The downside of having a job is that it consumes my all-important blogging time and demands that I prioritize my daily activities, with "things that make money" coming in first on the list. Hence my late reaction to this:
Ohio State is vacating its wins from the 2010 football season, including its share of the Big Ten championship and the Buckeyes' victory over Arkansas in the 2011 Allstate Sugar Bowl.
Responding to the NCAA's investigation of a memorabilia-for-cash scandal that cost former coach Jim Tressel his job and led to star quarterback Terrelle Pryor leaving school, the university also said Friday it is waiving a $250,000 fine imposed on Tressel and changing his resignation to a retirement. The move contradicts a comment university president Gordon Gee made last month when he said Tressel "will pay the fine."
Calling this a slap on the wrist would be an insult to the concept of a slap on the wrist, which at least causes some non-zero level of pain. We've known for months now that OSU/Tressel knowingly played ineligible players -- any games those guys participated in last year were going to be vacated, and that was basically the starting point for punishment. In other words, this was literally the least Ohio State could do.
This is not surprising in the slightest. Throughout the entire process, the laughably incompetent Ohio State administration (led by Orville Redenbacher) has been saying things like "this is an isolated event" and "I just hope the coach doesn't dismiss ME" and blah blah blah, and they've been sweeping things under the rug only to have them come flying back out directly into their collective face. Their goal has been to admit nothing, do nothing of relevance and just hope the NCAA won't find enough proof or motivation to hammer them.
I didn't expect them to change their strategy now.
Here's the complete sum of self-imposed "penalties":
Loss of all 2010 wins (a given from the beginning)
Two years of probation
Amazing. They also managed to remove some of the original punishment, saying "don't worry about the fine, Jimmy -- happy Easter to you." So yeah ... the coach who covered up years of extensive NCAA violations is off into his cushy, parade-honored "retirement" with no official punishment whatsoever. I mean ... whaa??? This would be flat-out unbelievable if it weren't coming from the same school that originally thought a two-game suspension would be fair punishment.
It's one thing to snub your nose at the NCAA; it's another to laugh directly in its face.
A not-insignificant notation goes here: This announcement is in response ONLY to the NCAA's original notice of allegations, the one that came out a few months ago following the original TatGate investigation and coverup. This was before all the car stuff, before the Sports Illustrated reports, before the Dennis Talbott allegations. And with all that craziness not yet included, OSU had little motivation -- other than appeasing the NCAA, which isn't a bad idea but has been off their radar so far -- to do much of anything now that Tressel is gone.
The message: Tressel was a naughty boy who has been badly punished via retirement (?), and nobody left behind should have to suffer for his silly misdeeds (which of course should be considered meaningless next to his near-biblical acts of greatness).
OSU is past the point of covering up and is now publicly challenging the NCAA: Punish us. Prove that "the cost of violating the rules costs more than not violating them," as NCAA prez Mark Emmert claims.
The ball's in your court, Emmert. Authoritah FTW on August 12.
NOTE: No, Michigan doesn't get credit for a win, and the OSU win streak isn't over. The 2010 game just gets erased from the record books, which doesn't change the horrifically depressing fact that Michigan hasn't beaten OSU since (gulp) 2003.
Janzen Jackson re-enrolls at Tennessee: After leaving school in the the spring to deal with "personal problems" that (to my knowledge) never became public, safety Janzen Jackson re-enrolled at Tennessee for summer classes on Wednesday and is "expected to be a full participant when training camp begins." This is pretty fantastic news for Derek Dooley on two levels:
Jackson is good (duh) -- probably the best player on the team, actually. He was named second-team All-SEC last year as a sophomore after finishing with five picks and 69 tackles.
UT has zero depth. I'm not sure exactly what the count is currently, but when Dooley took over before last season, the Vols had something like 72 (or some similarly terrifying number) of scholarship players. A big part of that was the seemingly loaded '09 recruiting class, which had two five-stars -- Jackson and the legendary Bryce Brown -- and a bunch of other talent but has now been reduced to less than half its original size just two years later.
