Today, in it just means more

Only 32 of 130 FBS schools don’t face an FCS opponent this year (list to follow). SEC was only conference w/every member playing an FCS team

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) August 23, 2017

Can’t add that ninth conference game, though.  No way.

2017 Preseason Coaches All-SEC Football Team

The lists are out.

Georgia has three players on each of the first and second teams and two on the third.  Alabama, for comparison sake, has nine on the first team alone.  Still got some catching up to do, Kirby.

Today, in brewery science

This may be the most perfect marriage of beer and university yet.

I don’t think the school currently allows beer sales in the stadium, but I imagine until then, it’ll do fine at tailgates.

“So, when does college football start?”

There are many answers to your question, grasshopper.

Today, in coaching ’em up

If you’re wondering about the transition from Tracy Rocker to Tray Scott…

Entering his second year, Rochester believes he has improved his footwork and hand placement while in his stance. It has become a key focus for Rochester and his teammates on the line as it is the specialty of Scott.

Scott joined the program in February after Tracy Rocker was let go after National Signing Day for an undisclosed reason. It may have not been a challenge to welcome a new coach, but Rochester did have to adjust to Scott’s style, which differed from Rocker.

David Marshall agreed after also being a significant contributor as a freshman.

“He’s a technician, and he’s probably the most technique-based coach I’ve met in my life,” Rochester said. “He preaches it. He knows we have the talent and skills to make plays, but it’s all about the technique — making things more efficient and make more plays.”

Happy talk for now, but I’d love to be proven wrong when they hit the field.

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Clay Travis and white supremacy… what could go wrong?

What started out as a sensible, albeit regrettable, decision wound up being blown up by a guy who loves doing that, especially if it marks ESPN.

When the Charlottesville protests erupted two weekends ago, ESPN executives — for better or worse — wondered if there might be an issue on their hands.

With Robert E. Lee suddenly back in the news, they feared Robert Lee, a young, new play-by-play announcer assigned to the Virginia-William & Mary game on opening weekend would show up in Twitter memes and posts on Web sites like Awful Announcing or Deadspin. They were worried that his big moment, even on a lightly watched game, might turn into a national joke.

According to an ESPN executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, ESPN asked Lee if he would be more comfortable calling another game but gave him the option to stay. Lee chose to switch assignments, and ESPN accommodated him.

This would never have been an issue at all, except for the fact that it was leaked to Clay Travis of Outkick the Coverage, who frequently critiques ESPN and has accused the company of having a liberal bias.

Travis wrote about it on his Web site Tuesday night and it exploded into a national story, with Travis appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program.

Mickey worried about some people behaving like dicks on social media, gave the announcer the choice to swap games, accommodated his rational decision (would you want to take the risk of being made a national punch line over something which you have no control?)… and wound up with some people behaving like dicks on social media anyway.  Ain’t PC great?

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UPDATE:  This Will Leach piece is so smart.  There are two essential points.

One —

ESPN wasn’t being “politically correct.” They were just being corporate. The phrase “political correctness” has been morphed and twisted to the point of meaninglessness. The action that some mock as “political correctness” is less about “being political” and more about “not being a thoughtless rude jerk.” No reasonable person ever says, “I’m about to be politically correct,” unless they are purposely mocking the practice they have decided to use for their own rhetorical purposes. Here’s a way to think about what is inaccurately described as “political correctness:” Is what you are saying needlessly hurtful? Are you just saying it because you are resistant to change, or because you are resistant to understanding how someone different than you might see the world? Are you just saying it to get high-fives from people who choose to see the world just like you do? You are not being “politically incorrect.” You’re just being a jerk. Let’s not confuse the two.

It is worth noting that ESPN was not even trying to be “politically correct” in this sense. The decision-makers just thought, “How can we make sure we don’t get yelled at by our bosses because people might make fun of us on a Saturday afternoon?” The issue for ESPN here isn’t “political correctness.” It’s rabbit ears.

