STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Penn State football coach Joe Paterno will retire at the end of the season, his long and illustrious career brought down because he failed to do all he could about an allegation of child sex abuse against a former assistant.
A source told ESPN's Tom Rinaldi that it was Paterno's decision to retire and that he has had no contact with the board. It is not yet known if this is adequate action in the board's eyes.
"I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case. I grieve for the children and their families, and I pray for their comfort and relief," Paterno said in a statement released just after initial reports of his pending retirement.
I don't have much else to say beyond the stuff that filled yesterday's mandatory outrage post. It hurts a little when we find out people aren't who we thought they were (insert Denny Green rant here). We feel cheated. Paterno is, by all accounts, a great man who's done little other than win a lot of football games, be a great leader of men and represent Penn State in squeaky-clean fashion for the past 50 years. But there was one thing he had to do in his life to stop something awful from happening, and he didn't do it; that'll always overshadow the rest. That's unfortunate but unavoidable when the effects (many years of could-have-been-stopped sexual abuse by his top assistant, specifically) are taken into account.
There's a great piece up on Grantland about what it means meant to grow up as part of the Penn State community. For everybody who believed JoePa (past-tense reference) was the perfect man, the larger-than-life-yet-still-a-common-man coach on the perfectly American small-town campus running the perfect program, the new image of Penn State football is one that's really hard to grasp (obviously).
These excerpts seems particularly poignant:
Sometimes we were guilty of regarding him as more deity than man, as if he presided over us in mythological stand-up form. He was as much our own conscience as he was a football coach, and we made that pact and imbued him with that sort of power because we believed he would wield it more responsibly than any of us ever could. Maybe that was naïve, but we came of age in a place known as Happy Valley and naïveté was part of the package, and now that word isn't in our dictionaries anymore. ...
Our leaders failed to cover, and while they deserve the benefit of due process, they deserve to be held accountable for whatever mistakes they made. If it means that this is how Joe Paterno goes out, then so be it; if it means that 30 years of my own memories of Penn State football are forever tarnished, then I will accept it in the name of finding some measure of justice. Every sane person I know agrees on this. ...
I don't know what it feels like to grow up there now. I want these things to disappear from my consciousness, but they won't. The place where I grew up is gone, and it's not coming back.
That middle portion is bolded for emphasis. Outside of the stupid brahs rallying outside Paterno's house Tuesday night singing "Sweet Caroline" -- a truly disturbing choice, BTW -- everybody realizes that this is what must be done because it's right, and doing what's right is more important than a coach's legacy. Anybody who doesn't realize that is making the exact same mistake Paterno made nine years ago.
Matt Millen might have been the most awful general manager in the history of sports, but I cede my last words (for now) to a guy who played at Penn State in the Paterno-Sandusky glory years and can put that aside to see the whole situation for exactly what it is:
Three days later, I finally have time to write about The Only Game That Mattered last weekend.
Alabama-LSU was the most (insert adjective here) game I've ever seen. You could call it "intense" or "dramatic" or "physical" or "full of crazy defensive plays that turned would-have-been-huge touchdowns into not-quite-as-huge field goals or nothing." The thing you could probably not call it: "great."
I mean, I have no problem calling it a great game in a competitive sense; we got arguably the two best teams in the country going to overtime to (probably) decide a spot in the BCS title game. That's awesome. Whether it was a great game is a slightly different matter. Dominant defenses plus overtime does not necessarily equal greatness. I guess it doesn't really matter whether the game itself was great according to my vague definition of the word, but there are some related things about the two teams that I'll get to momentarily.
Let's start with the defenses: They're both unquestionably dominant. There's a reason LSU and Alabama are at/near the top of the polls, and it's not because of spectacular quarterback play or really anything other than having defenses that just utterly suffocate people (not literally). As much as I laugh about Les Miles having the logical-thinking skills of a 5-year-old, he has John Chavis pumping out consistently elite defenses that are basically as good as Nick Saban's, which is saying something. Every stat out there (raw or advanced or any other type) says these are two of the 10-ish best defenses in the country. Stuff like this is just ridiculous:
That is so, so clutch.
As for the offenses ... gack. Even with defensive awesomeness taken into consideration, there are some things that are more or less defense-independent that neither team could do with much competency (completing passes to relatively open receivers, to be specific). About a month ago, Geno Smith threw for 463 yards as West Virginia put up 21 points and 533 total yards (!) against LSU; that's a lot. A.J. McCarron was reasonably efficient (16 for 28 at 7.1 yards per attempt) but was completely useless in any obvious passing situation Saturday night. And neither team hit four yards a carry despite having Trent Richardson on one side and the Spencer Ware/Michael Ford combo on the other. That has a lot to do with the defense but doesn't exactly demonstrate all-around TOUGHNESS POWER MANBALL DOMINANCE.
Also, Jarrett Lee is apparently still Jarrett Lee:
I was less surprised by the horrific back-to-back picks than I was by the immediate turn to Jordan Jefferson, who had taken basically zero meaningful snaps this season prior to that point. He ended up with 10 pass attempts and 11 carries, which says a lot about both the way the game went and the complete lack of faith everybody at LSU had in the passing game (for good reason). The safest way to avoid disaster is to avoid the possibility of disaster and let the defense do the rest.