Assuming Jackson's "personal problems" haven't robbed him of some amount of on-field ability, he returns as probably the second-best safety in the SEC (Mark Barron at Alabama being the best) and represents a massive chip in Tennessee's bid for a second straight uninspiring bowl game that won't mean anything other than big-picture progress.
I find this both sad and not at all surprising. Just beat Michigan and we will honor you by dressing our children in your ridiculous attire despite your absurdly hypocritical lack of morality.
Ohio!
Michael McAdoo is pissed, yo: Former North Carolina defensive end Michael McAdoo -- who was stripped of his remaining eligibility as part of the UNC academic shenanigans -- is suing the NCAA and the school because he claims "inaccurate information" was used in the decision to end his career.
The argument:
McAdoo's lawyers argue that the school's Honor Court found him guilty of only one infraction: representing another's work as his own after Wiley had formatted in-text citations and the "works cited" page for websites used to prepare his research paper.
The school's Honor Court decided to suspend him from school for the spring semester but allow him to re-enroll in the summer and then return to the football team this fall. It cleared him in a second case and the student attorney general decided there was insufficient evidence to pursue a third against him.
He had also received $110 in improper benefits. Most of that was connected to a trip to the Washington, D.C., area with teammates Marvin Austin and Greg Little, prompting the school to hold him out for the first three games of last season.
So the $110 in benefits (gasp) was the basis for the three-game suspension last year, and the school decided to suspend him from spring football this year after the "citation" issue (which does seem a little shady based on Jennifer Wiley's alleged let-me-help-you-with-that involvement with the rest of the team).
But if that's really all there was to it -- and the school Honor Court is probably as good a source as any when we're talking about academic misconduct -- it does seem a little ridiculous that he permanently lost his eligibility due to basically one allegation of cheating that the school basically wrote off as "meh, not that bad" and was officially determined to be an extra benefit worth $11 (srsly).
That said, I don't understand why the school is named in the lawsuit when it obviously wasn't UNC's decision to revoke his eligibility, and the NCAA is a third party specifically authorized by member schools to write and implement rules, so good luck in court -- especially when this is the goal:
The lawsuit seeks to compel chancellor Holden Thorp to reinstate McAdoo while also preventing the NCAA from interfering in the process or punishing the school if McAdoo returns.
Yeah ... probably not. Important disclaimer: I'm no law-talkin' guy.
Dee Hart's freshman season ends before it began: Ahhh, Demetrius Hart. The one-time gem of Rich Rodriguez's 2011 recruiting class who bolted for Alabama when it became pretty obvious that RichRod was dangling in the wind at Michigan, Hart tore it up in spring ball and seemed to be in line for some serious playing time behind Trent Richardson this year.
Alabama running back Demetrius Hart will miss the 2011 season after the freshman injured his knee Tuesday night, sources confirmed Wednesday.
Hart, who enrolled early and was impressive in spring practice, is scheduled to undergo surgery later this week after suffering the injury during voluntary workouts, according to the sources.
Ouch. Given the typical impact of an ACL tear and Alabama's absurd talent pool, this probably means a lot more to Hart than it does to Bama. He'll take his redshirt year to rehab and presumably be in the mix for the starting job next year after Richardson leaves for first-round gold in the NFL draft.
Purdue running back Sean Matti found dead: The headline says it all. Matti was apparently at some sort of party on or around Lake Freeman (which isn't far from West Lafayette) when he was reported missing, and he was found dead in the water the next day.
Matti was a senior walk-on who had never touched the ball or done anything of note (other than probably bust his ass for a spot on the team), but that doesn't make it any less sad. He was 22.
It's a fine day to celebrate our country, despite it being roughly 6 million degrees outside right now. So whether your thing is a spectacular J Leman-esque tie or an impromptu speech following a typically nonsensical Chris Myers question on national TV, do it in style.
