When you compare your coaching search to a sexually transmitted disease

It’s a real shame if you don’t have a subscription to The Athletic, because today, you’re missing a classic.  David Ubben went through the emails sent to John Currie during last year’s abortion of a head coaching search ($$), and what turns up is pure comedy gold, as you might expect.

Again, paywall being paywall, I’m not going to quote from it extensively, but two tidbits ought to give you enough flavor of what a certain portion of the Vol fan base is going through.

First, he went through about 2200 pages (!) of emails, tallied the votes from fans who urged a specific candidate be hired and found the winner was… Lane Kiffin.  Say no more.

Second, this is beyond priceless:

“I’d have rather had Butch Jones than Greg Schiano,” Denney said.

“Hiring him would have been like hiring gonorrhea or syphilis. Nobody wanted that. Except maybe two or three people,” West said. “So the fans, obviously, voiced their opinion.”

Wait a minute… two or three people want to catch the clap?

I already know I’m gonna have to save Coach Gonorrhea for the right moment, but its time will surely come.

Oh, by the way, they’re all behind Pruitt.  Until they aren’t, of course.

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Ranking the rivalries

A fun post over at For Whom the Cowbell Tolls ranking the SEC’s top conference rivalries got me to thinking what my list would look like.

Their top five list reads this way:

1. Alabama-Auburn
2. Georgia-Florida
3. Ole Miss-Mississippi State
4. Florida-Tennessee
5. Alabama-LSU

There’s also an Honorable Mention list.

• Ole Miss-LSU
• Auburn-Georgia
• LSU-Texas A&M
• Florida-South Carolina

Naturally, some of the debate has to start with what makes a good rivalry.  History, passion, stakes — all of that goes into it.  I’d argue that a series able to generate spontaneously a nickname is strong evidence of a spirited rivalry.

That being said, it’s hard to argue with the top three games listed there.  From there, it gets a little murkier for me.

To start with, I don’t see how you can rate Florida-Tennessee ahead of Auburn-Georgia.  No question the former has been a high stakes game on and off over the past 25 or so years, but the two schools have faced off fewer than fifty times.  Compare that to the 122 times Auburn and Georgia have played, the closeness of the series (the Dawgs lead by mere two games) and the maybe more obvious than clever “Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry” nickname and it’s hard to see how it ranks as the inferior of the two.

And Florida-South Carolina?  How does that come out ahead of the most glaring omission from those lists, Alabama-Tennessee?  Florida-LSU is a bigger rivalry than Florida-South Carolina, which is only memorable lately because South Carolina’s last two head coaches had previously coached at Florida.

(Now that I think about it, another sign of a big rivalry is a cross-divisional game important enough for the SEC to protect by locking it in annually.)

The other game I’d add to the honorable mention list is one that’s sadly been a victim of conference expansion, Auburn-Florida.  The two have played 83 times and Auburn holds a narrow five game lead in the series.  Wikipedia notes that thirty-three of the games in the series have been decided by a touchdown or less.  Shame you dropped that one, SEC.

Anyway, what’s on your list?

Shots fired.

Judging from the responses I’ve gotten in regards to yesterday’s ridiculous haul of commitments, cannon shot has officially entered meme territory.

UGA’s staff knows that the talent margin is closing, that we are no longer a team with a couple of nice pieces – that we are getting deep. Sandridge was a cannon shot. A championship playoff run, at a position of need, and we still get the commitment – regardless of what is being written about currently (and make no mistake, it isn’t a coincidence).

It has been a long time since we’ve been this deep. On the staff and on the roster. It’s the middle of July and we are all in the same range of commitments and we are ahead of them. Pressure is all on them.

They’ll crack any day, man.

In the meantime, Georgia now sits sixteen spots ahead of South Carolina in the latest 247Sports Composite team rankings.

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UPDATE:  In case you were wondering, the Lexicon has been updated.