Fuzzy Math

So this week the NCAA allowed for two new bowls.

The St. Petersburg Bowl and the Congressional Bowl have been added to bring it to a whopping 34 bowls

68 teams out of 120 (Go Western Kentucky Hilltoppers)

Yes... that is over50% of your teams that will be playing in a bowl this year.

Now say that you take away 1-AA victories as wins that count towards bowl eligibility.

It would be mathematically impossible with the 6 win minimum for a bowl for all the teams necessary to fill all the bowl slots as you have to have as many losses shelved out as wins.

Awesome. It's like getting the snow cone after the baseball game even though your team was run-ruled in the second inning.

Not that that happened to me ever. I ruled and took the losers' snow cones and wimmuns.

Suck It, Bobby!!!

Man!

The En-See-Aye-Aye has said heck no to Arkansas' Bobby Petrino's request to allow Ryan Mallet to skip that whole pesky sit-out-a-year-for-transferring rule.

Anything you've heard about the weeping and lamenting in Fayetville may or may not be true.

Fight on Ben

Mauk was denied his appeal for a 6th year of eligibility.

But yet again fighting against the man.... Mauk will seek to go to the next level up to appeal.

Stick it to the man, Ben. Stick it to 'em

Meeting of the Minds

The transcript from the meeting of the BCS Commissioner in south Florida

Mike Tranghese - Big East
Dan Beebe - Big 12
Mike Slive - SEC
Kevin White - ND Athletic Director
John Swofford - ACC and BCS Commissioner
Thomas Hansen - Pac 10
Jim Delany - Big 10




JS: Hey guys thanks for getting together again this year. Great year all around for everybody. Mike nice championship. Two in a row for you.

MS: You're @#$% right nice year. The SEC rules all.

JS: Calm down, calm down... ok ok. Old Business?

KW: Yes. We talked last year about changing some of the revisions to get Notre Dame into the BCS more easily...

JS, MS, DB, JD, TH, MT: ... grumble grumble grumble.............

KW: ... well I think we need to change it more.

JS: Why the heck do we need to do that?

KW: Well we got left out this year.

DB: You guys won 3 games man... what do you expect?

KW: We're Notre Dame. We're the definition of...

JS: We'll talk about it later Kev.

KW: OK... but don't forget like last year.

JS: We won't. OK new business?

MT: I would like to make a motion. I want to kick out you, John, and Jim Delany

JD: What? Why?

JS: That's ridiculous Mike. Why would we do that?

MT: Well.... we're still pissy about the whole raid of Virginia Tech and Miami thing.

JS: Mike that was over five years ago man.

MT: And our only good coach left for Jim's league to Michigan

JD: That's not my fault.

MT: I don't care. I'm tired of sucking. We've sucked for too long. It's somebody else's turn to start sucking for a while. Why not the Big 10. They've sucked up their last four BCS appearances. Or the Big XII We beat OU. Yeah let Dan for a while now. He's the rookie.

JS: It doesn't work like that. Maybe y'all need to get some more competitive teams. Kevin, I don't get why you guys can't just join up like in the other sports.

KW: We're Notre Dame. We don't need a league. We'd dominate the East. No question.

MT: Y'all sucked last year. We won our BCS game against Oklahoma. You won three games and lost to Navy for the first time in forever.

JS: OK we'll talk about that one later to guys. Let's talk about the elephant in the room.

BCS.
Controversy.
Playoffs.
Plus-one.

All: ... ... ...

JS: Come on guys you have to talk about it this year. They said we would and I have to say something to the reporters.

Jim, Thomas have y'all made any head way.

JD: #$@$#%$#% you and #@$%$%$ your @$#@$% playoffs. Rose Bowl or bust &^%^*%.

TH: Yeah. What he said!

DB: Guys come on you have to at least talk to us about this... why not?

TH: The Rose Bowl stays. It is the Grand Daddy of them all.

DB: Look guys, I know you hate losing the match up but we all have to at one point or another. It's just part of the deal. We didn't get to be in the Fiesta Bowl for two years there. It's just a part of trying to find the best teams.

JD: The Pac 10 and the Big 10 are the best teams.

MS: Y'all have two championships this decade guys.

TH: 2003 counts.

MS: Like heck it does. LSU won that fair and square.

TH: The AP says otherwise.

MS: The AP also has Pitt ranked before the start of the season

MT: Hey!!! What's wrong with that!

DB: Shut up Big Least.

JS: Calm down calm down guys. Come on. Now look. This is why we have to figure this out. All the arguing and fighting has to stop. We set up a solid system and this stuff goes away.