This video is equal parts weird, confusing (srsly WTF) and hilariously awesome:
I'm not sure if my favorite part was "the instructor is an adult male who contains 40 years" or "the boys of cow must increase their speed." So full of win.
Still, this is far from the strangest quasi-college-football-related video I've ever come across. That title will (probably) forever belong to whatever this thing is.
The cover has been blown off the weird "here's some money for some recruits" relationship between Oregon and wannabe agent Will Lyles, as Yahoo's Dan Wetzel and Charles Robinson -- who are on a freakin' roll with their various investigative reports this year -- published an in-depth interview Friday in which Lyles sings like a canary with all kinds of delicious details.
The takeaway: Oregon worked with Lyles exclusively for his "access" to Texas kids (specifically Lache Seastrunk) and agreed to pay $25,000 to help him start up a recruiting service that would provide them with nothing of substance, and when Chip Kelly realized that this was (a) stupid and (b) going to come out publicly, he asked Lyles to put together a bunch of recruiting information retroactively so he'd have something to show the NCAA.
A couple of particularly crushing excerpts:
"I look back at it now and they paid for what they saw as my access and influence with recruits," Lyles told Yahoo! Sports. "The service I provided went beyond what a scouting service should. I made a mistake and I'm big enough of a man to admit I was wrong." ...
Lyles said Oregon never asked him for written profiles of any players from March 2010 until February 2011. When the request came, Lyles said, he believed it was because Oregon wanted to establish that he had provided legitimate scouting services. ...
Lyles’ intimate involvement with Seastrunk’s letter of intent came just weeks after Kelly and Oregon agreed to be Complete Scouting Service’s first client. It also was after Lyles filed the founding documents of his company. That places him under the jurisdiction of the NCAA as an active recruiting service provider.
So ... that all sounds pretty bad.
It's not as bad as it could be -- Lyles is pretty adamant that he did NOT pay any recruits (why share, amirite?), which would be the nuclear explosion we've all been waiting for -- but it's pretty bad.
The problem is the same as when everything first came out: Either Lyles wasn't running a recruiting service and was getting paid for his (ahem) persuasive abilities or he was a recruiting service and was getting paid for his persuasive abilities. He's readily admitted that he provided nothing of real value other than his creepy knowledge of how to connect with his naive and malleable high school buddies -- the rest is just semantics. The emails, phone records and various notes are all pretty benign and don't add any exciting dirt to the pile, but they don't need to.
The funny thing (not in a "haha" sense) is that my first reaction to Oregon's involvement was "well yeah, this is pretty bad, but Chip Kelly's not gonna get fired or anything" ... and then I got to this part:
Lyles said they requested printed reports on Class of 2011 prep prospects, ones that had already signed letters of intent, as soon as possible.
“So I just threw it together.”
Lyles said he took old profiles off a computer, copied some information from elsewhere and tried to accumulate a last-minute recruiting package. He said he never bothered to consider the quality because he felt Oregon didn’t care.
“They were covering their tracks,” Lyles said. “They were covering their asses. They were scrambling.”
Prepare your distressed politician face, Chip Kelly. The coverup is ALWAYS worse than the crime (just ask Cheatypants McSweatervest).
I honestly have no idea whether Kelly's job is in immediate jeopardy, but we can expect the following things:
Some sort of contrite or defiant public statement;
An NCAA investigation;
Punishment that may or may not make Kelly unemployable (this is dependent on both his response and what exactly the NCAA believes Lyles was doing in exchange for his hefty paychecks).
The second and third items on that list will be tedious and slow, maybe even slow enough that the whole issue will have drifted out of the public consciousness and Kelly will be salvageable if Oregon wins a lot of games and stops doing stupid, rule-shattering things.
But given the vengeful axe the NCAA has been wielding of late, it's probably not the best time to find out. Paying middlemen has been known to be a coach- and program-destroying tactic.
