Ball’s in your court, Gators.

Bengals have formally requested permission to interview Florida defensive coordinator Todd Grantham for their open coordinator position, sources tell @TheAthleticCFB.

feeling is he is a lead candidate, per sources. unclear when he would interview.

— Will Sammon (@WillSammon) February 11, 2019

Based on the man’s track record, it depends on when he gets that sweet contract extension.

Prelim S&P+ sez…

… it’s gonna be a wild ride this season.  For Georgia, I mean.

• Five Six SEC teams in the top ten.  Georgia plays two of the four five not named Georgia.  (And hopefully looks to get number three in the SECCG.)
• Three more members of the SEC East, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee, are in the top 21.
• Vanderbilt is the lowest ranked team in the East, and it still came in at number 53.
• Notre Dame and Texas A&M start out at 12 and 13, respectively.

There’s a lot of meat there.  Kirby has his work cut out for him, at least until the season’s closer.  Georgia Tech is 89th.

Business decisions

Okay, this isn’t a basketball blog, but I can’t let Tom Crean’s criticism after Saturday’s loss pass gently into the night without comment.  In particular, this.

″…It’s all on me because I’m the one that decided to keep these guys,” said Crean. “It’s all on me, and I get it, because the last thing I can do with making decisions on keeping guys in the program in the spring is now get overly mad at them because I’m the one that made the decision.

“So I live with that every day, and it doesn’t mean that they’re not great kids, but very few programs when there’s a takeover, OK, when you have guys that haven’t done it at any point in time really in their career — those guys, they move on. That’s what happens in a job change, and I didn’t do that. And so I’m not going to complain, and we’ve just got to keep doing everything we can do to fix it and make it better.”  [Emphasis added.]

That part in the bold is what happens when frustration makes a coach say the quiet part out loud. Greg McGarity made this absurd attempt to deflect from it.

“I think his comments were misinterpreted,” said McGarity. “From the very onset, if you look at the press conference in its entirety, he led off by taking full responsibility for everything. I think Tom cares deeply about these players and the perception that he was not caring or trying to shift blame to them was certainly not taken that way.

″…If you look at the whole press conference in its entirety, instead of maybe pulling a couple of graphs out and singling out those, it didn’t portray the whole story.”

Now, it’s easy to let the focus of the comment center on player criticism, as McGarity tried to do there, but what’s really telling is the admission that some players are led to move on when there’s a coaching change.  Crean is merely stating the obvious:  coaches are paid to win, and if you don’t think you’ve inherited kids who can contribute, business decisions are inevitable.

Just as obvious, though, is the question being begged here.  If that’s reality from the coaches’ standpoint, why should players be held to a different standard when it comes to making similar business decisions?  I expect Thomas Mars and others of his ilk will have Crean’s name on their lips going forward.  Maybe you should, too.

A school’s gonna do what a school’s gonna do.

Purely for shits and giggles I gotta ask those of you who think it’s okay for schools to collude to fix players’ compensation — is it also okay for them to do the same with professors?

(h/t)

Allow me to retort.

As you can imagine, the proud denizens of StingTalk have leapt to the defense of Coleman Rudolph’s assertion that Georgia Tech has had better coaching over the past thirty years than has Georgia in the face of what they perceive as withering, ignorant criticism.   Maybe just this once, they’re on to something.

I mean, I don’t know how anyone who’s ever watched Tech’s last offensive series of the 2004 game could possibly disagree with Rudolph.

At the 1:01:39 mark, you see Tech’s OC signal to Reggie Ball to spike the ball on third-and-21, much to Uncle Verne’s amazement.  No wonder Reggie was confused on fourth down.

Now that’s coaching ’em up, he said ignorantly.

Today, in concern trolling

Connor Riley wants to know what the fuck is wrong with you people.

Why is Fields seen as a villain to some, while many are outright rooting for Eason? Why can’t everyone wish the best for both Eason and Fields?

He left out the great middle, which belongs to those of us who don’t care one way or the other about either, since they’re no longer in Athens.  The rest of you, though, evidently should be ashamed of yourselves.

Maybe part of it is because Fields committed to Georgia when it had already become clear that Jake Fromm had usurped the job from Eason, and Kirby Smart had no intentions of giving the job back to Eason. Maybe part of it is because Eason sat out a season, while Fields sought immediate playing time, like he did at Georgia. There’s probably even the fact that Fields went to play at Ohio State, a much more hated program than Washington.

Many will also likely point to the timing of Fields’ initial transfer announcement. News of Fields entering the transfer portal came out the Monday before the Early Signing Period. Georgia’s season hadn’t finished yet, as the Bulldogs still had to play in the Sugar Bowl.

Reports of Eason transferring to Washington came out the day after Georgia’s season ended last year. There wasn’t a transfer portal for him to put his name him into though. Had Georgia played in the College Football Playoff in 2018, Fields almost certainly follows a similar timeline. The same could be said for Eason had Georgia not made the College Football Playoff in the 2017 season.

Fields was certainly a more divisive player among the fan base while at Georgia. Eason and Fields were both better recruits than Fromm. But the calls to play Fields were louder than they ever were for Eason during the 2017 season. Fields was much more athletic and clearly had every bit of arm strength that Eason had. But with the exception of the LSU game, Fromm was an even better player in 2018 than he was in 2017.

Gosh, why can’t we all just get along and see everyone as winners in the game of life?

Hey, at least I’ll give him credit for not playing the racism card there.  Maybe he’s saving that for another click-bait day.

They don’t pay you for what’s on the front of the jersey, pal.

They pay you for what’s on the back.

It seems likely that the Purdue football program’s new recruiting class will benefit coach Jeff Brohm on the field, but there’s no doubt it will help him at the bank.

Under the terms of his contract, Brohm will get a $45,000 bonus because the class was ranked among the nation’s 25 best by at least one of the outlets specified in an incentive provision of his agreement. The group was 25th in both the ESPN and 247Sports Composite rankings. (It was ranked 26th by rivals.com, the other outlet listed in the agreement.)

Meat on the hoof, and the cows don’t get a cut of the action.

“Oh yeah, I mean, there’s a chance that it could come from anything.”

Well ain’t this a kick in the pants:

Clemson officials still don’t know or aren’t saying how three football players tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug prior to the Dec. 29 Cotton Bowl. But as the program continues to appeal the suspensions, head coach Dabo Swinney acknowledged it could have come from within — mistakenly.

Swinney told The Post and Courier that the process is out of his hands and that the university’s legal team is still looking into all possibilities, which includes the chance that Clemson gave the players something the athletic department thought was cleared by the NCAA.

Dabo’s not saying that because it’s some random thought that just popped into his head.  He’s clearing the stage for what’s to come.  Hey, Clemson won the national championship, so it’s not like there are going to be repercussions he can’t handle, but if you’re one of the three kids who were banned from playing in the CFP, that’s small comfort.

That being said, if the program were giving players PEDs inadvertantly or not, Dabo’s lucky only three tested positive.