With less than a minute to play in the game and the Tennessee Vols inbounding the basketball while nursing a two-point lead, Bruce Pearl put his hands together to call a timeout. Then, something extraordinary happened. Senior wing J.P. Prince, the man responsible for more spectacular and more boneheaded plays than any player in the history of Vol basketball, called off Pearl on taking the timeout. Amazingly, Pearl relented. The Vols inbounded the basketball, ran the shot clock down, and kicked a pass out to sophomore shooting guard Scotty Hopson. Hopson, a native of Hopkinsville, Kentucky who picked the Vols over the Cats after a spirited recruiting battle, rose up into the air and let the ball go.
While the ball was in the air, it was still a ballgame. But by the time the ball swished through the net and sent 21,162 inside Thompson-Boling Arena into a fit of ecstasy, the game was over.
It was 70-65 and 37.1 seconds remained in the game. The Vols would go on to win 74-65, meaning the top two teams in college basketball have three losses among them, two having come in Knoxville, Tenn.
Prior to this game, Pearl said that Tennessee could have a good season if they didn't beat Kentucky, but that the Vols couldn't have a great season without beating Kentucky. Saturday's game would be the second meeting between Coach John Calipari and Bruce Pearl, the first time the two men have faced each other twice in the same year.
But the two foes have coached against each other once each of the last four seasons, when Calipari was at Memphis. Currently, Calipari leads the series 3-2, and in the midst of those five games we've rapidly learned that neither man can stand the other and that the games between the two teams are almost always close. But many in the national media, in their rush to crown Calipari as the unchallenged leader in the SEC coaching clubhouse, overlooked the fact that Pearl had gone .500 against Calipari despite having much less talent. In fact, fired Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie had a better career record against Pearl than Calipari.
Nevertheless all of these facts were snowed under in the rush to crown Calipari's greatness.
In the game less than a month ago, Pearl flummoxed the high-flying Cat offense -- give John Wall the ball and get out of the way -- with a zone defense. The result? With 10 minutes remaining in the game at Rupp Arena the Vols held a 52-50 lead. Then Kentucky's Eric Bledsoe hit a couple of big threes down the stretch to blow the game open.
Now there were 40 more minutes to come, this time in Knoxville.
More so than any of Pearl's five seasons, this has been a season of turmoil for the Volunteers. On New Year's Day Tyler Smith, the Vols best player, was arrested on a traffic stop, two guns were uncovered, and ultimately Smith was kicked off the team. Three additional Volunteer players riding in the vehicle were suspended. Pearl's Vols responded to that setback by rolling off five consecutive wins, including a home victory over number one Kansas.
But since those five games and the return of the three suspended Vol players, Tennessee had stumbled, going just 6-5 over the last 11. Did the Vols have what it would take to bring down the Wildcats?
Time would tell. Come along as we take a telecast journey. Here are 17 thoughts from watching the game.
1. If you've ever thought about living on the East Coast, aside from the general unattractiveness of the women, this CBS regional broadcast should end those desires.
On the one hand, two top 25 teams that hate each other, Kentucky and Tennessee, are playing for over the 200th time. On the other hand, Georgetown is playing Notre Dame.
Guess which game the East Coast got?
This is what East Coast sports programming boils down to, pick two teams from large cities and put them on television even if the game isn't a good one.
I know, I lived through college here.
It was a sports disaster.
2. The UT student section regales the Kentucky basketball team with SAT chants.
The great thing about John Calipari is you're not even sure which player those chants are being directed at. And we probably won't even find out for another five years.
3. Does Bruce Pearl have a new orange jacket?
We got into a big discussion on the radio show about the fact that Pearl's jacket didn't match the Tennessee basketball team's uniform.
But this jacket looks new and the orange looks like it actually matches the team's orange.
Given that Pearl is 0-3 on the season against Vandy and Kentucky in the orange jacket, maybe a new jacket was called for.
4. CBS's Jim Spanarkel reports that Samuel L. Jackson is a huge Tennessee fan.
So congrats to him for sharing a bit of knowledge I didn't have.
By the way, in case you're wondering, the fact that Jim Spanarkel is doing this game is a great sign that CBS hedged their broadcasting bets.
Where did CBS find him?
Well, according to Wikipedia, Spanarkel is "currently a First Vice President and a certified financial planner at Merrill Lynch in New Jersey."
Maybe Word Wide Wes is a client, who knows?
5. After giving up the first four points of the game to Kentucky, Tennessee takes off on an 18-0 run that sends the Vols in front by 14.
During this run, Tennessee attacks Kentucky in transition.
The Wildcats seem stunned that Tennessee is running, and are slow to react after missed shots. Tennessee takes advantage, scoring rapidly rather than running down the shot clock as the Vols did in their previous match-up.
Advantage, Pearl.
6. Has there ever been a great player that is less interested in running up and down the court than DeMarcus Cousins?
In fact, has there been a more dominant player that moves less in recent memory? Imagine if Cousins was actually a hustler, what he'd be capable of doing on the basketball court.
As is, he loafs his way up and down the court like he's already playing in the NBA and has a limited number of steps he can take in a game. His running is downright Manute Bol-ian.
7. At the half it is 40-29 Vols, and Kentucky has yet to execute a single offensive play.
Honest question for Kentucky fans, what has Cal done to make a single adjustment on the offensive side of the ball in the first half?
Honest question for Tennessee fans, what amount of money would you have wagered on J.P. Prince connecting on two three-point baskets in the first half?
8. Calipari makes his halftime speech.
He calls World Wide Wes on his cell phone: "Wes," Cal says, "I'm going to need you to get me five NBA lottery picks next year. I can't beat Pearl in Knoxville with four."
9. With 14:06 remaining in the second half, Tennessee storms out to a 19-point lead at 54-35.
The game is close to blowout territory, but the Vols will not score a basket for the next five minutes. Instead Cameron Tatum will decide that each Vol offensive possession should end with him hoisting up a heavily contested three forty feet from the basket.
10. And John Wall turns into Michael Jordan for the next five minutes.
Jordan played five or six years in the NBA before he began to get the Jordan treatment from the refs.
Wall?
It's taken him just over one month for SEC refs to literally trip all over themselves to give him beneficial calls.
In particular there are two plays that account for six points and make this a ballgame. First, Wall charges over Cameron Tatum, gets the block call and the resulting basket.
Then, less than a minute later, Wall flies down the court, is fouled one step inside the three point line, and then is allowed to take three more steps before laying up a shot.
You guessed, it, and one!
It's almost like the SEC officials are competing to see who can finish the season having called more and one plays for John Wall.
11. At this point, with the game headed towards a dogfight finish, there's a frenzy in my house.
It's lunchtime for my two-year old son and my wife has to pick a lunch destination with my in-law's.
The Treaty of Ghent was executed in a more timely fashion.
Am I the only person this happens to? Inevitably, just when games get tight, my son has to put on his coat and refuses to do so. He's wailing, rolling around on the floor kicking his legs, now I know what Coach Cal feels like when he asks DeMarcus Cousins to go to class.
12. Kentucky runs a recognizable play out of a timeout, the alley-oop.
Only the pass bangs off the backboard.
Who ends up with it?
DeMarcus Cousins of course.
Honest question, if Kentucky's offense consisted entirely of passes thrown off the backboard, how many plays would end with Cousins getting a lay-up or shooting free throws?
Answer.
50%.
By the way, Kentucky fans, how many times did the Wildcats feed Cousins in the post today and let him work?
I can't even remember one single time.
13. Kentucky ties the game 65-65 on a Cousins dunk.
Immediately preceding his assist, John Wall registers a 3.9 forty.
After watching Wall streak up and down the court all season, I'm legitimately interested what his forty time would be if he left Knoxville and headed to Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine.