KW: I'll only accept a plus-one/playoff if ND is guauranteed an invite.

JS: We can't do that Kevin.

KW: Why?

JS: Is it fair if we invite a 0-12 Notre Dame over a 12-0 Boise State?

DB and KW: Yes!!!

KW: Dan... why do you care.... oh yeah. Forgot about that.

DB: Shutup.

JS: Stop it all of you. Am I going to have to call Myles again.

All: No sir.

JS: Good. Now seriously. We've got to decide on something. We're taking too much heat.

Jim.
Thomas.

I need you guys to be serious and help us out here. We're going to have to be serious here and have some intelligent discussion. Playoffs. ABC. Rose Bowl. Breakup.

JD, TH: (begin singing) We shall be free.... We shall be free. So stand straight, Walk proud, 'Cause we shall be free.

(JS begins crying quietly)

DB: How about we keep the Rose Bowl and the match up, but just make it a part of the playoffs?

JD: The Rose Bowl is the MNC each year.

MS: No it's not, man. It hosts the MNC game once every four years like every other Bowl.

JD: No it's the MNC.

TH: He's right.

JS: (wiping his tears and speaking through a broken voice) Let's just bump it to next year.

sob..

sniff...

JD: Anything else wainch?

NH: Yeah got got something else to say?

JS: No. Good meeting.... See you guys.... sniff... sob... next year.

(Delaney and Hansen slap each other on the back and walk out for a night of bar hopping and loose living. Swofford curls into a ball continues crying.)

KW: Wait what about the BCS and the...

MT: Not this year man... next year maybe... next year.

DB: Are all the meetings like this?

MS: Well a lot of them involve some fighting so this was a relatively good one.

MT: You get used to the crying after a few years.

More Football Mandatorization.

Lawmakers are continuing to press College Football by bringing up more legal issue.

A couple of months ago we reported Georgia getting butthurt about getting left out of the MNC game.


I said something about if a whole group of schools get screwed over the course of a couple of years, government could do something about this. Well, they sped up the process (Thanks SI.com.

The three congressmen involved in the aforementioned SI.com article are Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., and Mike Simpson, R-Idaho.

Of course somebody from Hawaii, Georgia, and Idaho have no vested interest in seeing that changed whatsoever.

Westmoreland:

"We shouldn't have to argue about who the champion is," Westmoreland said, citing the excitement and unpredictability of the NCAA college basketball tournament. "That should be decided on the field."

Never mind that Georgia didn't win their conference, nonetheless their division. Give us our shot dangit! Wait... What we did during the season wasn't good enough?

These threats have been going on for a while now and someday they may stick, but till then, Myles Brand, don't worry too much.

NCAA = Teh Wainches

Like clockwork, the *(&^%!@# NCAA steps in to ruin all things normal and fun. The hammer that is Myles Brand has said that the football teams that will be part of the "Gridirion Bash" concert series would violate some sort of NCAA policy.

What policy you ask?

Who the foxtrot knows?

Wait, wait...

Here it is:

“We never expressed any concern with the actual event being conducted as scheduled,” the NCAA said in a written statement, “but only with the participation of student-athletes as part of the for-profit event.”

According to the NCAA, MSL wanted to use the appearance of football players as part of the event, and did not want to require athletes to pay admission. Both would have violated NCAA rules

Holy crap? Y'all have a problem with the schools making money off of students popularity? The same organization that allows for tickets to sell for thousands of dollars and doesn't mind taking a chunk of that every single week of the season has a problem with football players seeing a concert for free? Completely understandable.

Crap, I have a problem with third and fourth string punters getting into the games for free. Most of them will never have to do anything on a gameday and they get a seat 10 times better than the one I paid for.

Just for fun

The Birmingham News ran an interesting piece detailing the pay of the commissioners of NCAA Division 1 Conferences.

At first thought before I even clicked I ranked what these guys would be making in my mind.

1. SEC
2. ACC
3. Big Televen
4. Big XII
5. Pac 10
6. Big East

Why? Everything is bigger in the SEC. They have the last 2 national championships in football and basketball. A huge fanbase as well as tons of national exposure across the board.

I figured the solid football of the ACC and dominance of basketball would drive that position's pay up.


Here are the actual results from the 2006 year:

Jim Delany
Big Ten $959,236

John Swofford
Atlantic Coast $759,971

Kevin Weiberg (since resigned)
Big 12 Conference $699,700

Britton Banowsky
Conference USA $558,618

Mike Slive
Southeastern Conference $545,129

Tom Hansen
Pacific-10 Conference $513,891

Mike Tranghese
Big East Conference $468,446

Craig Thompson
Mountain West Conference $377,740

Karl Benson
Western Athletic Conference $370,568

Yeah, you read that correctly. The commissioner of the most profitable and successful conference makes less than one of the mid-major commissioners. You also read correctly that Jim Delany makes almost a mil. You should hate your life right now.

