The Mail Bag

The Tecmo Tourney Part 2

2010-03-15T10:20:00.003-05:00

Read the full column here.

For those of us who lived it, it was the Woodstock of our generation, with even less showering. So FanHouse sent Clay Travis in search of the masters of the soaring golden football, the electronic gladiators of Tecmo Super Bowl. This is their story, eight bits of gridiron glory at a time. Nay, this our story. Part I can be found here.

My name is Clay Travis and I'm in love with a video game, Tecmo Super Bowl. There, I said it.

That's why I've traveled all the way to Madison, Wisc., to compete against 87 strangers in the largest Tecmo Super Bowl tournament on Earth. I've already lost my first game 21-14 and now I'm playing one of the best players in the tournament, Josh Holzbauer, a defending champion.

And I have to win or else I will be eliminated from the tournament and have nothing to do but walk outside and kick icy snow drifts.

It's 11 in the morning, I'm 30, my wife and son are back home in Nashville, and Barry Sanders is literally running circles around my defense. I can't tackle him. No matter how hard I try. Worse than that, my running back for the Minnesota Vikings, Herschel Walker, appears to have ingested 14 bottles of quaaludes and a bottle of gin. He has no speed.

For the first half, I stay competitive.

Somewhat.

Trailing 14-0 late in the second quarter, I have a first and goal against the Detroit Lions. Score here, and since I deferred possession after winning the opening toss, I'll begin the second half with the ball and a chance to tie the game. My first down pass into the end zone is incomplete and then on second down I'm intercepted.

Josh has time for just one play, and he drops back to the end zone and uncorks the Tecmo Super Bowl Hail Mary.

Anyone who has ever played the game knows the aching feeling as the ball traverses the entire length of the field, climbing high into the video game sky.

Josh's receiver soars into the air to make the length of the field catch and scores as time expires.

It's 21-0 and my Tecmo Bowl tourney chances have just given up the ghost.

I lose 35-0 without marshaling much of an offensive effort.

Now I'm 0-2, it's barely 11:15 in the morning, and I'm effectively eliminated from contention.

It suddenly hits me that I'm in Madison, Wisc., about to spend eight hours watching other people play a video game.

16. With just one game remaining, my only goal is to win a single game.

That's what I've traveled this far to accomplish, a single win at a video game from 1991.

Nothing else matters.

My final competitor is Andrew Happel, a dark-haired player who is also 0-2, having failed to score against Josh or Bryan, the other competitors in our foursome, in his first two games. Andrew wins the toss and selects a match-up between the San Francisco 49ers and the Houston Oilers.

I take the 49ers.

Predictably, Andrews scores his first touchdown of the tournament on his opening drive.

Once more, I'm down 7-0.

Worse, Andrew's drive, featuring three fourth down conversions, has taken almost the entire first half. Worse than that? In fifteen plays, I have not managed to pick his play.

Not once.

There are only eight play options.

Many times Andrew has faced third or fourth down and long so I know he's going to be passing. Yet, even still, I can't stop him.

My hands are white-knuckled on the controller. I need something, anything, positive to happen.

17. I take possession.

On my second offensive play, Jerry Rice goes 70 yards for a touchdown.

Finally, I can exhale.

Then I get a stop and take my first lead of the tournament at 14-7.

From there I punch in a fourth quarter touchdown to finish with a win, 21-7.

It's now 11:30 in the morning and the bracket challenge portion of the tournament, the 32 single elimination games, won't commence until 3 p.m.

18. Bryan Johnson, who finishes 2-1 and will advance to bracket play, and I head for lunch at State Street Brats.

Over lunch we debate the lasting popularity of the game. Why, of all the video games we have ever played, this one stands out so much in our memory and has attained such a cult following. Why, in essence, even as adults we are willing to cross state lines to compete against other grown men we don't know.

Neither of us would make this trip for any other game.

Ultimately, we decide Tecmo Super Bowl's allure is a combination of many things: the inclusion of actual NFL players, the fact that unlike Madden there was not a yearly Super Tecmo Bowl update so the game captured several years of players without changing, the relative simplicity of the game that, unlike a modern Madden game, allowed everyone a chance to win, the season-long competitions and statistics keeping that allowed one game to build upon another, the impact of luck -- the Hail Mary length of field pass is the great equalizer -- and ultimately the psychological battles over play selection.

