Thursday morning buffet

Plenty to enjoy today.

• Spurrier’s okay with the fan base bitching about the way his team is playing.
• Meteor pissing match.
• Four of Todd Gurley’s top five career rushing performances have come in his first five games this season.
• Malcolm Mitchell and Justin Scott-Wesley have “practiced better,” this week.  That couldn’t come soon enough.
• Asshole of the month.
• A little Coach Ekeler for ya’.
• Wild Dawgin’.
• Here are Gary Pinkel’s comments on yesterday’s SEC Teleconference.  Globalization and the SEC?  Somebody in the media’s trying too hard.

Straight out of Mandingo

George O’Leary is alleged to have said this:

The suit alleges that O’Leary used a derogatory word for African-Americans and called the NFL “one big ‘Ru-Ru’ tribe.” The suit also alleges O’Leary once advised coaches to check African-American players “to make sure their gums are blue, because they are bigger, faster and stronger than (African-American players) with red gums.”

Two questions come to mind here.  One, is there an automatic annual line item in the UCF athletic budget to cover O’Leary litigation expenses?  And, second, how does Central Florida manage to sign any recruits?

“Everyone looked at each other and said, ‘Say what?'”

Julie Hermann was, is and will always be a real pip.

“I got to make sure I’m in town for the weekend on Parents Day.”

University of Arkansas at Little Rock AD resigns after his comments about the physical attributes of the mother of one of the school’s women soccer players were picked up on a live microphone.

The topper is that the school recently canned its baseball coach after he faced charges of sexual harassment.

Tuesday morning buffet

Suffering from a World Cup hangover this morning?  Eat something.

• The Pac-12 distributed only 68 percent of its revenue to members in fiscal 2013.  Man, those television networks are expensive.
• Would paying college players slow down early exits for the pros?  Maybe.
• Gentry Estes looks at where Brice Ramsey’s at right now.
• Kentucky beat writer asks the musical question “Does Georgia have anyone left to play defense?”  More than Kentucky does, I’m willing to bet.
• Hawaii athletic department fails to pay players summer scholarship money due to clerical snafu, resulting in seven kids sleeping in the locker room until paperwork went through.  AD’s analysis of the situation:  “When it comes right down to it, we need to plan better.”  No shit, Sherlock.
• In fiscal year 2012-3, Georgia generated more revenue from football and men’s basketball than your average NHL team.
• To some extent, Chris Low’s rankings of SEC defensive lines looks like it was determined by throwing random darts.  Which probably means nobody really has a good handle on what the conference has this year.
• Kevin Scarbinsky wonders if the SEC needs a rule prohibiting dismissed players from returning to the league, and concludes it won’t happen.  “Richt deserves credit for sticking to his principles in letting players go knowing they can and have come back to beat him. Hard to imagine the rest of the schools in the league would line up to save him from his own idealistic self.”
• Here’s a list of ten toughest non-conferences schedules.  Only one SEC team makes the list – guess who.
• And here’s Phil Steele’s combined experience chart for 2014.  Georgia is middle of the pack in that department.
• John Infante points out that if Joker Phillips’ recruiting transgression is deemed serious enough, Boom could face the possibility of a suspension under the head coach responsibility bylaw.
• “Auburn is all about giving players second chances…”  Gah.

“I think some of these schools have forgotten where they came from.”

Okay, I know it’s a target rich environment, but put Mike Bianchi and George O’Leary together on the subject of autonomy and what do you get?  Gold, Jerry.  Gold.

George O’Leary is starting to wonder if the Southeastern Conference is being governed by league commissioner Mike Slive or Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

O’Leary, the blunt, straightforward coach of the UCF Knights, compares the SEC’s recent threat to break away from the rest of major college football and start its own division, to the Confederacy’s decision to break away from the United States and risk the sovereign unity of college football.

“They sound like the South during the Civil War,” O’Leary said of the SEC and the other saber-rattlers in the so-called Power 5 conferences. “If they don’t get their way, they’re going to secede and start their own country. . . . I think college football is in real trouble.”

Does that make Mark Emmert college football’s Abraham Lincoln?

Public shaming as a policy setter

Stupid is as stupid does, boys.

Kansas State announces it has granted release of Leticia Romero under school's new policy. She can't transfer to a Big 12 school.

— Blair Kerkhoff (@BlairKerkhoff) May 27, 2014

So Kansas State went through this entire rigmarole, was ridiculed nationally… all to wind up letting Romero go anyway.  But there’s a new policy, so, hey!

These are the people some of you think are capable of managing the business of college athletics.  The truth is, they couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag if you gave ‘em a flashlight and pointed them in the right direction.