With friends like Corch…

Urban Meyer describes himself as “pro-student”.  I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.

“But to say (players) can go out and get their own shoe contract and things like that,” Meyer said, “I think, ‘What would that do for this great sport, and really, what would that do for college athletics?’ ”

According to NCAA rules, coaches can have only 20 hours per week of hands-on involvement with players.

The reality is that players are expected to put in considerable time on their own, making it closer to the commitment required for a full-time job, as Northwestern’s players contended.

“A quarterback can’t play college football at a high, high level at 20 hours per week,” Meyer said. “He’s got to do it on his own. I think it’s a great rule. Players, just like coaches, can decide to be great. If they’re watching the hours, punching the clock and saying, ‘I’m done at 20 hours,’ you probably have a pretty average player.

“Coaches created that (20-hour) rule (because) if you give us 40 hours, we’ll keep them 40 hours. And they still have to take care of their academics.”

As a general rule of thumb, beware of people who drop “this great sport” homilies.  Can’t have players competing with coaches for shoe contracts, you know.

The Greatest Recruiting Story of Our Era

And all it cost Ohio State was a NCAA secondary recruiting violation.

Tuesday morning buffet

Clearing the decks, filling the chafing dishes…

• Is Brendan Langley looking at a chance for some redemption in the bowl game?
• At least 12 bowl games have peddled deep-discount seats on Groupon, LivingSocial or Goldstar in recent years.
• “Ball and McClendon managed, and so did Georgia’s offense.”
• Breaking down Auburn’s rushing attack.
• ESPN does a Gator Bowl roundtable with its Georgia and Nebraska bloggers.  It doesn’t sound like they have much more of a grasp on what’s gonna happen than we do.
• How come nobody told me Nick Marshall has a football playing cousin named Quez Mahoganey?
• So did Corch want to hire Chad Morris or not?
• For Mike Bobo, “Interviewing elsewhere could lead to another boost in salary, if not taking over a program of his own.”  Either way, it sounds like Greg McGarity will probably have to raise the budget for the coaching staff.
• Of course they did.

Random recruiting tidbits

No, this ain’t about which members of the 2014 recruiting class are headed to Athens.  You should know me better than that by now.  It’s just three random stories I thought I’d share:

• At ESPN RecruitingNation, Jeremy Crabtree has a good story about how the new NCAA academic requirements are affecting JUCOs.  He actually describes a thoughtful NCAA process behind the new rules – unlikely, I know – and while that’s commendable, I have this feeling that the JUCOs are going to game some of that with good old-fashioned grade inflation.  It will be interesting to see how much impact these rules have on D-1 schools that have come to rely on talent injections from the junior college rankings.
• The AJ-C‘s Michael Carvell asks the SEC for an interview about its reaction to the Butch Jones loophole story and gets a statement instead.  The statement is about as empty as you’d expect at this point, since Jones hasn’t actually done anything yet.  Will this become next year’s big story at the SEC spring meetings?  Stay tuned for signing day and we’ll see.
• By all accounts, Virginia’s run under Mike London has underwhelmed, to say the least, culminating in a terrible 2-9 2013 season.  He’s coming back for what I consider to be one of the weakest reasons to keep a head coach, to save a good recruiting class.  (Virginia right now is the only team with commitments from two of the top twelve recruits in the country.)  But that’s not what I find interesting.  This is:  “But several programs, most notably Alabama and Ohio State, have continued to recruit Blanding and Brown in recent months, trying to convince the two prospects that London could be gone next season, according to two people involved in the Tidewater recruiting scene who have spoken to college assistant coaches still pursuing Blanding and Brown. They were granted anonymity in order to speak freely.”  I am shocked, shocked to hear that Saban and Corch practice negative recruiting tactics.  And here I thought Alabama and Ohio State were such good programs that they sold themselves.

The saddest thing I saw yesterday.

Sometimes, a man just wants to be left alone with his mediocre pizza after losing a shot at the national title.

There’s a Papa Johns commercial lurking somewhere in there, Corch.

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UPDATE:  Delicious.

Wednesday morning buffet

Hungry?

• There is a Chris Conley-Georgia Tech-Dragon*Con joke lurking somewhere in this story, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna be the one to make it.
• On the other hand, I think we all know this is something else Mark Richt has lost control of.
• Another tale of amateurism:  “To be honest,” he said, “I didn’t feel like I was doing nothing wrong.”
• Can you guess the only SEC head coach who wasn’t employed when he was hired for his current gig?
• How smarmy is Urban Meyer?  Smarmy enough that I can’t mock a John Feinstein column related to college football.
• Now this is some world-class trolling.
• Shilling for himself in South Carolina, Rick Perry makes a funny about TAMU failing to beat Missouri.  Well, I’m sure somebody thought it was funny.
• And here’s Athlon’s list of college football’s 20 worst coaches at great programs.  Georgia has fewer on the list than Alabama, Florida, Notre Dame or Southern Cal.
• Loran Smith has a nice write-up of the Georgia Tech game.

