Another season of pick ’ems coming right up. Invites are going out as you read this. If you don’t get one, click here to sign up.
Same rules, same format as always, so you will be picking against the spread. Hope you’ll sign up; the more, the merrier.
Filed under GTP Stuff
Stewart Mandel’s relationship with Georgia? Call it… complicated. In today’s Mailbag ($$), he manages to describe UGA as one of three, maybe four teams with a legitimate chance of winning the national championship this season and goes on in the next breath (“But even I have some slight hesitation jumping fully onboard the UGA bandwagon…”) to concede there’s some validity to the perception that the Dawgs are overrated at number three.
What’s a Montanan to do, I asks ‘ya?
Filed under Georgia Football, Media Punditry/Foibles
The thing about this problem ($$)…
… is that it’s not the problem you think it is.
“What the business model was for years was to get as many people in the stadium as possible,” said Kenny Mossman, senior associate athletic director of external operations at Oklahoma. “I think the philosophy has now shifted to making sure that this seat can deliver the revenue that we need to sustain our department.”
Suck it, alumni.
“Over the past 10 or 12 years the trend in college football facilities, specifically, was quantity,” said Stephanie Pope, vice president, director of interior design at Davis. “We want more people in the stadium, we want the biggest stadium out there. Over the past three to four years, it’s shifting from quantity to quality. That is what the University of Alabama is proposing to do.”
Okay, but whose “quality” are we talking about there?
“Coach Saban doesn’t ask a lot from the students, but he wants his students to be there the whole game and cheer the whole game, and that’s not that much to ask for if you see what he’s done for this community and what he’s done for this university.”
Never mind. We’re screwed.
Filed under College Football, It's Just Bidness
Tommy Tuberville is running to be the great state of Alabama’s United States Senator.
He’s got some baggage, though. He has a hard time with commitment.
Just ask the folks at Ole Miss. Or this kid, “who was in Lubbock for an official visit last weekend, told the recruiting site Wreckem247.com that Tuberville stepped away from a dinner with several recruits and assistant coaches Friday night and never returned” after receiving and accepting an offer to become Cincinnati’s coach. Or Cincinnati, for that matter.
That seems like a target-rich environment for a political competitor. So, if you’re Tubs, and you really don’t want to stick to sports, what’s the winning strategy? Apparently, it’s pandering.
Tuberville returned several times to the theme that a belief in God is essential to fixing what he believes are the nation’s pressing problems. He received applause and an amen or two when he said he believes the Trump presidency was a gift from God.
“I want to help Donald Trump and you get this mess straightened out,” Tuberville said. “And I’m going to do that. But we’ve got to put Jesus and God before everything else. And if we don’t do that we’re going to be brought down to our knees again.”
Maybe that’s why he never won a national title at Auburn.
Filed under GTP Stuff
This is one of those random exercises I go through now and then out of sheer curiosity, so take it for what it’s worth, y’all. Georgia’s last losing season came in 2010, when it finished 6-7 after that embarrassing bowl game loss.
How many losing seasons have the other SEC East teams endured since the last time Georgia finished below .500? Welp, here you go:
That’s a lot of mediocrity this decade. The two things that stand out are South Carolina having the same number of truly crappy seasons as Florida and (I almost hate to admit this) how good a job James Franklin did at Vanderbilt.
Is the reason the East is thought by some to be swinging back against its Western counterpart due to the slight decline in the number of its teams that finished with losing records — only two last season, compared with four in 2015?
Beats me. Any thoughts?
Filed under Georgia Football, SEC Football
Yeah, this has aged well.
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.
This is what cracking under pressure looks like.
Chalk that up partly to Kirby’s prowess on the recruiting trail and partly to the 2013 signing class finally dropping out of the calculations. And here’s hoping that’s the last time I’ll refer to that smoking crater at this blog.
Filed under 'Cock Envy, Georgia Football, Recruiting
I can’t help coming back to LSU’s athletic director’s comments about ending the money flow from his department to the school, not so much because of the money itself as instead because of the open way he discussed what he sees as the real world relationship between the two.
Yesterday’s post contained a comment in which he referred to the athletic department as “an auxiliary” to the university. If the subtext isn’t clear enough, try this quote:
“This needs to be run as an enterprise,” Woodward said. “Recently you’ve seen how much we’ve invested in our student-athletes — unlimited meals, cost of attendance, you name it. It’s covered in a positive fashion from our TV contracts and generous donors. But (the growth of overall cost is) not ending.” [Emphasis added.]
This isn’t someone who sees the role of an athletics department as being subservient to a school’s larger academic mission purpose. Those student-athletes, “our student-athletes”, are part of keeping a functioning operation profitable. They’re with the school, but not of it.
I’d say this is radical stuff, but, let’s face it, all Woodward is really doing is saying the quiet parts out loud. You’re kidding yourself if you believe otherwise. He should make for a fun witness in the next antitrust lawsuit.
Filed under College Football, It's Just Bidness
We’ve all directed our fair share of mockery Geoff Collins’ way, so it’s only right to point out that with yesterday’s commitment of a four-star wide receiver from Florida, Georgia Tech currently stands a respectable 23rd in the 247Sports Composite.
No, that’s not a recipe for a national championship run, and, yes, there’s still a long way to go until December, but you’ve got to start somewhere and I’d say finishing better than any year since 2007 would qualify for that.
Funny how, despite all the protestations to the contrary from the Stingtalk folks, academics aren’t an insurmountable roadblock to bringing in a functional signing class at the Flats. Maybe all it takes is a coach who doesn’t act like he’s allergic to recruiting.
Filed under Georgia Tech Football, Recruiting
Saban.
Yeah, that’s ridiculous, but equally noteworthy for me is how few schools out there are riding a streak longer than one season.
Filed under College Football
According to assaulter and all-around schmuck Zach Smith, that is.
Co-host: “I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about Dan Mullen at Florida. He has a chance to get to that level. Why hasn’t Florida gotten back to (elite) level?”
Smith: “Yeah, we talked about that at length, and the biggest thing is Dan Mullen is thrust into this conversation only because he is the coach at Florida. He would not be in this conversation based off his successes on the field — based on his resume, but he gets thrust into this group because he got the job at Florida. Why did he get the job at Florida? Because Florida wasn’t an attractive job. It wasn’t. The stadium’s not selling out, where they have really fallen off. The recruiting has been down to some extent, especially from the Urban Meyer era. So, why did he get the job? He got the job because Scott Frost didn’t want the job. Think about that. This is a job that was top five in the country in 2005 when Urban turned down Notre Dame to go to Florida. … He didn’t have the resume to get the Florida job that Urban Meyer got in 2005. Dan Mullen had the resume to get the Florida job in 2018.
“I don’t think he (Mullen) has the swagger to be a great head coach or to be a great recruiting head coach, but he’s a really good football coach.”
He must’ve seen that hat.
Filed under Gators, Gators...
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