Catching up has identified the shrimp fork

The Oklahoma dudes are gone: All those Oklahoma receivers who got suspended a couple weeks ago -- including Jaz Reynolds, this year's obvious No. 2 across from Kenny Stills, and backup Trey Franks -- are off the team. This is from Bob Stoops:

"(They) have been removed from scholarship and we aren't counting on any of them.

"We'll keep moving forward. This program doesn't bank on any one individual player. We've recruited a lot of really good players, so we'll keep moving on."

Wow. There was a report from OUInsider at the time of the "indefinite suspensions" that Franks would be done for the year and Reynolds would be out for seven games (an oddly specific number); apparently not.

I'm gonna be lazy here and blockquote my previous post on the three guys' suspensions:

Reynolds was third on the team last year with 41 catches for 715 yards and five touchdowns and would be a significant loss, especially with Ryan Broyles gone. Kenny Stills is pretty dang good and a legitimate No. 1 wideout, but depth might be an issue since Reynolds and Franks are the only other scholarship receivers on the roster who have ever caught a pass and might not even be on the roster by the time the season rolls around. ...

Keep in mind that Landry Jones was flat-out not good last year after Broyles got hurt. Whether that continues with even less experience at receiver (at least for the first half of the year) remains to be seen.

Yeah ... that. It might not be a coincidence that Oklahoma requested a transfer waiver Monday for junior receiver Jalen Saunders, a Broyles clone who had 1,065 yards and 12 touchdowns last year for Fresno State, made the All-WAC first team and and then bailed when Pat Hill was fired. Given that his reasons for transferring were (according to him) purely coach/system-related, a waiver approval seems unlikely; I can't remember a guy ever getting approved to play immediately just because his previous coach got fired and he didn't like whatever was going on with the new guy. Oklahoma probably figured it was worth a shot anyways since (a) the depth chart at receiver this year is horrifying and (b) the NCAA makes inexplicable decisions all the time.

BTW, defensive back Cortez Johnson -- who transferred from Arizona after the Mike Stoops relocation -- also requested a waiver. His doesn't sound any more likely than Saunders' given the lack of a family-emergency-type justification.

This is so John L. Smith: How was I just made aware that John L. Smith has a Twitter account? This is the hilarity that emanated from it the other day:

Linebacker Jarrett Lake was the first player to properly get his entire place setting set correctly #GoHogs twitter.com/JohnL_Smith/st…
— John L. Smith (@JohnL_Smith) June 6, 2012

EVERYBODY STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND LEARN WHICH ONE IS THE SHRIMP FORK FOR SERIOUS THIS IS IMPORTANT. This is somehow both amazing and not at all surprising given the complete insanity of John L. Smith, who's apparently using "etiquette team dinners" as a way to fill the weekly time slot vacated by Bobby Petrino's "etiquette speed dating" (zing!).

As for his Twitter account, I've conducted a highly scientific study and determined that his tweets include an average of two exclamation points each and never fewer than one, because obviously tweeting is so exciting! #gohogs!!!

Hogs Win! Great game! Congratulations Razorbacks! Omaha Bound! Go Hogs!

 I have nothing more to add.

Speaking of Arkansas: The new-uniform unveiling du jour:

Reaction: The standard home/road unis aren't much different from the old ones and look fine, and I kinda like the different-but-still-classic-and-reasonable look of the white helmet. The black-ish ones are awful; they look color-reversed or something and are almost identical to Arkansas State's, which ... ummm ... yeah. Recreating another in-state school's uniforms just to have a black one because everybody's doing it = dumb. Get off my lawn, etc.

No more number retirement: Michigan announced a kind-of-vague program last year featuring "legends patches" as a way to honor guys whose numbers would typically be retired; the reason provided was that they simply couldn't retire any more numbers and still have enough for everybody to wear, thus honorary patches and the reissuing of the numbers.

The initial ceremony-type thing involved Desmond Howard and resulted in this, which will be worn by Roy Roundtree this year on the No. 21 jersey:

Program extension ahoy:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) -- College football's winningest school is putting three of its five retired jerseys back on the field, honoring former President Gerald Ford, Bennie Oosterbaan and Ron Kramer as "Michigan Football Legends," this year.
 
A current player to be determined by the football staff will start wearing Ford's 48, Oosterbaan's 47 and Kramer's 87 after each former star is honored with a ceremony.

"The success and acceptance of the Desmond Howard Legend recognition led to conversations with the family members who had retired jerseys, several of whom were never recognized or celebrated in the appropriate manner," Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon said in a statement. "The Ford, Kramer and Oosterbaan families want to see their family member honored in this way."

Tom Harmon's No. 98 and No. 11, which was worn by brothers Francis, Albert and Alvin Wistert, are the other two jerseys that have been retired.

Interesting. I don't have a particularly strong feeling about this either way given the school's number constraints (it seems unfair that Charles Woodson and Desmond Howard can't really be appropriately honored despite winning the freakin' Heisman Trophy) and the made-up-but-probably-true fact that 99 percent of Michigan fans can't identify more than half of the retired numbers and their accompanying players.

