Meet the new kids on the block.

Jordan Hill’s list of likely true freshman contributors:

• De’Nylon Morrissette, wide receiver
• Branson Robinson, running back
• Marvin Jones Jr., OLB/EDGE
• Jalon Walker, ILB
• Malaki Starks, safety
• Mykel Williams, defensive end

The biggest issue for all six is the young depth stacked in front of them.  For example, given who just left for the NFL, you’d think Walker would have a great shot at meaningful playing time, until you remember he’s got Rian Davis, Trezmen Marshall and Jamon Dumas-Johnson sitting in front of him.  Starks faces a similar situation at safety.  Jones isn’t an early enrollee, so he’s got that to work through.

Of the six, I think Robinson and Williams are the most likely to contribute in 2022, the former because Georgia’s never had a problem throwing true freshman running backs into the mix early and the latter because he’s too freaking talented not to see the field.

Your thoughts?

Today, in no hard feelings

Together, again.

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“2 goats, 1 duck, no beef.”

Cool.  Now do Nick and Jimbo.

Sometimes, it feels like college football is morphing into pro wrestling.

Blue-Chip Ratio 2022

Bud Elliott’s annual accounting of who’s got talent is back.

Put simply, to win the national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits (AKA “Blue Chips”) than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes.

This has been true basically as far back as modern internet recruiting rankings have existed.

… This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It does not guarantee a national championship, but a team not meeting it is almost certainly guaranteed not to win it all.

There’s even some subtext for Dan Mullen.  Or at least for the people who made him sound like a better coach than he was.

That is not to say that development does not matter. It certainly does. But nobody wins a national title by player development in lieu of elite recruiting. Plenty of coaches who are regarded as elite have never sniffed winning it all because they cannot accumulate enough talent. On the other hand, there are examples of coaches who are not regarded as premier head men who have won it all thanks to elite recruits. Not to lump them into the same category, but nobody ever accused Gene Chizik, Les Miles, Mack Brown, or Ed Orgeron of being tactical masterminds.

Coaching matters. But recruiting is by far the most important piece when it comes to separating the good from the great.

Anyway, here’s what the ’22 edition looks like:

What’s striking there is that there are now five teams at 70% or better — and three at 75+%.

In 2014, no team was above 75 percent. In 2015, only Alabama was. In 2016 and 2017, it was still just Alabama. The 2018 BCR saw Ohio State get into that super elite class.

This year, there are still three teams over that number. But note that Oklahoma and Texas A&M are also over the 70 percent mark. The BCR has never featured five teams above seventy percent.

Oh, and Alabama, which set the all-time record for the highest BCR in 2021, smashed its own record in 2022, at an incredible 89.4 percent!

Yeah, any day now, Nick Saban’s coming back to earth.

The other side of concentration at the top is that there’s that much less talent for everyone else to share.  Gapping, bitchez!

Mike Gundy’s having a day.

He spent his time yesterday at the Big 12 Media Days demonstrating a severe deficiency of fucks to give.

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy on college realignment: "The moves that are being made are only being made for the money. Period."

— Brian Davis (@BDavisAAS) July 13, 2022

Oklahoma State HC Mike Gundy: "The future of Bedlam is there's a year or two left. That's the future of Bedlam based on somebody else's decision."

— Joe Cook (@josephcook89) July 13, 2022

Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy offered advice — “jokingly,” he said — to new Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark on Wednesday: Don’t let the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners continue to participate in the league’s business meetings.

Gundy, who has been Oklahoma State coach since 2005, said he’s surprised that the Longhorns and Sooners — who will join the SEC on July 1, 2025, if not earlier — were still involved in Big 12 meetings.

“It’s interesting,” Gundy told reporters shortly after his remarks onstage at Big 12 media days. “We go to conference meetings, and OU and Texas are in there. They’re still in the conference. But I’m guessing when they leave, they’re scratching down things that can help them when they’re in the SEC. So it is an unusual situation. I think there’s a business side of it that nowadays people say, ‘It is what it is.’ Which 10 years ago, they might not even let them in meetings.

“The new commissioner, I mean, honestly, if I was him, I wouldn’t let OU and Texas in any meetings.”

Ha, ha, ha.  Kidding, not kidding.

Not that he’s wrong about any of it.

More fun with FEI

One thing this chart of Brian Fremeau’s makes abundantly clear…

15-Year FEI Ratings: SEC pic.twitter.com/scyegY8iyA

— Brian Fremeau (@bcfremeau) July 13, 2022

… is how insanely good the 2019 LSU and 2020 Alabama offenses were.  Literally off the chart good.

Aging like a fine wine

Hey, 70-year old Nick Saban wants you to know he’s discovered something.

Alabama coach Nick Saban believes college football is heading down the path of megaconferences.

During an appearance on the “Always College Football” podcast this week, Saban lamented the way realignment has stripped the tradition associated with playing in the same conference over a prolonged period of time.

… “But I think we’re going to deal with it in a greater capacity than ever before because I think megaconferences are probably here to stay,” Saban said. “Market share, there’s a lot of that involved in why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Thanks, boss.  I hadn’t noticed until you brought it to my attention.

Meanwhile, Steve Spurrier tells us Clemson’s a good fit for the SEC because…

Clemson didn’t resemble an ACC football team throughout the 1980s – not to Steve Spurrier, who was a Duke assistant and later its coach during that decade. The Tigers won the ACC five times in the ’80s.

“When I coached at Duke, Clemson was actually like an SEC school in the ACC,” Spurrier said. “That was before FSU, Syracuse and Virginia Tech (joined the ACC). When you played Clemson, they looked like SEC guys.”

… “Their defensive guys were a little bit bigger, a little bit faster,” Spurrier said of Clemson’s ’80s teams. “They just lined up and tried to smash you. That was their style of offense.

“They certainly could slide right into the SEC.”

The point isn’t that these two have grown senile.  It’s that they’ve been listening to their own bullshit and having the media treat the banal as brilliance for so long, that it’s become the default position.

Six months later…

Man, it’s hard to believe that half a year ago, I was freezing my ass off in an Indianapolis parking lot celebrating a national championship.  And when I say it’s hard to believe, there’s a part of my brain that’s still processing it, which is probably why I still obsessively watch the replay of the fourth quarter of the game.

But we live in a what have you done for me lately world, and that means there’s always the next season.  Can Georgia climb those golden stairs in 2022?

… The buzz and activity surrounding the program very much parallels what the Bulldogs experienced when they tried to repeat as national champions 41 years ago. In the summer of 1981, Georgia had just completed the East End enclosure of Sanford Stadium. Preliminary plans for the football building that eventually would be known as Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall were being flashed across Dooley’s desk.

Those Georgia teams were the only ones to win back-to-back-back SEC championships (1980-82). Alas, though, they could not run down another national title despite returning the best player in college football in Herschel Walker.

Dooley is hopeful this team can.

“I think it’s going to be very difficult, but I’d like to see Kirby defy the odds,” Dooley said. “I mean, it’s a possibility. The program he has going now has the chance to do that.”

There’s probably a “there are three things that can happen after you win a natty, and two of them are bad” joke in there somewhere, but, yeah, I haven’t quite crossed that threshold to the land of it’s a given, where ‘Bama fans congregate, either.  Where are y’all at this point?