports besides football, because it was football alone that was the reason for their invitations to join the conference’s party.)  Add to that a disregard for geography, tradition and conference scheduling —  remember, Dawg fans, we’ve got two more Presidential election cycles to go through before setting foot in College Station, Texas — and it’s not much of a leap to conclude that conference expansion has been largely unsuccessful, at least by the metric of maintaining what’s been special about the SEC.

Largely ain’t the same thing as totally, though.  And in one spectacular way, conference expansion has been everything Mike Slive and the people who hired him thought it would be.  It gave Slive the lever to overturn the conference’s existing broadcast contracts, which had fallen behind the times and were eclipsed by bigger deals like the Big Ten Network, and allow for the creation of the cash cow that is the SEC Network.  For them, that’s what’s special about the conference.

In the end, it’s what’s in the eyes of the university presidents that matters.  So when it comes time to write Slive’s epitaph, it’ll be a simple one.  Mike Slive always made money for his partners.

“Are you going to win it?”

Nice, anonymous Georgia fan.  Although I’d like to think that anyone posting comments at GTP could have brought a stronger game to the presser.

Then again, those are probably tougher questions than the staff’s getting from Butts-Mehre… unless McGarity smells the opportunity to fine somebody.

Jeez, Freeze.

I’m no fan of the man, but as cringeworthy as the comment is, I almost hope this is a misunderstanding.

Calloway told reporters during the Under Armour Combine Media Day earlier this week about how Freeze is describing the investigation with recruits.

Q: We’ve heard a lot about negative recruiting at Ole Miss with the NCAA thing going on, what has Ole Miss said to you about that?

“Well, Coach Freeze told me when you’re that big and out there with faith in Christ, he’s like, ‘What do you expect? Jesus got nailed to the cross.’ So, he was just telling me sometimes things like that happen, but that’s never going to change how he’s going to treat his players and take care of them. Even if — I don’t know if he really did make the mistake, doing what he did or not — but I can just tell he’s a good person, great person. I know they’re looking at maybe a bowl suspension [for 2017]. I don’t know what they’re gonna do. But I don’t think that’ll affect anything as far as how he treats his players and stuff like that.”

Oy.

Crucified by the NCAA?  Seriously?  Does that even sell on the recruiting trail?  If it were my kid and Hugh Freeze walked in the door saying that, I’d really wonder what was going on inside his head.

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UPDATE:

What is being reported is not what I meant. Coach Freeze wouldn't make that comparison at all @CoachHughFreeze

— Chevin Calloway (@_chev1_) December 29, 2016

So I guess the difference between Jesus and Hugh Freeze is that the former never had any trouble being understood.