I do have two requests, though. The first: Don't issue those numbers to random Recruit X who almost definitely will have no appreciation for it and won't live up to it. I know that's what MGoBlog is calling for, but I'm of the opinion that it really has to be something meaningful that's earned over the course of a career, even if it means Player Y won't have a chance to establish his own number as something legend-worthy. The second: Keep 48 and 98 retired. Ford was the freakin' president of the United States, so his number obviously means something beyond "All-American offensive lineman," and Harmon was a Heisman winner who put up some of the most ridiculous numbers EVER, was on the covers of Time and Life, married a movie star and then went on to become a World War II hero (a legit hero). He was Tom Brady if Tom Brady had been even better at Michigan and then gone over and negotiated a Middle East peace treaty right after he left school. How is anybody gonna live up to that?

Anyway, other than that, I'm on board with the idea of doing something dynamic (for lack of a better word) to honor various dudes of yore rather than just putting a bunch of numbers across the top of the press box or whatever. And I don't seem to be alone ... so that's nice.

Sucks to be those guys: The punishment for Ohio State's Jake Stoneburner and Jack Mewhort, who were suspended indefinitely last week for "interfering with official business" (also known as urinating on the outside of a building at 2 a.m.):

No explanation needed.

Way to pay attention: South Alabama becomes an official member of the Sun Belt this year, according to everybody except the people in charge of NCAA Football, who are too busy trying to figure out how to include special mascot entrances and whatnot rather than include all the teams:

The Jaguars were left out of EA Sports' hit video game franchise NCAA Football 13 despite being a full-fledged member of the Sun Belt Conference in 2013.

Julie Foster, a communications manager at EA Sports, told JagsJungle.com, a South Alabama fan site, that the video game franchise didn't know South Alabama was going to be a full member of the FBS.

"South Alabama was a provisional member of FBS last year and did not play a full FBS schedule," she wrote the site in an email. "We did not receive confirmation that they were changing to a full FBS schedule this year until it was too late for inclusion in NCAA Football 13. South Alabama will be included in NCAA Football 14."

There are four schools moving up (for some reason) from the FCS to the Sun Belt this year, and South Alabama is the only one not included. Derp.

There's a reason I stopped buying NCAA Football two years ago, and while it has everything to do with gameplay and nothing to do with FCS team accuracy, this is a pretty good indicator of the state of the franchise. #bringback2kfootball

The Big Ten is happy with the BCS; nobody cares

I said last week that my where-things-stand-with-the-playoff-stuff post would be outdated by approximately Wednesday; I was way off. The Big Ten finished its presidents/chancellors meetings Sunday and then sent Jim Delany out into the world to say a bunch of things over the course of the next two days, which makes this post a little late (food poisoning FTW) but probably still useful to those of you who have lives and don't follow way too many people on Twitter.

There were two notable takeaways, one of which didn't come from Delany and one of which might be completely inaccurate depending on your interpretation of Delany-isms. The first:

"I think if the Big Ten presidents were to vote today, we would vote for the status quo. We think it best serves college football," Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman said. "I don't think any of us are anxious to ask our student-athletes to play a 15th game. We think, in many respects it is as good as you can do."

Errr what? Perlman and I apparently have much different definitions of "best serves college football." I literally cannot comprehend any desire to maintain the debacle that is the status quo and would be infuriated if the above-quoted comments actually meant anything in terms of slowing/halting progress toward the playoff thing; they do not. Even Perlman realizes this:

"But we're also realistic that that doesn't seem to be something that has gotten a lot of support and that some movement is necessary. Our second strong preference would be for a plus-one."

Translation: A playoff cannot be stopped but might be manipulable to our benefit.

How much weight this "strong preference" carries is kinda hard to say; everyone other than sources from the Big Ten and Pac-12 has been saying that a plus-one is "off the table," which leads me to believe they're the only conferences pushing it and therefore are gonna end up getting thoroughly outnumbered come negotiatin' time. Here's an amusing response-type thing from Big 12 overlord Texas president DeLoss Dodds:

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott told the Wall Street Journal that a plus-one – a championship game after the bowls – was still on the table. When reminded of that news, Dodds smiled dismissively without commenting.

He then lit a ground-up-money-filled cigar with a $10,000 bill and commanded Iowa State to dance for his pleasure.

Anyway, "dismissive" would also accurately describe my reaction. I've explained repeatedly that I don't really see the benefit of a plus-one that's kinda/sorta like a playoff but isn't really a playoff and retains most of the problems inherent in the current system, and I don't think the support for it exists seeing as how everybody else -- even Jim Delany -- has already moved on from the format stuff and is instead debating the who/how selection issues.

I'm also not sure why the plus-one would be preferable to the Big Ten. What's the purpose of staying as close as possible to the status quo when the status quo has resulted in a 10-year national title drought and a 1-7 record in the Rose Bowl in that time? At no point in the last decade would a plus-one have resulted in a Big Ten team even playing for the national championship, let alone winning it, but WOO LET'S DO THAT!

