Talk, talk, talk

Today, I had a nice chat with Georgia Sports Blog’s Tony Waller (aka Tyler Dawgden) that is the subject of a Waitin’ Since Last Saturday podcast.  If you don’t get enough of my bloviating at the blog, you can listen to me blather here.  (Apologies for the sound quality; I think my phone was misbehaving this morning.)

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Today, in no doubt this will end well

Really.

Source: Tentative agreement in West Virginia would give WVU and Marshall a cut of sports betting. Would be first two NCAA programs with such an arrangement.

— David Payne Purdum (@DavidPurdum) May 10, 2018

No, really.

Schools in bed with sports books… and to think some of you are concerned about player compensation ruining college sports.

Is the G-Day QBR meme about to take a hit?

This is only at the rumor stage, but note over at Dawgs247, Rusty Mansell appears to be reporting Stetson Bennett is contemplating a transfer from Georgia.

2017 Yards Per Play: SEC

I always enjoy Matt Melton’s annual jog through conference statistics.  As the header indicates, his latest analysis of the SEC has been posted.  I don’t think you’ll find much of a surprise here.

Yeah, LSU underachieved a little and maybe Mississippi State overachieved a little (although I think in the case of MSU, when it lost in conference, it tended to lose really, really badly, which no doubt skews the numbers), but overall… well, let Matt lay it out.

… Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2017 season, which teams in the SEC met this threshold? Here are SEC teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

No SEC teams significantly over or under-performed relative to their expected record based on YPP. The top three teams dominated the conference, finishing a combined 21-3 with Auburn’s loss to LSU the only one coming against the other eleven. There is really nothing interesting or new to report in that regard. So, instead I’ll focus on something that is rather interesting.

The point left hanging there really is interesting.  It’s an exploration of how long SEC coaches who win their division stay on afterwards.  Let’s just say you could make an argument that winning a division could put a coach on the hot seat.  It just means more, man.  Take a minute and read Matt’s data.

Dan Mullen’s burden

We’ve spent a good amount of time discussing Jeremy Pruitt’s heavy load at Tennessee, but Florida’s new coach has his own set of issues to overcome.  He’s got the benefit of being a link to better times, and that’s certainly a help during the inevitable honeymoon a new coach enjoys.  So this is an easy carry, as far as it goes.

Mullen is a bridge to the Gators’ last glory era as the offensive coordinator on Urban Meyer’s 2006 and 2008 national championship teams. That’s how he remembers Florida football, and that’s what he expects it to be again.

“The surprise, I think, is we’ve fallen behind a little bit in certain areas,” he said Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale. “Whether it be facilities, whether it be crowd support, whether it be just the passion, energy and excitement I’m used to seeing from when I was here before. You’ve got to understand, for me, I’m seeing [it] back that way. I’m seeing we’re having an unbelievable crowd here tonight, we had an unbelievable crowd last night, for the spring game, I’m seeing that energy and that excitement that everyone tells me has been missing.

“So that is probably the thing that surprises me, that somehow we let — and I say we, we’re all in this together — that somehow we let our standard slip a little bit in everybody and what it is to be a Gator and our standards and expectations. But I’m really excited to see the energy and the passion and the enthusiasm everyone has to get that Gator Standard back and to get it back in a hurry.”

That standard he’s referring to there was multiple SEC and national championships in a short time frame under Corch.  Yes, the coaching staff did a fine job, but let’s not forget how much of that was fueled by a combination of factors such as extraordinarily gifted talents in Tebow and Harvin, an SEC East that had fallen off and a conference that was just seeing the nascent rise of an Alabama dynasty under Nick Saban.

Needless to say, Mullen faces a very different world now.  It’s all well and good to pump up the fan base with talk of a return to the good old days, but what happens if you can’t recreate them?

Condi reconsiders.

“Just to be blunt about it, you don’t waste Condoleezza Rice’s time if you’re not serious about it…” — Mark Emmert

We saw some of this coming when, a few days after the commission she chaired filed its report, Rice expressed some exasperation with the lack of consistency in NCAA guidelines about compensation for student-athletes’ names, likenesses and images, but now she’s come out in full-blown retraction from the stand taken by the commission (and, by extension, the NCAA itself) regarding same.