The Ole Miss student body voted Tuesday to adopt a new mascot, replacing Colonel Reb, the grandfather-of-Yosemite-Sam looking gentleman and symbol of the Old South associated with Ole Miss athletics since 1938. The final tally passed by an overwhelming majority as 74.6 percent of ballots cast voted yes.
Since the Colonel was removed from the football stadium seven years ago, Ole Miss has been the only SEC school without a mascot. However, after the vote, the drought will end, once a 12-15 student mascot committee is chosen. With this vote should come a commendation to Ole Miss students for taking charge of the mascot replacement and moving on from what had become a deeply divisive symbol of the school. Now they've just got to make the correct selection among a bevy of candidates. And not kowtow to what will undoubtedly be lame suggestions put forward by whatever marketing company the university hires to float suggestions their way.
The early dark horse?
Try Admiral Ackbar, the rebel leader from Star Wars who famously screamed, "It's a trap," at the last possible moment. Already the Admiral, a native of Mon Calamari, which already sounds like it could be just down the road from Itta Bena or Yazoo City or Mississippi's other colorfully named towns, has picked up an early tide of support thanks to the Web site notrap.org and his past credentials as a leader of the rebel alliance. In fact, the Admiral has already hit the campaign trail, hustling for votes on Twitter, -- "I am eagerly awaiting on the forest moon of Endor for the results," the good admiral tweeted -- and garnering 1,400 followers on his Facebook page.
I can't wait until LucasFilms gets word of Ackbar's role and sues the students for appropriating his image.
Anyway, given that a student body selecting a mascot is a big deal, who should the committee consider? Fortunately I've got 10 nominees for you. But before I discuss those, let me go ahead and toss my support firmly behind one man, William Faulkner.
I first wrote that Faulkner should be Ole Miss' mascot in November of 2006. I included the idea in my first book, "Dixieland Delight," and later endorsed the idea in a 2007 column that you can read here. I rationalized as follows: Faulkner went to Ole Miss as a student, the university owns his home, Rowan Oak, and his Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner played quarterback in high school, and, most importantly, the alums I've heard from all love the idea. It's impossible to do better than Faulkner.
William FaulknerPut plainly, Faulkner was a literary rebel, a man who refused to follow contemporary ideas of what a story should look like, and, as a result, millions of people know the state of Mississippi through his words. Are you telling me that a Faulkner mascot, a student dressed up in a tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth, a mustache, and a cane, wouldn't immediately become the most iconic mascot in the South? Maybe the entire country?
What's more, Faulkner actually encourages football fans to read -- and if you read message boards, the e-mails I get, or even the comments after these articles, who could be against that? -- and offers an indelible connection to the university's educational mission and, and this is pretty key, the year Faulkner died, 1962, was the last year that Ole Miss won a national title.
Erase the Faulkner Curse?
You bet.
It absolutely, positively has to be Faulkner for Ole Miss mascot. Anything less is a joke. Which leads me to these further nominees.
1. The Flood
Ole Miss' original mascot was The Flood. It was replaced in 1938 by Colonel Reb. So, at a school that claims to love tradition, Colonel Reb was actually an interloper.
If you want to return to tradition and completely cut the legs out from underneath the Colonel Reb adherents, why not return to the most traditional mascot of all?
2. Cooper Manning
The famous "other" Manning brother, Cooper is a graduate of Ole Miss whose football career came to a close due to a neck injury. It was this injury that led Peyton to select Tennessee.
So restoring Cooper to his rightful place, the sideline at Ole Miss, might end decades of misery.
Either that or dressing up someone as Archie Manning's DNA might be the answer. The NCAA has too few double-helix shaped mascots.
3. Miss Ole Miss
The best slogan at Ole Miss: "We redshirt Miss Americas."
The story derives from when two future Miss Americas were on campus at the same time. So why not have a campus vote every year for the woman who most embodies the qualities of Ole Miss women? That is, she's really hot, smart, well-dressed, and everyone wishes they were with her.
The bonus?
Students remain engaged in the mascot process due to voting each year.
4. Ed Orgeron
Ed OrgeronFor three primary reasons:
A.) He's already a pro when it comes to jumping around on the sideline.
B.) His go-to move, ripping off his shirt and swinging it above his head, is sure to inspire the hoi polloi
and
C.) Once probation hits at USC, he may well be unemployable anyway. He'll need the job.
5. Jake Brigance from "A Time To Kill"
Bonus: John Grisham is an alum.
Further Bonus: Brigance can make shooting unarmed men inside a courthouse with an M-16 seem heroic.
Quoth the Jake: "Close your eyes ... Now imagine she's white."
Given the SEC arrest rates, who needs a mascot who can make the players seem like good guys even when they're clearly guilty as hell?
Flim Flam Bim Bam
Ole Miss, By Damn!
6. A riverboat gambler
If this happens, students should riot.
My antipathy for the riverboat gambler cliche is well known and oft-stated, basically it makes no sense.
Why?
Because in today's South, a riverboat gambler isn't actually a risk taker, he's more likely to be your grandmother on a rotary trip to Baton Rouge or Evansville, Indiana.
Is there anything lamer?
Nope.
Your move Ole Miss.
7. A Mint Julep
The only problem I foresee with this mascot is that it mistakenly suggests that alcohol and college football are somehow connected.
As Feb. 21, 1970 dawned in Baton Rouge, La., LSU's Pistol Pete Maravich was 0-5 against Kentucky in his career. Now came this, the Pistol's final chance to beat the Wildcats in the final game of his extraordinary career. Jubilant LSU fans who'd recently finished celebrating Mardi Gras began to arrive at the 9,000-seat John Parker Memorial Coliseum in Baton Rouge. Rarely had a college basketball game been bigger. That day's regular season finale would be nationally televised, a rarity for the time. Kentucky boasted a No. 2 national ranking, an already legendary coach in Adolph Rupp, and a superstar of the Wildcats' own, senior forward Dan Issel.
Already this season Maravich and Issel had dueled once, in Kentucky's Memorial Coliseum on January 24, before a standing-room only crowd of 12,500. Maravich went for 55 points in that game, but Issel managed 35 and his Kentucky team won by 13. Now Maravich, who'd set the NCAA career scoring record in Kentucky's Memorial Coliseum in last month's defeat, had his final chance to beat the top team in the SEC.
The crowd was raucous and the arena made it seem more like a bullfight than a basketball game. The court was on top of a dirt floor, the same place where cows were paraded and sold. "It was basically in a rodeo arena," Issel said. "You walked out on 4x8 plywood planking from the locker room to the elevated floor."
The television cameras captured the ecstatic Bayou Bengal fans, and millions tuned in across the country, including Perry Pratt, the uncle of Kentucky senior Mike Pratt, who had retired to San Diego.
"He'd never seen me play before. Not in high school, not in college, never," said Pratt, now a radio analyst for Kentucky baksetball. "Television was a big deal."
By the end of the game, a new record would be set for regular season college-basketball viewing, breaking the record set by Houston and UCLA in the previous year.
Pistol Pete Maravich, who had been filling the arena since he was a freshman playing on the junior varsity team, was in the midst of leading the nation in scoring for a third consecutive year. Having averaged 43.8 points as a sophomore, 44.2 as a junior, Maravich was once more averaging over 44 points per game. That and 6.2 assists and 5.3 rebounds per game.
Despite all his success, Rupp, who would set the Division-I wins record with 876 victories when he retired in 1972, had a strategy that had thus far led to five victories.
"[Rupp] always told us to play him straight up, one-on-one, because he couldn't beat us by himself," Issel said.
With the fast-paced style favored by both Press Maravich, Pete's dad and the LSU coach, and Rupp, an innovator and proponent of fastbreak basketball, both teams would have many possessions in the game to come.
And so the shootout began in Baton Rouge.
Issel scored then Maravich scored.