The only conceivable benefit: The Rose Bowl has a basically guaranteed spot as a relevant semifinal-type game. That's apparently worth never actually winning anything.

The beauty in all of this is that the inevitable implementation of a four-team playoff (and I really believe it is inevitable based on the consensus support from everybody else) will save the Big Ten from its own Rose Bowl-centric stupidity and irrelevance. Yay for that. Boo for holding up the process with nonsensical negotiating-stance comments about things that have already been decided.

As for the second takeaway, here's the comment from Delany that made everybody run to the intertubes to discuss:

"I think it should be the four best teams," Delany said.

O RLY? That quote immediately jumped out at me as being significant in the determining-the-participants process seeing as how he's (apparently) completely reversed course in the past month. This is from a couple weeks ago:

At the Big Ten meetings earlier this month, Commissioner Jim Delany voiced support for a "hybrid model" that would give preference to high-ranked conference champions but would also make allowances in case one league had more than one elite team. At this point, the factions seem to be a group made up of the Big 12, the SEC and Notre Dame (top four) and a group made up of the ACC, Big East, Big Ten and Pac-12 (preference for conference champs).

So ... that's interesting. Also interesting was this tweet from Joe Schad, who was there when Delany made his "four best teams" comment and offered this interpretation:

Jim Delany has not done a 180. He still wants preference for conference champs. Some are misinterpreting "four best" comment.

There was little explanation as to what that meant; I'm assuming he's saying that Delany wants the four "best" teams but thinks that the top four in the standings don't necessarily represent the four "best."

That doesn't totally align with the rest of Delany's comments, though:

"I didn't really think that the conference champions-only (model) met the public's demand for elite teams playing each other," Delany said. "I thought the combination of champions and an elite at-large team regardless of status -- it could be a champion, could be an independent, could be a divisional runner-up or championship loser -- was probably the right formulation. But that was just to get the discussion going.

"I think that people understand now that our search right now is to find the best four football teams. However you do that, typically it's going to involve a lot of champions. I don't care whether it occurs in a committee, but I do think the two key issues are honoring champions, honoring strength of schedule, honoring teams and coaches that try to play a good schedule and recognizing teams that play an additional championship game versus one that doesn't."

I'm not entirely sure how to interpret all that but am going on the assumption that a top-four playoff would be acceptable to Delany (and, by proxy, the Big Ten) if there's either (a) a selection committee that can tweak the bracket to reward conference champs with higher seeds or (b) a ranking system that is weighted toward conference champs via bonus points or something.

Example: An extra 0.05 BCS-standings points for a conference title would have put Oklahoma State ahead of Alabama last year and almost entirely eliminated the gap between fifth-ranked Oregon and fourth-ranked Stanford but still resulted in Alabama finishing No. 3, which would have been fine (IMO) for maintaining the credibility of the playoff as a whole. Anything beyond that really starts to skew the standings to an unreasonable degree. FWIW, I'm on record as supporting a committee because of the potential benefits of bracket flexibility.

Whether that would fit into Mike Slive's "One, two, three, four" mandate from the SEC meetings is unclear since he hasn't really expanded on the possibility of modifying the selection formula. There's also still the Larry Scott problem: He's made it abundantly clear that the Pac-12 wants "competing in our conference and winning our conference to mean no less than it does today and maybe even more." That's pretty vague in terms of specific requirements but implies something much different from what the SEC is demanding.

As I wrote a few days ago, I still think there's a preference-for-conference-champions middle ground that can/will be found eventually. I'm less optimistic that it'll happen by the time the Presidential Oversight Committee gathers to compare monocles on June 26, though; the reneging on an apparent four-team consensus makes it hard to believe that everything from format to siting to eligibility to selection method is gonna be totally finalized in 16 days, especially with only two meetings in the interim (June 13 and June 20). I'll hope for the best anyway.

Catching up wears jean shorts

Because they had to pick somebody: Matt McGloin will be Penn State's (probably crappy) starting quarterback this year. I know because Bill O'Brien announced it at a golf event (?) on Friday:

Penn State coach Bill O’Brien has named senior Matt McGloin the starting quarterback.

O’Brien announced his decision Friday at a charity golf tournament. McGloin, a redshirt junior, will top a depth chart that will also include Paul Jones and Rob Bolden. The Nittany Lions open the season on Sept. 1 vs. Ohio.

"We’ll probably release our depth chart on Tuesday morning," O’Brien said. "There won’t be too many surprises on there, I’m sure. But Matt McGloin will be our starting quarterback next year."

McGloin would fall into the "won't be too many surprises" category. He was the nominal starter for all but the first two games last season and was mediocre, which put him about three standard deviations ahead of Rob Bolden. Here are some numbers: 54.1 percent passing for 134 yards per start with eight touchdowns (three of which were against de facto bye week Eastern Michigan) and five picks. The latter ratio is fine but doesn't acknowledge that he went for under 100 yards three times in the last four games of the year despite averaging just over 23 attempts per game. That's pretty awful, especially for a guy with no real running ability, which is why he ended up 89th in the country in efficiency.

