Ho, ho, ho, and all that

We’ve got a tradition here at the blog on Christmas day, and this year, Robert Earl Keen is up in the rotation.

Merry Christmas, y’all.  From the GTP family to yours.

A takeaways take away

Georgia finished next to last in the conference in defensive takeaways.  If I’m reading this Dan Lanning quote correctly, part of that was by choice.

“We’ve got to get more takeaways,” Lanning said. “You try to emphasize it, and we do know there are certain defenses you can play that are going to be more predicated to create takeaways and maybe have more eyes for the ball, and we didn’t necessarily play as many of those this season as we could have.

Question there is, if you believe you need more, why would you deliberately choose to scheme in a way that didn’t allow for that?

TFW academics are academic

So much for integrating into campus life.

Burrow, who will be a top pick in the NFL draft in the spring, didn’t go to LSU for the college experience. He already had that at Ohio State, where he earned his undergraduate degree in three years. With Dwayne Haskins Jr. likely to start at quarterback in the 2018 season, Burrow opted to take his two remaining years of eligibility elsewhere.

Burrow, who was awarded a master’s degree in liberal arts on Friday, acknowledged his laser focus on football in Baton Rouge kept him sequestered. That’s why he decided to spend a few minutes celebrating with fans post game at Tiger Stadium last month.

“I don’t go to class. I take online classes so I don’t get to see any of those people,” he said. “And I kind of just wanted to see them for the first time and just thank them.”

Justin Fields isn’t even doing that much at Ohio State.

Justin Fields rarely has to step inside an Ohio State classroom building because he also does most of his school work online to accommodate his grueling football schedule.

Fields, a sophomore and the Buckeyes’ Heisman Trophy finalist quarterback, said online classes allow him to split his time between studying at home or relaxing with Netflix and the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, where besides football facilities there is a new lavish lounge for players that offers made-to-order meals, massage chairs, video games on big screens and a cryogenic chamber.

“Usually the assignments are all due in the same day, so that makes it easier for me,” said Fields, who transferred from Georgia last January.

I don’t really blame the kids.  They didn’t make the world they operate in; the people running college athletics — you know, the ones who piously proclaim it’s all about the academic experience — did.

Online classes are a fact of modern college life. For football players with immense demands on their time nearly year round, working online helps them fit school in when it’s convenient — especially during travel for road games — and to avoid having to mix it up with a bunch of other students clamoring for a selfie for their Instagram. The arrangement also allows them, if they choose, to spend most of their waking hours around teammates and others associated with the football program.

… Of the 46 Power Five conference schools that responded to an AP survey, 27 have no limits on how many online courses athletes may take. A dozen others have few online course offerings or limit how many athletes may take. Just six have no online offerings or prohibit athletes from taking them, including private schools Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Southern California, Texas Christian and Notre Dame. Michigan is the only public school among the Power Five conferences that doesn’t offer online learning.

It’s not worth the effort to be outraged, in other words.  These kids have a job to do and the main purpose of academics is to keep them eligible by any means necessary.

Meet the signees

Here are some brief bios of Georgia’s 2020 class.  Whom are you most excited/pleased about joining the program?

Cost of doing business

What a waste.

A federal magistrate judge on Monday awarded lawyers representing the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the NCAA’s athlete-compensation limits $33.2 million in attorney’s fees and costs.

The case is on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but if the award stands, it means the NCAA will have had to pay a total of more than $75 million to plaintiffs’ lawyers in connection with two antitrust cases that have been a major part of the college sports landscape over the past 10 years.

The NCAA and various conference co-defendants have combined to spend millions more defending the cases, although some of those costs have been offset by insurance.

Forget that this money could have been spent on player compensation.  How about spending it to increase scholarships in programs like baseball?  Assholes.

You got your chicken, and you got your egg.

From Seth’s Mailbag ($$):

But here’s what Smart did not say at either press conference: “Our offensive scheme is great and I’m not changing it.” He did essentially say the play-calling was good against LSU and that execution was the problem, and you know what, he was right. But as has also been noted the execution may have been off because that was one of the rare games this year where Georgia tried to open things up.

Was Georgia’s execution off because of lack of practice, or was there a lack of practice because Georgia couldn’t execute a more open offense?

“There are a number of factors you can look at.”

It was the best of times ($$)…

But college football’s 2019 regular season proved a refreshing departure for the networks that paid hundreds of millions of dollars to show it. TV audiences were up — in many cases, way up.

“The SEC on CBS” saw a remarkable 24-percent year-over-year increase, resulting in the network’s most-watched season (average 7.1 million viewers) since 1990. FOX enjoyed its most-watched season (3.7 million), with a 12-percent bump from 2018. ESPN’s networks, which include ABC, enjoyed a four-percent increase for their 247 games (3.9 million viewers for ABC, 1.8 million for the cable networks).

… it was not so much the best of times.

In fact, average SEC home football attendance this season was the lowest it has been in a long time.

