He drinks a whiskey pod, he drinks a vodka pod…

I’m not sayin’.

The pods are a super limited-promotional item, available in a single bar during London Cocktail Week, which ends on Sunday. They were devised by the staid scotch brand The Glenlivet and the award-winning bartender Alex Kratena, who have said the capsules, which are bound by seaweed protein, are a stunt of sustainability marketing. Such boring strictures of reality did not prevent people from making jokes about how the pods would soon be omnipresent at outdoor concerts and frat houses. The pods drew quick comparisons to everything from Jell-O shots to Gushers fruit snacks, in addition to the laundry-detergent capsules that became a meme in 2018 after several dozen teens ate them on YouTube.

Many other people looked upon the scotch pods and saw nothing but pure, open-container law-circumventing brilliance. The capsules seemed perfect for sneaking booze into nearly anywhere. When asked if the pods were intended to be a futuristic evolution of the flask, a representative for Glenlivet seemed vaguely horrified and assured me that the capsules were intended to be consumed by adults as a novelty during the week’s cocktail convention. They’re “almost like a cocktail version of El Bulli’s spherical olive,” she said via email, apparently distressed that the internet had taken up a litany of less luxurious comparisons.

I’m just sayin’.

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Tuesday morning buffet

You know you want some.

• “we ‘OR’d them because Tennessee ‘OR’d us first.”  LOL.
• Matt Hinton’s SEC preview is worth a read.
• And Bill Connelly’s updated his 2018 S&P+ projections.  Georgia currently sits fifth.
• If I mention Bill’s, I’ve got to mention Brian Fremeau’s 2018 preseason projected FEI Ratings, too.  He’s got Georgia fourth.
• Every time I read something about Baylor, I just wanna go take a shower immediately afterwards.  Ugh.
• “A college football gambling cheat sheet for 2018“.
• Here’s another handy guide to streaming college football games.
• Anthony Dasher suggests a few new Dawgs to keep an eye on.

Snip, snip

I still get the regular question about how my cord cutting experiment is going — just fine, thanks — so I thought I’d share this article about it than an alert reader sent my way.

For what it’s worth, after trying several options, I’ve stuck with YouTube TV and been quite happy about it.

But, then again, I’m not this guy:

Steve Young of Holly Springs is an N.C. State fan with nine TVs in one room. He says he has researched cord-cutting and it doesn’t make sense for him. “These cord-cutting features are designed for using one TV at a time,” he says.

Shit, dude, nobody’s got a brain designed for nine at once.

Thursday morning buffet

A little of this, a little of that and pretty soon all the chafing dishes are full.

• If you’re a believer in narratives, ESPN’s Playoff Predictor has Georgia with the third best shot of being there this season.
• Today, in where are they now: Kevin Ramsey — yes, that Kevin Ramsey — is a college football head coach.
• Athlon rates Georgia’s offensive line as college football’s third best.
• With regard to the NCAA’s new basketball rules announced yesterday, I should have known better:  “Top officials with the NBA and USA Basketball were blindsided with timing and changes in the NCAA’s announcement of future rules surrounding pro basketball prospects, sources told ESPN.”
• Bill Connelly looks at receivers.
• Zach Smith sounds like a totally normal guy.
• SEC point differential since 2014 is just another indication of the different plane of existence ‘Bama has occupied.
• “A New Mexico State University study has found that more water is needed to keep artificial cool enough to safely play on during a hot summer day than what is needed to water Bermuda grass for a day.”  Science, bitchez.
• Georgia Tech “adjusts” its substance-abuse policy, although there’s no word on how that might affect a player arrested for his involvement in smuggling 90 pounds of weed.  (In fairness, Houston was reinstated to the team, so maybe there’s been no change in that regard.)
• Chip Towers wants to impress upon us that Deandre Baker’s status is shakier than we might expect:  “there’s no guarantee Baker’s status as a starting cornerback is guaranteed.”  You know it must be serious when a guaranty isn’t guaranteed.  Get this man an editor, stat!

“If you really want to see where someone is committing, you shouldn’t overlook [social media] data.”

How long do you figure it’ll take for Nick Saban to hire Kristina Bigbsy?

Kirby blinded me with science.

It sounds like Georgia is leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of a national title.  (h/t)

SEC champion and College Football Playoff entrant Georgia has been using MuscleSound for assessments of players’ game readiness this season.

MuscleSound is a Colorado-based company that uses ultrasound imagery to measure glycogen and determine muscle fuel by sending photos to its cloud for computation with its proprietary algorithms. Low readings can be a precursor to soft-tissue injuries. Nutrition and training recommendations can be catered to each athlete.

The ultrasound company is relatively new to college football, having worked with Colorado since last year and starting its collaboration with Georgia this fall.

Data provided by MuscleSound showed a sampling of up to eight Georgia players each week to provide a snapshot of the team’s physical preparedness. The Bulldogs received their highest score prior to its second game of the season, a come-from-behind road victory at Notre Dame that not only showed team stamina but also proved decisive in propelling the school toward its eventual No. 3 national ranking and matchup with Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl.

One of Georgia’s two other highest marks came before its 42-7 thrashing of Florida in the rivalry game formerly dubbed “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” That game was preceded by the Bulldogs’ bye week, likely explaining the energy boost.

Dayum.  I’ll have to take their word on much of that, but I got that the two highest scores came in the face of two of Georgia’s biggest wins this season.  (Although it looks like the Dawgs did just fine as their scores declined during the Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and Tennessee trifecta.)

In any event, it’s noteworthy what kind of data this staff is receptive to analyzing.

Inside the minds of recruits?

So, it turns out there’s this thing out there that purports to help a school analyze which recruits it’s pursuing are likely to sign and which are likely to spurn.

The company founded by the four Northwestern undergraduates, called Zcruit, essentially borrows that same mentality, one of putting numbers behind what have long been gut-based decisions, and applies it to the recruiting landscape.

Think of this way: Every program in the Football Bowl Subdivision is chasing after the same pool of recruits; most programs recruit the same region as countless others; some programs offer hundreds of recruits to sign just 25 future student-athletes.

Boiled down, Zcruit’s goal is to assist a program’s efforts by streamlining the process — by taking all the streams of data at their disposal and creating a formula for recruiting success, in the same way a university’s admissions office attempts to pinpoint the best and most likely fits for the student body at large.

Three baseline factors are taken into account. The first is demographic information: background information, such as where a recruit is from. The second is a prospect’s interactions with the school, such as how many visits he has made on campus, whether he attended any camps or when the scholarship offer was tendered.

The third is the prospect’s interactions with other schools. Is he showing any interest? When was he offered by another school, when did he visit, how many times did he visit? In the end, the data compiled by Zcruit creates a threshold, for lack of a better word, between whether a program should recruit a player — if the data suggests he’s gettable — or whether it should move on to another prospect.

Zcruit claims a pretty good success rate, too.

Zcruit worked alongside Bowers and the coaching staff during this current recruiting cycle, helping the Wildcats identify and evaluate a number of recruits at positions of need. With one week until national signing day, the algorithms created by Zcruit have predicated which recruits would not sign with Northwestern with 94% accuracy; the same algorithms predicted which recruits would sign with the Wildcats with 80% accuracy.

Man, a program that could have predicted what my teenage daughters wouldn’t do over 90% of the time sure would have come in handy back then.  Just sayin’.

More power to you, guys.