And two —

Clay Travis has clearly lost his mind. There has long been a school of thought that Clay Travis, who used to write about college football for Fox Sports but now mostly talks about globalist cucks and head lice, is actually a smart person who has decided that the way he can advance his personal brand is to try to become the Sean Hannity of sports and appeal to a select, but stubbornly, resolutely focused, sliver of the sports fan audience. As someone who has worked with Travis in the past, briefly at both Deadspin and Fox Sports 1, and found him mostly affable and effusive in person, let me humbly submit that if Travis’ “Sean Hannity of sports” schtick began as an act, the artist and performance have since merged into an unrecognizable singularity. He’s more Pepe the Frog than man now.

In a post on Outkick the Coverage that “broke” this “story” — please do not be distracted by the ads for Outkick the Coverage; there might be some for Infowars-esque Outkick Super Male Vitality Drops by the time this is published — Travis breathlessly screams about “MSESPN!” and their desire to avoid “offending left wing idiots.” This is Travis’ game, of course, and he is surely doing a victory lap today, having uncovered the vast, left-wing ESPN agenda he has convinced himself to be real. But let’s not forget that he’s the one who did the framing on this. What Travis believes to be a liberal conspiracy, a normal person might see as “a big corporation not really understanding social media well and doing something stupid they mistakenly thought would remain privately stupid, as a result.” Turning this into a political issue benefits Travis — it gets him on Breitbart and allows him to beg Skip Bayless to have him on his show — but is not actually what is so funny and ridiculous about this. Travis has invested so much of his personal and professional capital in “guy who tells the TRUTH about the liberal media AGENDA” that it’s all he can see. He’s a hammer who thinks the whole world is a nail, the lone truth teller in a world full of cucks. Sign up for VIP Membership. Get a Free T-Shirt!

ESPN is guilty of nothing more than ineptness.  Clay Travis is a consummate asshole.  If you can’t see the difference, that’s on you.

Wednesday morning buffet

Hot, steaming chafing dishes… yum.

• Georgia’s young defensive linemen are “hungrier” this season.
• Unbridled optimism, part one:  Pete Fiutak has Georgia going 10-2, beating Florida and winning the SEC East on the tiebreaker with the Gators.  I’ll take that, happily.
• Unbridled optimism, part two:  Barrett Sallee ups that by predicting that Georgia wins the damned conference.  I’d take that, too, except I can’t quite wrap my brain around it.
• “I think Tennessee is headed in the right direction, a statement I won’t make for Georgia and Florida.”  There’s always somebody.
• What makes a great college offensive line?  That’s something every Georgia fan would like to know.
• Something else Sallee is bullish on:  “That will change, though, because the SEC is about to be hit with an offensive explosion in 2017.”  I’ll believe it when I see it.
• Bill Connelly gets deep in the weeds with this post about big plays, but the tl;dr summary is this:  “Efficiency is everything in college football. Explosiveness is too random to rely on without efficiency.”
• “We’re the leading edge of a much larger iceberg when it comes to what’s coming in youth athletics.”
• This made me laugh.

“Paul’s just warming up. He’s on mile 4 of a marathon.”

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

According to the report, he is adding weekly in-studio “SportsCenter” segments. His four-hour radio/TV gig also will add an hour.

The network will fly Finebaum from his Saturday “SEC Nation” campus pregame show to Connecticut every weekend during the season, giving him a high-profile perch on Sunday morning “SportsCenter” episodes to analyze the college football weekend.

I can only hope that one day we’ll look back on this and wonder what in the hell Mickey was thinking.

I ❤ Nick Chubb.

Nick Chubb still remembers the lesson his first running backs coach at Georgia, Bryan McClendon, taught him. Attack. Go north.

And in Chubb’s mind, he didn’t obey that lesson, that one fateful time. So there’s one way to fix it.

“Attack. Don’t go to the sideline. Get upfield,” Chubb said. “I let myself get on the sideline at Tennessee. So now I just get upfield every time. Instead of going out of bounds.”

Well, it was pointed out, don’t you have to go to the sidelines sometimes?

“Yeah, I mean … you don’t really have to,” Chubb said.

He grinned.

I mean, how can you not?