“We’re getting a big surge here at the end in some key areas.”

When it comes to accountability and the Georgia Way, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

University of Georgia president Jere Morehead presented a rosy picture of how Bulldog teams are faring to the athletic board of directors at its spring meeting Thursday morning.

He congratulated athletic director Greg McGarity for a “tremendous year of success,” on the field and and in fundraising.

Between the lines, that’s certainly the case for women’s tennis, which reached the NCAA finals last weekend, and the baseball team which is in position to host through the NCAA super regional round as it tries to reach the College World Series. Football reached the SEC championship for the second year in a row.

Morehead cited 17 of 21 sports competing in the NCAA postseason, but in another barometer Georgia is lagging as of now.

Georgia is 35th in the most recent NACDA Directors’ Cup, which ranked ninth in the SEC. The Bulldogs were 15th in the standings at this point a year ago in the all-sports measurement.

Ordinarily, I’d say to Jere that tremendous doesn’t mean what he thinks it means, but, screw it, all anybody really cares about is football, so, you go, Greg.

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“If you’re going to pretty much any event nowadays—Disneyland, even—you can buy a beer.”

This may be the best reason ever a school left the Southeastern Conference.

Chris Maitre is a Tulane football lifer. He attended Green Wave football games with his father in the 1970s at the Superdome. Chris was just 5 then, but he can vividly remember his dad clasping an adult beverage in his right hand as the Wave played on the field below. “Alcohol, specifically beer, has been at Tulane events for as long as anybody can recall,” says Maitre, now a senior associate athletic director at Tulane who has worked at the school for 23 years. “I don’t know when we didn’t have it.”

The stadiumwide sale of alcohol at Tulane football games can be traced back to 1967, a year after the Green Wave left the Southeastern Conference to become independent.

Honestly, you’re a school located in New Orleans.  Did you really have a choice?

Anyway, the SEC isn’t welcoming back Tulane any time soon, but it apparently is taking a serious look at in-stadium alcohol sales at next week’s SEC meetings in Destin.

On the agenda for league decision-makers is a decades-old bylaw prohibiting member schools from selling alcohol in general seating areas at athletic venues. Many of the conference’s high-ranking administrators are optimistic that league presidents will not only seriously discuss the alcohol ban but will overturn an archaic policy that exists in no other major conference. The bylaw will be “front and center” during the four-day event at the Hilton Sandestin Beach Resort, says one athletic director; another AD says it’s “the main thing.”

55 schools and the NCAA now allow beer and wine sales at events — or, in Tulane’s case, even more.

… Tulane in New Orleans and Louisiana in Lafayette, both an hour’s drive from LSU’s campus, not only sell beer and wine but serve daiquiris, frozen cocktails made with tequila or rum. Tulane is believed to be one of the first schools to serve alcohol in general seating areas. Bill Goldring and Danny Brasseux, two longtime Green Wave supporters, remember beer sales in Tulane Stadium for TU games the year the New Orleans Saints began sharing the venue in 1967. Goldring, a longtime member of Tulane’s legislative board, is a billionaire businessman from New Orleans whose family has been in the alcohol industry since 1898 and owns Sazerac, the second largest spirits company in the United States. “What’s really a joke, you go up to LSU and you sit in certain areas, and you get all the alcohol you want,” Goldring says. “If you’re tailgating before the game, everybody is drunk and you can smell it from 10 miles away. If it’s a feel-good policy, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

Maybe the common folk can get high on the fumes.

Anyway, plenty of places are selling and making money on booze.  The world hasn’t come to an end, either.  What’s your next move, SEC?

Feeding the beast

There are fifteen, count ’em, fifteen, bowl games scheduled between the CFP semi finals and finals, including five after January 1st.

All of that reflects a general trend of stretching out the bowl season from start to finish.

In recent years, the bowl season has begun on a Saturday before Christmas with several games. This season, bowls begin Friday, Dec. 20 with the Bahamas Bowl at 2 p.m. ET. The Frisco Bowl is later that day. The next day six games, including the Celebration Bowl, which matches teams from historically black colleges in the Southwestern Athletic Conference and Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, will air on either ESPN or ABC.

(Also, don’t forget that’s just ESPN’s schedule you’re looking at.  CBS and Fox have five more broadcasts to add to the mix.)

Don’t get me wrong here.  I’ve got no problem with bowl games; the more, the merrier, as far as I’m concerned.  But for a bunch that’s struggled with the message of making the CFP a special, new tradition for college football fans (how’s that whole “fuck it, let’s play on New Year’s Eve” thing going, anyway?), wholesale abdication of postseason scheduling to Mickey seems like a poor way to go about showcasing your crown jewel.

Hell, who am I kidding here?  They’ll probably use it as another excuse when the time comes to expand the CFP to eight teams.

“Taken together, the first year of the Joe Moorhead era feels like a waste.”

I mentioned the other day that Mississippi State rewarded Joe Moorhead with a pay bump and contract extension for what was a fairly mediocre 8-5 season.  Based on this Matt Melton post, I may have been generous calling it mediocre.

And here are the APR [Adjusted Pythagorian Record] standings with conference rank in offensive touchdowns, touchdowns allowed, and APR in parentheses. This includes conference games only with the championship game excluded.

You read that right — MSU’s APR was second in conference play, behind only Alabama’s.

Finally, SEC teams are sorted by the difference between their actual number of wins and their expected number of wins according to APR.

If you think that looks pretty bad, well, Matt agrees with you.

The Bulldogs undershot their APR by over two and a half games. Going back to 2005, that is one of the largest negative discrepancies between a team’s actual record and their APR (in the BCS/Power Five).

That in itself is a pretty amazing ‘accomplishment’, but when I looked closer at the numbers I was shocked at Mississippi State’s performance in their conference wins and their conference losses.

In their four conference losses, Mississippi State managed a solitary offensive touchdown.

Matt’s pretty kind about that in his conclusion, but if I were a Mississippi State fan, I’d be a little alarmed.  Moorhead was hired for his offensive chops and his team’s relative lack of success in 2018 fell squarely on his offense.  (Yeah, Fitzgerald wasn’t an ideal match for his scheme, but offensive geniuses are supposed to find ways to match scheme to personnel.)  Moreover, MSU lost some real defensive studs to the NFL draft, so it’s questionable that the Bulldogs will be as stout as they were on that side of the ball last year.

He’s got some real coaching to do this season to earn another pay bump.

Friday morning buffet

The chafing dishes have been refilled for your dining pleasure.

• In case you didn’t hear, D’Wan Mathis underwent emergency surgery at Piedmont Hospital in Athens on Thursday to remove a cyst that was on his brain.
• Meet George Pickens.  (You can bet Jake Fromm will this summer.)
• 247Sports ranks the top twenty college football facilities in the country.  Georgia clocks in at number eleven, behind five other SEC programs and number one Clemson.
• While we’re on the subject, Georgia is looking at dropping a cool $80 million on a new football facility, depending on ” … donor support and how it’s financed”.
• Rankity, rank, ranking college football quarterbacks.
• Holy crap — Texas A&M has hired Ole Miss’ Ross Bjork as its new AD.  I wonder if Hugh Freeze has a little more spring in his step this morning.  (Probably not, since Jimbo is safely ensconced there.)
• “College athletes in California would be able to sign with agents and profit from endorsement deals under a bill that cleared the state Senate…”
• On a related note, Mark Emmert’s net compensation for 2017 was about $2.9 million, a more than $450,000 increase over his pay for the previous year.  Further, the NCAA spent $56.6 million on outside legal fees.  Gosh, I wonder why.