Juron Criner might (for some reason) miss the upcoming season: The rumors have been flying around the interwebz the last few days after the Arizona Daily Star reported that UA wideout Juron Criner, a second-team All-American last year and the best receiver in the Pac-10 Pac-12, might miss the 2011 season "because of undisclosed medical reasons.”
Neither Criner nor Mike Stoops nor the school has commented publicly, so speculation is running rampant and nobody seems to really know anything. Probably the most connected person in the UA community -- longtime beat writer and Lindy's college football editor Anthony Gimino -- said he hasn't been able to reach Criner and doesn't want to "conjecture on what I hear about the state or causes of Criner’s condition."
Calling whatever's going on "Criner's condition" sounds kinda bad, but again, nobody seems to know anything for sure right now. Meanwhile, both Bruce Feldman at ESPN (through a tweet) and AZCentral.com's Bruce Cooper said the whole thing is actually related to a family member's illness and not anything involving Criner himself ... but Criner apparently did have some sort of neurological testing recently, and it's unknown what the cause was or whether it was even related to the current situation.
So ... something's going on, it's potentially serious and his status is unknown (BTW, Criner would be a senior this year but does have a redshirt available). Arizona is actually pretty deep at receiver -- David Douglas, David Roberts, Dan Buckner, et al -- but there's nobody even close to Criner's level (duh), and losing him could be the difference between first and fourth in a Pac-12 South that's wiiiiide open for the taking with USC still ineligible.
Ohio State signs Luke Fickell to billion-year contract: Luke Fickell told Dan Patrick the other day that OSU has removed the "interim" tag from his job title, which obviously means that he's the long-term guy and will be coaching Ohio State forever and always until the end of time.
"Luke is our head coach this year. At some point either during or after the season a decision will be made on who will be our coach going forward."
Or something like that. When you're bleeding recruits like somebody just stabbed your recruiting jugular with an ice pick, you've gotta do something -- I guess this is something. But his chances of keeping the job beyond this season are still just slightly north of zero.
As MGoBlog aptly put it, nobody rearranges deck chairs on the Titanic like Ohio State.
Tyler Gabbert transfers to Louisville: Tyler "Little Brother of Blaine" Gabbert, who left Missouri after playing pretty crappily in spring and coming in behind James Franklin on the QB depth chart, is headed to Louisville.
Mark this one down as "surprising" or "confusing" or something other than logical, because Gabbert will have to (a) sit out a year as a D-I transfer and (b) compete in 2012 with Teddy Bridgewater, the highly touted incoming freshman who's expected to start right off the bat (and presumably beyond).
Bridgewater was a consensus four-star QB considered one of the 10 best in the country last year by pretty much everybody who does the recruiting thing, so if Gabbert was looking to avoid competition, he chose the wrong place. But it's a nice score for Louisville, which went from having zero legitimate starters to having probably two.
Zach Brown transfers to Pitt: Buried on the depth chart at Wisconsin and all but forgotten behind clones James White and Montee Ball, senior Zach Brown is d-u-n in Madison and headed to Pitt.
Brown's good enough to be a starting running back somewhere ... or at least he was a few years ago. He ran for 568 yards as a freshman, 305 as a sophomore, 279 as a junior and then zero last year as he redshirted and earned his degree (which means he's eligible to play immediately). And Pitt -- minus the microscopic Dion Lewis, who declared for the draft after a meh sophomore season -- would be a fine option except for two things:
The crazy-shifty Ray Graham ran for almost 1,000 yards last year as a not-quite-full-time complementary guy and is the preseason All-Big East first-team running back.
Todd Graham's throw-it-all-over-the-lot offense equals way fewer available carries, so even if Brown gets a role roughly equivalent to what Graham had last year, he probably won't end up with more than 100 rushes this year.
