Monday, June 21, 2010

Making Defenses Look Stupid, One Play At A Time

This much-linked instructional video on Malzahn-ball from Offensive Musings is... pretty awesome.  Check it out:

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Oily Irony

As noted here a few weeks back, long-time Birmingham News mediocrity and certified Nick Sucker Ray Melick recently left both the paper and the newspaper business.  In an example of irony worthy of Biff Henderson's Realm of Mystery, it turns out Melick's new job is... spokesman for British Petroleum.

Really, it wasn't that much of a career change for old Ray.  One on the one hand, you've got a steady gig as an apologist and booster for an oily, dishonest and generally disreputable megalomaniac... and on the other, you get to be the mouthpiece for BP.

Looks pretty good on him, now that I think about it.

New At Rivals

I have another new column up at AuburnSports.com, this time regarding the recent spate of conference expansion madness.  It's on the subscriber side, but here's a preview:
First of all, what the heck are we supposed to call all these Conferences Run By People Who Can't Count? 
"Pac Televen" is an easy one, but what about the others? The Big 10 now has 12 teams and the Big 12 has 10. 
Wouldn't everybody's lives be easier if they'd just mutually swap all their t-shirts and banners and stationary? Or maybe the Big XII-Minus-II should just revert back to the old Southwest Conference moniker, since they're now all but formally Texas And A Bunch Of Texas' Rivals.
It's enough to drive one to drink-assuming, of course, that one stopped drinking beforehand.

Monday, June 14, 2010

More "Journalism" From ESPN

Here's ESPN SEC blogger Chris Low, in (admittedly) a nice-ish column about the 2004 Tigers:

After all, go back and check how many times over the past two decades that an SEC team has run the table with an unblemished record.


The answer: Four.


Alabama did it in 1992 and again last season. Both were national championship clubs. Tennessee did it in 1998 and also won the national championship.


The fourth was Auburn in 2004.
Um, Chris, that number is actually five.  The fifth undefeated team was Auburn, in 1993.  You may recall hearing a little something about that.

Sheesh.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Rivals Redux

I'm very happy to announce that I'll be returning to the AuburnSports.com site at Rivals.com as an opinion columnist this season. We haven't worked out the frequency of the new columns yet, but there will be at the very least a new column the Monday after every game, and additional columns as situations merit (I'll also continue to blog about Auburn and the SEC here at FTB--this site isn't going anywhere).

One situation that merited comment is today's announcement of NCAA sanctions against Southern Cal, including the forfeiture vacating of all USC's games from the 2004 season the 2005 Orange Bowl. At the request of AuburnSports honcho Jeffrey Lee, I wrote up this column on the retroactive impact (if any) of those forfeits the vacation (insert Go-Go's joke here) on the 2004 Auburn Tigers.

Short version: I don't care.

UPDATE: Now that the actual sanctions report is out (as opposed to the early reports from ESPN, some of which turned out to be erroneous), I've corrected the column accordingly.