Two men who'd grown close as teammates trying out for the 1968 Olympic team sought to one-up each other in a contest that would leave Issel's Pratt enthralled, almost like a spectator that was handed a jersey.
Pete Maravich"I wasn't surprised that Dan was scoring so many because they had young big men and he got them tired," Pratt said. "But Pete? It seemed like Pete lived at the free-throw line. He was so creative, did such unexpected things with the basketball that he was always getting fouled."
In the game Maravich would toe the line 22 times, making 18.
"That's the real test of the true scorer," said Pratt, "how many times does he get to the line."
Ultimately Issel would shoot 19 of 33 for 51 points and also snag 17 rebounds.
But Maravich, a floppy-haired whirling dervish, would shoot 23 of 42 for 64 points.
"I remember watching him making those shots, and he took some wild shots in those days, and thinking, 'Can they upset this? And then thinking, 'Nah, they can't beat us.'"
Indeed Maravich's 64 points weren't enough -- Kentucky beat the smoking Pistol for the sixth and final time, 121-105.
In a little over a month, Issel and Maravich had combined to score 205 points in the two games between Kentucky and LSU. After the game the duo were supposed to be jointly interviewed. But the Pistol refused to come out of the locker room.
"He was too upset," said Issel, "so I did the interview alone. I didn't blame him, I'd have probably done the same thing if we'd lost."
Inside the locker room a frustrated Maravich responded to reporters' questions about the game.
"What happened ? Well, for one thing, Kentucky was hot as hell. And for another, it seemed every time I looked up one of their guards would lose the ball, it would roll through nine pairs of legs and Issel would stick it in for a three-point play."
Told of that quote almost 40 years later, Issel laughed.
Then he got serious.
"A basket and a foul was the old 3-pointer. If we'd had three pointers back then? At least 10 or 12 of Pete's baskets in that game would have been 3-pointers. He'd have gone for over 70."
"Easy," Issel said.
"That year I came in second in the nation in scoring at almost 34 points a game. Do you know how many points I was behind Pete?"
"Ten!" Issel exhorts, answering his own question.
"He averaged 44! Without 3-pointers!"
"Maravich wasn't a great shooter, but he was the best ballhandler and passer I've ever seen," Issel said. "Lots of times people just think he was a gunner. I don't think he gets his rightful place in basketball history for what he could do with a ball in his hands."
Joe Paterno's Coke-bottle thick black eyeglasses that always gave the 83-year-old Penn State Nittany Lions head coach a vaguely owlish gaze are no more. That's because JoePa, the man without an e-mail address or an awareness that the Internets exist, recently had Lasik surgery to correct his vision. The end result? College football's most iconic single object or trait that defines a head coach is no more.
And let's be honest, Paterno's eyeglasses weren't just a device that made it easier to see, the glasses were a window into the man's soul. Paterno's glasses were like the man himself: straightforward, functional and unadorned. See those dark-rimmed black glasses on a man, and you knew what to expect. This was a man not given over to flash or to grand displays of emotion. This was a man who valued hard work over showboating, getting the job done over looking good while doing it.
In fact, I'll even go this far, Paterno's glasses were the single most well-known fashion choice of any living college football coach. Are any of us prepared for what life without an owlish-Joe Paterno will actually be like? How could we be? The man had been rocking the same glasses since John F. Kennedy was president. There are only three certainties in college football: all players will eventually leave, the ACC will be bad, and Joe Paterno
Yep, after 394 victories, the most in college football history, Paterno says his new look even throws him for an occasional loop.
"I feel strange. When I don't wear 'em, and I put on a sweater, I reach to take the glasses off and I don't have them on," he told Fight on State.
The feeling is so odd that Paterno has had his signature frames and lenses refashioned, even though they aren't necessary, just because he misses the feel. So while mourning over the departure of Paterno's frame and lenses may be premature, there is no doubt that the improvement of Paterno's vision leaves behind a glaring void in the all-important iconic coaching look. All of us, each college football fan in America, craves a replacement. I kindly offer 13 potential replacements.
Jim Tressel's sweatervest at Ohio State
Tressel is still young in terms of tenure, but the sweater vest fits him perfectly. It's staid, boring, the clipped apparel of a man who appears to live a joyless existence. Terrelle Pryor didn't need to visit Ohio State and meet with Tressel to see whether or not his skills would translate to Buckeye brilliance, all he needed to do was watch Tressel shuffle down the sideline, back unbending and ramrod stiff, cotton sweater vest taut and unwrinkled -- does he iron it? -- to know that he and Tressel were not compatible.
Now give Tressel the least conventional quarterback in the country, a man who excels at making plays outside of a regimented setting and you have a recipe for disaster. Tressel clearly has been successful, but mixing Tressel and Pryor is like asking the coach to show up one day in a Hawaiian shirt, slacks, and boat shoes while strumming a ukulele.
It ain't happening.
Les Miles' hat at LSU
Thesis: There are two ways to wear hats: A.) purely as a functional device, i.e. protection from the elements, and B.) for ceremonial status, like the Pope or generals.
Les Miles' hat is pure ceremony, Napoleon meets the Bayou. (There's a Louisiana Purchase and clock management joke here, but even I think that's too complicated.) The Miles hat is designed to inspire confidence, terrify the enemy, and give the illusion that the man wearing the hat has such prodigious mental capabilities that his brain requires breathing room, a billowing airspace lest the heat emanating from the complex mental equations brewing inside unleash a conflagration.
In reality, of course, Miles believes that a hat worn too closely to his skin allows others to see inside at what he is thinking.
Tommy Tuberville's transition lenses at Texas Tech
Now that he's at Texas Tech, Red Raider fans will experience the curious fashion sense of a man who uses bottles of Brylcreem like they're going out of style. Despite being a multi-millionaire, rather than carry sunglasses and glasses, Tuberville makes the radical move -- perfected in 1973 -- of rocking the transition lenses, glasses and sunglasses in one frame!
Now you see Tuberville's eyes, whoa, the sun emerges from a cloud, now you don't.
It's like Zartan meets football.
Dave Wannstedt's mustache at Pittsburgh
Dave WannstedtThe Wannstache is a reliable sort of mustache so long as you don't pair it with a baseball cap and sunglasses, Miami style. Then the Wannstache turns into the disguise worn by a bank robber or porn star, potentially both. As is, Wannstedt's Pittsburgh mouth fur is kind of 'stache that your reliable yet unsuccessful uncle might wear. You look at him sitting across the table from you at Thanksgiving dinner and think, this guy is solid, he might get fired from his job at the printing press but he's not going to cheat on my Aunt with a Big Boy's waitress.
There's a trust factor.
But there's also a ceiling of achievement. A man with Wannstedt's stache is never, for instance, going to win a national title or open his own successful auto body repair shop.
Rich Rodriguez's wristbands and gloves combo at Michigan
I have a theory: If a coach has to wear wristbands with play calls on them, his offense is too complicated for mere mortals to understand. Such is the case with Rich Rod's wristbands. Combine the wristbands with gloves, as Rich Rod occasionally does, and Rich Rod looks like Barry Bonds up to bat in the final years of his career. It's as if he halfway expects for his own quarterback to try to bean him while he's standing on the sideline -- Varsity Blues style -- and needs the wrist, hand, and arm protections to stave off a broken nose.
In two years, when his disastrous era finally ends, Michigan fans are going to look at pictures of Rich Rod covered in layers of apparel to keep him warm on the sidelines, staring quizzically at his wristbands while wearing mittens and think -- how did we ever hire this guy?
Steve Spurrier's visor at South Carolina
If Spurrier had retired from coaching at the end of the 2001 season, the visor would have become the second most iconic headgear -- after Bear Bryant's houndstooth cap -- in the history of college football.
But after several years of losing football games in South Carolina, the visor has a different feel. Gone is the country club domination, the sense that Spurrier plays by different rules than you or I. Now you get the sense that Spurrier's visor suggests he'd rather be golfing, retired from college football and all the trials and tribulations of ending his career with a quarterback like Stephen Garcia.