They’re good kids. Really, they are.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Corch elects not to suspend two of his players who were ejected for fighting in the Michigan game for the Big Ten championship match.  That puts the ball squarely in the hands of Jim Delany.  If enabling Jim Tressel to take his team to the Sugar Bowl in the wake of Tatgate is any example, I’m sure he’ll do the right thing.

Flawed BCS? Corch is just sayin’.

You gotta love the way Urban Meyer calibrates the validity of college football’s national title format.

“Without spending much time on it, because it’s not fair to our team for me to spend much time on it, I will say this — I think it’s a flawed system,” Meyer said Monday. “But when you logically think about what the BCS people have done, and which obviously we’re all part of, I think it was great for a while. I think you take an imperfect system and you do the best you can without hosting a playoff.”

Gee, “great for a while”?  I wonder when that was.

Flash back to Florida, 2006. Ohio State coach Jim Tressel was known as “Senator,” but “Mayor” Meyer was no political slouch.

It remains a somewhat sore and squishy subject, but Meyer became embroiled in BCS politics in 2006 when, as Florida coach, he made waves by saying before the final polls came out that the national championship game should not be a rematch between Ohio State and Michigan.

“A rematch would be unfair to Ohio State, and it would be unfair to the country,” Meyer said. “I just don’t believe that’s the thing to do. How do you tell Ohio State they have to go beat the same team twice? (Michigan) had their chance,” Meyer said the day after No. 1 Ohio State narrowly defeated No. 2 Michigan 42-39.

Yes, those were happier times, when college football was being fair to all of us.  But those days are gone, evidently.  At least we’re getting a new playoff system, though.  That ought to bring some satisfaction to Corch, right?  Well, at least until Ohio State’s outside looking in again.

“I imagine there’s going to be controversy with the playoffs too, now. It’s not a 64-team playoff; you can only have four guys. What’s that fifth team going to feel like?”

I’m sure he’ll let us know when it happens to him.

No big deal

You know, for a guy who claims to be easily offended by the on-field actions of another head coach…

“That wasn’t right,” Urban Meyer said in his recently released biography, “Urban’s Way,” about the celebration. “It was a bad deal. And it will forever be in the mind of Urban Meyer and in the mind of our football team. … So, we’ll handle it. And it’s going to be a big deal.”

… ol’ Urbs is no shrinking violet when it comes to pulling off the occasional dick move of his own.  (h/t The Wiz of Odds)

When Urban Meyer called timeout to challenge the ball spot of Allen Robinson’s fourth down reception in the third quarter, Bill O’Brien could only stare down Ohio State’s sideline.

The timing of the challenge called into question the Buckeyes’ approach to their ultimate 63-14 blowout of the Nittany Lions on Saturday. At the time of Robinson’s initially called fourth down conversion, Ohio State had been up 49 points.

“The timeout to challenge the spot? He didn’t think we had a first down, so he called a timeout to challenge it. I have no thoughts on that,” O’Brien said after the game.

Maybe O’Brien will write a book about it one day.  Or at least call a few late time outs the next time Penn State is on the winning side of a Buckeyes game.

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UPDATE:  From Matt Hayes -

Let’s not get confused here. What Meyer did wasn’t running up the score. It was much worse.

What he did was tell the 65 scholarship players at Penn State—a team with 20 less scholarship players than his own, and a team that has lived hell the last two seasons through no fault of its own—that a 49-point humiliation wasn’t disheartening enough. You’ve had the worst night of your life, young men.

And now I’m going to make it worse.

I called or texted 10 BCS coaches in the last few days, and each made it a point to say that Meyer’s decision had nothing to do with running up the score. Pouring it on, they all said, is leaving starters in the game.

Meyer had his starters out midway through the third quarter.

“That wasn’t running up the score,” said one BCS coach. “That’s being a (expletive deleted).”

For once, I’m not sure what “expletive deleted” means there.  Too many possibilities…

Stay tuned for that next Urban Meyer press conference.

Gee, I wonder what they’ll be asking Corch about this weekend.

In the new issue of Rolling Stone, contributing editor Paul Solotaroff delivers a detailed investigation into Aaron Hernandez’s life, tracing his path from affable high school football star to deeply troubled NFL player to murder suspect. Solotaroff conducted interviews with family friends, high school teammates and NFL sources to help explain why the potential NFL great was ensnared by drugs, guns and a life of violence. Here are five revelations about Hernandez from “The Gangster in the Huddle”:

… In college his coach (then-University of Florida head coach Urban Meyer) may have helped cover up failed drug tests, along with two violent incidents — an assault and a drive-by shootout outside a local bar.

Granted, “may have helped” covers a lot of speculative ground.  But, hey, isn’t that what pressers are for?

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UPDATE:  Really, Rolling Stone, is this all you’ve got?

“We didn’t hear that story till much, much later – the police didn’t file a report,” says a local reporter who was covering the team. As a sophomore, Hernandez was benched for the season opener, meaning he’d likely failed drug tests over the summer. But Meyer denied it, saying he “wasn’t ready to play,” again giving cover for bad behavior. “Meyer kept us at such a distance,” says the reporter, “or flat-out lied, that we couldn’t verify a pot suspension.”

Sounds like somebody who sat in Seat 37F.