Mr. Conventional Wisdom and SEC Media Days

A tradition unlike any other…

Biggest non-story of the week? The conflict between Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher. Yes it happened. It was also over by the Spring meetings in Destin. But the question will be asked.

— Tony Barnhart (@MrCFB) July 18, 2022

Well, we know Greg Sankey would like it to be the biggest non-story of the week.  But I don’t think Barnhart carrying the league’s water is going to convince many media folks to go along.

Today, in motivation stones

So…

Asked if bowls are still a reward in college football’s system, UTSA coach Jeff Traylor brought up a crazy idea to intertwine NIL money with prize money. The players on the winning roster of the bowl gets $10,000. Losers get none.

“That’ll get their asses up to play,” he said.

— Ari Wasserman (@AriWasserman) July 17, 2022

How crazy an idea is that, really?

Have an Oregon vs. Georgia preview!

It’s mid-July, and you could use one, right?

CFN’s Georgia Bulldogs Preview 2022

Pete Fiutak does a nice job setting things up with this take on last season’s aftermath.

There’s a college basketball theory that all you can reasonably ask for is to consistently put great teams on the floor year in and year out. Do that, and you’ll eventually catch the breaks when it matters in March.

Demanding a national title is tough, but the Final Four? Yeah, if you’re a Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, Gonzaga, etc., that’s a reasonable goal every season. Keep getting in it, and soon you’re going to win it.

The Georgia football program kept fielding great team after great team – that includes the Mark Richt era – and it all finally came together. It was finally its turn to have the right mix and the right things fall into place to get that national championship.

There wasn’t anything flaky or fluky about it, and it wasn’t the catch-lightning-in-a-bottle run of 2019 LSU – all-timer team, national championship program, but too up-and-down over the last few years. Georgia was due, it got the job done, and now its status goes to a whole other level.

It was national title-good over the last several seasons under Kirby Smart, but the program went from promise – like Oklahoma and Notre Dame programs that are CFP-good, but can’t take it that one extra step – to proof. It just made the jump to raise the expectations to the reasonably insane.

Georgia now gets table service in the VIP lounge of respect that Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State hang in.

What do those four have that just about everyone else doesn’t? The consistency every single season to keep rolling no matter how many generational stars they lose.

There’s plenty more where that came from, so you’ll want to read it all, especially since there’s nary a mention of Metchie and Williams to be found.

Your Daily Gator accepts reality.

One of the Swamp247 writers posts a ranking of Florida’s 2022 opponents from easiest to hardest and Georgia’s at the top of the list.  That isn’t surprising, but three pages of comments without a single slag of the Dawgs is.

Agent Muschamp, I’d say your work there is done.  You weren’t alone, but you definitely started the wheels in motion.  Thanks, man.

USA TODAY’s 2022 Preseason All-SEC team

Is here.

Georgia has three players on offense:

Quarterback: Bryce Young, Alabama

Running back: Tank Bigsby, Auburn

Running back: Chris Rodriguez Jr., Kentucky

Wide receiver: Kayshon Boutte, LSU

Wide receiver: Cedric Tillman, Tennessee

Tight end: Brock Bowers, Georgia

Offensive line: Nick Broeker, Ole Miss

Offensive line: Emil Ekiyor Jr., Alabama

Offensive line: Broderick Jones, Georgia

Offensive line: Darnell Wright, Tennessee

Offensive line: Sedrick Van Pran-Granger, Georgia

Placekicker: Harrison Mevis, Missouri

All-purpose: Jahmyr Gibbs, Alabama

And three on defense:

Defensive line: Jalen Carter, Georgia

Defensive line: Brenton Cox Jr., Florida

Defensive line: Byron Young, Tennessee

Defensive line: BJ Ojulari, LSU

Linebacker: Will Anderson Jr., Alabama*

Linebacker (tie): Derick Hall, Auburn

Linebacker (tie): Henry To’oTo’o, Alabama

Linebacker (tie): Nolan Smith, Georgia

Defensive back: Jordan Battle, Alabama

Defensive back: Antonio Johnson, Texas A&M

Defensive back: Kelee Ringo, Georgia

Defensive back: Cam Smith, South Carolina

Punter: Nik Constantinou, Texas A&M

Can’t help but wonder what the thinking was on Brenton Cox, though.

And then there were four

Welcome to the It Just Means More Conference, boys.

When the Southeastern Conference took its football media days event to Atlanta for the first time in 2018, Alabama coach Nick Saban had guided the Crimson Tide to five national championships, Georgia’s Kirby Smart was coming off the 2017 league title, Kentucky’s Mark Stoops was continuing to build a respected program, and Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher was entering his rookie season with the Aggies.

Those are the only four coaches still at their respective locales as the SEC returns to Atlanta this week for a second occasion, with the likes of Auburn’s Gus Malzahn, Florida’s Dan Mullen and LSU’s Ed Orgeron having been unable to maintain their jobs since the last go-around.

That’s some impressive turnover.  Maybe if all those fired coaches had valued education more, they’d have stuck around longer.

Steelemas, nugget no. 3

Phil Steele has his own YPP metric, although in this case, it stands for yards per point.  The higher a team’s defensive YPP, the stingier the defense has been, and the more likely it is that the team’s record will either regress or remain the same the following season.  Since 1990, 84.7% of the teams with a defensive YPP of 21.35 or higher have followed with a weaker or same record the next year.

There was only one team in college football which managed a defensive YPP higher than 21.35 last season.  That team?  Georgia (26.4).

“We don’t talk enough about how much good comes from college sports.”

Normally, when I read a Mike Bianchi column and think “Christ, what an asshole”, it’s in reference to the author, but there are always exceptions to the rule, such as in this case, an interview with Central Florida’s athletic director, who actually had the balls to say,

“We have to continue to keep our student-athletes and their education at the top of mind,” Mohajir is telling me during a recent interview. “But when I say something like that, everybody says that’s a bunch of athletic director B.S. Well, it’s not B.S.; it’s why many of us got into this business. Somehow, we have allowed education to be devalued in college sports. We’ve allowed the media to devalue it. We’ve allowed the trial lawyers to devalue it. We’ve allowed our national leaders to NOT talk nearly enough about it.”

That is rich, to put it mildly.  That a guy whose school just jumped to a conference that now runs from Florida to Ohio to Texas — and is actively looking to expand further into Arizona, Colorado and Utah! — can whine about the devaluation of education with a straight face… well, hell, he may have just broken the doing it for the kids meme for good with that.

(By the way, Terry, you didn’t “allow” the trial lawyers to devalue jack shit.  You colluded in a way that violated the law and got your asses kicked in court for doing so.  But I digress.)

The topper is how tone deaf Bianchi himself is.  His observation after that statement?  “Education has been lost in the current narrative about college athletics. All we talk about today is how many millions more in media-rights money will a school make if it jumps from one conference to another….”  You mean like Terry Mohajir’s school, Mike?  Damn, there goes that media devaluing education thing again.  It’s as if the UCFs of the college football world are having all that filthy lucre forced down their throats against their will in their struggle to value education.

Mohajir is incredibly cynical or he’s that high on his own bullshit.  Either way, it’s pretty nauseating.  Though at least the volleyball player flying back from Waco midweek in the middle of the night can console herself with the notion that her athletic director is giving her education the lip service he thinks it deserves.