Just another day in Gainesville

Florida running back Lamical Perine could be facing a battery charge after a tow truck driver accused him of pulling his arm as he was attempting to tow Perine's mother's car earlier this month.

— Robbie Andreu (@RobbieAndreu) May 16, 2019

A sworn complaint was filed on May 7. In the complaint, the tow truck driver said Perine grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the car.

— Robbie Andreu (@RobbieAndreu) May 16, 2019

Ordinarily, I’d say this comment is par for the course from a defense lawyer…

“That is bullsh–. There’s a certain amount of touching that is not intended to be a criminal matter,” Cervone said. “I could put my arm on your shoulder as I walk past you and technically that’s battery. Some people revel in something that’s not a big deal. It’s a football player and it becomes the end of the world.”

… but since it’s coming from State Attorney Bill Cervone, I’d expect there’s nothing much to sweat here.

I am so ready for Herbie to tweet that Dan Mullen has lost control in Gainesville, though.  Now that Richt’s retired, somebody’s gotta carry that torch.

(h/t)

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There’s a reason he got a seven-year deal.

Hoo, boy.  Bill Connelly’s S&P+ preseason projections have Georgia Tech favored in only one game in 2019, against The Citadel.  And that’s before you get to this:

S&P+ is not programmed to consider drastic scheme changes…

That is… simply Chantastic.

2018 Yards Per Play: SEC

My favorite Matt Melton exercise is back.

So we know what each team achieved, but how did they perform? To answer that, here are the Yards Per Play (YPP), Yards Per Play Allowed (YPA) and Net Yards Per Play (Net) numbers for each SEC team. This includes conference play only, with the championship game not included. The teams are sorted by division by Net YPP with conference rank in parentheses.

No surprise whatsoever at the top.  Or at the bottom, for that matter.  Dig a little deeper for those:

Mississippi State’s season should have been better than it turned out.  Surprisingly, given Moorhead’s background, that was on the offense.  Obviously his personnel was mismatched for what he wanted to do, and maybe that’s something that’ll get fixed via recruiting, but it’s hard to see how the MSU defense, with the losses of its best players to the NFL, is going to maintain its place at the top of the conference in 2019.

The other thing of interest in Matt’s post is that it somewhat punctures a myth about Alabama.  Saban’s teams haven’t just won on defense.  They’ve often been very good on offense.

Defense may win championships, but overall excellence makes that even more likely.

“Once we see you’re in the portal, you can be cut.”

In case you were wondering, there are a lot of coaches who really, really don’t care for the transfer portal.  Like this guy:

Kirby Smart is torn. Georgia’s coach believes players deserve a certain amount of transfer freedom. Excuse him, though, if he’s not exactly celebrating the seven-month anniversary of the transfer portal this week.

“My biggest problem with the portal is that it gives kids an easy way out,” Smart said. “I know the devil’s advocate of players’ rights and they should be able to go wherever they want to go. But I’m telling you, no normal parent would say, ‘At the first sign of trouble, I want my son to run.'”

I really love this “easy way out”, quitter bullshit.  The reason the portal is a reality isn’t because, as Smart intimates, some kids are too soft.  It’s because there have been plenty of Smart’s peers over the years who have been unreasonable in their restrictions on where and how kids have tried to transfer from their programs.

Add to that a heavy dose of hypocrisy…

It’s difficult to have sympathy for coaches when their biggest headache is “roster management.”

But there is also that ethical, psychological, loyalty component to it: Be a man. Finish what you started.

Coaches preach it until they don’t and leave for the next best job overnight. A bit of hypocrisy at work there?

As for loyalty, you won’t find the following phrase written in large type on the portal: A school doesn’t have to renew the scholarship of any player who places his name in the portal.

I got news for you, Dennis.  A school doesn’t have to renew the scholarship of any player who doesn’t have a multi-year commitment, portal or no portal.

Smart, Georgia coach: “[The transfer issue is], ‘Where are you going to go to get developed the best?’ But that’s not the society we live in. We live in the, ‘Me, now, I want mine now. I want to go play right now.'”

Man, losing control really sucks.

*************************************************************************

UPDATE:  One further thought from Dodd’s piece that some might be overlooking…

Clay Helton, USC coach: “I’m hoping kids get educated on it. With it being new this year, I think it went over the top. … I’ve got to figure there will be a lot of people without homes.”

Although unofficial, that 247Sports transfer portal list shows approximately 400 of those 720 FBS players have yet to find a new school.

Herm Edwards, Arizona State coach: “It’s caught a lot of kids by surprise in the fact that a lot of guys don’t have scholarships. There’s a little bit now, ‘Whoa, what just happened?’ I think they assumed their name is in the portal, ‘I’ll get a scholarship somewhere else.’ The unintended consequence has hit them in the face.”

There’s a distinct possibility that some of this might be self-correcting, as it begins to sink in with kids pondering a portal decision that they might not be in as much demand as they think they are.

Of course, I pose that realizing that every year there seem to be more college juniors who think they’re destined for an NFL roster than it turns out.

Good news for Lulu and Junior

It’s one thing to mock Georgia Tech football for its ticket woes (and at least Collins is struggling mightily to inject some life into that program).

It’s another thing when it’s Tennessee.

Tennessee for the first time is offering a season-ticket style pass that will allow fans to attend every home football game, but would not ensure them the same seats for each game.