As we would later describe it, "The get in the dome factor."

Could you reliably predict what plays your opponent would run given the circumstances? Mere happenstance would suggest that one in eight times, you'd predict the right play of your opponent. But good players had a much higher rate of play selection than the odds would suggest. In fact, once you could get inside a player's head, a series of correct play calls wasn't impossible. In fact, it could become downright likely.

Not only were you playing a foe, you were reading an opponent, poker meets football.

19. By the time we return, the psychological intensity of the games has increased.

Banter is more limited. The players left in the tournament know how fine the video game line is between success and failure. How quickly the Tecmo Super Bowl gods can take vengeance on the unworthy.

As the bracketed games commence, Josh Holzbauer's girlfriend, Erin Holte, has arrived for the competition. After confessing that Josh destroyed me in an earlier game, I ask her about her boyfriend's obsession with a video game.

"I don't get it," she says.

Holte lives in Milwaukee and she and Josh are in a long-distance relationship. When she comes up to Madison, the games don't stop. "I'll watch him play 10-plus games a weekend," she says. "And it gets more intense in the month or two leading up to the tourney."

Does she mind?

"Not really, because he seems happier when he's playing."

20. Eliminated from competition, I walk among 16 opening round games, attempting to discern greater truths, Buddha-like, from listening to the sound of the trilling music.

I learn many things.

A.) Games between good competitors aren't very high scoring. No competitive game features a team putting up more than 30 points. In fact, if you can score 21 points in a regulation game, you stand a very good chance of winning in this tournament.

I'd debated this with people before I left for the games, whether offenses or defenses would predominate. For the most part, defenses keep offenses in check.

B.) Most good Tecmo Super Bowl players eschew length of field passes and other gambit plays in favor of more traditional, and higher probability of success plays.

While the length-of-the-field touchdown might be the most memorable play of the game, it isn't particularly effective. Not from a strict probability perspective, anyway.

Most good players only attempt these long passes at the end of halves or at the end of games, when scoring via another method is impossible.

C.) Scurrying out-of-bounds is common.

Why?

Because fumbles come at inopportune moments and avoiding contact keeps drives alive.

D.) In games between very talented players, luck is magnified.

Talent only occupies about 70 percent of a Tecmo Super Bowl game. The other 30 percent comes from what we affectionately call the Tecmo Super Bowl gods.

When will a fumble or interception come? Will open receivers inexplicably drop passes? All day long the largest groan comes when an open receiver drops a pass. There is simply no explaining the luck factor, but all of us are aware of it.

E.) Big gains are generally taken away and drives become important because they can milk away the entire half.

I watch one game featuring two great players. The score at the half is 3-0.

What's most impressive about the game? One of the players has only had five offensive plays in the first half.

Five!

F.) Really good players rarely give up gains of more than 30 yards.

Even when spectacular offensive players like Bo Jackson and Barry Sanders are in the open field, most defenders practice containment at this point, keeping a good gain from turning into a touchdown.

Which leads me to this:

21. Tecmo Super Bowl is like a poker match.

There's skill involved, but the luck factor is what ultimately makes the game addictive. Going to the river for the flip in poker? It's the equivalent of waiting for a Hail Mary pass to land as the final seconds of a game tick away.

Catch the length of field pass in the end zone and a last-second upset is possible even if you've played the game perfectly. You can never rest.

22. All players get along well, except for the guy wearing a Notre Dame jersey with J. Christ as the name on the back.

J. Christ is making his first and last appearance in the tournament and is rapidly eliminated. Rather than leave, he begins drinking beer by the pitcher.

Looking for a fight, J. Christ eventually finds a willing participant, another eliminated competitor. Suddenly there's a rush outside into the parking lot as the fight materializes.

J. Christ squares up in a 1910s boxing stance, fists moving in front of him like a brawler in the steerage section of the Titanic.

But before punches can be thrown J. Christ's girlfriend materializes in the parking lot and gets between he and his combatant.

Other than this, there's a respect for the game that is almost golf-like. No one attempts to look at the video game controller as a player selects plays, mutual respect governs the competition.