Then again, given the option of being a part-time player at a Big East contender like Pitt or a no-time player at Wisconsin, the choice probably wasn't that hard. The only other notable school on his list was Miami, which would have been a better playing-time choice but might not have been seriously interested.
Lloyd Carr (?!?) talks possible college football anarchy: I could pretty easily pump out 20,000 words on the BCS and potential playoff systems and why most fans and their proposals are dumb, but since those things are all just time-killers, I don't. Howeva ... if there's anyone out there I'd expect to toe the NCAA line and talk about how tremendous (so tremendously tremendous) the system is and blah blah blah, it's Lloyd Carr.
"I was in New York a month ago for the College Football Hall of Fame and I talked to some important people that said in the next 10 years or so, there could be a group of prominent schools with large budgets and stadiums that could break away from the NCAA and play their own schedule. There could be anywhere from 60-65 teams that would break away and play their own schedule and then have a playoff."
It's not clear if he was really advocating/believing this or just mentioning that he heard it, but the fact that relevant people are even talking about it is pretty interesting. I think most people who understand the financially mandated hierarchy of the current system agree that if a playoff (anything other than a plus-one) is ever gonna happen, this is how. Whether it would be good for college football is a completely different issue and anyone's guess.
One of the reasons I posted those Golden Nugget lines the other day was to help establish a couple weird memes I've noticed over the course of the offseason. One of the popular ones (as you probably figured out from the headline): Auburn relied so heavily on Cam Newton that his loss -- and that of Nick Fairley, to a lesser extent -- equals instant suckiness.
This isn't a completely baseless assumption. Since a lot of predictions (especially in Vegas) are primarily stat-based, these numbers from last season are pretty terrifying:
Auburn: 6,989 total yards, 72 touchdowns Cam Newton: 4,327 total yards, 50 touchdowns
I'll do that calculations for you: Newton accounted for about 62 percent of their total yards and just a hair under 70 percent of their touchdowns. So yeah ... that's, like, a lot. And given that the offense was basically tailored around Newton and his absurd athleticism -- veer read option, veer read option, veer read option play action, etc. -- it sort of makes sense that he singlehandedly accounted for 500 more yards than UCLA last season (lol).
Also significant: Auburn returns seven starters this season. Not seven on offense -- seven total. That's allegedly the fewest in the country. Between Vegas and stat-obsessed K.C. Joyner over at ESPN, the so-called experts are snuggling these numbers like a teddy bear as the justification for Auburn's pending demise. And that's not an exaggeration: Based on current lines, Auburn should lose no fewer than seven games this season, which obviously would mean no bowl game and a pretty quick reversal of opinion on the Gene Chizik era.
HOWEVA ... I have a few (three, to be specific) beefs with the experts on this one. I'll start with the nerdiest-looking and most important one.
1. Gus Malzahn. Shortly after Chizik was hired and Auburn fans everywhere were filling the message boards with deep thoughts like "WTF," he somewhat quietly hired Malzahn as O-coordinator and former Duke coach Ted Roof as D-coordinator. They were both unquestionably among the best in the country, and getting them on his staff was the first in many brilliant moves by a guy who had a not-so-sparkling head coaching resume to that point.
Malzahn came from Tulsa but was mostly remembered for his role as OC on the drama-filled 2006 Arkansas team that included Darren McFadden, Felix Jones and (briefly) Mitch Mustain. This was the team that popularized the Wildcat, and between that and Newton, the perception of Malzahn is one of a Rich Rodriguez-type read-option advocate who needs a mobile QB to run his offense. To anyone who says/writes this, I respond: Did you ever watch Tulsa?
Malzahn made a name for himself as a dominant prep coach in Arkansas with an air-it-out offense (led by Mustain, not coincidentally), and in places where he's had complete control of the playcalling and someone other than Cam Newton at quarterback, he's actually been pretty balanced. He has just one real constant: a mind-blowing tempo. Like RichRod, Chip Kelly, et al, Malzahn likes it fast -- the faster the better.