I thought Jones -- who was academically ineligible last year but was a relatively highly touted recruit in 2010 -- might get a shot based on potential; apparently not (not yet, anyway). McGloin is the most accurate of the three, which presumably will be of some benefit in an O'Brien passing game that shouldn't be as laughably bad as Penn State's recent versions.

It's not like there are traditions or anything: The SEC approved a new scheduling format Saturday that demonstrates exactly why superconferences suck. Here are the details:

The SEC announced Friday that it approved the 6-1-1 playoff format, which means each SEC team will play six divisional games, one cross-divisional rivalry game and one rotating cross-divisional game.

While the length of the 6-1-1 scheduling format has yet to be determined, commissioner Mike Slive said it will be around for at least three or four years, which opens a future door for a nine-game conference schedule.

Translation: SEC teams will play only one cross-divisional game each year other than their locked-in rivalry games, which means non-rivals that aren't in the same division will play once every six years. Georgia will play in Death Valley once every 12 years. Arkansas will play in The Swamp once every 12 years. Etc.

Going to nine conference games would make things better since at least you could rotate two non-rivalry cross-divisional games a year, allowing you to play everybody once every three years rather than once every six, but it still wouldn't be optimal and probably won't happen anyway since it would eliminate one of the sacrificial-lamb home games everybody wants.

Really, anything beyond 12 teams basically stops being a conference and becomes two conferences that share a name and little else (like games). There will be a point at which expansion's monetary benefits plateau because interest has done the same with meaningful games fewer and farther between. I'm not sure all the guys running various conferences realize this but am honestly thankful Jim Delany does:

"One of the most underrated qualities about any conference is its stability and the glue that holds it together," he said on Monday's league conference call. "And I think whenever you go beyond a certain level, you're running into possible dilution issues. ... The larger you are, the less you play each other. The less you play each other, the less tradition you have and the less those games tend to mean, if they can't be repeated over and over."

 That's ... like ... yeah. Yeah!

Best arrest ever: Michigan defensive tackle Will Campbell was arrested in the wee hours of some morning last month, which would normally be cause for concern since he's a projected starter but instead has caused me to laugh continuously for about the last four days. This is why:

Michigan senior defensive tackle Will Campbell is facing one felony and one misdemeanor charge of malicious destruction of property stemming from an April 7 incident, according to court records.

According to Ann Arbor police, Campbell was arrested after attempting to slide across the hood of a vehicle at 2 a.m. on April 7 in the 600 block of Church Street. An officer in the area could hear the sheet metal on the hood of the car buckle under Campbell’s weight — he’s listed at 322 pounds — and arrested the senior, police stated.

I'm speechless. It should not be a surprise that the police report lists him as "intoxicated." That's probably the most concerning part since he doesn't turn 21 for another month.

Campbell was an uber-recruit four years ago who's done relatively little to date but will be starting (probably at the nose) this year as a senior, mostly because there are no other experienced options but maybe/hopefully because he's finally had a light-bulb moment under Greg Mattison and has figured out how to effectively use his ginormousness. Fortunately for me and Michigan's horrifyingly thin D-line, serious discipline sounds unlikely at this point since Brady Hoke has announced that there'll be no change in Campbell's status.

A slightly more amibiguous arrest: Ohio State's Jake Stoneburner (starting tight end) and Jack Mewhort (starting left tackle) were arrested outside Muirfield Village over the weekend for "interference with official business." That doesn't mean anything to anybody who's not a lawyer; word on the interwebs is that they were caught relieving themselves in a rather public location, and since it's on the interwebs, it must be true.

Anyway, whatever they were doing has resulted in this:

Ohio State issued a statement Monday saying that Meyer had suspended senior tight end Jake Stoneburner and junior offensive tackle Jack Mewhort after they were arrested by police on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing official business. The school said it had no further comment.

It probably goes without saying that indefinite suspensions for the starting left tackle and last year's leading receiver -- with 14 catches (!) for seven touchdowns (?!?) -- could be problematic. It also probably goes without saying that a suspension for a misdemeanor charge that stems from urinating on the outside of a building probably won't remain an indefinite suspension for very long, especially with Urban Meyer being the guy handling the discipline.

In the unlikely event that this actually produces something resembling missed playing time, Ohio State will probably survive the season opener against the Ohio version of Miami.

I will now go back to being amused by this response from Dominic Clarke, a potential starter at corner who got kicked off the team back in January following his second arrest in three months:

Sooo...lets see how urban meyer's bitch ass handles this one?

Yesssssss.

Jesse Scroggins to transfer: The lede pretty much says it all:

Redshirt sophomore quarterback Jesse Scroggins will be leaving the USC football program and intends to transfer to another school.