23. As the Sweet 16 arrives, it becomes clear that the truly good players have groupies.

Corner men, hype men, call them what you will, but these friends of the Tecmo players stand over the player's shoulders offering encouragement and leading cheers.

Bryan Johnson, eliminated in the previous round, and I agree that the finals need to be in Las Vegas. Replete with ring announcers and entrances to pulsing music.

24. By the Sweet 16, there are no heavy drinkers remaining.

Earlier, many competitors drank, now the games are too serious for alcohol. One false move with the controller, a missed tackle, a mistimed field goal, can spell doom.

Read the rest here.

The Tecmo Tourney Part One

2010-03-12T10:10:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

The first half of the 88 competitors arrive shortly before 10 a.m. on the first Saturday in March. We're meeting at the Badger Bowl, an old bowling alley four miles outside of downtown Madison, Wisc. It's a brilliant sunny morning, snow piles block out several parking places and dry ice cakes the black pavement. On the frozen lakes surrounding Madison, people play ice hockey, ice fish, and ice skate in brilliantly colored parkas that stand in stark contrast to the bright white snow reflecting in the sunshine. But we've not come to spend any time outside, inside we've all got serious work -- it's time for the world's largest Tecmo Super Bowl tournament.

It's dim inside the bowling alley. Already, amazingly, every bowling lane is occupied, but I don't see anyone playing Tecmo Super Bowl. For a moment, I allow myself to consider, what if this was an elaborate prank? What if there is no tournament and I've traveled to Wisconsin for no reason at all. Nervously passing the packed bowling lanes, eventually I come to a large bar replete with a stage and dance floor. Later, in the evening, an Ozzy Osborne cover band will take the stage and rock out for middle-aged bowlers. But that's in the future. In the present there are eleven flickering televisions of varying sizes, from old school big screens to 20 inch TVs, all turned to the greatest sports video game of all time. I breathe easier. I'm not alone in my love affair for a video game that is almost 20 years old. Competitors are getting in some last minute game prep. My heart skips a beat, I'm nervous and I don't know a single person. It's time for the sixth annual Tecmo Super Bowl tournament and I'm one of the competitors.

A man in a Randall Cunningham jersey stretches in front of the empty bracket stretched across a full length table. Another competitor walks up beside me, "I wish that jersey said, 'QB Eagles,'" he says. "That would be awesome."

Immediately, I am at ease. I'm among Tecmo Super Bowl friends. The joke, for those who are not diehard fans of the game, is that Randall Cunningham refused to allow his name to be used for the game. So he's identified on the screen as QB Eagles. The joke has a high hit rate for American men aged 25-40 who grew up playing sports video games. Otherwise, it's likely to be greeted with awkward silence.

I check in at the table with Josh Holzbauer, one of the event organizers, pay my $15 entry fee -- the winner will collect $400 -- and survey my surroundings: the eight-bit Nintendo machines, the vintage video game graphics flashing upon the screen, the bedraggled controllers that have, at two decades of age, survived many a video game war, and lots of grown men preparing to play the game they played as children. Suddenly I remember the feeling of eighth grade crushes, geometry homework, the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," and midnight curfews ... what it felt like to stay up all night sitting front of a television screen with your best friends playing a video game over and over again.

Across the ocean in Paris, Marcel Proust remembered the past with madeleines, I remember the past with Tecmo Super Bowl.

"Find your stations," yells Josh Holzbauer.

It's finally time for the competition. But how, you might be wondering, did I end up here? Follow along on a journey into the heart of Tecmo Super Bowl.

1. My pregnant wife and 2-year old son drop me off at the Nashville airport shortly before 7:30 Friday night. I will be away from them for two days to participate in a video game tournament for a game that was released in December of 1991.

In December, 1991, I was 12 years old.

My wife thinks this is odd. She also thought it was odd when she would see her husband play an old video game with his friends whenever they came back into town. Grown men, bent over old controllers, frantically pushing one of two buttons, a or b, with all of our might, as if the world's fate depended upon it.

Which, to be fair, it sometimes felt like it did.