Shockingly, neither guy is guaranteed much of anything at this point:
Miles is not naming a starter for Saturday night's homecoming contest against nearly six-touchdown underdog Western Kentucky. He says he expects both Lee and Jefferson to play throughout the remainder of the season.
While Lee has started every game and is 9-0 in that role this season, Jefferson took nearly 80 percent of the snaps in the top-ranked Tigers' 9-6 overtime victory over Alabama last Saturday night. Lee threw two interceptions in the game and never saw action after the second one early in the second half.
I'll be a little surprised if Jefferson doesn't get the nominal starting gig from here on out. I mean, yanking a guy after two bad throws and giving him no snaps the rest of the way doesn't exactly scream "you're still the guy," and it's hard to envision anybody having much confidence in Lee in a meaningful game given a track record that's filled with waaaay more disastrous plays than good ones. The fact that Jefferson can grab an extra 30-ish yards a game on the ground isn't insignificant.
On a related note, has any BCS-era team won a national title with a quarterback controversy-type thing? I don't think so*. Whether that'll end up mattering for LSU remains to be seen; it seems like having a decent passing game will be necessary at some point, but the defense might be awesome enough to make it a total nonfactor.
So ... rematch? I've been specifically avoiding everything with "rematch" in the headline for the following reason: Anybody who thinks they know enough to decide yes or no right now is an idiot. Both of those teams are very good and totally worthy of playing for the national title. Oklahoma State and Stanford are also very good. And Oregon played LSU arguably better than Alabama did despite losing by two touchdowns; it's not irrelevant that Oregon outgained LSU by 60 yards and gave up two scores directly off of fluky special-teams turnovers by DeAnthony Thomas in his first career game. That was also at a neutral site, whereas Alabama got LSU at home. I can't sit here and definitively say, "yup, those are the two best teams in the country." I still think they are, but that's, like, my as-of-today opinion, man ...
... and could easily change based on the results of Oregon-Stanford and Oklahoma-Oklahoma State. I just won't know until all the data is in; actually, I probably still won't know for sure, but at least I'll be able to base my opinion on more than just one game of questionable quality.
What's kind of irritating, though, is that it'll only matter if Oklahoma State and Stanford both lose. There's no scenario in which Alabama can play in the title game without a bunch of help, and that's a lame byproduct of a stupid polling system that requires an arbitrary drop after any loss, regardless of who it was against or by how many. Losing in overtime to the No. 1 team apparently equals a three-spot drop, which is dumb because it's not possible to do any better without winning. If Stanford/Oklahoma State/Boise/whoever could do better than that against LSU -- which is the logical comparison point for the teams ranked right behind LSU -- they should be No. 1 since they'd hypothetically beat LSU in regulation.
The polls are full of stupidly illogical unwritten rules like that. Argh. If you think they're the two best teams, put them at one and two on your freakin' ballot. If you don't, stop talking about a rematch until everybody you think is better proves themselves to be NOT better. Like I said the other day, it's really not as complicated as the voters make it. /rant.
One more thing about the game: LSU might not be historically dominant and might not play games I define as great, but there's no debate about resumes at the top of the polls. Beating Oregon at a neutral site, beating West Virginia (back when West Virginia was frightening) on the road and beating Alabama in Tuscaloosa gives LSU about two more legitimately impressive top-25(-ish) wins than anybody else in the country. They've earned their (probable) title-game spot the hard way.
*2008 Florida doesn't count since Tim Tebow's playing time was purely situational and Chris Leak was good.
I really want to write about LSU-Alabama but just can't avoid the Penn State thing, especially now that these probably-inevitable reports are coming in:
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Joe Paterno’s tenure as coach of the Penn State football team will soon be over, perhaps within days or weeks, in the wake of a sex-abuse scandal that has implicated university officials, according to two people briefed on conversations among the university’s top officials.
It's worth noting that Paterno's regularly scheduled Tuesday news conference was canceled, which makes sense given the fact that there wouldn't be a single question related to football but also serves to reinforce the NYT report.
I don't even know where to start with this mess. I've read a lot of stupid stuff and a lot of brilliant stuff in the last 24 hours, and none of it makes me feel any better about the disgusting actions of a bunch of powerful people at Penn State, with Jerry Sandusky taking "disgusting" to the nth degree.
Depending how closely you've been following the story, this chronology from the Associated Press might be of some informative value in establishing exactly what we're talking about here. I was going to blockquote it, but the list of appalling things is so long that it would double the length of this post. Just click the link if you want the full list. Here are a couple particularly awful excerpts from the grand jury report:
June 1999 — Sandusky retires from Penn State but still holds emeritus status.
Dec. 28, 1999 — Victim 4 is listed, along with Sandusky's wife, as a member of Sandusky's family party for the 1999 Alamo Bowl.
Fall 2000 — A janitor named James Calhoun observes Sandusky in the showers of the Lasch Football Building with a young boy, known as Victim 8, pinned up against the wall, performing oral sex on the boy. He tells other janitorial staff immediately. Fellow Office of Physical Plant employee Ronald Petrosky cleans the showers at Lasch and sees Sandusky and the boy, who he describes as being between the ages of 11 and 13.
Calhoun tells other physical plant employees what he saw, including Jay Witherite, his immediate supervisor. Witherite tells him to whom he should report the incident. Calhoun was a temporary employee and never makes a report. Victim 8's identity is unknown.