And as soon as the legal framework is clear, developing a new policy on name, image and likeness. NCAA policy is inconsistent on this matter. Olympians already enjoy an exemption and there are other case-by-case exceptions. It should be possible to develop a legally compliant approach that allows student athletes from all sports to benefit.

She elaborated more fully here.

“We believe that students ought to be able to benefit from name, image and likeness but you can’t decide a program until you know the legal parameters,” Rice told USA TODAY Sports. “That was the point. I think some of the commentary suggested that we didn’t really speak on this issue. I think we did speak on this issue, it’s just that we understand there’s a legal framework that has to be developed first.”

Rice said she thought the commission’s report was “pretty clear” in its support of athletes being able to cash in once the various legal issues are resolved. But she maintains that the NCAA cannot do this while a pair of ongoing cases are pending.

“I think people may have looked at the fact that we said there’s a legal framework to be developed and said, ‘Oh, well, maybe they’re punting on this.’ Nobody was intending to punt on it.”

Yes, there’s some bullshit in that.  The commission tabled the question of adopting an Olympic model for player compensation because of current court cases, so there was no statement from them that students should benefit from same.  Condi’s being a little bit dodgy there.  But even if you accept her explanation, the litigation excuse is weak sauce.  There is nothing stopping the NCAA from changing the current prohibition against compensation for NLIs today — indeed, as Rice notes, part of her frustration lies in the exceptions already squeezing through that have no logical consistency.

“There is a legal framework that has to be determined, but name, image and likeness –athletes are going to have to be able to benefit from it,” she said. “I think everybody can see that. Exactly what that’s going to look like, I don’t think that we could design it. I don’t think that today the NCAA could design it because the legal framework still has to be developed. But when I see policies that are as confused as the NCAA’s policies on this, I think, ‘Why haven’t you gone and looked at this before?’ It’s really time to come to terms with name, image and likeness.”

The current NCAA rules, she said, “(are) just incomprehensible. And sometimes when something’s incomprehensible, you have to go ahead and say, ‘This is incomprehensible,’ which means it probably isn’t right. And I thought that in the report, we were pretty clear, that we think the framework doesn’t work.”

Rice is not alone. There are currently mixed signals about who can get paid as an athlete and who cannot. While Olympic swimming star Katie Ledecky of Stanford is one of the most recent to have to stop competing collegiately in order to start earning money, Notre Dame basketball star Arike Ogunbowale recently received a waiver from the NCAA that allowed her to make money as a participant on Dancing with the Stars. The NCAA said it was granting the waiver because the show was unrelated to her basketball abilities.

Rice isn’t buying it.

“I couldn’t for the life of me understand the explanation,” she said, “because obviously she’s there because she hit two winning shots in two basketball games (in the women’s Final Four), so that’s the connection.”

I do give her credit for being forthright about her frustration there.  And especially with this:

“I would hope that what the NCAA is going to do is they’re going to take this moment, once they know what the legal framework is, and they are going to recognize that this has got to benefit athletes. Here I really stand with the athletes on this. It makes sense for the NCAA to have a legally justifiable framework that works, and currently the framework doesn’t work.”

That being said — and this is the part that the cynic in me expects to hear at any moment — she’s just tossed a lifeline to Emmert’s crew with that phony excuse.  The NCAA will be happy to take the stance that its heart is in the right place, but until those awful lawsuits are resolved, its poor ol’ hands are tied.  Hey, kids, if you want to blame somebody, blame those damned lawyers you hired.  In the meantime, pay no attention to how much the schools are raking in without sharing.

These people suck.

“Now on to knee surgery recovery #3!”

This no doubt explains why Georgia just went out and took on another graduate transfer at punter.

Man, sorry to hear that.  Keep your chin up, Marshall.

(h/t)

Musical palate cleanser, go ahead and shake it edition

This one popped up on my drive into work this morning and I thought I’d share.

From one 0f my favorite Dwight Yoakam albums, the 1993 release This Time, here’s Dwight channelling his inner Rolling Stones, with “Wild Ride”.