Here's a breakdown of Malzahn's run-pass ratio each year along with the QB's rushing yardage and the team's national rank in rushing and passing yardage.
'06 Arkansas: 539 rushes, 302 passes, -32 QB rush yards, fourth in rushing, 109th in passing (Malzahn won several national coordinator of the year awards after the '06 season but left for Tulsa, which wasn't exactly a big step up in the world but did get him playcalling autonomy)
'07 Tulsa: 562 rushes, 564 passes, 119 QB rush yards, 41st in rushing, third in passing
'08 Tulsa: 674 rushes, 428 passes, 186 QB rush yards, fifth in rushing, ninth in passing
'09 Auburn: 550 rushes, 364 passes, -116 QB rush yards, 13th in rushing, 56th in passing
'10 Auburn: 652 rushes, 296 passes, 1,473 QB rush yards, fifth in rushing, 66th in passing
Last season was a serious outlier, yes? Before Cam Newton came along, Malzahn's average starting quarterback ran for about 39 yards per season yet led an offense that finished 13th overall in total yardage.
Cam Newton did not make Gus Malzahn -- the guy just understands offense. I know this is going way back into the archives, but circa 2009, Auburn had noodle-armed and immobile Chris Todd at QB, no dominant receivers, a good running back (Ben Tate) and one standout lineman (center Ryan Pugh) ... and that team finished 16th in total offense and went 8-4 despite having a defense that was 68th and 79th in the two most meaningful categories (yardage and scoring).
More video:
Malzahn is like the MacGyver of O-coordinators: No matter what you give him, the result will be something awesome.
2. Michael Dyer and Onterio McCalebb. Outside of Cam Newton's superhuman athleticism, one of the biggest factors in the success of Auburn's call-it-until-they-stop-it veer option last year was the threat of the uber-fast McCalebb getting the corner.
Neither that play nor that threat will cease to exist, especially since presumptive starting QB Barrett Trotter (a redshirt junior who might have started in '09 had he not torn his ACL in spring ball) is more comparable physically to Newton than Todd. Trotter actually averaged 13.6 yards per carry last season, which would be amazing and some kind of record if it had come on more than five runs. And if Trotter doesn't work out, incoming freshman Kiehl Frazier will immediately be the most athletic QB on the roster when he shows up and could also fill a Newton-type role (if Malzahn decides that's what he wants), albeit probably not very consistently since, you know, he'll be a freshman.
Dyer was a big-time recruit who wasn't asked to do much early but ended up (a) giving Malzahn the powerful feature-type back he'd lost in Tate and (b) breaking Bo Jackson's freshman school record with 1,093 yards on just 182 carries (that's 6.0 a pop). The guess here is that he gets 20-plus carries more than the three times he did last season and picks up a significant portion of Newton's slack -- he's probably one of the 10 best running backs in the country.
The graduation-decimated offensive line is a little more concerning -- right tackle Brandon Mosley is the only true returning starter -- but going back to Malzahn and his absurd track record (no worse than 35th nationally in total yardage), we're probably talking about the difference between good and excellent.
If Dyer can be the 2009 version of Tate (very plausible), McCalebb and Trotter can combine for another 1,500-ish rushing yards (also very plausible) and the defense can just be average, there's no reason Auburn can't go 8-4 again, which might not be "WOOOOO NATIONAL CHAMPIONS" but also won't be "FIRE CHIZIK AND BURN IT ALL DOWN" (like 5-7 would be).
Which brings me to ...
3. Ted Roof. One of Auburn's coordinators used to be a D-I head coach, and it wasn't Gus Malzahn. Roof had an epically terrible stint at Duke (6-45 in four-plus seasons), but that shouldn't detract from his ability as a D-coordinator: He was awesome in that role at Georgia Tech, made Duke's consistently abysmal defenses respectable, went to Minnesota and oversaw a walking-on-water-esque transformation in one year and then was offered the job at Auburn. Seeing as how Auburn >>> Minnesota, that was probably an easy decision.
