I’m starting to think Brandon Marcello is straight up trolling us now.
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UPDATE: You’ve got to admit this is a pretty snappy graphic, though.
Daily Archives: June 5, 2020
“Is the time now for Dan Mullen to finally unseat Kirby Smart?”
Filed under Gators, Gators..., Georgia Football, Media Punditry/Foibles
You can’t keep a good magazine down.
Death, taxes and…
Though it will be sad not to find it on newsstands this year. Damn you, COVID-19!
Filed under Phil Steele Makes My Eyes Water
Your Daily Gator feels vindication.
Brandon Marcello says the Portal Master™ is the third-most likely coach in America to win his first national title. Kirby Smart is fifth.
Mullen once predicted nine to 10 wins in a casual conversation before the 2010 season at Mississippi State. The Bulldogs won nine with Relf, a tight end playing quarterback, and blew out Michigan in a bowl game. Ten years later, Mullen made a prediction this week for his Florida team in 2020.
“I expect us to go undefeated this year,” Mullen said Wednesday on the Pat McAfee Show. “I’m not guaranteeing it, because I’ll be honest with you, I have two national championship rings here at Florida and we didn’t go undefeated in either of those two seasons. We still won a national championship.”
I guess that settles it, then.
Filed under Gators, Gators...
New man on the job
FootballScoop’s been running a series on the twenty most important assistant coaching hires for the 2020 season. Number ten is somebody we’re familiar with.
Who: Scott Cochran, Georgia
Title: Special teams coordinator
Previous stop: Alabama director of strength and conditioning (2008-19)
Why he’s important: Well, here we go. This is really happening.
The most popular strength coach in the game — arguably, the most popular in college football history, and the archetype of what a Hollywood screen writer would imagine in their head — has pulled off a mid-stream career change. After 20 years prepare their bodies to perform once toe meets leather, Cochran is now responsible for that toe.
He’s ranked one spot ahead of his replacements at Alabama, for what that’s worth.
I’m curious to see how high on the list Todd Monken’s name appears.
Filed under Georgia Football
The true meaning of amateurism
Shot.
Chaser.
That sure is an awful lot of concern to have for a bunch of kids who are just students playing the game for the sheer love of it. The best things in life are free, but if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it’s about the money.
Be true to your school, indeed.
Here’s the real tell, though.
The vast majority of college athletic directors who responded to a poll do not believe the NCAA is capable of policing a potential future market for college athletes making money from endorsement deals.
There is a growing consensus among college sports stakeholders that an independent oversight board will need to be created to enforce new rules if the NCAA adopts a proposal to allow college athletes to make money from their names, images and likenesses. Those proposed rule changes, which were supported by the NCAA’s board of governors in late April, would allow college athletes to make money while in school as long as the moneymaking ventures fit within a set of yet-to-be-determined “guardrails.”
The NCAA rule-makers have not yet figured out what those guardrails would be, or who would enforce that no athlete or school steps outside of them. NCAA leaders such as president Mark Emmert indicated earlier this year that initial plans were leaning toward using the organization’s current enforcement staff and campus-level compliance officers to fill that role. Roughly 85% of respondents to a recent poll conducted by Lead1 — a professional association of athletic directors — said they are “not confident at all” in the NCAA’s ability to enforce its proposed rules, according to Lead1 president Tom McMillen. [Emphasis added.]
These guys are so worried about the money that they don’t want the outfit their own schools created to enforce an amateur regime for college athletics regulating this. That’s what amateurism is all about. You want to know how desperate they are about protecting the hen house? This desperate:
Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, who is working on a federal bill to address the future of college athlete compensation rights, said he is favor of using a third party to oversee the process.
“A lot of these unanswered questions could be answered by an independent oversight body that reports to Congress,” Gonzalez said Thursday during a webinar organized by the Knight Commission, a group that works to reform college sports with education as its priority.
An oversight body that reports to Congress sounds awesome, doesn’t it?
Gonzalez’ bill wouldn’t give schools the antitrust exemption they crave (“legislatively impossible,” per Gonzalez), but his bill will include safe harbor provisions intended to protect the NCAA from legal challenges that threaten rules that prohibit schools from paying athletes directly.