But here's the thing about Tecmo Super Bowl, every man who played the game, is jealous of my trip to play against other grown men. Since December of 1991 when the game was released, it has been popular. Now, just shy of twenty years later, the game has one of the greatest cult followings in video game history.

But unlike when you were young and there were always friends to play with, now we're all grown. If you're like me you probably live in a house with a wife and at least one child. And even if you're not married and don't have children, you probably don't have the time to spend an entire day playing an old video game with your friends.

So in some way, my trip to Wisconsin is like a trip back in time.

2. To reach the Tecmo Super Bowl tournament, I'm flying something called Midwest Air.

Yeah, you've never heard of it either.

As part of my travel, I have either a layover or stopover in Milwaukee. I'm uncertain which it is because while my plane will be the same, I have to disembark and then reboard.

In the process of disembarking, I lose my ticket to reboard for the second leg to Madison. So I have to get a new ticket from the desk clerk.

Five minutes later after I'm reticketed, we reboard.

Only there's one problem -- I've managed to lose my new ticket.

"I just gave you that ticket five minutes ago," an exasperated desk clerk says.

"I know," I say. "I apologize for my incompetence."

I've always had an ability to lose boarding passes. Last year, I opened a book I'd been reading four years ago, "The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber," and found my boarding pass for a Southwest flight to Albuquerque, NM.

I'd lost the ticket four years prior.

"You really lost it?" the desk clerk asks. "How is that possible?"

"I'm really not sure," I say, "but it's gone."

"What are you doing in Madison?" she asks. I believe she asks this question to relieve the tension between us. Either that or her question was a ploy designed to elicit whether or not I posed a threat to the other travelers.

"I'm going to a video game tournament," I say.

"Just go," she says.

3. Near midnight, I arrive in Madison, Wisc.

On the way to my hotel, booked less than a mile from the Badger Bowl, traffic stalls in front of a train crossing. Several Midwesterners, noting that no train is coming for a long time, hop out of their cars and take it upon themselves to lift the guardrails and wave cars through.

I've never seen this happen before.

Which brings me to my big observation about life in the South as compared to life in the Midwest. In the South, the people are friendlier, but less organized. If you ask a Southern person how to get somewhere, we'll talk to you for 15 minutes, but inevitably our directions will be incorrect because there is no real purpose to any of our roads. The cities have grown too rapidly for us to really have any idea about directions, and we never have any idea what the actual names of roads are anyway. Probably because the road names change so frequently. Plus, we don't really use the compass directions east, west, north and south. But we're friendly, so we'll pretend we know the directions to where you want to go.

In the Midwest, directions are infallible. The road signs are readily apparent, the roads don't change names, if you have directions you never get lost. I think this has something to do with the cold. There's a belief that you might die if you get lost in the Midwest.

And they don't want you to have to stop.

Getting lost is an insult.

4. Gameday arrives and I face the first dilemma of the competition: How do you get loose for a video game competition?

You can't stretch, right?

This really threw me for a loop. I was antsy and ready to play, but I didn't feel like there was anything I could do to channel the nervous energy.

Ultimately, I don't do anything.

5. My fellow competitors at the Badger Bowl appear, for the most part, to be between the ages of 24 and 36.

There are no girls.

Many players wear old jerseys honoring players who are featured in Tecmo Super Bowl. Ronnie Lott, Derrick Thomas, Brent Jones, Randall Cunningham, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and, interestingly, one Notre Dame jersey with the name J. Christ on the back.

Eleven states are represented: Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Rhode Island, New York and Tennessee.

As the competition nears, one girl, Jamie Morrone, materializes at the bar with her boyfriend. Jamie is a blonde twenty-something already wearing a blue t-shirt commemorating the day's competition. (I'm also wearing my own matching blue t-shirt with Tecmo VI emblazoned on the shirt and the state of Wisconsin in the background).

Asked if Morrone finds her boyfriend's obsession with a 1991 video game strange, she shrugs her shoulders, "I'm just supportive, and he's buying all my drinks for me," she says.

6. This is the sixth Tecmo Super Bowl competition, and with 88 competitors divided into 22 groups of four for first-round play, the largest tournament yet.

While it's the sixth competition, it's only the fifth year. The first competition, featuring 20 players, was such a success, that the guys couldn't wait an entire year for the second. So they played two in the first year.

