Daily Archives: May 13, 2022

May 13, 2022 · 9:46 AM

The art of the hire

Yet another great Mike Leach story, from Bruce Feldman ($$):

When Leach was at Texas Tech, one of the defensive coaches he interviewed, the late Carlos Mainord, who had previously worked as a defensive coordinator for the Red Raiders in addition to being Miami’s defensive backs coach under Jimmy Johnson, left perplexed about whether he was offered a job. Mainord called Sonny Dykes, a young Tech assistant he’d known for years because of his relationship with his dad, Spike Dykes, the former TTU coach.

“Should I get Jimmy (Johnson) or Spike to call him?” Mainord asked.

“Nah,” Sonny told him. “Don’t get them to call. You should just show up to work like you’ve got the job, and he’ll get so uncomfortable about it that he’s not gonna tell you to go.”

Mainord did just that and worked as Tech’s new safeties coach, spending the next half-decade in Lubbock.

“It really was the Costanza approach,” said a former Red Raider coach.

I wonder if they gave him the Penske file.

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19 Comments

Filed under Mike Leach. Yar!

May 13, 2022 · 8:45 AM

The snark never gets old.

Athlon takes a look at the number of starters returning for every SEC team here, and I have a question.

(Nah, not about the sub-headers.  Athlon just fucked those up; they’re supposed to be offense and defense.)

If Alabama’s bringing back thirteen of their 22 starters from last season’s team that played for a natty, but none of them are Metchie or Williams, is that an overall plus or minus?  Asking for a friend…

25 Comments

Filed under Alabama

May 13, 2022 · 8:30 AM

The call is coming from inside the house.

Missouri lawmakers have amended a state law to give college coaches and university employees a more active role in the endorsement opportunities their athletes now have in the name, image and likeness movement. The amendment was introduced on the House floor Thursday then passed through both chambers in Jefferson City and now waits for Gov. Mike Parson’s signature.

Last summer, the state legislature passed a bipartisan bill similar to other versions around the country that allow college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness in the form of paid endorsements with third-party companies. On Thursday, Rep. Kurtis Gregory, R-Marshall, introduced an amendment to the law to allow coaches and school officials to become participants in the process, similar to a recent Tennessee amendment signed into state law earlier this spring.

“As with anything that is new and evolving, we need to go in and update a few things to stay competitive, and that’s what we’re doing,” Gregory said on the House floor. “Some other states have gone in and made changes to theirs. And that’s all we’re trying to do is stay on par to make sure our coaching staff and athletic department can go out and recruit the best of the best athletes get them to come to our state.

If anarchy is the result of the absence of government regulation, can we really call this the Wild West if the sheriff is the one making the rules?

5 Comments

Filed under Political Wankery, Recruiting

May 13, 2022 · 8:00 AM

There’s always another shiny toy.

This reads like something an academic from… I dunno, Mars? … observing American sports for the first time would post.

That it comes instead from a national writer who covers college football is kinda sad.  What exactly would the Pac-12 releasing its schedule on the same day the SEC releases theirs do to enhance this Georgia fan’s enjoyment level?  I don’t know.  Mandel’s use of “probably” there tells you he doesn’t know, either.  It’s just that it’s the kind of thing someone like me should enjoy, if my approach to the sport were more enlightened.

As far as scheduling games out years in advance, what does he expect?  Again, college football doesn’t share a monolithic structure with the NFL.  It’s up to individual teams to fill in the framework set by individual conferences when scheduling and that can be a messy process when you’ve got more attractive opponents than you do annual slots in the schedule.  When it clicks, though it’s part of the charm of the sport — just ask any Georgia fan what a complete gas it was to head up to South Bend in 2017.

Mandel’s attitudeis cut from the same cloth as ESPN’s continued effort to modify college football’s regional appeal into something more homogeneous and national in approach.  It’s a matter of convenience.  For them.  A college football schedule release day may not do much for me now, but think of all the stories Mandel and his writers could compose for a week or two afterwards.  Why should the media covering the NFL have all the fun?

