First They Had No Mascot, Now They Have No QB

Late this afternoon, the NCAA denied Jermiah Masoli's petition to transfer to Ole Miss without sitting out a season.

First, read Mellencamp's entirely-too-hilarious-to-skip take.

Second, while I've got no regard to speak of for Houston Nutt or any team he happens to be coaching at the moment, this is another good example of the NCAA's institutional lack of reliability.  Was the grad-student transfer rule intended to facilitate playing time for guys who get kicked out of a program one week and jump to a different one the next?  Of course not.

Does that make it okay for the Mandarins of Indianapolis to apply that rule selectively, just because they think Nutt is a sleaze?  Nope.  Not even if Nutt is a sleaze (which he is).

Nutt, who got himself into this mess, deserves what he's getting; Ole Miss, which hired him, deserves it by extension.  But that still doesn't make it all either okey or dokey.   If the NCAA didn't want the rule to apply to booted-out program jumpers, they should have written it to say so--and not having done that, they should have followed the letter of the rule today, instead of following their subjective inclinations and denying Masoli's request.

UPDATE:  Tony Barnhart agrees.  Neal McCready REALLY agrees.

Double Shot Of PFD

Who says Pat Dye is congenitally conservative?  At age 70 (and pushing 71), he's starting on a new career as a columnist this year, with plans to pen three columns a week for the online edition of Inside The Auburn Tigers. 

Auburn long-timers will no doubt remember "The Dye-gest," a Dye column that ran in the front of the pre-internet, dead-tree version of ITAT from Dye's first season in 1981 until the NCAA nixed coaches writing in single-team-oriented publications in the late 80's.  I always figured either ITAT honcho Mark Murphy or then-Auburn SID David Housel did the actual writing back then, but that was pure speculation on my part.

At any rate, here's Dye's first column of the 21st Century, plus a related interview with Doug Segrest of the Birmingham News.  Both are particularly entertaining for Dye's (accurate) descriptions of Houston Nutt and Les Miles as "squirrely."

The Road Ahead

As most of you noticed a couple of months back, I've signed back on as a columnist with Rivals' AuburnSports.com site for this season. Part of the Rivals deal is for the Monday-morning post-game columns that originally started over there in 2001, and then moved here to From The Bleachers in 2004. If anybody's curious, that happened because the then-coaching staff didn't react well to being called out their multiple '03 screw-ups, and threatened to shut the Rivals guys out of the Auburn athletic department if they didn't drop my column.

But that's all water well under the bridge at this point, and I was happy to accept new AuburnSports honcho Jeffery Lee's invitation to return as a columnist this year. The downside of that for all of you is, my Monday columns will only be appearing at the subscriber-only side at Rivals.

However, Jeffery is offering a free first month's subscription (their usual intro deal is just a week) to any new subscriber who comes over from FTB. If you're interested, just head over to the Auburn Rivals site, sign up for a subscription, and forward a copy of your receipt email to mail -at- fromthebleachers.net. I'll touch base with Rivals from there, and you'll get your first month credited back.

Besides the Rivals gig, I'll also be participating in al.com's weekly Blogger Roundtable, and all of that content will be linked from here, and should remain free. For the first couple of bits I wrote for al.com, I've sent them considerably more traffic than they're sending me, so many thanks to all of you for tuning in and clicking over.

That's it for reading the bulletin this season. Now on to the fun part...

... And There Was Much Rejoicing

The M-Zone, where blogger Yost covered all things Michigan, went quietly into hibernation a couple of years ago. I was among the saddened legions when Yost hung up his keyboard, as M-Zone was far-and-away my favorite non-SEC blog.

But behold, the aggregation of asininity and failure known as Jim Delaney has at last succeeded at something: his proposal to move the Ohio State-Michigan game from the season-ender to October brought Yost back out of retirement, and the results are not pretty--at least not for Delaney.

Fair warning: this one has more f-bombs than Cee-Lo's new single.