March 1, 2002 — A Penn State graduate assistant enters the locker room at the Lasch Football Building. In the showers, he sees a naked boy, known as Victim 2, whose age he estimates to be 10 years old, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky. The graduate assistant tells his father immediately.
March 2, 2002 — In the morning, the graduate assistant calls Coach Joe Paterno and goes to Paterno's home, where he reports what he has seen.
March 3, 2002 — Paterno calls Tim Curley, Penn State Athletic Director to his home the next day and reports a version of what the grad assistant had said.
March 2002 — Later in the month the graduate assistant is called to a meeting with Curley and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz. The grad assistant reports what he has seen and Curley and Schultz say they will look into it.
March 27, 2002 (approximate) — The graduate assistant hears from Curley. He is told that Sandusky's locker room keys are taken away and that the incident has been reported to The Second Mile. The graduate assistant is never questioned by university police and no other entity conducts an investigation until the graduate assistant testifies in Grand Jury in December 2010.
The obvious Sandusky outrage is, um, obvious. Using your position as a coach and charity founder to arrange private visits with boys only to molest/rape them is so patently disturbing that I don't even know what to say. Being locked up for life is too good for people who habitually violate children, even if we're ignoring the extra-sick part about doing it through a charity that's supposed to be helping at-risk children and instead was taking advantage of their lack of parental oversight. Ugh. I don't think I can write about this topic coherently for very long.
Seeing as how Sandusky is a sicko who's going to jail, the question everybody's asking now is the same one that always gets asked when you hear about stuff like this: Why didn't anybody stop it? How could Joe Paterno, Mike McQueary (the GA who's now a full-time assistant), the vice president of business, the athletic director and possibly the school president all find out about a longtime employee raping boys in the facility and doing nothing other than take away his keys? It boggles the mind.
There have been a lot of Paterno defense-type pieces written that have focused on the fact that he fulfilled his legal obligation by informing the athletic director (exactly what Paterno was told and what he told the athletic director is unknown, but we know McQueary told him in at least a general sense about the rape in the showers). Fulfilling your legal obligation is all well and good, but good Lord, when the police don't intervene, how can you just let it slide? This isn't some sort of infidelity like "I caught him with so-and-so's wife;" we're talking about a horrific crime. This was obviously acknowledged -- at least to some extent -- since Penn State took away his keys to the locker room, but not reporting it to the police shows a pathetic lack of morality from everyone involved. Any one of them could have potentially stopped another six years of sexual abuse by picking up the phone. Joe Paterno could get the governor and the Happy Valley chief of police on a short-notice conference call at 4 a.m. if he wanted to, and he never did anything besides tell the athletic director some version of the story and wash his hands. The A.D. gets special commendation for lying about it to a grand jury, which is always a wise decision.
I was actually formulating an outrage-filled column in my head yesterday at work when I stumbled across this one from Greg Couch at FOXSports.com that gently removes the words from my head and assembles them into a brilliant piece that will now be heavily quoted:
If the report is right, Paterno, leader of men for the past half century, simply called his athletic director and passed on the information of the rape his graduate assistant described to him; like telling your boss on a co-worker who is stealing staples from the supply closet.
No, Paterno, and the other school officials, did nothing to help the boys, or to help any other boys in the future.
They actually told Sandusky that he couldn’t keep bringing boys from his charity onto the Penn State campus, into the football facilities, according to the grand jury findings.
Not that they told him to stop doing to those boys what is alleged.
Just stop doing it here.
Bingo. This part also hits the proverbial nail on the head:
While the graduate assistant and janitor don’t get a pass, they were reacting to an emotional and horrifying scene.
Joe Paterno was not. Penn State athletic director Tim Curley was not. Penn State’s senior VP of finances and business Gary Schultz was not. Penn State president Graham Spanier was not.
They were acting, if the grand jury is right, in the most cool, calculating, self-preserving way.
There's a sentiment floating around that because Sandusky was Paterno's friend/confidant/co-worker for 35 years, it had to be extremely difficult to grasp the allegations and do the appropriate thing. I don't doubt that; I'd be horrified to find out one of my closest friends was a psychopath committing unspeakable crimes and needed to be removed from society forever. Still, you do it. You don't allow him to victimize countless more kids while pretending everything just went away because you passed along the info and nothing happened.
There is no chance I will ever be able to regain respect for Joe Paterno, which is why I'm following a friend's advice and ditching the use of "JoePa." In his sadly perfect words, "'JoePa' is a revered term, a teddy-bear-like figure that couldn't be implicated in anything like that. Paterno is a man that didn't know what to do and chose the wrong, wrong path." Well said.
For the record, I also feel the same level of disdain for Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, but those people were far less powerful (titles mean nothing) and are far less relevant to me.
When I started writing this, it wasn't yet known that Paterno was about to be forced out and I was mentally debating whether he should be fired. In that regard, the fact that he didn't do anything illegal has some significance. In a purely by-the-rules sense, he didn't do anything worthy of being fired; he did something (or didn't do something, in this case) morally/ethically terrible, but if we started firing college football coaches for moral/ethical crimes, we'd be out of coaches in a hurry and the SEC would cease to exist. Paterno's "crimes" just went to an extra level of awfulness.
