All kinds of business being passed…
Hope you enjoyed it, Harbaugh.
What are these kids supposed to do now at five in the morning? Sleep?
Coaches are gonna hate that one Wonder if Saban’s already dreaming up a work around.
Ditto. Find it interesting this proposal passed by the same margin as the first one I mentioned.
Filed under The NCAA
Florida high school coaches don’t seem particularly impressed by Jim McElwain’s efforts on the recruiting trail.
“From what I can see, they have to do a better job of identifying the younger studs and kind of lovin’ on those guys really early the way the other big dogs do like Florida State, Alabama, Ohio State,” Ross said. “They identify those young kids pretty early on and do a good job making sure that ‘hey man, we love you, we want you to come here.’ From my experience and how [Florida has] been around us, they tend to wait until that kid has those big-time, Power 5 offers and then they try to sneak in.
Um… that kind of sounds a little familiar.
“Florida will always be a big name, but they just aren’t that premier team yet like some of those other schools right now,” Ross said. “I think once they have a great season, it will kind of snowball with recruiting, but until then, they have to do a better job of jumping on the younger kids and showing them love.”
Once they have a great season? The Gators have won the SEC East two straight years. The message is getting muddied. As a Georgia fan, that’s okay by me.
Filed under Gators, Gators..., Recruiting
Say what you will about Leach, he’s good for quote material.
Leach coaches in the Pac-12 now but coached in the Big 12 and SEC previously. He said he faced the most skepticism when he coached in the Southeast.
“First, it becomes it won’t work,” Leach said. “Second, they basically say, ‘oh it’s a system,’ suggesting that people who don’t do it that way — who just run it up the middle, stick all your asses together so one hand grenade can kill everybody — that’s the right way to do it. Since they do it the right way, they’re OK with the fact they lost.
“This is a great time to be in the SEC; everybody’s got the same offense: run right, run left, play action. And they tease themselves and say we threw it four more times a game this year than we did last year.”
“… who just run it up the middle, stick all your asses together so one hand grenade can kill everybody” — hey, when did he have the time to watch tape on Georgia’s offenses the last two seasons?
In defense of the SEC, I would suggest that any conference would perform better offensively, regardless of scheme, if it deployed better quarterbacks than what we saw last season. Let’s not forget we’re not that far removed from two teams with their asses stuck together finishing in the top five in yards per play.
Even so, before you dismiss Leach as a blowhard when it comes to belittling SEC offenses, remember that he had a big hand in this:
Just to give you an idea of what Mumme pulled off with his newfangled attack, compare Kentucky’s offensive stats from 1996, Bill Curry’s last season there, with the 1999 stats. Notice a bit of an improvement there? Kentucky’s 1999 yards per game average would have ranked the Wildcats fourth in last season’s SEC (and is about 115 ypg more than last year’s UK team averaged).
One more thing about that ’99 team of Mumme’s. The quarterback that season was the immortal Dusty Bonner, who succeeded some guy named Tim Couch. Couch, in his last season at UK, threw for 4,611 yards in 12 games. That total would have led the SEC last season by more than 700 yards (and Arkansas played one more game). That 1998 Kentucky team wound up playing in the Outback Bowl and Couch was a Heisman finalist. How many other seasons can UK claim like that? Maybe I’m missing something, but that strikes me as a pretty good indication that a pass-based spread attack could function just fine in the SEC.
I see no reason lightning can’t strike again. (Hell, for that matter, look at what Missouri did last season.)
The problem, of course, is that you can’t play Air Raid on defense, and that was Kentucky’s Achilles heel when Leach coached there. Will this year’s Ole Miss prove to be different? Hard to say, but don’t forget that Freeze has changed his coordinator on that side of the ball, too. In any event, Ole Miss ought to be entertaining to watch this season, if nothing else.
Filed under Mike Leach. Yar!, Strategery And Mechanics
Boy, you ain’t kidding about that, Mister anonymous prominent Power Five athletic director.
Thank Gawd they’ve got geniuses like Larry Scott and Bob Bowlsby to cover for them.
Filed under College Football, It's Just Bidness
Gee, who could have expected that a former Ole Miss football player who’s now a state legislator is introducing a bill aimed at NCAA investigations?
Rep. Trey Lamar, R-Senatobia, introduced the potential legislation (House Bill 1040), which would force under the threat of financial penalty for the NCAA “to complete its investigation, present findings to the NCAA Committee on Infractions and to render its final decision either imposing penalties for the violations proven in the investigation process or dismissal of the allegations” within nine months of a member institution’s response to a letter of inquiry.
“Financial penalty”? Do tell us more, Trey.
Should the NCAA fail to meet these time frames, the bill proposes it would be fined $10,000 each day it goes past the window of time and said fine should be “payable to the member institution subject to the investigation and actionable through the Circuit Courts of the State of Mississippi.”
Only in Mississippi would somebody think it a good idea to incentivize schools to drag out violation investigations. At least I hope only in Mississippi.
Though Rep. Lamar can rest comfortably with the thought that the NCAA’s head of enforcement is sensitive to time issues.
Filed under Political Wankery, The NCAA
Will the last disgruntled Baylor Title IX staffer please turn out the lights when she leaves?
Filed under Baylor Is Sensitive To Women's Issues
This is one of those things that is both entirely expected and yet entirely disappointing at the same time: “But as it turns out, a sideline bias in the NFL is real, and it’s spectacular.”
Then again, that’s the NFL. We all know that the SEC has long stood for the proposition that its officiating staffs are the most professional in the biz. No worries, road teams!
Filed under Stats Geek!, The NFL Is Your Friend.
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