Ray Goff has a long memory ($$).
When Will Muschamp was hired to replace Steve Spurrier, it brought up two very different emotions for Ray Goff. He was happy his former player was getting another shot to be a head coach in the SEC, but the thought of Spurrier still doesn’t sit well with Goff.
“I was happy for him. He’s a good guy, good person. I’m talking about Will,” Goff said. “I’m not going to say much about Spurrier.”
If you can’t say anything good about someone…
Filed under Georgia Football, The Evil Genius
ESPN has its initial strength of schedule rankings posted here. The SEC looks like this:
The thing to keep in mind that if they’re forced to shrink the season because of the coronavirus, that spread is going to compress. In other words, if I were a Florida fan, I’d be really hoping for a 12-game season.
Filed under SEC Football, Stats Geek!
Those of you who believe the times have justified Greg McGarity’s obsession with the reserve fund, a question: if the financial situation continues to deteriorate, which step would you prefer to see the athletic department take initially, cut salaries or dip into the fund?
It’s a trick question. The correct answer, if you’re McGarity, is to see what you can get from the fans and donors first.
Filed under Georgia Football, It's Just Bidness
The time referenced there is the five-year period between the 2011 and 2015 classes. The metric used is this:
It’s a measure that takes into account the total number of Top247 prospects a program signed along with where/if those players were drafted (3 points for 1st rounders, 2 points for 2nd-3rd, 1 for 4th-7th), dividing the total number of prospects by the point total to create the rating. This removes any advantage created by a program’s ability to recruit an overwhelming number of Top247 players. It also rewards programs that produce more first- and second-day picks, removing a “quantity over quality” argument. We also limited this list to teams that recruited at least 10 Top247 players from 2011 to 2015.
To more accurately represent how a program develops players, 247Sports removed four categories of prospects from the data:
- Players who were dismissed.
- Players who didn’t qualify.
- Players who medically retired.
- Players who transferred after two or fewer seasons on campus. If a player stayed three years and transferred, they count against a team’s ‘not drafted’ tab. If a player transferred and was drafted elsewhere, they count for the team to which they transferred.
So, we’re looking at the end of the Richt era. As you can see, Georgia finished twelfth on the list, which seems in character for the time — not bad, but not great. Four SEC teams are ranked higher.
Georgia checks in with a rating of .78. None of these players were recruited by Kirby Smart, and I’d expect to see an uptick in Georgia’s score over the next few years. However, it is interesting that both Florida (39) and Miami (33) have both produced more total draft picks than the Bulldogs (31) since the start of the CFB Playoff era.
Maybe it’s a case of Georgia closing the gap with Florida.
Filed under Georgia Football
This is what comes of torching your credibility for more than a decade.
Some had waited months, others years and even a few decades. The college sports world excitedly readied itself for this day as it approached, an indelible moment in NCAA athletics history, when the governing body of college sports would jettison 100 years of amateurism policies that so many believe are un-American. Like the kitchen sink, poof, it’d be gone, replaced by modernized rules governing athlete compensation, specific pathways for college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness.
Eternally berated, the NCAA would claim a rare victory, a crowning achievement—maybe the crowning achievement—by ushering in a new era in college sports.
And then, on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. ET, it released a report totaling 14,000 words, 31 pages, 18 subsections, seven sections and, as one Congresswoman put it, zero concrete ideas. “My initial reaction is it’s a PR document,” says Donna Shalala, the former president at NCAA member schools Wisconsin and Miami who now serves in the U.S. House of Representative as a Democrat from Florida.
Shalala slammed the NCAA for a vague, nonsensical piece, released only to entice the press and appease the public, she said in an interview Wednesday afternoon from her Miami home. In fact, if she had received such a report while still a university president, she imagines herself wondering aloud, “Why are we paying all these people at the NCAA if they can’t give us more details than this?’”
