Same old, same old SEC East

What’s better, the possibility of upside or the carry over of elite?

“The first thing I want to know is how many elite units are there over here? In this case the here is the SEC East,” Pate said. “There’s one. In this entire division right now, there’s one I know I can count on. I think Florida’s offense is going to be really good. Do I know they’re going to be elite? I don’t know that. I’ve heard some people suggest they could make this, now until the end of someone’s going to suggest, someone’s going to do this, this LSU-type leap. This year-two, got the same quarterback in the same system, got things figured out now, this Joe Burrow, LSU-type leap. I think that’s very unreasonable. It’s unreasonable to expect from any team in any given year. Guess it’s not impossible, but unreasonable. So I cannot count on Florida’s offense to be elite. They may be. Maybe that’s their ceiling. But Georgia’s defense will be and that’s the only one I see over there right now.”

I’m going with the latter, if only because Georgia beat Florida last season with an offense that’s likely to be worse than it will be this season.

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Another early top-25

PFF’s preseason power poll is based on a combination of “recruiting rankings, returning players and market information” on top of their proprietary metric.

Georgia sits fifth, one spot ahead of Florida and behind number three Alabama and number four LSU.

I do find it interesting that two fairly highly ranked SEC teams have some shoring up to do at an important position.

10. AUBURN (+3300)

Bo Nix was only the 70th-highest-graded quarterback in college football a season ago, failing to complete 57 percent of his passes or earn more than seven yards per pass attempt.

14. TEXAS A&M (+2500)

Kellen Mond, while relatively highly regarded, struggled a bit last season, earning our 48th-highest passing grade and failing to eclipse seven yards per pass attempt in 2019.

Some upper-tier SEC team is going to have a quarterback take the next step and that’ll likely be the team that makes the big jump this season.  The question is, which quarterback and which team?

“We’re putting teams on airplanes instead of busing them somewhere…”

Once things return to a semblance of normalcy, I have the feeling we’ll hear a lot of talk about unsustainable business models, but on the P5 level, at least, I suspect it’ll be more talk than action.  The money will start rolling in again and that’ll be that.

The mid-majors may be a different story, though.  The UL athletic director Bryan Maggard suggests some sort of broad, regional cooperative among second-tier conferences may be appropriate.

“Some type of alliance or cooperative scheduling agreement could work,” Maggard said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me that instead of having initially two conferences merging, you may have five to seven conferences really start talking and doing more regional non-conference scheduling.

“It might not be a governed or structured process, but I think this has opened everybody’s eyes that the current business model for college athletics isn’t the best.”

There are limits, though.

“I think everybody will dip their toe in the water for this upcoming sports season,” Maggard said. “Obviously, the sports of football and basketball are already set, but certainly for your diamond sports and your Olympic sports it’s very possible that you’ll start seeing some of that interaction among conference that are regionally close to each other to have their teams scheduling more. And hopefully, that’ll serve as a catalyst for a much larger movement down the road.”

They’ll travel for a paycheck, which makes sense.  Ironically, this kind of proposal enhances regional interest, which is the thing that P5 football is slowly morphing away from.  There’s a lesson to be learned there, except ESPN is too much of a distraction.

A Memorial Day evergreen thought

I wrote this five years ago and the sentiment still stands.

Today, more than any other day, it’s worth reminding ourselves not to rely on the nobility of the sacrifices made by those serving in the armed forces to excuse the lack of wisdom of our elected officials who often put them in harm’s way for questionable purposes.  And when it comes to downplaying the honor of our troops because of questionable politics, vice versa.

To the former, I say thanks, sincerely.