OU to get 2005 wins back. What's that? Like 7?

It's not like there were that many wins to begin with, but OU has had its wins from 2005 restored.

If you don't remember they were stricken from the record by the hammer that is the NCAA because of Rhett Bomar and J.D. Quinn's receiving of paychecks for "working" at a car dealership. By working, of course, I mean not showing up or doing anything. They received well over a 10k between them for minimal hours worked.

What was awesome about the whole story is that it was broken on a Texas A&M message board months before ESPN or SI were on that one.


*** On a completely unrelated note, Myles Brand has been seen driving a new Beamer with a big red tag sticking out of the trunk.

Congress Calls Sports to Steroid Meeting. Again.

After the day long debacle that was Clemensgate, congress has decided to spend more taxpayer money talking about steroids.

This time the NCAA will appear as well. It hasn't been as monumental an issue for the NCAA as of late as it has for the big leagues. That's probably because kids have the bejeezus scared out them from Lattimer from The Program.

Big and Pac 10's are still the most important conferences. Evar. Really.

While I don't really care about playoffs and plus-ones and minus-threes a whole-whole lot. I do have a problem with the 10's. Well Televens. Well one ten and one elev.... screw it. You get the idea.

According to another CBS Sports Article they continue to do everything they can to block anything that stops a Big 10/Pac 10 Rose Bowl. Even if it means creating an abortion of a game.

I love tradition in college football. Gosh I love it.

Sometimes, however, it has to change. Tribes sue. Bonfires fall (not to make light of the tragedy at all.) Conferences change teams. The 10's need to realize this.

The rest of the conferences are wanting something more legitimate to name a champion and Delany and Hansen continue to be a road block

Two (Pac-10's Tom Hansen and Big Ten's Jim Delany) are dead set against a plus-one, which to some seems to be the next logical evolution of the BCS..

My problem lies with this. Between the two conferences, three "outright" champions exist in the last 20 years. Three. USC, Michigan, and Ohio State each have an outright "we won it and nobody else" championship. Only two of those are in the BCS era and Ohio State's is still a questionable one. It's not like they have the corner on the market of dominating teams today.

I'm personally a fan of the four other commissioners (Big East, Big XII, ACC, SEC) and Myles Brand huddling together at the convention start whispering while Delany and Hansen sit there outside of the huddle trying to listen in.

The huddle breaks. Myles walks over and puts his hands on DeHansny's shoulders and says "We've decided to go another direction," and kick them both in the junk. Really. That would be awesome.

The blame game.

Since the NCAA last week announced that they had planned a few change of rules the CFB Blogosphere has been pretty adamant against it.

SMQ
The Wizard of Odds
EDSBS

The main thing talked about was the clock issues. The other things are fairly inconsequential except for maybe the facemask rule.

Here are the new rulings involving time:

The first is the implementation of a 40/25-second play clock, similar to that of the
NFL. At the end of every play, the 40-second clock will start, which is the rule in the NFL. The old college rules featured a 25-second clock that did not start until the officials marked the ball ready for play. On a change of possession, the first play will be run on a 25-second clock.

and

After a player runs out of bounds and the ball is made ready to play, the official will start the game clock. Under the old rules the game clock would not start until the ball was snapped. This new rule will not apply in the final two minutes of the first half and the final two minutes of the game.

You know the NCAA doesn't give a flying flip about if a game goes to long. It affects them in no way, whatsoever. The only people that are raising heck about this are the networks. We mean the big ones. What's going to happen to ESPN? They have to push back the repeat of Sports Center for 45 minutes?

What you have is the larger networks that want to get their three to three and a half hour games done and through in time to get to your reruns of Grey's Anatomy and evening news. I don't want those people to be denied their shows either. Personally, there hasn't been anything worth cutting away to on a Saturday night on network television since CBS dropped Walker, Texas Ranger. I digress.... (that's a whole other article)

That leads us to the elephant standing in the room that nobody wants to look at or talk about. Well at least the networks don't.

Our problem is that the networks wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have the millions tune in to see the big game see, all of their advertisements pop up on the field, get in all of the contractually-obligated commercials, have Grissom from CSI come up from the bottom and let me know that CSI has changed nights, hear the announcers tell us about how great Samantha Who? is going to be, get a great game in, spend 45 seconds on an intro coming back from the commercials telling us who this game was brought to us by (after having seen their commercials just 20 seconds ago, and hopefully end the game exactly in time to get us to our regularly scheduled program.