This year's theme is, "They threw to Jerry." As in Tecmo legend Jerry Rice. As such, the overall tourney bracket has been divided into four regions named after Tecmo quarterbacks: Joe Montana, Rich Gannon, Steve Young, and Chris Miller.

Chris Miller was the toughest connection to find. Ultimately the guys discovered that Miller threw a touchdown pass to Jerry Rice in the 1991-92 Pro Bowl.

7. One of the competitors in my group is Bryan Johnson, a 26-year-old Chicago White Sox video coordinator.

Johnson and I talk as we await the beginning of our competition. Johnson tightly clutches a piece of folded over white paper. He has run fifty season simulations on the game to come up with relative team values, ranked 1-28. He's averaged up the number of wins each team put together in fifty simulations, while also creating a column of each team's highest and lowest win total. He's averaged the performances and utilized those numbers to assign a power ranking to each Tecmo team.

Johnson is slightly embarrassed by the work, but only slightly. He also has a good sense of humor about his obsession. "I don't have a girlfriend," he says. "Shocking."

Johnson has driven up from Chicago for the competition. "I wouldn't do it for any other video game," he says.

I know exactly what he means.

8. There are many rules associated with the competition.

Lots of them are detailed and only hardcore players of the video game would know their significance. You can read those rules here.

But one rule that is incredibly important is this: you have to be prepared to play with any of the 28 teams on the game.

Hence Johnson's simulation and ranking of team strength.

Before each contest a coin is flipped, the winner of the coin flip selects the two teams, and then the loser of the coin flip gets first pick of the two teams.

It's a brilliant system to keep match-ups fair.

Lawrence Taylor book9. Before we start there is a dramatic reading from LT: Over the Edge Tackling Quarterbacks, Drugs and a World Beyond Football.

The author?

Tecmo Super Bowl God, Lawrence Taylor.

The excerpt is short, dealing with Taylor's rookie season, and the usual requirement that each rookie stand up during training camp and be humiliated by being forced to sing his team fight song, answer ridiculous questions, and so on.

Lawrence Taylor's performance was different. He stood up in front of the New York Giants: "I'm LT," Taylor said, "Don't f*** with me."

10. Our television, the group E location, is tucked away in the corner of the bar, not one of the big screens.

Two high bar stools sit in front of the television. A wall is directly to our left.

To begin the tournament we have all been divided into pools of four teams, World Cup style. Two players will advance from each foursome, after which time a 32-team single-elimination tournament will commence.

11. Each of the 10 televisions feature a Jerry Rice memorial coin. On one side is Jerry Rice's head, on the other side is a logo for the NFL Quarterback Club.

My first game is against Bryan Johnson, a guy who has run 50 simulations to value the teams.

We're both nervous. While I haven't run the simulations, I have done a Google search to find someone else's rankings based on simulations. I pull out my iPhone and survey the rankings after I win the toss.

I select two evenly matched teams: the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Johnson has read my column and knows that the Chiefs are my team. Yet the Eagles are higher rated on his sheet.

"I'll let you have your team," he says.

12. "I'm really nervous," Johnson says, fidgeting on the stool beside me.

Truth be told, I'm nervous too. While I don't expect to win the tournament, I do expect to be competitive. And above all else, I don't want to be blown out. Yet, what if I've come to a tournament where men can manipulate Tecmo Super Bowl players like Leonardo Da Vinci could paint?

What if I'm in for an absolute mauling, a video game decapitation?

Johnson takes the ball first and attempts a long field goal on fourth down. Jittery, he pushes it wide left.

"Damn," he says.

With good field position, I take over the ball and go to my favored player, Christian Okoye, the man who I'd name my own son after, on a running play towards the top of the screen.

It's Okoye time!

13. But the Nigerian Nightmare fails me.

Johnson picks my play and his defense swarms Okoye, who fumbles on the first hit of the game. The ball spirals into the air, sickening music accompanying the bounding ball.

Jerome Brown of the Eagles, RIP, scoops up the ball and rushes it to the end zone.

Just like that, I'm down 7-0.

My mouth is dry. I'm shell-shocked. I reach behind me and take a drink of someone else's water.

"That was a big play," Johnson says.