It's the headgear of a man who has already checked out of the employment line.
Urban Meyer's absent chin at Florida
The absent chin is a huge evolutionary advantage. While other coaches are sleeping, Urban Meyer is able to emerge from his coffin late at night and suck the marrow of small children without his chin getting in the way.
Bret Bielema's windbreaker at Wisconsin
Bielema is the anti-Rich Rod. The guy coaches in Wisconsin and always shows up in the windbreaker, like he's up early on a private yacht headed for Bermuda. Snow flakes are falling, people are dying of hypothermia in the stands, and Bielema rolls up the sleeves on the windbreaker so his bare Viking arms are exposed to the elements.
The Mike Tyson of my childhood was a glowering teddy bear, a mellifluous assassin, the single most captivating athlete of my youth. A man without parallel, the only athlete who never lost. Sure, there were other athletes whose talents captivated, Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson chief among them. But Jackson and Jordan were heavily packaged athlete superheroes who stood for all that was good in the world: hard work, Nike, sacrifice, Nike, team work, Nike, the rewards of a life well-lived, and ... Nike. Tyson? No one offered a better preview of life's complexities than Mike Tyson. He was an incandescent comet, burning bright across the sports sky. The winking, gap-toothed star of the video game that we all played for hours, the partner to Little Mac on Mike Tyson's Punchout.
Our own undisputed childhood champion.
We didn't know him, and we didn't know what he stood for, and we all knew he was somewhat dangerous, a careening wagon of of caricatured excess, but we all, every single of one of us of my generation, loved Mike Tyson. That's why 20 years ago to the date, February 11, 1990, you and I were so crushed when Mike Tyson lost to Buster Douglas.
I was 10 on February 11, 1990. And when I woke up the morning after the loss and turned on SportsCenter my world came crashing down. How could Mike Tyson -- the biggest, baddest, most unbeatable person in all of sports -- have lost to a boxer we'd never heard of?
And in Japan? While we were all sleeping?
For people of my age, Tyson was a mythological figure before we even knew what the word mythological meant. Most of us had rarely, if ever, seen him fight live because his fights were late and on premium cable. Tyson's fights took place on HBO, and we'd only just persuaded my dad to add basic cable to the Travis family repertoire. There was no way in hell he was springing for premium channels.
None.
Even now my dad won't pay for movie channels. In fact, he wouldn't pay $2 more a month for the NFL Network when the Comcast dispute blew up. "Not doing it," dad said.
As a result, despite my affinity for Tyson, I'd only seen him fight live one time. The other fights I watched on replay and read about in Sports Illustrated. But that one July night, while playing in the state baseball tournament in Waverly, Tennessee, we were in a hotel that had HBO. Tyson was fighting a man named Carl "The Truth" Williams.
I was giddy over being able to watch the fight.
We all knew, all the boys gathered around the flickering television screen, that Mike Tyson was going to win, going to dominate. Just as Kid Dynamite had dominated our free hours on Mike Tyson's Punchout.
One of the other boy's fathers surveyed the room, "You reckon The Truth will last more than a round?" He dragged out The Truth, laced the name with sarcasm. The Truth occupied five syllables.
The room roared with laughter.
There were no Carl "The Truth" Williams fans. In fact, I didn't know a single boy my age who didn't love Mike Tyson. We all did, every single one of us.
It was July 21, 1989, and Mike Tyson, then 23, was at the peak of his athletic powers. Carl "The Truth" Williams, a large man wearing white trunks emblazoned with "The Truth," entered the ring and banged his red gloves together. He looked afraid, terrified, certain that something bad was coming.
For a moment, we even felt a twinge of sympathy for him.
Only a twinge.
We wanted the baddest man on the planet to do what he did ... and Tyson didn't disappoint.
The Truth lasted for one minute and 33 seconds.
Then, Tyson floored him with a devastating left hook that sent the Truth spiraling off into the ropes.
We all went crazy in the hotel room, screaming, yelling, jumping on the beds. Even our dads were loud.
Mike Tyson was still undefeated and unchallenged, an uncoiled ball of pure fury, and he was now 37-0.
******
Less than six months later on that cold February morning, we all woke up to a shock -- Mike Tyson had lost to someone named James Buster Douglas, a 42-1 underdog.
Tyson was 37-1.
In those days they replayed the fights on HBO and, as luck would have it, my grandmother, having recently signed up for cable, was in the midst of a free preview of the premium station. My dad and I went to her house and waited for the replay to begin.
Somehow, someway, even though I knew he'd already lost, I still believed that Tyson would find a way to win.
And Tyson almost did, summoning all his energy for a massive uppercut that floored Douglas in the eighth round. By the time I watched the replay there was already an argument that the referee had taken too long to make his count against Douglas. But this argument seemed beneath Tyson, even to a 10-year-old, the baddest man on the planet didn't need to make arguments about how long counts took.
He was Mike Tyson!
The men he knocked down wouldn't have gotten back up even if they were given until 100 to make the count.
But Douglas got up.
Sitting there on the floor in my grandmother's house, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, a wobbly Mike Tyson in his black leather shorts, a Tyson who was retreating instead of attacking, a man who might lose.
And then came the 10th round.
Buster Douglas unleashed one big punch after another into the mythical and unbeatable Tyson. And then Douglas hit Tyson with an uppercut followed by three other huge punches and Tyson fell to the blue mat. As the referee stood above him counting, Tyson groped around on the ground for his discarded mouthpiece, put it in backwards, and attempted to stand on wobbly legs.
Too late.
Iron Mike had lost.
As I watched Buster Douglas celebrate, I felt a sadness creep over me. For most of my life as a sports fan, I'd root for the underdog.
Not now.
As Tyson lay on the ground I remember feeling sorry for him. Thinking even then that Tyson had lost something that he'd never regain. He was an unbeatable force of nature, the baddest man on earth. But what becomes of the baddest man on earth, once he's no longer the baddest?
What more does he have left once that idealization is punctured?
We've all seen what Mike Tyson has become, a paunchy celebrity vagabond. But at that moment 20 years ago we were all trying to come to grips with what Mike Tyson no longer was, the lion of the ring, an unbeatable perfection, the last perfection of our lives as sports fans.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Tennessee came in from the snow falling outside Vanderbilt's Memorial Gym Tuesday night, but the Volunteers never managed to heat up. Outplayed and outworked by the Commodores, Tennessee fell behind 19-4 less than eight minutes in, and ensured that the only drama would be whether Bruce Pearl would choose to be ejected from the game or suffer through a beating on the road..
That, and whether the officials could break a record -- or a whistle -- with all the foul calls. Before all was said and done Vanderbilt would attempt 43 free throws, hitting 37, and a raucous student section would break out the following chants, "Lane Kiffin," "Tyler Smith," "JP Prince sucks," "JP Princess," and others.
As Vandy raced to a 27-point second-half lead on the way to a 90-71 victory, the top two spots of the SEC East looked set. Absent a huge upset in Lexington Saturday, Vandy and Kentucky will be dueling for the top spot in the SEC down the final seven games of the basketball season.
Dive in for observations from a night in snowy Nashville that left two Top 25 SEC teams standing at identical 18-5 overall records.
1. As the game begins, one lone fan in an orange shirt is sitting amidst the white T-shirt clad Vandy students.
During the early commercial breaks the student section turns from the court and chants "A--hole," at him. Then, for good measure, the Vanderbilt Commodore mascot arrives and taunts him too.
The game has only just begun and already this guy is in for a long night.
2. Vanderbilt point guard Jermaine Beal, who many SEC coaches feel is giving John Wall a run as the league's best point guard, drains a 3-pointer to put the 'Dores up 17-4 with 13:29 left in the first half.