It just doesn't work that way. College football is the only television program where I can actually tell that they haven't run the new Dodge Nitro Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots enough times during the three hours. I swear, I've seen them cut away just to show it one more time (and only that commercial) just to make sure we saw how tough that new SUV is supposed to be. I can say with a straight face that I have seen that commercial 4 times in 5 minutes of commercials.

Now the networks want to point a finger at college football and tell them to shorten game times?

How about this if you really want to speed up the game:

- don't spend the first 30 seconds back from a commercial break telling me that the game was just brought to me by the same companies that I just saw the commercial of.

- don't tell me about the new soon-to-be Emmy winning 5 times in 3 hours. Let me decide if it's a hit new show.

- don't feel the need to cut away to commercials every time there's a fumble, time out, score, interception, big 3rd down coming up, punt, big first down play, or coach scratching his butt.

About this point in the post you should be thinking "That's true, but these games aren't shown for the passion of the fans and goodwill of the networks bringing it to us."

You would be right. It's about money and it always will be. I don't expect differently from a
sport that has a PapaJohns.com Bowl or a Jones SBC AT&T Stadium, or even the Rose Bowl... you know... presented by Citi. The blow to me is that every time I heard the MNC game referenced it was the Allstate BCS National Championship Game.

Money is why we have sports teams and that's OK. I know that we can't have the games on TV for free and that free tickets don't keep pads on the players.

The problem is that you can't regulate a game. You can't stop a QB from spiking the ball on a 2nd and 10 on the 15 with 20 seconds left. You can't stop a team from delaying to the last possible second to run a play when they hold the marginal lead with five minutes to play. Do you think the running back streaking down the sideline is going to think, "I'd better not step out... CBS needs to get to their next show?" Teams are going to do everything possible to get the win and if that involves making the game last an extra twenty-five minutes they are going to do it.

People have to make their money, but the networks are going to have to stop whoring themselves and the marketing department out to everything under the sun for extra pennies.

If the networks want this fixed they need to realize the same hand that is pointing the finger at the NCAA has four more pointing back at themselves.

FSU drops bomb, puts itself on 2 years probation

Saaaaaayyyy Jimbo, can you start this year?

FSU is putting itself on 2 years of probation for a cheating scandal throughout the program. This was seen in FSU's bowl game where they were missing 20+ players.

Wow. That sucks. Nothing to add here. No witty one-liners. Just a Torbush Wow.

NCAA considering changes

Apparently the NCAA is considering a host of rule changes.
(Thanks Wizard of Odds and EDSBS)

Those mentioned:

1. dropping the 5-yard incidental face-mask penalty
2. adjusting the "chop block" rule to make it easier to understand and enforce
3. giving the receiving team the option to taking possession at the 40-yard line after an out-of-bounds kickoff
4. eliminating warnings for sideline control
5. administering a 40-second clock to start play after a preceding play ends
6. starting the clock on a referee's signal after a play goes out of bounds
7. instant replay would be allowed on fumbles leading to immediate recoveries.
8. a coach who successfully challenges a play would get to keep a challenge.
   
9. penalty for so-called "horse-collar tackles."
10. defining helmet-to-helmet
    

There's a couple I'd like to talk about here in particular

Facemask

This one I'm kinda perplexed on. I like the idea of dropping the clearly incidental face-mask. I can't count the amount of times a guy has made a good tackle and his hand just was a tiny bit high, grazed the face-mask and is called for five yards. It leaves me cussing a lot in close ones. Even worse, sometimes that gets called for a ridiculous 15 yarder. So it's good to get rid of incidental but I think that we could see an increase in the penalty of the 15 yard variety. Those in-between calls will probably go to the way of the penalty as opposed to being dropped altogether.


Chop Block

Only to comment that this was probably discussed specifically because of Glen Dorsey last year. I have a feeling that the Miles/Tuberville feud will escalate.


Horse Collar Tackles

I hate the idea of this one. Just like I hated in the Pros. Roy Williams found an effective way that tons of people before him had to stop people from an angle. Are they trying to hurt people? No. It's just a way to catch a guy from behind and it's stupid. They shouldn't have done it for the clothesline, Shaq, or Williams and it's dumb to bring it to the college game.







Sideline Warnings
I don't like the warning. Refs should just penalize the team or coach for getting to close. Obviously let the coach get out there and chew the ear off of an official and talk. Just don't need put up with that crap.

The time warnings are the same thing they try to do every year... shorten the games. Nobody wants games shortened except networks. They can suck it.