The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

Gaze, if you will, on this bit of football-season-hurry-up-and-get-here awesomeness from the Gainesville's Sun's Pat Dooley. 

Then try and peel yourself off the ceiling when you realize we've still got a month of off-season to go.

Cross-Posted

After typing in this comment to Tony Barnhart's bit on the Football Writers Association of America thing today, it occurred to me that I should have just posted it on my blog.  So here it is:

As an Auburn grad, I have to say that I don’t want it. Not because the team wasn’t deserving–it certainly was–but because I’m not interested in preserving the myth of poll-generated “championships.” The collected opinions of a bunch of media employees, whether here or in the AP or Harris polls (don’t get me started on the SID–whoops, I mean “coaches poll”), aren’t worth a cup of warm spit to begin with, and they certainly don’t add up to a “championship.” I’d just as soon tell them where they can shove their fake championships, especially when they’re trying to make up for being idiots, six years too late.

And yes, I should have said, "having been idiots."  Sue me.

And, In The "Kiss Of Death" Department...

So a local organization here in Atlanta held a season kickoff banquet yesterday, featuring the in-state head coaches and a bunch of media figures.  The latter group didn't make the AJC's (typically minimal) coverage, but I understand from somebody who was there that ESPN cartoon character Lee Corso...

... picked Auburn to be 11-0 going into the final game in Tuscaloosa.

My reaction?

A Bold Prediction

Mike Bianchi will have three very interesting days this week while covering SEC Media Days in Birmingham.

Exodus: Pete Pelegrin

Check out this extraordinary kiss-off post from now ex-Miami Herald sportswriter Pete Pelegrin, who'd been assigned to cover Florida International sports, only to be repeatedly see his work spiked and/or ignored.

Big hat-tip to Jay Christensen for giving me the the heads-up on this one.  Like Jay said to me in an email, read it before they take it down (Jay's saved a copy at WizOfOdds in case of just such an event).

UPDATE:  Jay's prediction was correct; Pelegrin's post has been flushed down the Herald's online memory hole.

More Recommended Reading

My old buddy Lein Shory takes Stewart Mandel and the entire Poll-BCS-Media-Complex out behind the woodshed for a well-deserved beating.

Reprinting Mandel's over-the-top preview of the snooze fest known as the 2005 Orange Bowl was just gratuitously mean... and entirely appropriate.

Recommended Reading

Check out this excellent 2009 Auburn recap and 2010 projection from Team Speed Kills.

The only thing I'd add would be to note that the '09 defense's real problem was plan old depth, or rather a severe lack of it.  By the second half of the season, there just weren't any backups in the defensive backfield, thus playing the same three linebackers for entire games.  That led to an awful lot of second-half points, costing the Tigers leads (and games) against Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama.

With just a couple of role-players--not stars, mind you, just guys who could fill in for a series or two to spell the starters--at linebacker and safety, AU had a serious shot at finishing 11-2.  Without them, 8-5.  Whether they'll be there this year... well, we'll see.

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:

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.

The Truth Comes, Er, Out

The Onion reveals the secret behind the world's worst sport:


Soccer Officially Announces It Is Gay

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.

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.

Exodus: Ray Melick

Long-time columnist Ray Melick is leaving the Birmingham News, and apparently the newspaper business as well.

I was never much of a fan, but I wish him well.

The Banality of A-Day

Here's what's good about A-Day, or any other spring game: The weather is usually nice, and during the interminable off-season lull, fans to go on campus and see a somewhat-reasonable facsimile of football. And that's about it.

Every spring game is, by design, something of a bore. Coaches hate to show anything to anybody when they don't have to, and the tendency to turn spring games into demonstrations of distilled vanilla has only intensified since cable programmers with way too much air time to fill started televising them. So what you got in Auburn on Saturday was the same thing you got from every other big-program spring game: something that sort of looked like football, but really wasn't.