Many key figures on the nation’s political stage held similar feelings about the NCAA’s name, image and likeness (NIL) report. The Congressional members most at the center of the NIL debate on Capitol Hill—the same ones NCAA leaders are pleading for help on this matter—spent much of Wednesday rebuking the governing body of college sports for a proposal, they say, that revealed too few details, included too many NCAA-friendly restrictions and, maybe most ghastly of all, contained a not-so-subtle request for a Congressional antitrust exemption.
Antitrust? Some lawmakers were befuddled at the notion. The gall. “I want to see them learn how to make a decision first. Wouldn’t that be nice? They don’t have to committee everything to death,” says Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and a member of a key senate committee involved in the NIL topic in D.C. “We were giving the NCAA a chance to get their act together, but I think their leadership is weak. They are tentative and have shown they can’t come through with a requisite list of standards. They need to realize that the shot clock has run out on them.”
One thing a politician is good at is sensing when there’s somebody out there less popular than said politician. The NCAA has managed to pull off that neat trick. It’s no mean feat to be disliked more than the United States Congress, so, congrats for that, Mark Emmert. You’ve earned it with all the delays, the morphed definitions of amateurism, the empty threats (hello, Jim Delany) and all the other bullshit that have marked what passes for NCAA policy.
Even better, you and yours managed to put the perfect bow on the box yesterday.
Most lawmakers who spoke to Sports Illustrated on Wednesday quickly debunked the possibility of an antitrust exemption—which would protect the NCAA from NIL legal entanglements—painting the topic as a non-starter and a waste of time.
When you’ve got a looming threat — and, make no mistake, Florida’s NIL law scheduled to go into effect in July next year surely qualifies — pitching wastes of time to the body you hope will stem the tide is pretty much the opposite of what you should be doing. And if Emmert thinks things are urgent now, if nothing happens in Washington relatively soon, it’s not hard to think how much more urgent it’ll get next year.
“That’s why we’ve got to act and act fast. That means the NCAA has got to put a little more flesh on the bone than this proposal,” says Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and one of the legislative leaders on this subject. “It’s Florida right now, but as we creep closer to that date, you better believe Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and every other state with teams in the SEC or ACC are going to start passing laws as well.”
‘Ya think? Smart and McGarity will have a bill in the Georgia legislature faster than they had with the open records one that passed in record time. There won’t be a state with an SEC school that’ll miss that feeding frenzy. And at that point, the horse will be way out of the barn for Emmert’s purposes.
You know what? He deserves it.
Filed under Political Wankery, The NCAA
Jesus, if I see another “OMG, college coaches are freakin’ out about the one-time transfer waiver!” piece that throws in poaching as an afterthought ($$), I’m gonna scream.
That, and giving these people credence that they’re motivated out a sense of noble purpose.
“No one is gonna listen to the coaches getting to a whole 85,” said an ACC coach. “They still think we run guys off.” The coach added that he understands there needs to be sensitive to the risk of coaches running off players depending on what potential off-set rules are considered.
The fear of run-offs is something several coaches are mindful of. “The only way to offset it would be the ability to replace medicals and early NFL draft decisions,” said another ACC coach. “Portal for portal replacement would create more runoffs.”
Gee, I wonder how that became a misunderstanding.
If you don’t want this to erupt into a serious problem, the place to start is with the coaches, not the kids.
Comments Off on “They have to be worried about a complete free-agent market.”
Filed under Georgia Football, Transfers Are For Coaches.
He’s got a big arm. How much will Monken and Smart use it?
Filed under Georgia Football, Stats Geek!
Shot.
Chaser.
These guys can walk and chew gum at the same time when it’s in their financial interest to do so. End of story.
Filed under College Football, It's Just Bidness, The NCAA
Hey, look what college football’s best friend is contemplating!
If school presidents and conference commissioners aren’t nervous enough about the season already — and they are — this won’t help.
Filed under The NFL Is Your Friend.
Get The Picture 
You must be logged in to post a comment.