All I can say for sure is that I'll never be able to look at the guy as something other than a formerly great man who cronied up when it mattered and turned into a Coke-bottle-spectacled child-rape enabler. Considering that he hasn't really coached a game in a decade and has become a literal figurehead, that's not a program image I'd be super excited about if I were somebody with a lot of money/power at Penn State. Whether that mean's he deserves to go isn't an easy or simple decision; it looks like it's already been made, though.
I don't know what word appropriately describes this end to an otherwise-brilliant coaching career that should unquestionably go down as one of the greatest in history, but it's not a good word. For many reasons, the whole thing makes me sad.
Houston Nutt's bizarre really-good-and-then-really-bad tenure at Ole Miss will officially end next month:
OXFORD, Miss. -- After more than a year without a Southeastern Conference victory, Mississippi coach Houston Nutt will resign.
The fourth-year Rebels coach will lead the team for the remainder of the season, athletic director Pete Boone said at a news conference Monday. Boone also announced that he will step down as athletic director by the end of 2012.
The lede pretty much tells the story. Ole Miss has won one conference game in the past two years, and that was against a mediocre Kentucky team last season. This year's much, much crappier version of Kentucky -- which hadn't come within two touchdowns of an SEC team all season -- beat Ole Miss 30-13 (!) on Saturday. That was Ole Miss' 13th straight conference loss, which seems bad enough even without factoring in the patheticness of the Kentucky debacle or the 30-7 loss to Vanderbilt in September. Losing to Kentucky and Vanderbilt in blowout fashion = coach done, and for good reason. This team is downright awful right now.
It'd be easy to say "umm Ole Miss is always awful," but that's not entirely true. They went 9-4 in each of Nutt's first two years ('08 and '09), and the '08 season ended with wins over Arkansas, Alabama, LSU and No. 7 Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl. The Eli Manning-era Rebels were pretty good too. It's definitely gotten harder given the way Alabama and LSU just completely and utterly dominate recruiting right now, but winning at Ole Miss is possible.
Nutt did it for two years, then started bringing in 37-player recruiting classes (lol) and losing in spectacular fashion. The karma is so karma-y.
The weird thing about the complete collapse over the past two years was the immediacy of it, especially for a guy with an extremely solid track record. Nutt had all of two losing years in his decade at Arkansas -- 2004 and '05 -- and he followed those up by hiring Gus Malzahn as OC and winning 10 games before insanity commenced and Arkansas turned into a punchline for about a year. He left with a career record of 75-48, which is pretty good considering the blah state the program was in when he took over.
Continuing to do the nine-win thing every year would've made him a hero at Ole Miss. Losing to Jacksonville State and becoming the clear-cut worst team in the SEC West? Not so much. He started 18-8 but is 6-15 the past two years, which gives him a seemingly respectable 24-23 record that's not really all that respectable given the directional trend.
There was a great quote from Don Nehlen (the West Virginia coach back in the day) in Three and Out about the stages of rebuilding: "You lose big, then you lose close, then you win close, then you win big." Makes sense, right? But Nutt went the exact opposite direction, although his winning was sort of in between "big" and "close." Last year's Ole Miss was bad but at least mildly competitive against good SEC teams; this year's version is getting crushed by everybody, including Kentucky. We're talking GopherQuest-level ineptitude here. Seeing Mike Stoops get axed at midseason was a reminder that a team getting significantly worse is a team that's about to be without a coach.
I appreciated this quote from Monday's presser:
"The thing about the SEC that I know," Nutt said. "They pay you to win."
Indeed. No point paying a guy $3 million a year* to go 3-9 (or worse), track record or no track record. At some point, what you did three years ago doesn't matter as much as being craptacular on the field.
As for Ole Miss, the next-guy question gets the same caveat as Arizona's: How desirable is a job that's one of the worst (Mississippi State is probably worse) in a ridiculously loaded division that's about to add Texas A&M and Missouri (or a roughly equivalent transfer from the East) to the LSU-Alabama-Arkansas grouping? SEC money talks, but walking into a place where .500 will be tough but Cotton Bowls will be the expectation seems dumb. I'm not sure Gus Malzahn jumps at that.
The other name I keep seeing is Larry Fedora from Southern Miss; he seems more plausible. He's only 39 and can coach an offense, and he'd probably be enticed by a shot at a legitimate BCS-conference school just a couple hundred miles away from his current locale. I'd think Rich Rodriguez would at least get an interview, but I guess that's for the Ole Miss search committee Archie Manning to decide. Same for Mike Leach. Desperation sometimes works for everybody.
In 2003, probably the the most talented Michigan team of my lifetime* went to Iowa and lost in such wildly infuriating fashion that I've blocked everything from my memory other than "arrghgh 2003." In 2009, an apparently much-improved Michigan team went to Iowa for the first time in four years with a 5-1 record and still-existent hopes of awesomeness before this happened:
Pain. So much pain.
The only game I can really remember in which Michigan played at Iowa and did something other than rip my heart out was 2005, when Michigan won in overtime and went on to finish 7-5 (woo). That game obviously meant nothing since a loss would've just led to a little additional head shaking and a slightly crappier bowl game.
I always tell myself "Iowa isn't really that good," and regardless of whether it's true or not, a Michigan trip to Iowa = me getting stabby due to a fury-induced aneurysm. The pink locker rooms are of no help to me.
. . . . .
So that happened. Again. Clearly, the identity of Michigan's coach has no bearing on whether or not a visit to Kinnick Stadium will end with him spewing profanity into the powerless and corn-particle-filled ether.