I know, I know, the message boards are alive today with speculation over whether Cameron Newton is a flop, whether Auburn should play it safe with Neal Caudle, or hand it over to Barrett Trotter, or just hang it all up and forfeit the season out of sheer ennui. Opposing fans, also with nothing better to do, are all a-twitter--literally so these days--as well, which all by itself is kind of funny. About the only thing more boring and pathetic than watching your own team's spring game is watching somebody else's.

To all of the above, I say: Get a grip, folks. It's just A-Day.

With one single exception*, no spring game has ever told anybody a meaningful thing about their football team. If you want to have a much better idea about the team, I suggest you sneak into the final, closed scrimmage this week (but don't tell the security guards I said it was okay)**. That's where the real offense and defense will be on display--very limited display--and where the serious decisions about the initial starting lineups will be made. The A-Day films have probably already been flushed down the digital memory hole as far as the Auburn staff are concerned.

Given the coach-mandated limitations and constant shuffling of the lineups on both sides of the ball, I hesitate to draw any specific conclusions out of the "game" that was "played" on Saturday. That's not to say that some individuals didn't impress. One thing you can't hide is speed, and Auburn should have plenty of that when the real thing starts in September. On defense, I liked the hustle from Nick Fairley and Antoine Carter and whoa-Nellie, Demond Washington. On offense the running back stable looks solid even before the freshmen arrive, and whoever the quarterback is in 2010, he should be able to look forward to having more than two productive wideouts; DeAngelo Benton and Quindarius Carr both stuck out.

As for quarterback, all four of them (apologies to Clint Mosely for not mentioning him above) looked good passing the ball. I really liked the dart Newton threw to Darvin Adams on his first possession, and the long bombs from Trotter to Terrell Zackery and Caudle to Carr, respectively, were the offensive highlights of the "game." But with the two-hand touch rule on the quarterbacks and no serious effort made to play at Malzahn Ludicrous Speed, anybody trying to eke out any serious conclusions from the A-Day offense (or defense, for that matter) is kidding themselves.

So, that's A-Day. Kind of fun, kind of dull, kind of like football. For the next four-and-a-half months, it'll have to do.

* Auburn message board readers are by now thoroughly sick and tired of me telling this story, but for the rest of you, there was exactly one meaningful play in the entire history of A-Day "games," and it happened in 1994.

In the '94 spring game, redshirt freshman Dameyune Craig led the second-team White squad against the first-team Blues. Immediately after taking his very first snap in an Auburn uniform, Craig had the ball swatted out of his hands by a defensive lineman (I've forgotten which one). The ball bounced off the turf, Craig grabbed it out of the air, and proceeded to run for his life towards the far sideline. Just inches away from going out of bounds, he pivoted on one foot and rifled the ball 40 yards down the field to hit an open receiver on the other sideline. The pass traveled 60 yards in the air, and I about lost my mind jumping up and down and screaming.

Craig's next pass went for a touchdown, and a legend was born.

** The last closed scrimmage was actually held last week. So never mind.

Recommended Reading

College Football News' Pete Fiutak, on ESPN's fat new contract with the BCS:

Over the past few years when Fox had the big bowls, I’d get a call or five every late September from various higher-ups making sure that CFN (who provides content for FoxSports.com) didn’t go over the top when commenting on the BCS. To be fair and thankful, no one ever told me or anyone else at CFN what we could and couldn’t write or tried to limit what we could say on TV and radio appearances. That was never a problem (outside of not commenting on some of the announcer teams) since we’ve made it a point to not get dragged down in all the “BCS Sucks” rhetoric (again, since the ranting goes nowhere), and there was never any discussion of what we could and couldn’t write and say when it came to the BCS chase and how the rankings were shaping up. Fire on the process and the system … not really. Go nuts on what was happening within the system … fine. It’s extremely doubtful that the ESPNers will get the same leeway and freedom.