From this point on Vandy will not lead by less than 10. Taking just 10 shots from the floor, Beal will finish with 20 total points.
3. With his team down 19-6, Pearl gets a technical.
If this is an attempt to fire his own team up, it doesn't work. The Commodores surge out to a 30-10 advantage.
Funniest comment read on Twitter during the game: Bruce Pearl looks just like The Situation will in 20 years.
GTL, orange blazer baby.
4. Vanderbilt's A.J. Ogilvy snags a quick technical foul on his second shove of the first 10 minutes.
My friend Tardio suggests that Ogilvy has been given the technical foul for his new blond hairstyle. A hairstyle, mind you, that was the front page story in the local sports section, replete with six color photos of the hairstyle changes over Ogilvy's career. It also featured this quote from Ogilvy, "I've really always had some highlights in my hair. This time I just put in a whole lot of highlights."
How soft is Ogilvy?
He makes former Vandy center Will Purdue look like Bill Laimbeer.
Nevertheless, Ogilvy, who has been dominated by Wayne Chism for most of the duo's career, appears to be playing with renewed energy. In fact, and this is purely speculation, it almost looks as if Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings has challenged Ogilvy to set the tone of the game by picking up an early technical foul.
Regardless of his motivations, Ogilvy's physical presence is a reflection of a stifling defensive presence by Vanderbilt. Tennessee's offensive efficiency is atrocious.
5. Tennessee's Chism hits a three to cut Vanderbilt's lead to 30-13.
A Vol fan sitting in the lower level explodes out of his seat, begging for anything to cheer for.
He claps his right hand into an arm stump.
Somehow, this celebration sums up the Vols' effort on the night.
6. Melvin Goins, back-up Vol point guard, comes in and offers some possibility that the Vols can score a basket.
Slowly the lead dwindles back down to 13 at 36-23 by the television timeout with under four minutes to play in the first half. But Vandy's Brad Tinsley hits a running overhead lob shot with a degree of difficulty approaching 10, to send the Commodores into the locker room up 44-27. Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook
7. Steven Pearl's first half stat line: four minutes, 0-2 from field, one rebound, and three fouls.
If Pearl played 40 minutes he's on pace to finish with 30 fouls.
And here's the deal, none of the 30 fouls would actually be fouls. I think referees pick on him because they don't like Bruce.
8. At halftime, an Asian woman juggles bowls while wearing red heels and riding on a unicycle.
I feel like she would distribute the basketball better than Tennessee's point guards did in the first half -- she's got great vision and body control.
If former Texas Tech head coach Mike Leach could find a kicker during halftime, couldn't Pearl find a point guard?
She draws the greatest applause of the night.
9. The media lunch in Vandy's lounge is meatballs and chicken fingers.
As I survey the meatballs, eyebrow raised skeptically, a Vanderbilt student newspaper writer approaches and says, "The meatballs are surprisingly tasty."
This sounds like the line that Hugh Grant always drops in a romantic comedy to meet the lady.
And, no, I did not think that because I just watched Notting Hill in the cardio theater on a midday jog while training for a half-marathon. For the record, there was another bearded man wiping a tear from his eye when Julia Roberts said, "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her."
Someone else entirely.
I might as well dye my hair and join Ogilvy's inevitable Aussie boy band.
10. Vandy's Jeffrey Taylor is the best player on the court in the first half, scoring 16 points on just five field goal attempts.
Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings later comments on Taylor's performance. "He and I had a little discussion yesterday before practice. I told him that he's one of the only guys I've ever coached who is a better shooter than he thinks he is." Read the rest here.
In a little over three hours, Super Bowl commercials starred squirrels, beavers, chickens, longhorn cattle, horses, dogs, cats, hippos, giraffes, whales, cheetahs, tigers, snakes, and people pretending to be dolphins. Oh, and babies and kids. Also, men were made fun of for not being manly enough. There was a time when the Super Bowl was such a cultural zeitgeist that you went to school or work the next day and discussed the latest catch phrase. Who can forget the cool teacher in sixth grade referencing, "You Got the Right One Baby"? Or the cat drive commercial during the height of the Internet boom?
Now?
Now advertising executives give us animals or children. On Sunday it was my responsibility to assiduously study the commercials and bring you a countdown of the best and the worst. So that's what you're going to get. I'm counting down to the best commercial and alternating with the worst. The worst ads are in italics. Who got the best bang for their 2.8 million?
Read on.
10. The David Letterman, Jay Leno, Oprah Commercial
David Letterman, wearing a Colts jersey, opens by saying, "This is the worst Super Bowl party ever." Then as we pan back we first see Oprah, Letterman's erstwhile nemesis, followed by a further pan out to Jay Leno.
It's a promo ad for The Late Show with David Letterman and suggests that Oprah has brought both men together to mediate their differences.
Given all the backbiting between the hosts over the Conan imbroglio, the ad was likely an attempt by Leno to still show he has a sense of humor. Even though, you know, he doesn't. Granted, it was incredibly odd to appear in a promotional spot for his late night rival. But it was also so unexpected that it worked.
The Tim Tebow commercial fizzled. From the placement, right after Betty White gets tackled in a Snickers ad, to the tepid message, to Tebow tackling his own mother. Why in the world would Tebow tackle his mother? Because he's a football player? He was a quarterback.
What was all the fuss about?
This ad didn't actually endorse anything. Which makes you wonder, did Focus on the Family foment the outrage because they wanted to get their message out via the free media as opposed to via a television commercial that appeared to stand for nothing?
I think so.
9. Jim Nantz for Flo-TV
Is Jim Nantz becoming the Alec Baldwin of television sports? So well known for his iconic and serious delivery that he's now able to send himself up to perfection by doing that iconic and serious delivery in pursuit of a ridiculous storyline?
I think so.
He's already provided some racy commentary for How I Met Your Mother. As a newly-divorced man who is now free to hang his self-portrait wherever he would like, Nantz is poised for commercial success.
This ad wasn't anything amazing, basically a man was ridiculed for not being manly enough -- which was the most popular theme of the night after animals and babies are excluded -- but because it's Jim Nantz it works to perfection.
Having said that, it's awkward to pair Nantz with the games he's broadcasting. If I was CBS I'd seriously consider not allowing Nantz ads during Jim Nantz games.
Car ad fail: The Hangover is awesome! Let's steal the gag about a wild animal on a wild bachelor party and put a whale in an SUV.
People will love it!
Or they'll see it for what it was, a lame ripoff that falls flat. Stealing a tiger was funny in The Hangover because you knew the guys who had stolen the tiger.
Here?
Random guys are in a car with a whale.
What's worse, the ad cost $2.8 million and I can't even tell you which car company was represented.
8. Brett Favre's Hyundai 2020 MVP Ad
Another icon sending himself up. The gag is that Favre has won a holographic Super Bowl MVP trophy and is once more deciding whether or not to play a new season.
As part of his postgame interview Favre mocks his age, laments the fact that he is older than all the viewers, and basically shows that he has a sense of humor about the drama that surrounds the will-he-or-won't-he coverage of his football career.
The fact that this ad made the list shows how weak the contenders were. Basically, it was better than a human bridge for a beer truck.
How has Go Daddy triumphed by putting softcore porn, at best, on the internet?
Think about this for a minute, Go Daddy's commercials are awful and don't really do anything but direct you to their Web site, which, inevitably, crashes every year when people log on to watch the video.
But, really, why do people log on? For titillation value?
Please, you can find a billion videos online that are actually pornographic.
I don't understand why this works.
7. The Simpsons Coke Ad
Was this ad spectacular?
No.
The storyline suggested that Springfield billionaire Montgomery Burns was now penniless. But it married two cultural icons, Coke and the Simpsons, in a way that rarely happens today. All of The Simpsons' cast was involved and the ad strove for a cultural cachet that used to make Super Bowl ads memorable on the day after the big game.