My opponent takes possession again after a stop and converts a forth down by half a football length. (In Tecmo Super Bowl when the chains are brought out for measurement, the ball is either a first down by a half of a length or short by half a length.)

On the same drive, Johnson scores to go up 14-0.

14. Ultimately, I find myself trailing 21-0 at halftime.

Generally, a three-score second-half deficit is impossible to overcome in Tecmo Super Bowl, because there simply isn't enough time.

But I stage a spirited comeback and slice Johnson's lead to 21-14 on Okoye's second rushing touchdown of the game. Facing a third down deep in his territory with around 30 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Johnson reaches into his Tecmo Super Bowl bag of tricks and calls a punt on third down.

Why?

Because the clocks runs so rapidly on punts that I will have no chance to run another play.

Either I score on the punt return, a virtual impossibility, or the game ends.

Read the rest of the column here.

Quick Note: Broadcasting Live at SEC Tourney From 12-3 Central

2010-03-11T10:49:00.002-06:00

We'll be on the concourse outside section 118. Come by and say hello.

Also, there are four written columns from me that may all go up today.

A 5k word epic on Tecmo Super Bowl, an SEC Tourney piece, and taking a look at the Ben Roethlisberger case.

You can read those here.

The Tao of Tecmo Super Bowl

2010-03-05T17:11:00.002-06:00

Here is the full column.

(By the time you read this I'll be on a plane headed for Madison, Wisconsin where the Tecmo Super Bowl tournament will be played on Saturday.)

There has never been a better sports video game than Tecmo Super Bowl. Ever. Period. In fact, I'll go this far: if you are male and between the ages of 22-35 and cannot tell me who your favorite Tecmo Super Bowl player is within five seconds of being asked, there is a 100 percent chance you have wasted your entire life.

There are very few players in my life who, merely by being mentioned, stir fond memories within me. So what if many of these memories occurred on a computerized field inside my television screen instead of in real life? Nick Lowry, Robb Thomas, Christian Okoye, Barry Word, and Steve DeBerg, your pixilated alter-egos all made me a better man. And even though I've never been to Kansas City and don't even know a real person from Kansas City, I love the 1991 Kansas City Chiefs with a passion. To some people this might seem weird, to me it makes perfect sense.

It's en vogue to criticize kids these days because they spend all day playing video games when they should be learning life lessons by reading the Koran or baking cookies for old people. I say, this criticism is pure balderdash. If I were ever given another course to teach in college -- Vanderibilt has already made that mistake once -- I'm convinced every life lesson could be culled from my Tecmo Super Bowl gaming experience. I would call this class, The Tao of Tecmo Super Bowl, and my students would emerge with a more refined and nuanced view of life. Plus their thumbs would be very strong and extremely dexterous.

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This is because I firmly believe the majority of my moral code was hewed on the hardscrabble and pixilated universe of my old-school Nintendo's football screen.

Come Saturday I will be competing in a Tecmo Super Bowl tournament with 88 other Tecmo Super Bowl diehards. You can read the details of that tournament, which I will write about on Monday, here. Until then, dive in and experience the 46 life lessons that the greatest sports video game in creation taught me.

(Editor's Note: These life lessons originally ran on Clay Travis' Web site four years ago.)

1. Some people are just flat out better than others at things. For example Lawrence Taylor is the Christ figure of Tecmo Super Bowl. LT is omniscient, all-knowing and everywhere at once, blitzing the quarterback until the QB flees into the end zone, at which point LT turns and races into the nowhere of the screen only to reemerge at the other end zone in time to bat the pass away from an open wide receiver. It is no coincidence that both LT and He have two letters.

2. Words can hurt ... use them liberally.

3. When wide receivers miss passes their fingers resemble cheerleaders in the throes of the always classic spirit fingers. So the sexes, while different, are equal.

4. Fumbles make a goofy sound when they escape from your player's hands. Be alert to all goofy sounds.

5. Greed is good. Feel free to run Okoye the Untackle-able until the Nigerian government criticizes you for your wanton lack of consideration for his health.

6. Occasionally players are going to charge into the stands and create a maelstrom of turmoil. This was why when the Indiana Pacers took on the Detroit Pistons fans I was unmoved. I'd seen it all before on a Tecmo Super Bowl out-pattern that ended in the fourth row.