Scroggins was the No. 2 QB recruit in the country three years ago and was supposed to be Matt Barkley's backup/heir apparent last year before breaking his thumb and missing most of the season. He was still the nominal backup heading into spring practice but couldn't participate at all because he was academically ineligible; at that point, Lane Kiffin started saying ominous things about his future as Max Wittek and Cody Kessler (both former five-star-ish recruits, obviously) took most of the second-team snaps. Translation: This news surprises nobody since Scroggins was apparently losing his job and might not have been eligible anyway.

Assuming he gets his grades in order, he'll have some options; guys with his level of ability aren't typically available to schools that aren't USC. The limiting factor will be his class standing: He's already used a redshirt year, so if he transfers to another D-I school, he'll have to sit out the 2012 season and then will have two years left starting in 2013, at which point he'll basically be a juco transfer who has never played a meaningful down. No word yet on potential destinations.

Avert your eyes: Maryland has designed and is considering installing a black, turtle-shell-patterned field. I am not making this up. Here's a photo that may or may not be the unofficial rendering:

AAAHHHHHHHHHH!

And here's a little detail from the Washington Post:

This week, WUSA reported that “the turf being applied to the field will be either black or pewter,” according to “a source within the program."

A Maryland spokesman Friday disputed this report, saying that no decision has yet been made on the color or design of the field.

So it's not yet official, although that makes it no less disturbing. I'm assuming this is an UnderArmour project since I can't imagine anybody else (other than Nike) coming up with that. I mean, that thing (a) is literally painful to look at and (b) is gonna be SO FREAKIN' HOT in August/September; it'd be like playing football on a softer version of asphalt. No thanks.

My understanding was that the NCAA had passed a field-color rule back when Eastern Washington and Central Arkansas started doing inexplicably awful things with stripes and bright colors and whatnot; that apparently didn't happen, which means schools are free to do whatever stupidity draws attention.

Amazingly, installing a black field would not be the worst decision made by Maryland's athletic department in the last year and a half.

#andmikeleachwasavailable

I like you if you like me: Andy Haggard is still openly begging for a Big 12 invite for Florida State. This is not newsworthy in and of itself but is made newsworthy by this comment:

“We have not heard a thing, and we have not approached them and they have not approached us,” said Haggard. “If anybody approaches us, we are certainly going to listen to them. We have an obligation to Florida State to listen. You can't close the door.”

Interesting. Whether that means the Big 12 is not particularly interested in expanding or is just waiting until all the TV stuff gets finalized is impossible to know. It would seem that there's TV money to be had, but that money might not be super enticing if it comes at the expense of potential playoff revenue/access (in terms of fewer undefeated winners of a stronger conference). We'll see.

Dr. Saturday (no longer writing as Dr. Saturday) is back! Matt Hinton is now writing for CBSSports.com. I discovered this was going to be happening a couple weeks ago and forgot to mention it; he published his first column the other day, so I'll mention it now.

An excerpt from said column, which of course includes some useful data about the pointlessness of the ALL CAPS possible-playoff-scenario arguments:

For all of the head-butting and maneuvering and even my own personal preferences, I'm not really convinced that the eventual decision is going to make any difference. Since the inception of the BCS, the best four teams and the best four conference champions tend to be one and the same.

Read it.

This is so accurate: It's the Michigan State edition of Black Heart Gold Pants' ongoing series of this-is-how-they-should-look Pro Combat mockups:

This is, without question, the best thing that has ever been posted on the internet. I will not debate this. It has everything.

Just because: This is from EDSBS (of course it is):

I have no explanation. And this is from the comments underneath that thing:

I dunno. I'm just giving you stuff.

The latest on the playoff stuff

According to the italicized text above the headline at the top of this post, it's June 3, which means it's supposedly 17 days (but probably 23) until some sort of playoff format will be finalized and recommended and all that fun stuff. I'm pretty sure I've written about this before; this post will be less comprehensive than that one but will include a few interesting playoff-related tidbits I have open in my ridiculously overloaded browser.

There are basically two things left to be decided from a logistical standpoint: (a) who gets to participate and (b) where the games will be played. I'm intentionally ignoring/deferring the issues of selection format and revenue distribution since I'm assuming* the exact details of those can be hammered out after the basic infrastructure is in place; keep in mind that this thing won't be starting until after the 2014 season.

Anyway, this first item is from CBS Sports and basically just confirms what was being reported a few weeks back about the affiliated-bowls-as-hosts plan:

Commissioners in the process of molding the first major-college football playoff are leaning toward floating bowl sites for the semifinal games.

In fact, the predetermined rotation of semifinal sites in the bowls was described as a “non-starter” to CBSSports.com. There are still discussions over the sites of the entire three-game playoff (in or outside of bowls), but there seems to be a growing consensus that the bowls will at least host the semifinals. ...

(The conference commissioners) do not want the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds having to “go on the road” in the semifinals. In other words, if the Sugar Bowl were anchored in advance to be a semifinal site, it would be possible that a No. 4 seed – say, LSU – would have the home-field advantage playing the No. 1-seeded opponent in the Superdome.

Brian at MGoBlog had the perfect reaction to that last sentence:

I have this crazy good idea for how to fix this: play the games on campus.