As is, some Simpsons fans are doubtless upset at the creators for selling out, but I liked the welding of Americana.
KISS is endorsing Dr Pepper Cherry?
As if aging rockers had any coolness left after The Who's awful performance at halftime, now once-insane rockers are endorsing low-end sodas?
It makes you think Buddy Holly got lucky.
What's next, the surviving members of the Beatles for Diet Mountain Dew?
6. The Lost Spinoff Ad for Bud Light
A plane crashes on a deserted island. A Kate-esque figure emerges from the surf with a radio, but there is a competing discovery -- a full stash of Bud Light.
An island party ensues, no one wants to be rescued.
Given the timing, five days after the debut of the newest Lost episode, I thought this came off pretty well. For fans of the television show, it was a memorable satire of the recurring theme of the first several seasons: how do we get off the island.
For my money all we needed was to see a fat Hurley-esque character remark, "I'm finally going to lose weight!" and this would have been perfect. That or have a man in a wheelchair suddenly get out of the wheelchair and make his way to the Bud Light.
Anyway, I thought this one worked given the timing and the audience. But I thought it also would have worked OK even if you'd never seen Lost.
The Dorito dog collar ad involves my least favorite and least original Super Bowl ad theme: an animal meets an idiot.
Write this down, if you work in an advertising agency immediately kill any ideas that involve idiots or animals. It's time to get original.
5. Google's Ad
It was understated, classy and uncluttered, like the search engine. I don't think any commercial fit any product better than Google's ad. The Google search process is simple yet it leads us to all sorts of complicated information.
Put simply, life = difficult.
Google = making life less difficult.
McDonald's blew it with a take-off on their famous ad. The McDonald's credo: Let's go back to what was once an iconic commercial and make it worse by infusing it with new stars.
Remember when Larry Bird and Michael Jordan enthralled us with their game of H.O.R.S.E.? Well, this time new stars are playing a game of H.O.R.S.E.
Meet LeBron James and Dwight Howard.
Only, here's the deal, these guys are already superstars capable of amazing basketball moves, why use CGI to make them do even more impossible dunks? Wouldn't it have been better to let the cameras roll and see what dunk or shot attempts they actually came up with?
As is, they managed to take two stars and put them into a completely fake situation. What made the old commercial work was its veneer of originality in combination with a shootout contest.
McDonald's made an attempt to fuse the two generations by utilizing Larry Bird at the end, but it didn't work.
4. The Bud Light Book Club
The only three lines I remember from any commercial are both from this spot.
First, "I'd like to hear you read words."
Second, this sequence:
"So then do you like Little Women?"
"Yeah, I'm not too picky."
Somewhere Will Ferrell is kicking himself for not coming up with, "I'd like to hear you read words," in one of his movies. On a relatively weak night for beer commercials, this bit stood out.
The Clydesdale Horse ads are officially dead. This year's Super Bowl featured a baby Texas Longhorn racing alongside a horse. Then the Texas Longhorn grew up and burst through a fence so he could run alongside a Clydesdale.
For this, Budweiser paid in excess of $2.5 million.
This commercial was the equivalent of Phil Simms' haircut -- unoriginal and uninspiring. By the way, am I the only person that gets Boomer Esiason and Phil Simms confused? Are we sure they aren't the same person?
3. Megan Fox in Her Bathtub for Motorola
I loved this. A winking portrayal of the rapid-fire communication that ensues whenever a celebrity is caught in a compromising position. As quickly as Fox takes the picture -- "I wonder what would happen if I were to send this out?" -- it spreads across the country like wildfire.
Sparks literally fly in the next sequence. A man fails to hold on to the ladder of a friend, a wife slaps her husband, a gay man slaps his partner, and, in the raciest bit of any commercial, a woman bangs on a locked door -- "Jimmy, what are you doing?" -- in a veiled reference to masturbation.
Lane Kiffin is the Paris Hilton of college football. He's famous for nothing, essentially, except being famous. While at Tennessee, fresh off a firing from the Oakland Raiders, Kiffin claimed all the negative media publicity that surrounded his 13-month tenure in Knoxville was a deft manipulation of the media. Right. In reality, Kiffin was out of his league when it came to understanding how a major SEC team was covered. Kiffin claimed that the spate of attention, 95 percent of which was negative, was needed to revive a program he characterized as moribund.
A moribund program that was, you know, less than a year removed from playing in the SEC championship game when Kiffin was hired. But, no matter, college football's Paris Hilton had to make a scene. And he did, turning the Tennessee job into an extended version of the The Simple Life. When he bolted for USC, Kiffin claimed he no longer needed to capture media attention because the status of the program was so much better. Then, barely one month into the job, Lane Kiffin went all Paris Hilton on us once more: He offered and accepted the commitment of a 13-year-old quarterback David Sills.
For the first time, Kiffin's erratic decision-making has truly crossed over into the mainstream of American culture. Prior to this moment your grandmother might not have known who Kiffin was. Plainly, that wouldn't do. Everyone in all of American life must know who Lane Kiffin is. Prediction, within two years, he's released a sex tape entitled, "In the Fast Lane."
The quarterback in question, David Sills, is a seventh-grader. He is 5-foot-11 and, wait for it, 136 pounds. But, and this is key, doctors have projected that he will be 6-5 when he is fully grown.
I'm not making this up.
Middle school basketball players have previously committed to play for coaches with a screw loose. Such as Kentucky's Billy Gillispie. But offering a seventh-grader you've never seen play in person is a new low. Or, at least it would be if this was not the second time in eight months that Kiffin has been associated with offering and accepting the commitment of a 13-year-old boy. Back in the summer, before he even coached a game at Tennessee, Evan Berry, younger brother of Vols safety Eric Berry, purportedly committed to Kiffin and Tennessee before everyone backtracked.
What's more, the early backlash that arose over the idea that Kiffin would give a scholarship to a 13-year-old also eliminates any thought that Lane Kiffin didn't know how the public would react when he did the same thing with another kid. He knew exactly what the reaction would be. And he did it anyway.
Let's just say that Lane Kiffin was so blown away by a 13-year-old quarterback that he wanted to offer him a scholarship. Wouldn't it stand to reason that he should tell the boy and the boy's family to keep that commitment quiet?
Of course it would.
But poor Lane, he simply can't help himself. He needs the headlines even if those headlines are all negative.
Channeling Jessie Spano in the 1990 caffeine-pill addiction episode of Saved by the Bell that aired a full decade before Stills was born, the buoyant first-year teenager had this to say to Delaware Online:
"I'm very excited, but I was very, very nervous. It was very cool [to talk to Kiffin] but my heart was beating so fast, and I was scared. But after it was over, I was so excited and pumped."
Doubtless, Kiffin was so excited and pumped as well. Why wouldn't he be? The long offseason of college football wasn't made for the Paris Hilton of college football. Lane had to make a move to keep the headlines rolling.
Now!
Pete Carroll was never the type of man not to watch his highlights. Lane Kiffin? He's going to demand that all USC games feature a Kiffin-cam. Get used to this USC fans. I call it the Kiffin factor. Where once you could turn on your iPhones or BlackBerrys in the morning fairly comfortable that nothing extraordinary had happened in the national news associated with your head coach, now you have to wake up every morning with the entire spectrum of football possibilities before you.
Kiffin could have spent the night depositing lit bags of poop on Rick Neuheisel's porch or moved in with Brody Jenner, where he is now negotiating an end to the Cuban embargo with his close personal friend Raul Castro.
Truly, nothing is unexpected.
When you've built your entire career on recruiting and haven't accomplished a single other thing other than winning the genetics lottery of being a famous coach's son, it doesn't matter how old the kids are, you just can't say goodbye to national signing day.
That's why I'm privy to exactly what Kiffin promised 13-year-old David Sills to entice him to join the USC class of 2015.
