Your 3.6.19 Playpen

If ever a tweet was destined to kick off a Playpen, surely it’s this one.

multiple callers on @SXMCollege say pac-12 schools are struggling because parents of recruits in south and texas don’t like “liberal politics” on west coast

— Allen Kenney (@BlatantHomerism) March 5, 2019

If that’s not peak stoopid stick to sports, it’s high enough up that you can see the summit from there.

Comments time!

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Look who’s come a-courtin’.

Schools are still trying to reach out to Missouri’s senior players about transferring in the wake of NCAA penalties.  In fact, there’s a new SEC suitor.

On Tuesday, Mizzou confirmed another SEC school has notified MU about contacting players: national powerhouse Alabama.

It’s a pretty target-rich environment.  The Tigers have twenty seniors on the roster and eight of them start.

Last month, Odom made some strong comments to CBSSports.com about Tennessee trying to poach his roster — the day before he headed to Birmingham, Ala., for a regularly scheduled SEC coaches meeting, where he’d sit in the same room with some of the men trying to raid his roster. How did that meeting go?

“I had good conversations with the other guys in the league,” Odom later said.

I guess he’ll catch up with Nick at SEC Media Days.

Victimized

Pro litigation tip from a non-litigator:  when you’re trying to impress a judge with the seriousness of a crime involving paying college basketball recruits, don’t raise Louisville as some sort of an innocent paragon.

Part of the argument was that the impact of the crimes went beyond tangible monetary value, such as the lost scholarship when a player they paid became ineligible. Diskant pointed to Louisville, one defrauded school, and how the university was in the process of trying to build a reputation as “much more than a basketball team.”

“Yet it became involved in a basketball scandal,” Diskant said.

Judge Kaplan couldn’t help but interject, cutting Diskant off.

“They were involved in some problems before,” Kaplan noted of the historically scandal-plagued Louisville program.

Diskant had to agree. Facts are facts, after all. Louisville was, indeed, already on NCAA probation and had been stripped of its most recent national championship before Jim Gatto, Merl Code and Christian Dawkins decided to kick some money to the father of Brian Bowen II so the top-30 recruit would play for the Cardinals.

Prior scandals included prostitute-powered parties in the basketball dorm and tabloid personal foibles of Rick Pitino, the school’s longtime coach.

That went over well.  Sucks when reality gets in the way of a prosecutor’s narrative.

“There’s no incompetent group among our staff.”

Kirby doesn’t exactly sound torn up about not bringing Eddie Gran to Athens (assuming for the sake of argument that was ever in the cards, of course).

Coley, who coaches the quarterbacks, was picked to run the offense after three seasons on staff. The former Miami offensive coordinator replaces Jim Chaney, who left to be coordinator at Tennessee.

“I like the energy he brings,” Smart said. “He’s got enthusiasm for the players. Players ultimately play for coaches and the relationship you have with them and the drive you have with them is important. Now, so is scheme, so is getting guys to buy in and maybe not doing too much and keeping things exciting for the players. There’s a fine line in those things and James has been around really good coaches throughout his whole career and understands what it takes to win, especially in this conference. He’s been around it for a long time so we’re excited about him bringing some new energy.”

Lanning replaces Mel Tucker, who served as coordinator for all three of Smart’s seasons as head coach. He landed the head coaching job at Colorado.

Lanning just finished his first season at Georgia as outside linebackers coach.

Smart downplayed the process of having to replace both of his coordinators.

“It’s really probably overrated,” Smart said. “I think the media has made a lot bigger deal of it than it actually is. At the end of the day when you sit in the seat that I sit in, we’re responsible for both sides of the ball and special teams. So if you sit in those meetings, obviously it’s important to have good leadership but it’s done by a group of men who do it together.

In the end, it’s Smart’s world and his assistants are just living in it.

Move over, little dog.

With the news that the Las Vegas Bowl will be settling into new digs once the Raiders’ stadium is finished next year, it seems it’ll be too nice a setting for a mid-major.

According to Stadium’s Brett McMurphy, the bowl will move from UNLV’s Sam Boyd Stadium to the Raiders’ new palace upon its opening in 2020, and with an upgrade in venue will come in an upgrade in matchup. Out goes the Mountain West, in comes the SEC or the Big Ten.

College football’s two richest conferences have teamed up in recent years to pool their tie-ins, and now this will get them to one of the premier non-New Year’s Six destinations, at the expense of a premier Group of 5 destination. (For the record, the WAC/MW is a combined 10-7 in the Las Vegas Bowl against the Pac-10/12 since the tie-in began in 2001, including a 31-20 Fresno State win over Arizona State in 2018.)

And, sure, it’ll be a win-win for the Las Vegas Bowl itself. Over the course of the 6-year contract, the Big Ten and the SEC will each come to Vegas three times. Television and fans will love it. The first SEC vs. Pac-12 game will be the first non-playoff bowl game between the two leagues since the 1989 Freedom Bowl.

Thanks for keeping the seat warm, fellas.

One or two?

Pete Fiutak takes a stab at predicting where Vegas winds up with its projected regular season win totals for the 2019 season and comes with 10.5 for Georgia.  That’s on the same level as Clemson and Oklahoma and just a step behind Alabama.

Here’s the schedule again.  How many Georgia losses do you see on it?

They run this Waffle House.

The Stingtalk boys don’t take kindly to a Georgia State tweet involving Waffle House.  As is often the case there, unintended hilarity ensues.

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UPDATE:  It’s Waffle House Wednesday, bitchez!  (h/t DCWeez)

Envy and jealousy: epitaph for a fart-sniffer

I wouldn’t change a single punctuation mark of Brian Cook’s fare-thee-well to Jim Delany.

(Although I can’t believe he left out a reference to that $20 million bonus.)