Also irrelevant: Iowa actually being good. The fact that Iowa lost to Minnesota the week before cannot be overstated (and no, it doesn't matter that Minnesota seems to be slightly less awful than at the beginning of Big Ten play). Iowa also needed a miraculous comeback to beat Pitt at home and lost to an extremely mediocre Iowa State team. According to the advanced metrics, Iowa is basically Purdue, a.k.a. not very good.
My brain wants to know what that says about Michigan. I will now tell my brain to shut up.
It wasn't pretty. Michigan gained 323 total yards against a team that gave up 378 to Minnesota, 414 to Indiana, 473 to Iowa State, 395 to Penn State and 352 to Louisiana Monroe (guh). I could start anywhere; I'll start with this guy:
Denard Robinson is not a very good passer. He can be effective as a passer because his legs cause defenses to do things like this ...
... and leave receivers hilariously wide open for easy touchdowns, but he's not very good when tasked with dropping back and throwing it to guys 15-30 yards downfield who have defenders in their general vicinities.
There's an obvious solution: Don't do that. Seriously. I watched Denard go for 2,500 and 1,800 last year despite having little to no idea what to do in the passing game; he was a spectacularly awesome QB because the offense (a) was simple and (b) minimized obvious weaknesses. Give him a blocker and he can do some fun stuff on the ground. Pretend to give him a blocker and he can throw to receivers who have 15 yards of separation. Times were good.
Saturday was not so good. One of the unending themes of Brady Hoke's tenure has been "saving" Denard via not giving him 25 carries against everybody on the schedule. That sounds swell as long as it works -- like when Fitzgerald Toussaint is running for 170 yards against Purdue -- but when the running backs are averaging 3.5 yards a carry and every pass is terrifying because the odds of a completion and interception are roughly equal, what are you saving him for?!? It does no good for Denard to stay healthy so he can go 17 of 37 while getting 12 carries, about a third of which came on incredibly surprising jet sweeps. That's awful game management. Accept that your best running back is your quarterback (and your best pass play is anything with the threat of Denard as a runner) and adjust your playcalling accordingly.
A few weeks ago -- after the Minnesota game, specifically -- I felt pretty good about Al Borges figuring out what Denard could and couldn't do. I felt a little less good after Michigan State. After whatever it was that happened against Iowa, I have no confidence in anything related to Michigan's offense. That's partially on Borges and partially on being stuck in between two systems without any obvious identity or base play. It's hard to be consistent when the gameplan each week is a totally unpredictable mix of shotgun/under-center stuff, a little Toussaint, a little Vincent Smith, a little zone read, a throwback screen or two, etc. As of right now, I have no idea going into any given game whether the offense will be spectacular, terrible or anything in between. Borges' ability to get rid of the terrible and maximize the spectacular will be the determining factor in whether Michigan ends up going 7-5 and forcing me to pad my walls or going 10-2 and causing me to immediately start submitting Fiesta Bowl credential requests.
So ... I think that covers my complaints about the offense. On to the officiating? On to the officiating!
Great googly moogly ... I mean ... ARGHGH. This is a touchdown:
Knee down? Check. Keeping control of the ball (which does not mean the ball can't touch the ground) throughout the catch? Check. Touchdown. Brady Hoke's reaction is entirely appropriate.
Also, this is blatant pass interference:
There was also an even blatant-er pass interference that led to a pick at the end of the first half when Michigan was inside the Iowa 10, but I can't find a decent replay of that one.
In summary:
Insert standard stuff here about "shouldn't have been in that situation" and "can't rely on the officials to bail you out" and blah blah blah. Still, it's so freakin' frustrating to see a touchdown taken off the board and two obvious touchdown-negating penalties ignored in a game that results in a one-touchdown loss. I don't think that requires much more explanation.
Speaking of a one-touchdown loss, my ever-growing faith in Brady Hoke's understanding of situation-appropriate aggressiveness was shaken a little when he went for the extra point with seven minutes left and a nine-point deficit. I realize just about every coach takes the extra point there to make it a "one-score game," but here's the thing: At some point, you have to get a two-point conversion. The sooner you know if you've got the two points, the better. If Michigan had scored on the final play and then not gotten the conversion, there'd have been no time to adjust for that miss. The game's over. If you miss earlier, you can adjust your strategy in the final minutes knowing that you need two scores. Not going for it as early as possible (in the fourth quarter, anyway) is just delaying the inevitable to maintain the illusion of a one-score game when in reality you need one score and a conversion.
All in all, I'm still pleased with Hoke's decision-making this year (things like not punting from the other team's 36 are delightful), but that one irked me a little bit. I also noticed that he put a headset on with about three minutes left Saturday, which was kinda odd since I don't think he's worn a headset at any other point this season, even at the end of the Notre Dame game. Not sure what that was about. His shell also cracked a little bit at halftime when he said something to the effect of "We tried to throw it in there and thought we should've got a flag." That's the Hokespeak equivalent of "REFS Y U NO CALL GOOD?!?" from a guy who responds to even the most benign questions with stuff like, "Well, ya know, we're just a long way from where Michigan football needs to be." BTW, I'm pretty sure he's right about both of those things.