ESPN is unabashedly about making money through entertainment, and that’s fine. However, the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader is to hard-hitting sports commentary what Tiger Woods is to Buddhism. Each throws out the idea of doing something noble in an attempt to distract from what they’d really rather be doing.

ESPN sticks the controversial discussions and the most in-depth pieces on at times when most stations are running test patterns and informercials. Why ruffle feathers when Keyshawn Johnson can do yet another enabling “interview” with a guy who doesn’t know that 85 in Spanish is ochenta y cinco? That’s no problem for 95% of the programming hours, but it’s a huge issue when it’s time to put on the big boy pants and examine the controversial items like steroids and HGH (a topic that ESPN has been embarrassingly inept at covering and shameful in its lack of integrity when it comes to delving into the question marks surrounding stars like Barry Bonds, Usain Bolt, Lance Armstrong, Albert Pujols, Michael Phelps, and any other athlete whose performances appear to be way too good to be true), or Ben Roethlisberger’s alleged transgressions (at least the first time around). And it’s also a problem when the job of the analysts is to be a major influence peddler for a sport that relies on the judges.

No, college football’s national champion isn’t really decided on the field. Boise State, Cincinnati, TCU, and 114 other teams had no chance whatsoever of playing for the title in 2009 if Texas and the Florida/Alabama winner went undefeated. None. It wouldn’t have mattered if the Bearcats beat everyone on the slate by 40 points. As long as the SEC champion and Texas were unbeaten, they were going to play for the national championship because the pollsters weren’t going to budge the top teams out of the top spots as long as they kept winning.

Read the whole thing. Extra kudos to Pete for also noticing an issue related to the preseason polls that we talked about here last year: for most of the poll voters, if a game doesn't get mentioned on ESPN, in their minds it didn't actually happen.

Theme Music

While catching up on the ridiculously-prolific Jerry's WarBlogEagle posts, I came across this photo of Cameron Newton:


... and the first thing that went through my mind was this riff:



Reminds me a little of the first time I laid eyes on Daunte Culpepper, in a homecoming game Auburn played against Central Florida many moons ago. I'd heard Culpepper's name before, when he signed with but failed to qualify for enrolling at Florida State, but I'd never actually seen any clips of him playing. UCF hadn't been on TV much (if at all) up to that point, so when they broke the huddle for their first offensive play, I locked on to that one huge dude and said to myself, "Self, that is the biggest damned tight end I've ever seen in my life."

And then he lined up at quarterback...

We Can't Repel Mockery Of That Magnitude

Chaste Chaddd got wind of Ole Miss's drive for a new mascot, and decided the rest of the SEC should probably get their own Star Wars characters as well. One of my faves on Chaddd's list:

MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY (Ewoks)



I remember some purists were upset that George Lucas used a bunch of three-foot furballs to help defeat the Empire in Return of the Jedi. Their reasoning was those little guys, cute as they were, wouldn’t stand a chance against a legion of battle-hardened Stormtroopers. But folks didn’t think Mississippi State had much of a chance against Ole Miss this year either, and how’d that turn out? That being said, State fans hate it when you pet them and try to take them home.

Personally, as much as I approve of the drive to replace Colonel Rebel with Admiral Ackbar (hey, Mississippi does have a coastline--just a really small one), if we were going for verisimilitude in mascots here, Ole Miss football would be accurately represented by one of these:

Da Noorlinzaints!

Under most circumstances, I couldn't possibly care less about the NFL. When I read Stewart Mandel's by-the-numbers recitation of the college football media's conventional wisdom a couple of years back, the only sections that stuck in my mind were Mandel's sharp-tongued rejection of the No Fun League and all its works. In those particulars, I agreed with everything Mandel wrote, right down to the punctuation (which I would quote here, if I hadn't misplaced my copy).