Lol yes. If only. But yeah, there seems to be a consensus about the semifinal sites: The two top seeds will "host" at their affiliated BCS bowls. Everybody seems to be on board with this even though it will undoubtedly result in the Big Ten champ "hosting" USC in the Rose Bowl at some point in the near future. Insert Jim Delany joke here

Speaking of the Rose Bowl, there were some rumblings last week from Larry Scott about a plus-one ...

"I'd say before Friday that idea of a plus-one didn't have much traction, but I think the announcement (of the Champions Bowl is) a game-changer," Scott said. "We're pretty far down the path on four-team playoff options, but given the very positive reaction to what the SEC and Big 12 have done, it's possible that (a plus-one) could get some traction."

... that horrified me because of the potential to erase whatever progress had been made on the straight-up-bracket plan. I really have no interest in a plus-one; there are just too many possible scenarios in which there are still more than two title-game-worthy teams after the BCS bowls. See: last year, when the LSU/Alabama/Oklahoma State thing almost definitely wouldn't have been resolved via the bowls since they all would have been split up because of tie-ins, or any year that featured an undefeated Boise/TCU/Utah playing somebody outside the top five. No thanks.

But I'm not particularly concerned about that scenario anymore since Mike Slive showed up at the SEC baseball tournament last week and told everybody that a plus-one is stupid (or something along those lines):

"It's interesting because clearly what we did (in introducing the Champions Bowl) created a lot of thinking by a lot of people," Slive said. "I appreciate people thinking about that. But I think what's in the best interest of college football is a four-team playoff. I think it's better for everyone involved in the game."

This backs up what Big 12 commish Chuck Neinas and ACC commish John Swofford said the week before:

"I think it's beneficial to go to the four-team playoff," Neinas said. "The public expects a four-team playoff, and also to be able to provide the access possibilities and everything else, we need to look at a four-team format."

Swofford also said he remains in favor of the four-team model.

"The momentum continues to be in that direction (a four-team playoff)," Swofford said. "The key is being able to build a consensus how to do it.

So there ya go. The playoff will be a playoff and not a plus-one; "traction" requires more than Larry Scott and possibly Jim Delany talking about something.

As for the "who gets to participate" thing, the SEC spring meetings produced ... umm ... something:

Florida president Bernie Machen said the SEC would not compromise on having the four highest-ranked teams in the playoff rather than a group of conference champions.

"We won't compromise on that," Machen said at the SEC spring meetings. "I think the public wants the top four. I think almost everybody wants the top four."

OK then. FYI, that was a statement made on behalf of the conference as a whole, with the school presidents/chancellors and athletic directors providing unanimous support. I agree with the top-four assessment 100 percent but also find the "won't compromise" part of the quote somewhat concerning.

Cartman explains why:


SI's Andy Staples explains why in more words:

At this juncture, such a bold statement raises some serious questions about whether conference leaders can reach a consensus. It's one thing for a league leader to say the conference prefers a particular model. It's quite another to eliminate all wiggle room on a particular issue. ...

At their meeting earlier this month, ACC athletic directors and coaches backed conference-champ priority even though Commissioner John Swofford had previously stated a desire for the top four. At the Big Ten meetings earlier this month, Commissioner Jim Delany voiced support for a "hybrid model" that would give preference to high-ranked conference champions but would also make allowances in case one league had more than one elite team. At this point, the factions seem to be a group made up of the Big 12, the SEC and Notre Dame (top four) and a group made up of the ACC, Big East, Big Ten and Pac-12 (preference for conference champs).

Yeah ... that's not exactly a consensus, which is kind of a necessity. Machen even said after his initial comments that, "I don't really know what happens if someone says no. It really does have to be a consensus model to work."

I don't know how this gets resolved but (a) really hope the SEC/Notre Dame/Big 12 contingent wins since I hate the conference-champions-favoring plan and (b) really wish the the Big Ten hadn't given up on on-campus semifinals since this would be a perfect quid-pro-quo bargaining chip (give a top-four selection system and get semifinals in places that might actually get snow more than once a century). Alas.

Staples makes a couple really good points in that column, BTW. I recommend reading the whole thing but have to blockquote this portion for its brilliance:

The argument against the hybrid model (three conference champs within the top six and a wildcard) is that the No. 3 team could be left out in favor of the No. 6 team. That may sound fine to Big Ten and Pac-12 leaders now, but what happens when one of their champs is sitting at No. 1 and one of their teams is sitting at No. 3? They seem so focused on putting up roadblocks for the SEC that they have lost sight of the fact that they also have strong leagues that might someday be as dominant as the SEC is now.

Yup. I would be amazed at the shortsightedness if not for the people involved. I mean, it seems entirely possible that the Big Ten could produce two teams in the top three OH WAIT IT JUST HAPPENED FIVE FREAKING SEASONS AGO:

... my personal favorite is 2006: No. 1 Ohio State, No. 2 Florida, No. 5 USC, and No. 6 Louisville are in. No. 3 Michigan (11-1 with a 42-39 loss to Ohio State) and No. 4 LSU (losses to No. 3 Auburn and No. 2 Florida) are out. So Michigan, which was No. 2 but idle on Championship Saturday and got leapfrogged by Florida by .0101 in the final BCS Standings, doesn't get in. But Bobby Petrino's Big East champions, whose best non-conference win was over a 7-6 Miami team, gets to be in the Final Four?