The pass is dubbed the Vol Pass and sells for $280. It is available now and will cover all eight home games this season. The pass has been offered the past three seasons for men’s and women’s basketball.

Fans with the pass would secure their seats through an online selection process before each home game.

The seat inventory for each game will be available to view Monday morning of each game week until noon ET on Friday. During the seat selection process, fans will have the opportunity to purchase additional single-game tickets, if available, at face value.

No tickets for this pass will be mailed or held at will call. They must be downloaded via cellphone.

Traditional season tickets remain on sale for the football season.

College football programs are combating declining attendance.

The Vols’ announced attendance for last season’s seven home games totaled 650,887 for an average crowd of 92,984. Neyland Stadium’s listed capacity is 102,455.

Announced attendance reflects tickets distributed – not the number of fans who actually attend the game. As for actual attendance, records showed Tennessee totaled 545,343 fans in 2018, which equates to an average actual crowd of 77,906.

No word yet on whether Fulmer is considering a “4 tickets, 4 doughnuts, 4 cokes” promotion.

ACC football, like life, comes at you fast.

Check out the ACC Network’s official broadcast schedule for September 7:

👀👀👀 pic.twitter.com/TBJadfD8TB

— ACC Network (@accnetwork) May 15, 2019

Do they seriously think they’ll play four straight games in three hours?  (Georgia Tech might… last season.)

Kirby’s work here is done.

I could just inject stuff like this directly into my veins:

[Five-star running back Zach] Evans is watching all of his top teams on the field this year. While performance will be key, Evans is looking deeper into the behind the scenes happenings with everything going on in college football.

“How they respond to the coaches,” he said. “You see what’s going on with (Florida transfer) Chris Steele. You never just know until you’re on that team. It could be a front, you’re just playing the recruiting game. It’s a risk because you never know how these coaches are. You never know, that’s why I just use that as an example.”

The only thing better than working up a sweat with negative recruiting is letting your target do all the heavy lifting for you.

TFW possession is nine-tenths of the law

Not a good look here:

Less than 5% of Spartan Foundation money intended for athletic scholarships was distributed to San Jose State athletes from 2013-2016, according to sources and confirmed by documents reviewed by the Spartan Daily.

The documents detail misuse of more than $6.3 million during the tenure of former athletic director Gene Bleymaier. Less than $275,000 from the Spartan Foundation fund was distributed from 2013 to 2016, according to the account details.

The Spartan Foundation was marketed to donors on SJSU athletics’ website as a fund that provides athletic scholarships, and was managed as part of the Tower Foundation since 2014.

Money intended to go to the Spartan Foundation fund was sent to the athletics department office on South Campus, instead of Tower Foundation in Clark Hall, according to university documents reviewed by the Spartan Daily.

Athletics staff opened the envelopes and were supposed to identify which checks should go to the Tower Foundation and which should go into athletics’ current use accounts, according to the university documents. The latter accounts were used for car allowances and stipends for coaches and staff, rather than athletic scholarships, according to a Spartan Foundation account summary.

Hey, shit happens when you don’t address the envelope correctly.  Maybe it’s the fault of the Post Office.

“The Spartan Foundation is the fundraising arm of the San Jose State University Athletics Department,” the website previously stated. “As its primary objective, the Spartan Foundation provides scholarship support for all of San Jose State’s NCAA Division I athletic teams.”

Media relations specialist Robin McElhatton said the web page about the Spartan Foundation was outdated and has been deleted this week.

The Spartan Daily repeatedly reached out to President Mary Papazian, Charlie Faas who is the vice president of administration and finance, and athletics director Marie Tuite, all of whom declined to comment.

They’re probably still struggling to formulate a “doing it for the kids” defense.

I suspect there will be investigators knocking on the door any day now.

Vegas warms to the Dawgs.

For what it’s worth, at 7/1, Georgia now sits with the third-best odds of winning the national title this season.

(h/t)

When he moves his lips

Hey, remember when Jim Delany threatened to take his football and go home?

“… it has been my longstanding belief that The Big Ten’s schools would forgo the revenues in those circumstances and instead take steps to downsize the scope, breadth and activity of their athletic programs,” Delany wrote. “Several alternatives to a ‘pay for play’ model exist, such as the Division III model, which does not offer any athletics-based grants-in-aid, and, among others, a need-based financial model. These alternatives would, in my view, be more consistent with The Big Ten’s philosophy that the educational and lifetime economic benefits associated with a university education are the appropriate quid pro quo for its student athletes.”

Good times.  How’s that whole threat thing going, anyway?

The Big Ten Conference has established a new benchmark in the how-high-is-up world of college sports finance: It recorded nearly $759 million in revenue during its 2018 fiscal year.

The figure, which far exceeds any comparable annual figure for a college sports conference, was revealed in a new federal tax return that the conference provided Wednesday in response to a request from USA TODAY. It is a year-over-year revenue increase of 48 percent, with the conference reaching $512.9 million in fiscal 2017.

The return also showed that commissioner Jim Delany was credited was just over $5.5 million in total compensation for the 2017 calendar year. That, too, is a single-year record for a conference.

I had no idea DIII administrators made that kind of jack.  Well played, Jimbo.

Why anyone has ever taken a single word this asshole says about compensation seriously escapes me.