7. Greed can be bad. Randall Cunningham and Jim Kelly are both idiots for refusing to license their likenesses to Tecmo Super Bowl. Such a decision deprived these men from the eternal glory that could have been theirs for a mere pittance of a licensing sum. Steve Grogan laughs in their general direction.

8. Despite everything you've heard about life being composed of a myriad of options, there are really only eight. Four involve passing and four involve running. If one of these options is not good enough for you then move to Russia and take up communal farming you communist pig.

9. Taking the road less traveled really just means you like to run the flea flicker more often than you should.

10. Thou shalt not peek at another man's controller during play selection.

11. Audibling out of plays should not be allowed no matter what. We must fail in order to succeed. I think Quincy Carter learned this rule too well.

12. Most fans are indistinguishable masses of humanity that are only there to pay attention to what you are doing on the field. Also, they all do the same thing at the same time, so if one person is mad at you, everyone is mad at you. Incidentally, this is the only rule that Rasheed Wallace follows.

13. At times the best response to any situation is to just take your punishment. Ergo, when another player picks your play, frantically attempt to pass the ball (while risking interception) or take the safe sack. For rushing plays, turn backwards at your own peril; it's better to just hit the line and take your beating.

14. In the eyes of the Tecmo Super Bowl gods there is no race, creed or ethnicity; except for Bo Jackson, who is a God and not subject to the limitations of mere mortals.

15. Haste makes waste. Sometimes your defensive player will get blocked so hard he will sit on the field and his head will appear to be spinning. No matter how much you might want him to, he will not be able to stand and rush again until he has fully recovered from your misuse. Incidentally, this is also a clever subtextual metaphor for alcoholism.

16. There is no try ... just pass or run.

17. Everyone is happy when they leave the hospital ... even more so when they leave wearing a football uniform complete with pads.

18. Never run a reverse.

19. Invariably, when you are cursing at the football screen your mom will say, "It's just a game." Fifteen years later your wife will say the same thing. Accept that men are from Tecmo Super Bowl and women are the ones who pull the proverbial umbilical cord out of the wall that allows Tecmo Super Bowl to breathe.

20. Once you pick a team, stay with that team. I will be the Kansas City Chiefs until the day I die.

21. When something isn't working, just blow on it ... wait.

22. Sometimes you throw a perfect pass and it still doinks off your receiver's hands. Ergo, your plan may be perfect but your execution might still fail.

23. It may seem paradoxical, but sometimes running backwards can make you throw the football farther forwards.

24. Never substitute. God chooses starting lineups for a reason.

25. If you throw a football high enough into the air, it becomes golden.

26. Both Super Tecmo Bowl and life breed strange bedfellows, but do not shy from these connections. For instance, I would give former Kansas City Chiefs kicker Nick Lowry a kidney if he needed one.

27. Everyone has a male friend who always says something like, "I can't believe you guys are sitting around playing this old video game again." This person is not really your friend.

28. Acceptable pause in the game: you are overcome by laughter over your 58th successful juke move in a row with fullback Barry Word; unacceptable pause in the game: your wife is in labor.

29. Sometimes it takes more of a man to concede defeat than to continue battling. If you are down 28 or more points ... please start a new game.

Read the rest of the article here.

Hank Gathers Twenty Years Later

2010-03-02T15:53:00.002-06:00

Read the full story here.

Twenty years ago, on March 4, 1990, a mother watched her son take flight.

"He was so high," says Lucille Gathers Cheeseboro, two decades later. "And then when he came down, he was so low."

Taking flight was Hank Gathers, a soon-to-be NBA multimillionaire, who she'd already pledged to follow to whichever NBA city he called home when his career at Loyola Marymount ended. And why wouldn't she follow the second oldest of her four sons, the son who'd gone all the way across the country to play basketball at USC and left her in their hometown of Philadelphia?

"I cried for a couple of weeks," she said, "because I missed him so much and he was so far away."

