Category: NCAA Football

After Last Night

But before today’s games.

LSU is undefeated.
Alabama lost only to LSU 9-6 in OT.
Oregon lost only to LSU 40-27 in first game of season.
Arkansas lost only to #3 Alabama 38-14.
Stanford lost only to #4 Oregon 53-30.
Virginia Tech lost only to #7 Clemson.

Clemson, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Boise State all lost to an unranked team.

Houston is undefeated.

Everybody else has lost at least twice.

How would you seed the playoffs?

Letter to a Coach

Coach Saban,

First off, let me say you have a fine, fine football team. The running game and the defense are just fantastic. I’ll make this quick because you’re busy. Tuscaloosa probably has a part of town where Latinos are concentrated. If not Tuscaloosa, then certainly Birmingham. In that part of town there will be a makeshift soccer field, or maybe even a real soccer field. On this field you will find children of all ages for whom kicking a ball is easy, second nature, and who haven’t lived lives steeped in American collegiate football lore and therefore wouldn’t be super-duper nervous if asked to kick a weird-shaped ball through uprights that to them would seem a gaping target. After you’ve chosen your boy, explain that he will receive a college education at one of the top 100 state universities in the nation if a few dozen times a year he kicks the weird ball through the uprights for you. There may be a moment of confusion when the boy thinks he has to actually hit one of the uprights with the ball, and then when he realizes he merely has to kick it anywhere between the uprights, both of you will laugh, and laughter knows no borders.

John Brandon, Grantland

Arizona Makes a ‘Difficult Decision’

I would have said, Arizona Finally Makes a Difficult Decision, but never mind.

Pre-Snap Read takes a look at Arizona’s firing of eighth-year football coach Mike Stoops.

“There’s clearly more to it than just wins and losses, even if that’s always – always, always – the ultimate motivator behind a coaching move, particularly one that occurs in October, halfway through a season. When it comes to another quote from Byrnes, you can read between the lines as you will: ‘I think (Kish will) create a culture of calmness, which is probably a good thing for us.’

“Red, redder, reddest: that’s Stoops, or that was Stoops, along the sidelines as Arizona’s head coach.”

The school has to pay Stoops $1.4 million.

Exactly

Arizona at USC — 37-14, 37-10, 56-31. Arizona’s past three games. The Wildcats are the 14 and the 10 and the 31. And another loss coming up, at USC. Finished last season with five straight losses, three of them blowouts, did the Wildcats. At some schools, coaches build credit they can ride through tough times by winning a national or conference championship. In Tucson, apparently, an 8-5 season earns you that credit. Before two of those eight-win gems, Mike Stoops went 5-7, 6-6, a couple 3-8’s, maybe even a 2-10 way back there. Is this guy’s seat finally hot? Or hot again? Or genuinely hot? I’m asking. I don’t hear much news out of Arizona and I’ve spent two days of my life in Tucson — saw the Mission San Xavier del Bac, then built up an appetite walking around campus, and then relented to that appetite at one of the finest Outback Steakhouses I’ve ever been to. Let’s take this hot-seat talk in a different direction. If the Arizona athletic department doesn’t care about the football team, hire a head coach who needs the money. Hire a guy with two 11-dollar-an-hour jobs and four kids. This is a chance to help someone, to transcend sport. You can still hire regular assistant coaches to install their systems and call plays. Down South, we honestly don’t see much of a difference between losing most of your games (41-48, the Internet tells me) and losing all of them.

John Brandon: The Week in College Football – Grantland

This alum frankly doesn’t see much of a difference between losing most of your games and losing all of them either. And the record is more like 34-48 because beating Northern Arizona five times and Stephen F. Austin and The Citadel don’t count for much.

Best line of the day

“A few strokes before midnight Sunday, a motorcycle policeman turned on his red and blue lights and led four Oregon Ducks buses from Arizona Stadium to the airport.

“It was the only time all night that anything red and blue had a step on the Ducks.”

Greg Hansen, Tucson Arizona Daily Star

Red and blue are Arizona’s colors.