The league’s 14 teams combined to play 102 home games in 2019 — a number that includes three neutral-site games between two SEC teams (Florida-Georgia in Jacksonville, Arkansas-Texas A&M in Arlington, Texas, and the SEC Championship Game in Atlanta). Those games brought in a total of 7,418,914 fans. That’s 82,761 fewer fans than 2018 (7,501,675) despite there being two fewer games on the schedule that season (100).

The SEC averaged 72,735 fans in those 102 games in 2019. That’s a decrease of 2,282 from last season, and the conference’s lowest total since 2001, when it averaged 72,130.

The team’s high-water mark during that stretch, 78,274, came during the 2015 campaign. It hasn’t been a constant decline since then — the number dropped to 77,507 in 2016 and 73,571 in 2017, then went back up to 75,017 in 2018 before falling this season.

That looks like a mother of a canary in the coal mine, but Greg Sankey is quick to brush it off.

“Issues related to attendance are not unique to college sports,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said. “There are challenges that are common across sports, college and professional, such as viewing options through enhanced at-home and mobile technology and a new generation of fans with a changing set of attendance habits.”

And why not, with that sweet new TV deal just around the corner?  Well, maybe because of this:

Beck also said that, on the year-end surveys Auburn sends out to season-ticket holders, one of the most important things to fans is kickoff time. The seven teams with increased attendance this season combined to play 13 home games that kicked off at noon ET/11 a.m. CT. The seven teams with decreased attendance combined to play 14.

The SEC’s television broadcast partners decide kickoff times.

I think you misspelled “dictate” there, podnah.  But as long as the broadcast partner’s checks keep rolling in, nobody cashing them will care.  Even though they might pretend differently…

“I think they’re going to try to look the other way as much as they can.”

This is one of the funnier things you’ll read, a deep dive into the supposed inconsistencies in the NCAA’s enforcement of its — and I shit you not at this turn of phrase — “strict moral standards for advertisers and sponsors at college football bowl games”.

I mean, you know hilarity is about to ensue when you see a quote like this:

The NCAA’s Division I Football Oversight Committee has input on the handbook and is led by chairman Shane Lyons, the athletic director at West Virginia.

“The language (in the handbook), now that you’re throwing it out there, probably could be cleaned up a lot more,” Lyons told USA TODAY Sports.

Or this:

He cautioned against reading NCAA regulations “like a New York lawyer” would.

“You’re looking at it from 30,000 feet, and sometimes the NCAA rulebook is written from 10 feet,” he said.

The thing is, if you simply look at it through the lens of doing the least, to avoid upsetting financial sources, it’s plenty consistent.  That’s the way the NCAA rule book is written, sport.

The continuing adventures of always be ‘crootin’

Ultimately, only one of these narratives can prove true.

A source close to South Carolina told ESPN the coaching staff is still feeling confident in keeping Burch committed until February, and that there is a good possibility Burch just wanted to sign his paperwork with the rest of his teammates in February.

According to a different source, Alabama, Georgia and LSU have been in contact with Burch, still trying to recruit him. Had Burch signed his national letter of intent, it would have prevented opposing coaches from communicating with him.

Who you betting on here?

“It is our policy to not comment on pending litigation.”

Evidently, stiffing your former employer on a contract provision is something else you can do at Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech athletic director Todd Stansbury has been sued for breach of contract by Oregon State, his former employer, according to court documents obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The story was first reported by The Oregonian earlier Saturday.

Oregon State, from where Stansbury was hired in September 2016, alleged in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday, that Stansbury stopped making payments on money owed the school as part of his buyout for leaving before his contract was completed.

Stansbury left his position as Oregon State AD a little more than a year into the job. He signed a five-year contract in 2015.

Stansbury owed about $2.1 million when he left for Tech and had been making payments through July before stopping, according to court documents.

Maybe he forgot.

Given that Stansbury had made considerable progress in repaying the debt, reducing the principal owed from the original $2.1 million to $1.4 million as of Oct. 31 of this year, along with interest accruing at the contracted 9 percent, the dispute may concern how much is still owed or the rate of its repayment.

Or not.

The best thing here is that he’s playing both ends against the middle.

The buyout was a central element of the contract that Tech and Stansbury crafted together. Stansbury had strong interest in taking the job, as did Tech in hiring him, but the buyout was a major obstacle for him to accept.

To help him handle the obligation, then-president G.P. “Bud” Peterson agreed on a contract that included a $1.1 million loan from the athletic association to Stansbury to help cover the buyout. The loan would be forgiven if he were to stay through his five-year deal. (He would owe the entire amount immediately, plus interest, if he were to leave early, a term that Stansbury accepted as an indication of his commitment to Tech.)

His salary also was generous, at least in part to further assist with the buyout. Stansbury’s starting salary was $900,000, an 80 percent raise from his Oregon State salary and $200,000 more than predecessor Mike Bobinski was making at the time he took the AD job at Purdue.

You know, we give SEC ADs crap all the time for the way Jimmy Sexton runs all over them, but the way Georgia Tech handles contract negotiations with its athletic hires pretty much qualifies as Olympic level buffoonery all on its own.  They can do that!