As for "where Michigan football needs to be" ... ummm ... better than 7-5 would be nice. I think the thing that really pissed me off about the Iowa game (besides the obvious end-of-game debacle) was the fact that of the final four games, that was the one I felt the most confident about. The last three games -- at Illinois, Nebraska and Ohio State -- all worried me at least a little more than the one against the team coming off a loss to Minnesota. Losing to Iowa means an 0-4 finish is now a real possibility, and I don't even wanna think about that scenario and what it means regarding Michigan's legitimacy or lack thereof (not that 0-3 wouldn't have been a possibility after a win over Iowa, but at least 8-4 would've been the worst-case scenario). Basically, when you're about to flip a coin four times and are desperately hoping for four straight heads, seeing the first one come up tails is pretty terrifying.
All of the last three games are both totally winnable and totally losable; saying I have any idea whether 3-0 or 0-3 is more likely would be a lie. I'd love some tangible evidence that Michigan is better this year, preferably in the form of wins over good(-ish) teams, but I'll settle for wins of any type. I'm not that picky anymore. Just win all the games and I'll be happy.
*The '97 team was obviously pretty awesome and had one absurdly dominant player, and the 2000 offense had something like 10 future NFL starters, but that '03 team was soooo good in just about every way and still ended up losing three games. Woo glory days!
I've somehow made it all the way to Friday without a Gary Danielson joke. I'm both disappointed and impressed. Woo?
Anyway ... yes. The outside world will cease to exist Saturday night when a media black hole the size of Gary Danielson's crush on Mike Slive (there it is!) engulfs Tuscaloosa for LSU-Alabama, which is clearly THE BIGGEST GAME IN THE HISTORY OF EVER. Man the battle stations.
I don't do predictions anymore because (a) all the games worth predicting are closely contested enough that the things that determine the outcome are generally unpredictable and (b) it's surprisingly difficult for me to finalize coherent predictions each week before Saturday, which is kinda the cutoff date. Still, I've had a few thoughts and stumbled across some items of interest regarding this year's version of TBGITHOE (a better acronym would be helpful) that are worth posting, so this is where they go.
Long story short: Defensez is in ur base dominatin ur offense. Also, Trent Richardson is filthy good. We know.
The thing we don't know is whether either team has a quarterback who can throw the ball to his own guys more than the other guys, which will be significant since there'll be a third-and-4 on basically every series.
I have slightly more faith in Jarrett Lee since A.J. McCarron has even less experience doing anything other than hand off, but Lee hasn't had to do anything of note for LSU to win a game this year. The last time he was tasked with doing something other than throwing easy touchdown passes in four-touchdown wins, he was being unwatchably awful three years ago before losing the starting job to Jordan Jefferson. The Alabama game in Baton Rouge that year was possibly the worst-quarterbacked game in the history of quarterbacking. Video? Video:
He went 13 of 34 (gack) with four interceptions, one of which was returned for a touchdown and one of which was in overtime to basically give Bama the win. Just as a reminder of how bad Lee was in general that year, he had eight pick-sixes (!!!), which means he produced about 60 percent as many points via interceptions as he did via his 14 touchdown passes. Hoo boy. LSU fans were not impressed:
Improvement over a three-year period seems like a given, but the only thing that's really been established so far this year is that he's not a complete disaster in situations featuring minimal pressure. I mean, that's definitely improvement, but improvement to the degree of being good is mostly a theoretical thing at this point. I will give him some credit for not making any terrible mistakes this year despite facing some relatively good pass defenses; the relevance of that is debatable since Alabama is infinitely better than "relatively good."
Speaking of which, I stumbled across a poll on ESPN the other day that I can no longer find but asked a question along the lines of "Do you think Les Miles or Nick Saban is a better head coach?" This made me laugh, kind of like if somebody asked, "Do you think Mack Brown is the best coach in college football?" Is this a trick question? Recruiting hilariously talented classes (mostly within about a 200-mile radius) year in and year out is swell but not the same as great coaching. I stand by this assessment no matter how much Rick Neuheisel disagrees.
This seems like an appropriate spot for this thing from the Wall Street Journal:
Alabama has signed 137 players over the past five years, for an average of 27.4 per year. It signed 32 in 2008—a class that included nine starters on this year's team, plus Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram. This total places Alabama among the top five nationally in oversigning.
LSU has signed 126 players over the same period, which works out to 25.2 per year. That number is considerably lower than Alabama's but higher than many other top teams.
(Les Miles) said LSU has "in no way benefited from signing more players than other programs."
Errr ... what? The comparison point in that WSJ article is Texas, which has signed 112 players in the past five years. Michigan has signed 103. Good luck convincing me that signing an entire extra class over a five-year period isn't an advantage. Ridiculous. BTW, that article is appropriately titled "The Super Bowl of Oversigning," which yeah. These are the things that get overlooked when dumb analysts say dumb things about SEC speeeeeeeed.
So Alabama and LSU are both pretty awesome. It's pretty easy to say that now, even if neither one has played any very good teams other than Oregon (I'm far more impressed with LSU beating Oregon, West Virginia and Auburn than by Alabama beating Arkansas and Penn State). There's limited data in the college football world, so you take what you've got and make it big. The downside of this is that people are already stupidly determining whether there should or shouldn't be a BCS championship game rematch. I'm not gonna try to argue either way; my point is that the argument itself is dumb because we don't know which team is better, we don't know by how much, we don't know whether either team will look exceedingly different over the final four games and we don't know whether Stanford and/or Oklahoma State (not to mention Boise) are better than either one. There's still a third of the season left, and the game hasn't even been played yet! I'd like to have a little information about how LSU and Alabama actually stack up before turning into this soothingly calm dude ...