There's some saying about history something something doom something something.

Anyway, there's obviously some work to be done there in terms of determining the participants. For what it's worth (which is nothing), my guess is that there ends up being some sort of preferential treatment for conference champions, maybe in the form of limiting semifinal-hosting capabilities to conference champions in a top-four field. Notre Dame probably wouldn't love that scenario but doesn't have a true host-bowl tie-in anyway; it could be worked out.

There's an acceptable middle ground in there somewhere that can/will be found since nobody wants to renege now and both (a) deal with the public backlash and (b) walk away from the gajillions of dollars on the table in TV revenue.

Back to Staples for the win:

We probably should wait until the unseen hand in all this drama makes its moves. We know what the leagues want, but we don't yet know what television executives want. Their willingness to pay to televise the playoff hinges upon the quality of the matchups created. The better the matchups, the more money everyone gets.

So don't worry too much about the playoff falling apart, even if the rhetoric gets stronger in the next three weeks. Cash is the ultimate consensus builder, and it hasn't had its say yet.

Nailed it.

So ... that's where things stand. That was more writing blockquoting than I expected but hopefully provided a bunch of interesting information that will be outdated by, like, Wednesday.

*This could be a faulty assumption since there is already a "playoff revenue distribution subcommittee" in place. Still, I can't imagine that the money is gonna be a serious deterrent to getting a deal done; I'm with Staples in that I think the money is the thing that will ensure that something gets done because there's simply too much to pass up.

A glorious, self-congratulatory meta update

At some point between midnight and 2 a.m. this morning, this website hit 10,000 page views. The answer to the snarky question you definitely are thinking right now: No, they are not all mine since my own hits are excluded. There are, for whatever reason, actually people reading (or accidentally stumbling across) this site with some regularity.

It took 266 posts and 363 days; that's about 38 views per story and 28 per day. I'm not exactly Google.

Still ... I mean ... 10,000 is pretty decent considering my complete lack of a traffic-generating platform and the relative noob-ness of my site. I just gotta change that from 10,000 a year to 10,000 a day in order to quit my job and start producing hypothetically entertaining content on a much-more-regular basis. I'll work on that.

In the meantime, yay for something vaguely resembling a readership.

Yay.

ESPN needs to look up the definition of 'can'

I saw this feature called "20 teams that can win it all" start to pop up in various places on ESPN while I was on vacation. I did not read any of the team-specific pieces since I was busy hanging out at the beach and whatnot, but I was bored today and went back to check out the full list since I figured reading about actual football-type stuff (and not realignment) would be swell.

Here it is:

20. Texas
19. Clemson
18. South Carolina
17. TCU
16. Arkansas
15. West Virginia
14. Georgia
13. Wisconsin
12. Florida State
11. Boise State
10. Stanford
9. Ohio State
8. Virginia Tech
7. Oklahoma State
6. USC
5. Florida
4. Oregon
3. Oklahoma
2. LSU
1. Alabama

Lol wut?!? I mean ...

... yeah.

My laughing-pear reaction has nothing to do with being a Michigan fanboi and everything to do with the fact that Ohio State is the only team in the country that literally can not win it all this year. That inconvenient postseason-ban thing means they (a) can't win the Big Ten since there's a championship game now, (b) can't play in the BCS title game and (c) aren't eligible for the AP poll and therefore, by rule, can't finish No. 1 in any of the currently recognized ranking systems. They can not win it all this year. Can not. I don't know how to make this any clearer. Eastern Michigan should be higher on the list. Etc.

ESPN's lame explanation is that the rankings actually aren't projections for this year and are determined via some kind of weighted formula based on offensive and defensive drive efficiency from the last five seasons. The specifics:

The Program FEI (PFEI) ratings published on this site represent a rolling five year period of drive efficiency data, weighted for more recent seasons. PFEI has a strong correlation with next-year FEI ratings (.752) and is used as the baseline data for my annual FEI projections. For years in which drive data is unavailable, I have developed an Approximated Program FEI (APFEI) rating based on final scores instead of possessions.

I like the FEI drive-efficiency metric. It is very valuable in determining a team's relative quality during/after the season. It also tells me very little (in a specific sense) about future games; the writer cites a .752 correlation between program FEI and next-year FEI, which is nice but not close to being perfect (and correlation does not equal causation). It's a general guideline that basically demonstrates, in numerical form, that a team that has been cumulatively very good over the last five years is likely to be very good again the following year. Woo.

There's also this:

The national champion(s) in 23 of the last 27 seasons was ranked among the PFEI/APFEI top-20 at the start of the season.