I've never had anything like a favorite NFL team. Like most Southerners, having to choose between the Falcons and the Saints was, for most of either franchise's history, kind of like choosing between Cholera or Bubonic Plague. With the exception of one giddy night in Buckhead eleven years ago, I can honestly say that I've never given a for rip my now-hometown team, and even after having lived in Atlanta for nearly a decade, you still couldn't get me to cross the street to watch the Falcons.

The story isn't all that different regarding the New Orleans Saints. Other than being selected as the "designated Saints fan" among a crowd of Americans when we all went to see New Orleans play Oakland in a London exhibition game twenty years ago (I drew the short straw thanks to my living closer to NOLA than anybody else at that time--but the Saints did win), I can't say I've ever followed the Saints, either.

All that said, I loved this piece by my old bud Lein Shory about the Saints, New Orleans, and the late "Buddy D," more formally known as Bernard Diliberto:

It was at LSU, probably while making the drive to New Orleans or back and forth from Birmingham, that I discovered the Buddy "Buddy D" Dilberto radio show. The Saints were terrible at the time, which always makes for better sports radio, and Buddy was leading the charge for the hiring of Mike Ditka. Ditka didn't work out so well, which continued to make for fun listening. I still vividly remember one caller, in absolute agony after another Saints debacle:

"I don't know what to do, Buddy, I don't know what to do," the fan said.

"There's not much you can do," Buddy said, "except go into the bathroom, lift up the lid, and throw up."

My wife and I moved to Kentucky after finishing at LSU, and it wasn't until we moved to Chicago that I found sports radio just as amusing as Buddy D's show. Every once in a while I could somehow pick up AM 870 (I think that was the channel) to get another taste of Buddy, and I was saddened to hear of his death in 2005.

I mourned Buddy D as well. In the days before internet streaming, before satellite radio, and before college football was something other than a one-day affair for ESPN, there were WWL out of New Orleans and WLAC out of Nashville. After dark, those high-powered AM stations were a college football fan's best friend. You could hear LSU or Tennessee games live on Saturday nights, and on the weekdays there were the call-in shows bursting with news and opinion about SEC football.

Buddy D's show, while usually geared more towards the Saints than LSU and the SEC, was still as entertaining as all get out--much more entertaining to me than the Saints games themselves. Buddy's roux-thick NOLA accent cut through the static, and virtually every sentence was punctuated with Buddy's two favorite words--"Da Noorinzaints!"

Sure, for anybody else that would be four words, but from Buddy, and from all the other lunatics down there in the curve of I-10, they were and ever shall be DA NOORLINZAINTS! The first thing I thought when I heard the Saints had won the last playoff game a couple of weeks ago was, "I wish I could hear Buddy D tomorrow."

So for you, Buddy, and for all the long-suffering fans of DA NOORLINZAINTS, my hat is off, and if I were ever to have a rooting interest in a Super Bore--uh, I mean, Bowl, this'll be the time.

Go Saints.

Small Blog World

By now, chances are you've seen this fascinating clip of the "negotiations" between associate athletic director Bud Ford (as far as I can tell, Ford is what we used to call a Sports Information Director) and the press regarding how ex-Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin's "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home!" statement would be covered by the media:



For reasons I don't pretend to understand--as somebody in the clip notes, Kiffin was no longer an employee of Tennessee, so why exactly the UT athletic department was helping to enforce his wishes at that point is a very open question--Ford was trying to mandate an off-camera statement followed by an on-camera statement.

The reporter on the right of the screen, often mis-identified in blogs and message boards as ESPN's Chris Low, was actually WBIR-Knoxville news director Bill Shory. Bill is also the brother of my old friend and Auburn classmate Lein Shory (yes, that's right, UT fans, Bill is originally from... Alabama. Sorry, Bill, hope that revelation doesn't make your life more difficult).

As you'll see if you watch the whole thing, Bill won the argument, as he should have. Knox (and Kiffin, for that matter) had no business putting restrictions on the media in that situation.

(Cross-posted to WillCollier.com.)