... and stating yelling a case for anything. I suppose that need for relevant information is why I don't get paid half a million dollars to spew crap into the airwaves and onto the interwebs by ESPN/FOX Sports/insert major sports media company here. Anyway, no matter what happens in this game and over the next month, the two best teams should play at the end for the title. Period. It's not that complicated.
Oh, and the thing that's been talked about surprisingly little the past few days given all the OMG GAME OF THE CENTURY stuff is the Heisman and the fact that Trent Richardson can probably win it or lose it with a great or terrible performance. It's a Richardson-Luck race at this point, although Landry Jones could probably get back in it if Bama and Stanford get knocked off while OU runs the table and gets back in the championship game discussion. Richardson gets his showcase game this week; Luck goes against Oregon next week. If only one of the two still plays for an undefeated team as of next Sunday, we could probably hold the Heisman ceremony three weeks early and just get it over with.
As for the game itself, these comments from Urban Meyer (who obviously has pretty extensive experience against both teams/coaches) were pretty interesting, especially if you read between the lines:
"(Saban's teams) take your top five plays and really do a good job defending them. Usually, (they have) very good special teams and ball control offense. And they play field position with that great defense.
Seems reasonable, and I'm not surprised about the top-five-plays thing. There's a reason Saban gets paid something like $7 million a year. What about LSU?
"When you think of a Les Miles team at LSU, you're talking about one of the top three most talented teams in the nation."
Oh. Umm, yeah. Talented. Anything else?
"LSU is more traditional now. They have big backs and they're going to turn and hand the ball to them, and that's going to play right into Alabama's hands. So I think they're going to have to come up with a trick play or two."
Translation: Les Miles lacks functioning portions of his brain and wins with talent despite a laughably simplistic offense. I'd call that a pretty harsh coaching endorsement if I could justifiably disagree with any of it, which I can't. And this is a guy probably one win away from his second national title. Insanity.
So ... I think that pretty much covers it. Did I mention that ESPN has an LSU-ALABAMA 2011 COVERAGE page, where you can gorge yourself on mediocre analysis that will tell you little you don't already know if you've watched these teams more than twice this year? I also count 11 related stories on the main college football page, not including the totally unnecessary "All-Access" segments on both schools that have been aired this week and are posted on the aforementioned game-specific page. Seriously, it's out of control and yet probably worth it because ... I mean ... have you ever been to Louisiana or Alabama? Yeah.
One last tidbit, this one from the New York Times: There have been 12 one-versus-two matchups in the past 40 years. The No. 1 team has won seven times, which makes sense, but what's far more interesting is that the winner has gone on to win the national championship only four times out of 12. And it's not because the games were too early or the teams were overrated or whatever: All three of the one-versus-two games in the past 20 years took place in November, and the three winners produced a combined zero national championships (let's just pretend 2006 never happened plzkthx). Take that for what it's worth.
Regardless, I'll be watching (duh) and then eagerly anticipating LSUFreek's inevitable and guaranteed-to-be-spectacular reactionary GIF (thank God for the internet age, amirite?). Let's see some well-played FOOTBAW, please.
I can't believe I forgot about this: My all-time favorite rivalry meme somehow got overlooked last week amid my overworked-ness and underhealthy-ness. Mandatory video:
Also, there is now a Facebook page dedicated to "Gators wear jean shorts." Yes. If I were a Georgia fan, this would be my ringtone and every other audio narrative in my life.
Why I both hate and love ESPN: I flipped on SportsCenter late Saturday night to catch a few highlights from games I missed and noticed that one of the lead items -- like right in the mix with Stanford-USC -- was a bunch of stupidly early analysis of the LSU-Alabama game. I realize this is the BIGGEST GAME THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED, but seriously. At that point, there were still six full days until the game, not to mention basically an entire day of College GameDay in Tuscaloosa leading up to the 8 p.m. local time kickoff. Let's prioritize, plz. On a far more awesome note, I discovered that ESPN3 offers picture-in-picture. Schwing.
Let's agree to disagree: Lane Kiffin was not entirely happy with the officials Saturday night, and for (some) good reasons.
Kiffin, USC's second-year head coach, said he told an unspecified referee before the final play of regulation that he wanted a timeout after the Trojans ran a play, which began with nine seconds left on the game clock. But receiver Robert Woods winded a screen pass the opposite way and was tackled inbounds with one second left, and the clock was left to run out into overtime.
Speaking with reporters in a conference call Sunday, Kiffin also said he disagreed with three other notable calls from Saturday's game, including a taunting penalty on receiver Marqise Lee when he scored a touchdown early in the fourth quarter, a targeting penalty on safety T.J. McDonald on Stanford's game-tying drive near the end of regulation and a holding penalty on Stanford that appeared to have been called at the line of scrimmage and should have resulted in a 2nd-and-15 situation, not a 2nd-and-7.
Of the holding call, Kiffin said he discussed the play with his "friend Knox" over breakfast on Sunday morning and found that Knox, his son, was able to find where the ball should have correctly been placed after the penalty.
"Just so you know, Knox is two years old," he said.