Arizona has gone 63-84 since its 12-1 season in 1998.

It can always get worse

So some kid carrying twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system was driving the UNM football coach’s SUV when arrested yesterday. He said he was a recruit, but it appears he was possibly just a friend of the coach’s son. Whatever.

He was driving through the football game crowd when stopped. Not that he could have done any harm there — it was the smallest crowd at a New Mexico home game in 19 years. (They lost to a FCS school, Sam Houston State, in OT 45-48. Now 0-4.)

Meanwhile the most recent former UNM coach, Rocky Long, was coaching the San Diego State Aztecs in front of 110,707 at Ann Arbor.

Didn’t Sam Houston State used to be Sam Houston Institute of Technology?

Update: The 19-year-old was charged with aggravated DWI, minor in possession of alcohol, reckless driving and driving without a license.

The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos)

Nate Silver on The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos)

Surveys find that about one-quarter of the United States population, or between 75 and 80 million people, follow college football regularly. But which teams do they align themselves with?

This question is not easy to answer, but we’re going to make an effort to resolve it, and then use the results to shine a light on college football’s increasingly complicated realignment picture.

Did you know?

That the NCAA requires student-athletes to sign over all future licensing rights? And that those rights reportedly generate around $4 billion a year for the NCAA? And that the athletes whose likenesses and names are used earn nothing?

Some former athletes are suing, but it’s about time the NCAA was dismantled.

Best line of the day

“For more than a decade, Ohioans have viewed Tressel as a pillar of rectitude, and have disregarded or made excuses for the allegations and scandal that have quietly followed him throughout his career. His integrity was one of the great myths of college football. Like a disgraced politician who preaches probity but is caught in lies, the Senator was not the person he purported to be.”

Sports Illustrated investigation on Jim Tressel, Ohio State

“Says the former colleague, who asked not to be identified because he still has ties to the Ohio State community, ‘In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids who had probably saved up money from mowing lawns to buy those raffle tickets. That’s Jim Tressel.’ “

Best line of the day

“Looked at that way, players who are compensated beyond what the NCAA thinks is correct are simply finding a way to get paid for their work. This should surprise nobody. Time and again, the ‘amateur’ concept – a foul vestige of the British class system — has failed in this country because it is unsustainable in a nation that believes, even today, and even in Wisconsin, that hard work should return a fair wage. It was unsustainable in golf and in tennis. It was even unsustainable in the Olympics. It is unsustainable in college mega-sport as well. The only question is when the collapse will come, and how thorough the damage will be.”

Charles Pierce

Go read Pierce’s last paragraph, as good an assessment as you’ll read of college sports.

Today’s long reads

I don’t blog ’em if I haven’t read ’em.

The Kill Team

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them.

The Lost Boys

In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.

Fiesta Bowl scandal reminder that BCS system invites corruption

In an age of dwindling university budgets, the presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities outsourced the championship of their most lucrative sport to an organization that may have been involved in criminal activity.

But these new details prove that the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision presidents are venturing into downright reprehensible territory if they continue to support the bowls as a means to crown a national champion in football.

Real champions

If you like your college football to end in a real championship, consider the Football Championship School (FCS) playoffs which continue today.

Many of these games can be viewed at http://www.ncaa.com/allaccess/.

Western Illinois at Appalachian State
Villanova at Stephen F. Austin
Southeast Missouri State at Eastern Washington
North Dakota State at Montana State
Lehigh at Delaware
New Hampshire at Bethune-Cookman
Wofford at Jacksonville State
Georgia Southern at William & Mary

There are 125 FCS schools (and 120 Football Bowl Schools).

Villanova won the championship last year, Richmond in 2008, Appalachian State in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Line of the day

“On the next play, [Kansas] gave the ball to Sims again, and this time he broke through the [Colorado] line, scored from 13 yards out. The Jayhawks were down 45-24. There was 11:05 left. They had their consolation touchdown. I turned off the radio.”

Joe Posnanski

But that was just the first of four Kansas TDs in six minutes. And then they got one more and won, 52-45.