It hasn't been all candy and unicorns and puppy dogs at Auburn, though. The 2009 defense was pretty bad -- the worst statistically in school history -- and last year's wasn't a ton better despite having Nick Fairley crushing people's skulls in the middle of it. Auburn was 60th in total defense and 53rd in scoring defense last year ... but they were pretty good at one not-so-insignificant thing (the one thing Roof's teams are almost always good at): stopping the run. Auburn was ninth nationally in rushing defense, and that was pretty much the difference between the crappy 2009 unit (78th in rush D) and the good-enough-to-win-a-BCS-title 2010 one.
Roof's high-variance strategy is a big part of both the consistently excellent rush defenses and the less-than-thrilling numbers so far at Auburn. He'll blitz a lot, get a lot of sacks, stuff a lot of running plays, force a lot of turners and give up a substantial number of big plays, with the damage of those big plays pretty much being the determining factor in the overall success of the defense. I believe this is called "The Jon Tenuta School of Let's Blitz." It's a good system except when it's not.
But Roof is probably doing a better job than he's getting credit for. I was wondering when I started putting this post together about how much Malzahn's hair-on-fire offensive tempo skews the total number of plays (and therefore yards and points) in a typical Auburn game -- thankfully this requires no effort on my part other than summoning the FEI index over at Football Outsiders (BTW, if you don't read Football Outsiders, start now). The basic premise of FEI is that it's a tempo-free, schedule-adjusted rating system -- it strips out all the variables, runs the raw data (yards per play, points per possession, etc.) through a formula and spits out some numbers that essentially tell you which teams are the most productive/effective on both sides of the ball.
In 2009, that worst-ever Auburn defense was 53rd in FEI (not great but not terrible after finishing 25th in '08). Last year, it was sixth. Those numbers look just a little better than the raw ones and paint a slightly more accurate picture of the quality of those defenses, even if the average Auburn fan understands them about as much as they'd understand a Boeing technical manual or a toothbrush (zing!).
But anyway ... what I'm trying to get at with Roof is this: He's gonna do his thing, and he might shut down LSU one week and give up 45 to Arkansas the next. But if he just puts together a defense that's statistically somewhere between the 2009 and '10 ones -- maybe 30th in FEI and a little below average nationally in scoring and total defense -- that product plus an average Malzahn offense should still yield a pretty good team.
This is the proper spot for a caveat: The schedule is a freakin' slaughterhouse. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that Auburn could be a really good team and still end up about 7-5 just because of the pure volume of terrifying games (especially road ones). Insert Gary Danielson reference here about how the SEC rulez and everyone else droolz. It's also possible that my assumptions here are overly optimistic and Auburn will just be an average team, in which case there's not a single SEC game (other than maybe Ole Miss at home) that's not losable.
But all things considered, I'd feel pretty comfortable putting a few bucks on the under if the baseline of expectations at this point is seven losses. A drop-off is one thing; a bowl-less detonation is another.
The downside of having a job is that it consumes my all-important blogging time and demands that I prioritize my daily activities, with "things that make money" coming in first on the list. Hence my late reaction to this:
Calling this a slap on the wrist would be an insult to the concept of a slap on the wrist, which at least causes some non-zero level of pain. We've known for months now that OSU/Tressel knowingly played ineligible players -- any games those guys participated in last year were going to be vacated, and that was basically the starting point for punishment. In other words, this was literally the least Ohio State could do.
of the original punishment, saying "don't worry about the fine, Jimmy -- happy Easter to you." So yeah ... the coach who covered up years of extensive NCAA violations is off into his cushy, parade-honored "retirement" with no official punishment whatsoever. I mean ... whaa??? This would be flat-out unbelievable if it weren't coming from the same school that originally thought a two-game suspension would be fair punishment.