Zing! BTW, Kiffin's totally wrong about the timeout -- the referee didn't signal for the clock to stop until it had hit zero, so whether anybody had requested a timeout at any point was irrelevant -- but he's right about the T.J. McDonald hit and the holding penalty. The McDonald one in particular was devastating, as Stanford went from throwing an incompletion on third-and-6 to having a first down on USC's side of the field on the eventual game-tying drive. I say he's right because (a) McDonald led with his shoulder and not his helmet and (b) the receiver was juggling the ball and should be lit up in that situation by any safety worth a starting job. If you can't do that, you can't play safety ... which makes it all the more ridiculous that McDonald was suspended Tuesday for the first half of USC's next game. Argh. The holding penalty was just a flat-out screw-up for which there's no logical explanation. But I question whether Kiffin's 2-year-old can really figure out penalty yardage when my 2-year-old still isn't clear about whether she should eat dog food (although she can count to 13).
Georgia running backs Isaiah Crowell, Carlton Thomas and Ken Malcome are suspended for the Bulldogs' game against New Mexico State on Saturday, coach Mark Richt confirmed.
Richt would not discuss the reason behind the suspensions, only that a violation of team rules occurred. "They didn't do things the Georgia way," he said.
But a source told DawgNation that the three players were disciplined for failing a drug test that was administered last week before Georgia's 24-20 victory over Southeastern Conference archrival Florida in Jacksonville. The source had no knowledge of when the test results were known.
There's a zero percent chance we ever find out "when the test results were known," which means any Florida-generated controversy would be purely hypothetical. There's also a zero percent chance Georgia loses to New Mexico State even if Uga (the interim one since the real one died) lines up at running back, and he might have to since Crowell is the starter, Thomas is the nominal backup and third-stringer Richard Samuel is out for a month with an ankle injury. The real concern for Georgia has to be that Crowell, an uber-elite recruit who was the de facto starter from the moment he stepped on campus and is clearly the future of the offense, has already failed a drug test just eight games into his career. Any more = goner, which would be disastrous. In the short term, Georgia just needs him to not do anything stupid for a week so he can back in the lineup for the Auburn game in two weeks that represents the Dawgs' last real SEC test.
Garrett Gilbert headed to SMU: This has been rumored for a while but is now (kind of) official: ESPN is reporting that Garrett Gilbert, who left Texas last month after blowing out his shoulder and losing his starting job to a pair of freshmen, will enroll at SMU. My understanding is that he'll have to sit out 2012 as his transfer season and will then have one year of eligibility left (he's currently a true junior). That should work out nicely since current starter Kyle Padron is also a junior so will be graduating after next year. Gilbert has gobs of talent but generally looked like a deer in the headlights (or the grill) for most of the past two seasons; if he can figure out the not-throwing-terrible-interceptions thing, he'll get the honor of being the 2013 version of June Jones' throw-it-600-times triggerman.
Indiana dismisses Damarlo Belcher: This is pretty unimportant in the big picture since Indiana is downright awful, but senior Damarlo Belcher -- who was arguably the best wideout in the Big Ten last year -- was kicked off the team this week due to the always-specific "violation of team rules." He had 78 catches for 832 yards and four TDs last year but had a knee-area bone bruise early this season and had played in only six games before getting the boot (he did have a team-high 25 catches in those six games, which is decent). He obviously wasn't being thrown to as frequently this season, in part because of the injury and in part because of the revolving door of crappy quarterback play. Still, he was probably Indiana's most talented and productive player for the past year and a half (which isn't saying much), so his loss isn't entirely meaningless for a team desperate for tangible signs of decency as the inevitability of a 1-11 season sets in.
The Big East Conference will invite Boise State, Navy and Air Force for football only and SMU, Houston and Central Florida for all sports, a source with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press.
The conference's member presidents, meeting in Philadelphia, voted unanimously Tuesday to extend invitations to football-only and all-sports members. Commissioner John Marinatto declined to name the schools being targeted.
He did say he expected the targeted schools to accept but added that there are still details to work out with each institution.
That last portion is bolded for emphasis. I'm sure UCF will jump on board, and Houston and SMU will probably do the same, but I'm not sold that the others are ... umm ... sold. It's been known for a while that Navy and Air Force have been not totally super excited about the idea of signing up for something as stable as public-bathroom toilet paper, and I don't see much reason for Boise State to go be a big fish in (primarily) an East Coast pond when it can be a big fish in a Rocky Mountain pond that seems much more logical. Get back to me when Boise accepts that invite, because that's the only thing that'll salvage relevance for the soon-to-be-mid-major Big East.
Big Ron and The Noodle: Iowa-loving blog Black Heart Gold Pants wins the interwebz this week for 15 minutes of pure, brilliant, hilarious and not-at-all-subtle DOMINATION of the inanity of sports-talk radio, specifically an Iowa City radio show that decided to publicly pick a fight with one of the best college football sites out there and continues to believe Kirk Ferentz is the second coming of Vince Lombardi. Listen to it. Srsly. I nearly fell out of my chair when he politely asked for a job because of his fear of the internet becoming "old technology" while "AM radio goes racing by into the future." The sarcasm is so, so thick.
In case you can't tell, he's Dennis Erickson. The accuracy is a bit lacking (his glasses are a bit low and I've literally never seen Erickson wear a collared shirt to the presser), but the comedic brilliance more than makes up for it. Well played.