H/T: Mellencamp.

It's Official: I Am The Light Bringer

Well, at least according to al.com, which kindly describes me as a "college football luminary" in plugging my contribution to their new Blogger Roundtable feature. I'll be answering a question or two there a week this season; here's a preview of the first edition:

Question No. 1: "We know Alabama fans are supposed to be worried about their special teams and non-Mark Barron safeties, Auburn fans about Cam Newton's accuracy and the depth in the front seven. But what unit or aspect of your team that's widely accepted as a-OK--or even above-average or excellent--has you secretly worried?"

Answer: I'm parting with Jerry pretty dramatically here, but I'm afraid the iron-spiked bowling ball known as Ben Tate will be a lot harder to replace than anybody thinks...

Click through for the rest.

So, All That Happened

Chaste Chadd sums up the last ten years of the SEC via Facebook (which, er, wasn't launched until 2004, but work with him, people).

It's good.

Heh

Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel had a few choice tweets this week regarding Ticketgate at UAT:

# Tix director was a Roads Scholar RT @ClayTravisBGID: Alabama misspells Mississippi on tickets

# In wake of spelling error, admission standards at Alabama to be raised. You now need a 23 on your alphabet

# To curb agent activity Nick Saban has banned runners, NFL scouts and the alphabet from campus

# Alabama thanks Penn State for sparing them full spelling of Pennsylvania; confused to discover San Jose earned statehood

An Unabashed Plug

It occurred to me this morning that I ought to post a modification of the rant just below regarding the poor state of sports coverage in the local papers.  Specifically, that occurred to me while reading Andy Bitter's account of Auburn's first fall practice of 2010.  As far the AU beat writers are concerned, if you ask me, there's Bitter (at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer), and then a long, long way farther down, there's everybody else.  He's head, shoulders, elbows, knees and feet above the rest.

If you haven't bookmarked or blogrolled Bitter's War Eagle Extra blog, do yourself a favor and grab it now.

Q & A at AL.com

Here's a brief email interview that Charlie Roberts of al.com's Tiger's Corner blog conducted with Yours Truly. I appreciated Charlie's request, but have to note that my full response to the last question was cut out of the published interview.  Here's the unedited version:

TC: Getting away from Auburn: Why is most mainstream college football coverage so mediocre (to be charitable)? What can we do to fix it?

There's a lot of blandness and sameness in today's media coverage.  You read pretty much the same things no matter where you look, and that goes for the major media websites as well as the newspapers.  Part of that is not your--the media's--fault; access is so controlled these days that it's difficult for anybody to get quotes or stories that everybody else doesn't also have.  But I have to say that the quality of both the analysis and writing is not what it ought to be, and it appears to me that there's a lot of fear of bucking convention and the popular view of the moment.  Newspapers are in a terrible business situation, and I suspect there's a reluctance to irritate the subscribers they still have left.

I don't expect every newspaper sports writer to be a modern Clyde Bolton, but I have less interest in reading newspaper stories or columns than I've ever had in the past.  One reason is that almost all of the material is written by guys who went to journalism school andhave followed pretty much the same career paths as every other newspaper employee over the past fifty years.  There's a we've-always-done-it-this-way guild mentality, and I think that model is just worn out.

[Deleted section] To put it bluntly, why should I slog through the same old beat writer reports when I can read Jerry Hinnen at War Blog Eagle? Why spend time reading the umpteenth pseudo-Paul-Finebaum opinion column when I can read Orson Spencer Swindle Hall Mellencamp at Every Day Should Be Saturday? Why bother with by-the-numbers analysis when there's Matt Hinton at Dr. Saturday, who's not only a better analyst, but also a better writer than anybody in the local paper?

I can certainly understand al.com choosing to edit out criticism of its affiliated newspaper writers, but I also think they're proving my point by doing so.  I'm also sorry that the links to War Blog Eagle, EDSBS and Dr. Saturday didn't get passed on to their readers.

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