1. Monte Kiffin gave him his Purple Heart from World War I.
2. Lane connected with Sills thanks to his knowledge of classic cinema. Sills was wowed by Kiffin's expansive knowledge of such films as, "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Old School," released when Stills was a wee pocket passer of 6.
3. Lil Wayne will rap at Sills's senior prom ... in 2015.
4. When Sills hits puberty, Kiffin has already promised him his own pellet gun to rob neighborhood gas stations.
5. The USC song girls got on the phone and performed the newest Trojan cheer, "Dela-Where, Dela-Where, Dela-Where, it will be legal for us to sleep with you in five years."
6. Coach Ed Orgeron promised him a mustache. Told that he could not control the growth of a young boy's facial hair, Coach O. covered the phone and scowled.
"WhennaCoachOsayin' hairdegrow, hairdegrowin'."
7. Was I the only person that immediately thought, this kid must be the illegitimate child of Urban Meyer and Lane Kiffin is just trying to draw attention to him?
No.
Good.
8. Kiffin telephoned former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie to ask for tips. Gillispie, reached at his 1 a.m. tee time, had this to say, "By goshhhh, you're the Erwin Rommels of footballs."
National signing day is close to a regional holiday in the South. Nowhere else in the country is recruiting followed so obsessively. Maybe that's the reason the SEC continues to crush other conferences when it comes to signing the top football classes in the country, fans simply demand it. As Wednesday wound down, the top of the recruiting boards looked awfully similar to the top of the recruiting boards for the past six years: the SEC dominated.
How much so? Tennessee's class finished ninth in the country.
That sounds pretty good, right?
Unfortunately for the Vols, that only put them at fifth in the SEC.
Fifth!
That's because Florida clocked in at No. 1, with a class that some are already calling the greatest in college football history. Auburn pulled in a No. 4 class, Alabama fifth and LSU took seventh. Rounding out the list, per Rivals, Georgia and Ole Miss were 16 and 17, giving the SEC seven of the top 17 classes in America. South Carolina clocked in at 25, Arkansas and Kentucky were 48 and 49, and Vanderbilt was 60.
If Rivals isn't your speed, ESPN had similar class rankings, with five of the top nine classes in the country in the SEC and seven of the top 18.
What does all this mean for the balance of power in the country?
Since 2003, when the SEC began a run that would see five of the eight championships reside in the conference, here is how the conference has ranked in Rivals' recruiting databases:
In 2003, five of the top 11 classes in America were from the SEC.
2004? Five of the top 15.
2005? Four of the top 15
2006? Six of the top 16.
2007? Seven of the top 10.
2008? Four of the top 11.
2009? Six of the top 12.
2010? Five of the top nine.
2011? More to come.
Is the on-field dominance a coincidence?
I think not.
In fact, it's just evidence that the era of ManifeSECt Destiny remains upon us.
Perception is now fueling reality. The best players in the country want to play in the SEC because the best players in the country play in the SEC.
Good luck beating that.
But what do the SEC classes in 2010 tell us about the path of SEC football as we enter a new generation?
First, the usual disclaimers. Recruiting, like drafting, is an inexact science. You need a large sample size for to recruits to translate into on-field results. Even then, in terms of individual classes and individual schools in the SEC, recruiting well does not guarantee BCS bowls are coming. But recruiting poorly does guarantee that you won't win an SEC title. In other words, every school's class won't pan out, but all of them won't collapse either. Chances are, as has happened in the past few years, one or more of the top 10 classes in the SEC will be a national champion three years from now ... if not sooner.
1. Florida's class is dominant and the Gators are now going national for top talent.
Urban Meyer claimed he was overstressed. Then he went out and put together the greatest collection of defensive recruits in SEC history. I don't know about Meyer, but that would lower my stress level an awful lot.
How dominant are the Gators becoming in recruiting? They got three five-star defensive players from areas that are hardly SEC hotbeds: Philadelphia's Sharrif Floyd, Staten Island's Dominque Easley, and Moreno Valley, Calif.'s, Ronald Powell.
What's this teach us? The SEC's national footprint is growing. Gone are the days when Steve Spurrier told a top California recruit, Donte Stallworth, "We don't recruit California."
Now the Gators nabbed three of their four five-star players from thousands of miles away. This doesn't mean Florida abandoned their usual turf of Georgia and Florida -- they signed 19 players from those two states -- but it does mean that, if you're a top program, the SEC brand is opening doors that were previously closed.
The entire country is a fertile recruiting market. Gene Chizik 2. If you're at the right school, you can become a recruiting juggernaut because the school sells itself. See Chizik, Gene.
Corey Lemonier, a top defensive end recruit from Hialeah, Fla., committed to the "University of Auburn." Of course it's Auburn University, but that was about the only downside to this year's haul for the Tigers.
In fact, Gene Chizik was so pumped, in a moment of premature celebration, he traveled down to the Senior Bowl and clapped Terrence Cody's breasts together while making a squealing seal-like sound. As if that weren't enough, he also found three Nestle Crunch bars hidden in Cody's breast folds.
On a more serious note, Chizik had three classes at Iowa State.
All were awful.
Were those classes awful because Chizik was a bad recruiter or because the job makes a head coach as a recruiter?
I think it's the latter.
3. Nick Saban will never fail when it comes to recruiting, but other schools can slowly catch up.
After running roughshod over the SEC for the past two seasons, Saban and crew slipped back to earth this season. I know, I know, the Crimson Tide still finished with a top-five class, but they also took more risks than they have in the past two seasons.
'Bama fans will say that their team was so stocked after two top classes that many recruits were scared off. They'll be wrong.
In 2009, Alabama had four five-stars and 14 four stars.
In 2008, Alabama had three five-stars and 19 four stars.
These two classes, the top two in the country both years per Rivals, were the foundation for Alabama's national title.
This year?
The Crimson Tide had just one-five star and 15 four stars.
It might not sound like much, but three or four stud players end up making a class, and 'Bama lost several kids they thought they had a chance for on signing day.
4. Les Miles continues to illustrate that a blind monkey with dropsy could recruit well to LSU.
Here's a fun fact, the entire Big Ten conference managed the same number of five star players, one, as LSU. That means that Florida by itself had three more five star players than the entire Big Ten.
Uh oh.
Another fun fact, at Oklahoma State the last two classes Les Miles recruited finished 37 and 42. Here is what LSU's classes have ranked under Les Miles: 7, 4, 11, 2 and 6.
I ask you, how much of it is Les Miles and how much is being able to recruit players to LSU.
It's mostly LSU.
By the way, is anyone else certain that Les Miles still calls a fax the facsimile machine?
5. Derek Dooley saved the Vols' recruiting class and added a couple of flourishes on his own. But he also demonstrated that programs still recruit themselves as much as coaches do.
Fun fact before we get rolling here, Derek Dooley's nickname, given to him by his mother, Barbara, is Precious.
I'm not making that up. She told us on the radio. You can hear it yourself here.
Tennessee's finish in the top-ten is the recruiting triple crown that proves top SEC programs recruit themselves.
If you've ever doubted whether there is a clear divide between the big six programs in the SEC and everyone else, looking at the success of Gene Chizik, Les Miles and Derek Dooley this season offers some evidence of the pecking order in the conference.
These three men had never signed a top twenty-five class as head coaches, and all three managed top 10 classes this fall at Auburn, LSU and Tennessee.
Dooley's Louisiana Tech program finished 93rd in the nation. Is that because Dooley is a bad recruiter or because recruiting is a lot like sales everywhere? The better the product you have to sell, more people are interested in buying it.
That's one of the things that most astounded me about the Lane Kiffin era. Vols fans acted like Tennessee had never been a good recruiting program before. Lane Kiffin is a great recruiter, but four years ago the Vols had the number two class in the country. Send Kiffin out to Wyoming and let him put together a top-10 class. As is, all Kiffin has done is take over top recruiting programs and continue to be successful.