Here’s what they miss.  Nobody cares who wins the NFC South, but plenty of fans still care who wins the SEC East.  Because of parity, NFL schedules are a big deal because of their influence on playoff percentages and the draft.  Who Utah has to play this season doesn’t really strike anyone in this neck of the woods as a big deal for now, schedule drop day or no schedule drop day.

I know I’m on the losing side of this.  At some point, I expect Mandel will post something similar and won’t need to qualify it.  College football won’t be any better for morphing into NFL-lite, though.

29 Comments

Filed under College Football, The NFL Is Your Friend.

May 13, 2022 · 7:30 AM

YPP and the Gator Standard

Matt’s done his annual look at yards per play, conference by conference, and has posted the numbers for the SEC’s 2021 season (conference play only, with the championship game not included).

If something seems amiss there, well, you’re not wrong. I mean, fifth in the conference in net YPP should result in something better than a 2-6 conference mark, shouldn’t it?

Since Net YPP is a solid predictor of a team’s conference record, we can use it to identify which teams had a significant disparity between their conference record as predicted by Net YPP and their actual conference record. I used a difference of .200 between predicted and actual winning percentage as the threshold for ‘significant’. Why .200? It is a little arbitrary, but .200 corresponds to a difference of 1.6 games over an eight game conference schedule and 1.8 games over a nine game one. Over or under-performing by more than a game and a half in a small sample seems significant to me. In the 2021 season, which teams in the SEC met this threshold? Here are SEC teams sorted by performance over what would be expected from their Net YPP numbers.

Ole Miss and Florida were the SEC teams that saw their actual record differ significantly from their expected record. The Rebels overachieved by winning both of their one-score conference games and posting the best in-conference turnover margin (+5) of any SEC team. Meanwhile, Florida ended the Dan Mullen era by dropping their final four SEC games. Of their six conference defeats, four came by a touchdown or less. The Gators also had the worst in-conference turnover margin of any SEC team (-8) and were done in by non-offensive touchdowns.

Being an offensive genius who develops players better than anyone only gets you so far, it seems.

8 Comments

Filed under Gators, Gators..., Stats Geek!

May 13, 2022 · 7:00 AM

Check out the big brain on Gary.

Tell me you haven’t paid attention to the Alston decision without telling me you haven’t paid attention to the Alston decision.

“NIL … is a good thing. And actually, that part of it is going well on our campus,” Barta told broadcaster Gary Dolphin on the university’s “Fight for Iowa” podcast that was released Thursday. “But what has happened is it is now being used for recruiting inducements. That was never intended. It still is against the rules, but it’s blatantly being abused.”

Barta met with other NCAA powerbrokers recently in Scottsdale, Arizona, to work on charting the course for college athletics.

Repealing the one-time transfer permit wouldn’t affect incoming freshmen’s ability to score a big NIL deal. But, in Barta’s opinion, doing so would help stabilize the wild roster movement that is taking place on a lot of major-college campuses.

“You don’t have to lose your scholarship. But you must sit out a year. Because we can control that,” Barta said. “And that I think would slow down the (NIL) deals, because a booster isn’t going to offer a student-athlete a big sum of money if they know they have to sit out a year.”

Congratulations, genius.  You’re taking notes on a criminal conspiracy describing a textbook antitrust violation.  Lawyers across the country are shaking their heads.

This guy is the AD at a P5 university and once served as the front man for the CFP selection committee.  Jesus, where do they find these people?

12 Comments

Filed under General Idiocy, See You In Court, Transfers Are For Coaches.

May 13, 2022 · 6:30 AM

Sacrosanct

I may have mentioned California’s SB-1401, which is coming down the turnpike and would require schools to share revenue with athletes in the money-making sports, football and basketball.  I don’t really want to get into the pros and cons of the bill in this post, but, rather, I’d like to touch on an assumption that everyone seems to automatically make when discussing pay for play in revenue producing sports.

This:  “Public and private universities alike fear that SB-1401 could devastate the budgets for money-losing Olympic sports that depend on the revenue generated by football and men’s basketball.”

Why don’t they ever fear what the likes of SB-1401 could do to administrative and coaching salaries, which have been boosted for decades by athletic departments not having to pay college athletes?

Um… that’s a rhetorical question.

21 Comments

Filed under It's Just Bidness, Political Wankery