The power of the media

Just because I’ve commented about Clay Travis lately doesn’t mean I can’t give credit where credit is due to Mr. Steaming Hot Takes himself, Danny Kanell.

Know a lot of college football writers have been accused of rooting against the season. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case but some absolutely want to be able to say “I told you so” because they’ve been peddling only the absolute worst headlines
Sadly might cost the season

— Danny Kanell (@dannykanell) August 8, 2020

Yeah, it’ll be the media that kills the season.  That’s the ticket.

At least Travis has a website and a business to promote.  Kanell trolls for the sheer pleasure of it.

Grifting, grifting, grifting

Less than three weeks, from start to finish:

Clay Travis is doing his damnedest to live up to the principle that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

(h/t)

TFW you’ve earned that victory lap

Indeed.

‘Is there anyone we can pay to write positive stories?’

Larry Scott, media genius, at work.

The Pac-12 Conference had a publicity problem.

The conference was in deep distress in 2018. It was drowning in negative sentiment after an embarrassing instant-replay scandal in college football. The Pac-12′s basketball programs were coming off a winless showing in the men’s NCAA Tournament. And commissioner Larry Scott’s prized Pac-12 Network was stuck in distribution purgatory, still unavailable to large swaths of frustrated fans.

Said one longtime Pac-12 staffer: “We were incredibly desperate.”

The Pac-12 hired a high-profile crisis-management firm. The conference began working from a 34-page printed manual The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in 2019 — a playbook that directed the conference to “seek to identify positive voices that could shift the conversation.”

That plan further instructed the conference to “expand upon media partnerships” with two primary media platforms — the Los Angeles Times and The Players’ Tribune. According to emails and other documents, the conference struck a deal in 2018 with the Los Angeles Times that aimed to steer $100,000 in advertising to the newspaper in exchange for an expansion in conference coverage…

The Oregonian/OregonLive has obtained internal communications from both the Pac-12 and Los Angeles Times that reveal new details of the partnership. The Pac-12, which long denied there was a formalized agreement, for the first time now acknowledges it signed a contract to provide advertising revenue to The Times.

We interviewed more than a dozen insiders over the last 18 months, including Times president Chris Argentieri and executive editor Norman Pearlstine, who reached out early in the investigation expressing a desire to tell his side of the story.

Said Pearlstine a year ago: “Don’t let the Pac-12 speak for me.”

Pearlstine is now declining comment.

Emails, memos, and a human resources grievance show how the Pac-12 promised special access for the LA Times reporter and how the partnership set off alarm bells inside the news organization.

Unbelievable?  No.  Shameful?  Yes.  Especially you, LA Times.

Today, in clickbait

It’s now safe to say that Justin Fields was the better quarterback option than Jake Fromm. The 2019 season pretty definitively proved that…

Hindsight is undefeated.

I can’t help but wonder what ol’ Connor was thinking about Fromm and Fields at the time Smart made the obvious call to start the quarterback who led his team to a Rose Bowl win and came within a whisker of winning a national title as a true freshman quarterback, though.

Anyway, this is food for thought for his real question — what did Kirby Smart learn from doing something that nobody in America thought was the wrong decision (outside of the Fields clan, that is)?  And how will he apply the lesson to a completely different set of facts?

We’ll learn the answer to that in a couple of years, after Riley has the opportunity to look back and reflect on what Kirby should have known then.

Two morning takes

I’ve got a couple of tweets for you to peruse.

One, is Georgia too high or too low here?

Second probably deserves to occupy a Daily Gator post, but what the hey…

It’s not Florida ranking below Georgia that puzzles me.  It’s Florida ranking ahead of Oklahoma that does.  Your thoughts?

(h/t)

“The numbers don’t lie.”

The Sporting News purports to rank the top programs in college football by assigning point values to the following accomplishments:

Sporting News ranked all the FBS programs by their past 10 seasons with a statistical formula that bridges the Bowl Championship Series and College Football Playoff eras to determine the top 25 college football programs.

Here are the categories we used:

National championships: 10 points each
National title game appearances: 5 points each
College Football Playoff appearances: 5 points each
New Year’s Day Six/BCS bowl appearances: 3 points each
Heisman Trophy winners: 2 points each

Overall winning percentage, All-Americans and NFL Draft first-round picks were awarded with a poll style 15-1 score. Ties were broken by the team with the best overall record since 2010.

Notice what’s missing there?  Does anybody care about winning conference titles any more?  And if not, why even bother with conferences?

Your Daily Gator reads Athlon, is impressed.

What starts out as a fair reference to Florida’s 2020 schedule edge turns into a victory lap for the coaching excellence of the Portal Master™.

There is certainly some legitimacy to the thought that the Florida Gators football schedule for 2020 is easier than it has been in some time and some have said it is the easiest in the Southeastern Conference this year. All the teams on that schedule have to be coached by someone and sure enough it turns out that only three of the SEC’s top eight coaches are coaching any of the eight SEC teams the Gators are facing in 2020.

The ranking of the list of coaches I am drawing from comes from Athlon Sports’ magazine and the annual summer blitz that they offer for college football fans has Florida head coach Dan Mullen riding second on that list of coaches this time around. With Alabama’s Nick Saban in the pole position of the coaching rankings and the Crimson Tide not on the schedule in 2020 that means Mullen is ranked ahead of every other coach on the schedule.

The top name on the list is Georgia’s Kirby Smart who resides just behind Mullen in the ranking at No. 3 in the SEC.

In head coaching matchups, Dan Mullen is 0-3 against Kirby Smart.  According to ESPN’s preseason FPI, Florida has a projected 37.3% chance of beating Georgia this season.

At the No. 4 spot is a guy that started out middle of the pack in his first few years at his current program including a 6-2 mark as the interim coach at LSU when Les Miles was let go in 2016.

In head coaching matchups, Dan Mullen is 2-2 against Ed Orgeron.  Also, unlike Mullen, Coach O wears a national championship ring he earned as a head coach.  According to ESPN’s preseason FPI, Florida has a projected 45.6% chance of beating LSU this season.

And the third and last of the top coaches of teams that the Gators and Dan Mullen will face in 2020 is Kentucky’s Mark Stoops at No. 7.

In head coaching matchups, Dan Mullen holds a 5-2 record against Mark Stoops.  One of those two losses, though, came in the Swamp and ended a 31-game losing streak.  (FPI likes Florida’s chances against Kentucky, to be fair.)

You can see why the Portal Master™ enjoys the reputation he has among the Gator faithful.  Athlon, too.

Doubts, they have them.

Eight Sports247 pundits get together to predict the 2020 CFP field.

None of them project Georgia in one of the top four spots.

Numero uno

A while back, I wondered where Todd Monken would finish on Football Scoop’s 20 most important assistant coaching hires of 2020.

Welp, here you go.

The 20 most important assistant coaching hires of the 2020 season — No. 1: Todd Monken, Georgia https://t.co/mLQx7BvzIM

— FootballScoop Staff (@FootballScoop) June 22, 2020

This is, of course, where Monken comes in.

Monken’s rise to prominence came in 2011, when he became the offensive coordinator of what turned out to be the best Oklahoma State team of all-time. Those Cowboys averaged 48.7 points a game in a 12-1 season, winning the Big 12 title and the Fiesta Bowl and losing only at Iowa State in double overtime. That success won him the Southern Miss head coaching job, where he turned an 1-11 team into a 9-5 team in three years’ time…

Georgia’s revamped offense doesn’t necessarily need to rack up 8,526 yards and 726 points, as LSU did a year ago. As long as Monken gets the Bulldogs within barking distance of those numbers, Georgia is likely your 2020 national champion.