6. Mark Richt is going to have to take Georgia recruiting national ... or else.
The Bulldogs were the biggest signing day loser in the SEC, falling out of the top 10 and losing their top players to raids from out-of-state. Losing players to other programs happens in every state, particularly when, like Georgia, the state is stocked with so many top recruits. But generally those programs snag top players from other states as well.
Not the Bulldogs.
Georgia only signed 19 prospects. 14 players were from Georgia, four from Florida, and one player from South Carolina.
I'm not saying Georgia needs to get tons of national prospects, but it does need to supplement its recruiting base with national players at positions of need. The Bulldogs can't be lazy.
They've brought in top rated national players before with Matthew Stafford from Texas and Knowshon Moreno from New Jersey.
This time they rested on their local laurels.
And got burned.
This class, which breaks a multi-year string of top 10 finishes for Mark Richt, will do little to stave off the impression that Georgia's program is declining.
7. Ole Miss followed the rules this year ... and proved that national television can have a quick impact on a program.
Last year, the Rebels signed 37 prospects, necessitating a change in rules in the SEC, limiting signing classes to 28 players.
This year the Rebels only signed 25 players.
And, in an interesting test case for how success in the new era of national television can help a program, Ole Miss only signed 10 players from in-state.
What was the second biggest recruited state for Ole Miss?
Florida, with eight commits.
The Rebels took players from eight different states. This suggests that it only takes a couple of years of success to put your team on the radar.
8. South Carolina's best player, five star Marcus Lattimore, announced in a church.
Which makes sense, because every Gamecock fan spends the month of November praying for their season not to collapse.
Spurrier's classes at South Carolina have been better than his on-field results. He's had a top-10 class and four other classes in the top 25. But for whatever reason no positive results have developed.
Unless you count a Liberty Bowl win as a truly positive result.
The time for grumbling about a talent gap is over. Either the Gamecocks make the step up this year and make a run for the SEC East title or they never will under the Ole Ball Coach.
For the past several years Dan Mullen has thought he was a great recruiter, that players loved him, that every joke he told was worthy of Chris Rock's stand-up routine, that his recruiting touch was pure gold.
This year?
This year he probably felt like he was lobbying for same-sex couples.
In Mississippi.
State finished with 20 of their 26 players from inside the Magnolia state environs. No recruits were from states that didn't border Mississippi.
Some programs don't go outside their state because they don't need to, others don't have the option to bring in national players.
(Also, FYI, there will be a 2k word signing day column up on FanHouse in the next hour or so.)
This much is clear about SEC basketball as a decade dawns: Never has the disparity between the SEC East and the SEC West been greater in terms of basketball coaches, team talent, and the respective status of the programs in both divisions. Why has this happened? Because football is king in the SEC, and the divisions were designed to successfully calibrate the traditional football powers. Football behemoths Auburn, Alabama, and LSU were assigned to the SEC West and the SEC East picked up Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia.
Basketball was an afterthought, a way to pass the time between football seasons. Indeed, basketball had long been a second-class sports citizen everywhere in the SEC except for Kentucky. Since that time, as dollars have poured into athletic department coffers, many programs have stepped up their competitiveness in the sport. As a result, the unequal divisional alignment has become more glaring. This season? This season has erased any semblance of equality between the divisions. In fact, the SEC has developed a talent and coaching gap between the divisions so pronounced that it threatens the competitive balance of the league.
So much so, that I've got this idea: Why not scrap the divisions when it comes to college basketball?
Consider the proven coaches in the SEC East who have all led their programs to multiple Sweet 16s in the six preceding seasons: Florida's Billy Donovan (two Sweet 16s on the way to two national titles), Kentucky's John Calipari (four Sweet 16, including twice advancing to the Elite Eight, and a championship game loss, all at Memphis), Tennessee's Bruce Pearl (three Sweet 16s, including one at UW-Milwaukee), and Vandy's Kevin Stallings (two Sweet 16s). In fact, you can argue, and I would, that the four best coaches in the SEC are all in the East.
That doesn't even consider South Carolina's Darrin Horn, who has begun 3-0 against Kentucky and already advanced to a Sweet 16 with a mid-major, or Georgia's Mark Fox, who has drastically improved Georgia in his first season at the helm.
Match those six East coaches against these names: John Pelphrey, Anthony Grant, Trent Johnson, Jeff Lebo, Rick Stansbury, and Andy Kennedy. If I gave you one of those old-fashioned match-up tests, where you had to draw a line to connect each coach to the school, how many people could correctly match these coaches to their respective teams? Anthony Grant is in his his first season at Alabama, has a Billy Donovan pedigree and may be a future coaching star, while Trent Johnson, who has taken two teams to the Sweet 16, is in his second at LSU. Every other coach listed above has been at his respective school long enough to escape the deep shadow of mediocrity.
Only Stansbury has.
And even Stansbury at Mississippi State hasn't been that successful. In fact, in the midst of his 12 seasons in Starkville, he's never taken the Bulldogs to the Sweet 16 and has only advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament four times.
His career record in the SEC? Try 100-82.
Hardly the stuff of legends.
Yet compared to the rest of the SEC West, Stansbury is legendary.
Why?
The other five coaches in the SEC West have combined for seven total NCAA wins in a combined, wait for it, 35 seasons of head coaching.
Take away Trent Johnson's five NCAA wins and we're talking about four other coaches with 25 years in head coaching and just two NCAA tournament wins. And only one of those, Pelphrey's 2008 first-round win with Arkansas, was achieved while in the SEC.
Total it all up and the entirety of the SEC West coaches, in 46 seasons of combined head coaching experience, have 11 NCAA Tournament wins.
The SEC East?
John Calipari has 25 NCAA Tournament wins ... by himself. (Granted, UMass and Memphis have been forced to vacate both Final Fours he's made, but, still.) Still, Cal has won over twice as many games as the SEC West combined.
Toss in Billy Donovan's 22, Bruce Pearl's seven, Kevin Stallings' five, Mark Fox's two, and Darrin Horn's two, and you're talking about a grand total of 63 NCAA tourney wins for the coaches in the SEC East.
Ultimately, in 67 seasons of head coaching, the SEC East coaches have 63 NCAA tourney wins.
That's 63 to 11.
Does that strike anyone as surprising?
Maybe it does.
Does it strike anyone as surprising when you really sit and think about the disparity in coaching and talent that now exists in the two unequal divisions?
What does it tell us?
The SEC East schools take pride in their on-court performance. The SEC West?
Put simply, they don't.
In fact, do you need even more tangible evidence of how the divisions value their head coaches?
Well, I'll show you the money.
John Calipari's $3.96 million salary is more than SEC West foes Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Auburn, and Arkansas pay their head coaches combined.
Those four coaches total $3.55 million in salary.
And while basketball is Kentucky's primary sport so you might expect that the Wildcats would be an outlier on the salary front, fellow SEC East coach Billy Donovan also makes about the same that those four SEC West coaches are paid. ($3.5 million for Donovan vs. $3.55 million for the other four coaches.)
The top three coaches are all from the SEC East and six of the top nine are from the East. All told the SEC East coaches average $2.2 million a year in compensation, while the SEC West schools average barely over a million a year.
Given the production of the SEC West coaches, you might even argue those coaches are overpaid. Regardless, quite simply, you get what you pay for.
Is it a coincidence that six of the top eight SEC teams in the RPI are in the East?
Is it a coincidence that the top four teams in the East are 9-0 against the SEC West?
Quite simply, no, it isn't.
The SEC East is as good of a collection of teams as exists in college basketball this season. The SEC West? It's as bad as any.
Travis has become enamored of several objects, phrases or events which he frequenly references in the column. Among the most frequent:
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