That means there were four national champions that did not start in the top 20, which in turn means that the implication that the top 20 teams are the only 20 that can win the national title is stupid ... especially when one of those 20 teams literally can not win the title. What this should be called is, like, "20 teams that have the best five-year-average drive-efficiency numbers" or something; nobody would read it, but at least it'd be accurate.

Summary: I have a beef with an ESPN copy editor (assuming copy editors still exist, which is a questionable assumption). This is very important and totally worth the 600-ish words I just wrote only because I really wanted to point out that Ohio State can not possibly, under any circumstances, win it all. OHIO!

Please explain this illogical meme

 This is from a FOXSports.com piece published today and written* from the Big 12 meetings:

Once it’s decided whether the playoff will consist of the top four overall teams, only conference champions or some combination of both, another wild ride on the conference realignment carousel will begin.

“Obviously the decisions around the BCS, wherever that winds up going, could have other implications for some realignment moves,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said Thursday. “I’m sure there will be some more yet to occur.” ...

So while the Big 12 insists it is satisfied with 10 members and has not had any expansion talks with other schools, just wait until the details of the four-team playoff are finalized and the conference starts getting telephone calls.

I've seen this same thing implied in several other columns that I don't feel like pulling up and/or linking to, and I don't understand.

To be specific, what I don't understand is how/why a four-team playoff is going to set off additional realignment. I understand how/why money sets off realignment, but the above-quoted piece does not at any point reference TV revenue or profit or anything related to money at all; the point is that the implementation of a four-team playoff will, for some reason, set off this string of realignment-y events.

I think -- I'm not totally sure about this -- that the common misconception is that the four power-ish conferences are gonna somehow monopolize the playoff to the exclusion of the ACC, Big East, Notre Dame and various other teams that would never make it anyway. This is not possible. I know it's not possible because (a) there are about as many powerful people -- most notably Jack Swarbrick, ACC commish John Swofford, and whoever is officially in charge of the Big East -- who don't want that to happen as do want it to happen, and (b) that monopolization system was in place back in the original BCS days and then ceased being in place when the non-BCS conferences started threatening a lawsuit in 2004. That led to the advent of a fifth BCS game and two additional at-large spots rather than legal shenanigans since the Department of Justice's involvement wouldn't have been enjoyable for anybody other than the lawyers getting paid in Maseratis.

Translation: A four-team bracket built solely around the four power-conference winners probably wouldn't be legally doable even if it had mass support, which it doesn't since it would screw over everybody outside the four power conferences. Whatever playoff system gets implemented will, without question, feature some degree of access for non-BCS (or whatever you want to call them now) teams.

And going back to the point about the playoff potentially including only conference champions -- which is extremely unlikely now that the SEC has publicly declared that it "won't compromise" on a four-best-teams setup -- wouldn't that be a pretty good incentive to not consolidate into a loaded conference? I have to believe that the undefeated winner (let's say Florida State, hypothetically) of a meh ACC would be ranked higher than at least one of the power-conference champs unless it happened to be a weird year in which there was exactly one undefeated team from every elite conference. The strength-of-schedule factor would come into play, but not to the extent that it would eliminate the possibility of a non-Big Ten/Big 12/Pac-12/SEC team getting in the playoff since that would unquestionably produce another lawsuit explosion from the 60-70 teams not in the aforementioned conferences. In other words, it seems like being in a weaker (but not WAC-ish, obviously) conference and having a better shot to go undefeated would be preferable, although that's purely from a competitive standpoint and not a financial one.

Speaking of which, the piece I blockquoted above is specifically referencing the Big 12 and relies heavily on the assumption that there's no way it will continue as a 10-team league because of the need to be "proactive" and yadda yadda yadda. Question: What incentive would Texas or Oklahoma or even Oklahoma State to approve more members when the current setup allows them to bypass a conference championship game and thus have a better chance of finishing unbeaten and getting a spot in the playoff? There are obviously a few programs out there that would produce a revenue increase (and a conference title game would tack on a few more million bucks a year), but again, that's purely a money thing and not a playoff-induced thing.

I've been racking my brain and have come up with zero logical explanations for the playoff-generates-realignment theme; the stuff I've seen written (which is in line with the Big 12 piece) doesn't make sense, and everything that does make sense in terms of realignment wouldn't be generated by the implementation of a playoff. So I dunno.

Just remember the last two paragraphs as the major takeaway from what I've written here: There will be more realignment/consolidation (to some degree), but it will be because of the ridonkulous financial differential between the conferences with Scrooge McDuck-esque TV payouts and those without, not the playoff-type thing. I just can't figure out why the latter keeps getting cited as the lone explanation for whatever illogical thing will happen in the future when, in reality, it would actually seem to be a deterrent that'll just get ignored in favor of an extra drift of cash.

Because cash wins everything.

*FYI, that piece was written by Thayer Evans, who's normally pretty good. I don't think he's thinking this one through but also can't criticize him too much seeing as how he has a kinda-substantiating quote from Mark Emmert, who has zero decision-making power in all this but probably seemed like a good source since he's, you know, the president of the NCAA.