Talkin’ trash

Mean girls, anonymous SEC coaches edition:

Several anonymous opposing coaches assessed Georgia’s team and the likelihood the Bulldogs would be one of the elites within Lindy’s Sports’ annual SEC preseason summer preview.

“They have a new offensive coordinator (Todd Monken) and that’s always going to be interesting, no matter whether it’s coupled with a new quarterback (Jamie Newman) or coupled with missing spring practice,” one coach said. “There will be some growing pains, but they’ve got so many players on that roster. They’ve got good receivers — young and inexperienced, but they’re good receivers.

“Zamir White is a good player, fast and tough and can make hard yards in the SEC. They’re not close to what they were on the offensive line. They lost too many good players.”

Just curious what you think about the observation regarding the offensive line.  How dire is “not close to what they were”?  I mean, are we talking Florida 2019 o-line not close, or something in between that and Georgia 2019?

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TFW “it just means more” catches up to your political ambitions

This is flat out nasty.

When Clifton Robinson, the short but quick receiver from Naples, Florida, returned to the Auburn University football team in August 1999 after pleading guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor to avoid going to trial after being charged with the second-degree rape of a 15-year-old girl, first-year head coach Tommy Tuberville pledged to figure out the right punishment for him.

“Clifton is back on the team,” Tuberville said. “He and I will sit down today, and I’ll tell him that we do things right around here, so he can expect there will be some punishment. What it is, I don’t know yet.”

That punishment ended up being a mere one-game suspension from the team’s Sept. 4 season opener against Appalachian State. Auburn won 22-15.

Tuberville, now running for the Republican Senate nomination in Alabama with the endorsement of President Trump, is locked in a competitive primary against former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The winner will face Democratic incumbent Doug Jones. The Tuberville campaign declined to comment on this story.

Bold strategy, Cotton.  Let’s see if it pays off…

Tuberville’s past will indelibly be linked to the case of Roy Moore, who, as a Senate candidate for the special election in 2017, faced serious, credible allegations of sexual impropriety and predatory behavior with teenage girls as young as 14 while he was in his early 30s.

If Tuberville wants to build trust with the people of Alabama and govern from a position of moral authority on what’s right and wrong, he needs to be transparent and explain his past actions.

Hoo, boy.  It’s a good thing Tubs never pissed off anyone during his college coaching career.

“The lawyers are going to be really busy.”

It takes a pandemic to raze a partnership.

Learfield IMG College, the multimedia conglomerate that spent big over the last decade to buy up radio, marketing and sponsorship rights for top athletics programs, quietly approached several schools this spring amid the COVID-19 pandemic asking for 60-day delays to make scheduled payments before the last fiscal year ended on June 30 and to restructure deals in ways that would reduce or eliminate schools’ guaranteed rights fees, according to officials at nine schools that have partnerships with the company.

Learfield IMG, according to some of those officials who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, has even raised the prospect of drastic measures like activating force majeure clauses to get out of contracts if schools aren’t willing to renegotiate.

Some schools have agreed to replace their guaranteed distributions from Learfield IMG with a revenue-share arrangement, citing the possibility they would not be able to collect any sponsorship money at all in the near-term if football isn’t played this fall.

“We want to be good partners and we know there’s a lot of uncertainty now,” TCU athletics director Jeremiah Donati said.

But administrators at other schools, whose budgets have already been upended by the cancellation of the NCAA basketball tournament and expected loss of football revenue this year in even a best-case scenario, have been angered by the company’s approach. They see Learfield IMG as using the pandemic to either get out of some of their less-profitable deals or secure more favorable terms on contracts that, in many cases, extend out for years.

Said one Group of Five administrator: “People are madder about this than anything I’ve seen in my years as an AD.”

When they say it’s about the money… believe ’em.

Happy Fourth!

If this was good enough for last year, it’s good enough for now.

I can’t say it any better than I did last year.

Once again, this blog would like to join the Godfather of Soul in wishing all y’all a badass Fourth.

Enjoy the day.

I’ve got an assortment of Patak Meats’ finest lined up and ready for the grill.  What do you folks have in store?