It just means more.

As long as when you’re talking about “it”, you don’t mean the SEC’s non-conference scheduling.

No conference takes it easier in nonconference play year after year than the SEC.  Last year, the Big Ten outdid the SEC when it came to scheduling the most home games, but the SEC never stays down for long and has reclaimed that crown.  The SEC is playing a full 75 percent of its nonconference games at home.

The league is also playing the smallest percentage of true road games (just nine out of 56 games) and the greatest percentage of games against FCS competition.  The SEC just missed playing the smallest percentage of games against other Power Five teams.

Another annual characteristic of SEC nonconference schedules is that, when teams do play away from home, even in neutral-site games, they rarely leave the South.  Only three SEC teams will play games out of its home region: Georgia at Notre Dame, Texas A&M at UCLA and Ole Miss at Cal.  The Bulldogs are the only SEC team playing two games away from home, which is also very unusual.

At least the Dawgs have that going for them.  The rest is just the usual exercise in protection.  As long as the current postseason system enables it, the conference will keep going on its merry way with it, too.

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Straight from the Paul Hewitt school of contract provisions

I don’t know how I missed this when it was announced, but check out the sweet deal Mark Stoops has with Kentucky:

In addition to the two-year extension, the amendment adds an automatic extension opportunity to the contract. If the football team wins at least seven games but no more than nine games in a season, the term of the agreement will extend one year. If the football team wins at least 10 games, the term of the agreement will extend two years. For each additional automatic extension year, the total guaranteed compensation will increase by $250,000 from the immediately preceding year.

Now there’s a man who doesn’t want a ninth conference game on the schedule.

Today, in missing something

How can you rank SEC stadiums in order of loudness without a single mention of piped-in music?

As an aside, though, bonus points for this throw in:

Off-beat fact: Neyland Stadium actually ranks for the least number of square inches per seat in college football.

No shit.

Today, in burning questions

Talk about your inquiring minds want to know…

Former LSU center T-Bob Hebert, now a radio personality in Baton Rouge, decided to get a little more personal with Etling.

“Lloyd Cushenberry and Will Clapp — whose ass feels better?” Hebert asked the quarterback of LSU’s two centers.

“I can just tell you what you’re looking for as far as that in a center,” Etling responded without hesitation. “What you want is a nice, plump bottom. A surface area to put your hands on. You want them to feel you.

“As much as I love Will, and as great a football player as he is, he doesn’t have the biggest bottom. But him and I have really worked toward it. We’ve found a nice surface area to put my hands on.

SEC football, baby.  Puts a whole new spin on it just means more, don’t it?

(h/t)

Year of the grind?

I don’t know how great Paul Myerberg thinks the SEC will be this season, but it sure looks like he expects the league to be exciting.

Fun, hunh?

“Football has made the South a better place, even if we go around poisoning trees now and then.”

From Faulkner to State Representative Earl Ehrhart to Hugh Freeze…

“Freeze constantly, as much or more than other college coaches, played on that religiosity,” Wilson tells USA TODAY Sports. “He used it in recruiting and in talking to parents of potential recruits. It’s authentic. He believes it. I don’t think it’s hypocrisy. I just think his failings are the temptations of the flesh — and that sort of thing is also well known in the South.”

… football is just different down here.  As the author puts it, “College football in the Bible Belt is so often called a religion as to be a cliché, though it offers the distinct advantage of being true.”

And so, to reiterate something I admittedly harp upon, the more the people running the sport try to accommodate those who would trade regional passion for national interest, the more they risk destroying what makes it uniquely great.

“You buy a keg for $75 and sell it for $1,400.”

My favorite part of the booze industry’s rapid takeover of college sports marketing is the statement of the obvious — “It’s the inevitability of the profitability, which is extraordinary” — coupled with the traditional “don’t let alcohol near the innocent young” sanctimony, with the SEC naturally leading the way:

With the rise in beer marketing has come a level of inconsistency and, sometimes, hypocrisy as schools and conferences try to figure out how much to regulate it. Where there’s a restriction on beer sales or marketing at a college facility, there’s often a contradiction nearby.

The SEC has been adamant about not selling any alcoholic beverages at its athletic venues, but the conference does allow it in club seats and suites, at least one of which is sponsored by a spirits brand — Woodford Reserve Club at Kentucky’s Kroger Field. Other schools, such as LSU and Missouri, have experimented with selling beer within beer gardens just outside the stadium, which enables them to rake in the revenue while staying within the bounds of the conference rules.

That’s your SEC today, peeps:  no beer sales in the stands, but bourbon-infused naming in the club seats.  Still, those sweet, sweet liquor dollars really do seem inevitable, even in the Bible Belt.  I’m looking forward to hearing the spin Greg Sankey puts out on the day the conference officially renounces its current rule.  I wonder how long it will take Georgia to change its policy after that occurs.