The best part of the story:
Both Ackerman and Gonzalez acknowledged that the major change to NCAA policy will be bumpy. Ackerman said she is hoping for at least an “oiled machine” as opposed to the potential for a well-oiled one. Gonzalez said the odds of getting everything right on the first attempt are “basically zero.”
Given the parties involved, I wouldn’t expect anything less.
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UPDATE: There are some revealing quotes in this piece from Nicole Auerbach and Andy Staples ($$).
“I think there are some things in their blueprint that I would agree if I was the one writing this, but overall, I’m quite frustrated with them,” Walker said. “Here is such a huge tax-exempt, non-profit that — bless their hearts — just can’t seem to get it together. And now they’re almost looking at the federal government as a cop-out.”
“The pro leagues, at least at various times, have had strong leadership of their teams — either a commissioner or a group of owners — who can see their way looking at the long-term good of the sport and coming up with compromises and settlements that make progress for everyone,” Kessler told The Athletic. “We couldn’t do that here in part because there really was no cohesive boss on their side to come up with a collective position. The only default position they have is to defend their system. They go to trial more than anyone because they’re not really capable of exercising that leadership.”
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UPDATE #2: The Alston plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote a letter to Congress. (h/t)
Filed under It's Just Bidness, Political Wankery, The NCAA
Athlon’s 2020 All-SEC teams
This really isn’t much of a surprise.
But this?
Yeah, that is. (Trask is second, in case you’re wondering, with Nix and Mond following.)
What do you think of Athlon’s four teams?
Filed under SEC Football
Wallet news
A $149.4 million budget was approved, is there a Plan B if games are canceled? Will ticket money and donations be refunded ?
Greg McGarity: (On the alternative budget issues)it’s all dependent on the definition of mass gatherings, if it’s 50 percent occupancy (at the stadium), or 25 percent, or everybody can come.We just don’t know. We’ll know more at the end of this month, and we’ll know a lot more by August 1st. At some point in time, we know we have to be very clear in communicating what our plan will be.
“But that’s not important today. That will come into play in the next couple of months. We don’t really need to go in that direction right now because our first home game is not until September.
“(On the ticket refund question), Yeah, I think it’ll be consistent with baseball (refunds) as far as that, though we were into the (baseball) season. We would honor those requests in the event we had to go in that direction. That’s included in our projections and everything, the what-ifs and what might happen, so we can at least have an idea what to look for when and if that happens.”
He’s right that there’s no reason to make a final call this far in advance. And I expected that football ticket cancellations would be treated the same way B-M handled baseball. But notice that nothing was said about Hartman Fund contributions in the event there isn’t a way to allow for full capacity at Sanford Stadium this season.
It’s kind of a big deal, too.
Georgia reported Thursday it already has sold more than 56,000 season tickets, a school record after expanding the number available after last season.
No wonder Morehead said, “Personally, I’m hoping that we don’t have to put any restrictions on at Sanford Stadium.”
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UPDATE: I haven’t been able to find a direct quote about a refund for donations if seats are doles out on a piecemeal basis, but, to be fair, I’ll post what I could find on it from Seth Emerson ($$):
McGarity, asked if fans would be refunded the full ticket cost and their donation if not allowed to attend this year, appeared to say they would.
“Yeah, I think it’ll be consistent with (college) baseball as far as that, though we were into the season,” McGarity said. “We would honor those requests in the event we had to go in that direction. That’s included in our projections and everything, the what-ifs and what might happen, so we can at least have an idea what to look for when and if that happens.”
Filed under Georgia Football
Go sit in the corner
I hate to waste my time and everyone else’s on housekeeping issues, but after yesterday’s wankfest in the comment thread about Jake Fromm’s faux pas, I feel like I’ve got no choice. The constant back and forth with the personal insults that drives some of you has gotten extremely tiresome.
So, going forward, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m not going to ban anyone for them, but if you can’t debate somebody without getting personal, your comments — all your comments — will get shunted into a holding place for me to review. The ones that aren’t insulting will be posted; the rest will be trashed. This won’t be a high priority for me, so don’t expect me to drop what I’m doing so that the world won’t miss your keen insight about Georgia’s offensive line for a moment longer than necessary.
Once it looks like you’ve regained control of your better judgment, I’ll let you back into the regular flow. Look at it as a sort of virtual timeout.
That’s it. That’s the warning.
Filed under GTP Stuff
Get The Picture 
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