But now, in Gathers' senior year, all was well with the decision. Her son Hank's Loyola Marymount team was 23-5, averaging 122.4 points per game and had scored over 100 points 28 times behind the controlled chaos instituted by head coach Paul Westhead. On Feb. 3, 1990, Gathers had dominated Shaquille O'Neal and LSU, posting 48 points and 13 rebounds in an overtime road loss at Baton Rouge.

Now, 29 days later, it was March, and time for a West Coast Conference quarterfinal game game against Portland. Time for Gathers and the Lions to make their run.

Sitting in the stands alongside Hank's mom on that March day in Los Angeles were two other sons, Derek and Chris, Lucille's sister, Carol Livingston, along with other family members and friends. "We had burgundy and red towels that the minister's wife had made for us. We were holding them up and cheering," says Lucille. The towels are emblazoned with slogans, "Hank," says one, "The Bank Man," says another, a nickname Westhead had given his star player.

Still standing from Hank's alley-oop dunk, the family crumbles as he hits the floor.

"I couldn't move," Lucille says.

Twenty years later, there are still some days when Lucille can't move. "I feel good this morning," she says, on a late February day when snow blankets the city of Philadelphia and keeps her indoors. "But some days I can't talk about it, can't mention his name. They say you don't get over a child dying, you get through it."

Her voice cracks, tremors.

"I'm still not through it."

******

Hank was Lucille's second child. Named Eric at birth, he acquired the nickname Hank from his father. Born on Feb. 11, 1967, Hank was closest with his brother Derek, who was born just 10 months later, on Dec. 30, 1967. The two would attend school in the same grade, closer to twins than brothers.

Hank Gathers and Bo KimbleHank was not a natural on the basketball court. In fact, according to high school and college teammate Bo Kimble, Hank didn't play much on their JV or freshman team. "He worked twice as hard as most players, Kimble said. "Nothing came easy to him."

One day in high-school practice, Kimble drove to the basket and attempted a windmill dunk. Hank jumped, met him at the rim, and blocked the shot so hard that Kimble feared he'd hyperextended his arm. Kimble was furious. "We played basketball the Philly way," Kimble said. "That meant that when we were between the lines, we were not friends. If I'd tried to windmill dunk with the other hand, he'd have hypextended that one too."

Furious, Kimble was ready to fight. As calm as could be, Hank approached him after practice. "Don't forget we've got a meeting at 6," Hank said.

"He'd left it all on the court! Already!"

While in high school, Hank also developed a reputation as a prankster, once lighting Kimble's sneakers on fire after practice. "We'd just had practice," recalls Derek Gathers, "and Hank disappeared. Next thing you know he's under the [locker room bench] and Bo's sneaker is on fire."

As Kimble recalls, "He should have lit them on fire. They were horrible sneakers, the cheapest shoes. The soles were so bad, I felt like I was playing in skates. As Kimble watched his shoes smolder, Gathers said simply, '"You ain't wearing those sneakers again."

By his senior season, wearing number 44 on the basketball court for Dobbins Tech, Gathers blossomed into a major college prospect, winning a Philadelphia city basketball title alongside Kimble. He and Kimble committed to play together in college at USC.

After the coaching staff that recruited them to USC was fired following their freshman year, Gathers and Kimble transferred to Loyola Marymount, a small Catholic university in Los Angeles with an undergraduate enrollment of less than 5,000.

Basketball success followed rapidly. As a junior, Gathers led the nation in scoring with 33 points, and rebounding with 14 per game, a feat that only two players have managed in the history of major college basketball.

But in December, something scary happened, Gathers collapsed while attempting a free throw at UC-Santa Barbara.

Back in Philadelphia, Lucille received a phone call that woke her in bed and informed her of her son's collapse. "I thought they were kidding," she said, "because he always had trouble at the foul line."

Doctors found he had an abornmal heatbeat and and prescribed a beta blocker. Gathers missed two games in December and returned for a Dec. 30 contest against Niagara.

A shocked Lucille didn't know what to believe. "I'm just thinking this thing was going to go away. He's too big, he's too strong, there's no way anything is wrong with him."

Twenty years later, she wishes she'd insisted that an entire battery of doctors examine her son. But that's in the future, when she will have two decades to examine every moment, minutes, hours, and days that stretch onto infinity that can lead her to ask a simple question, "Why?"

Intent on watching her son play in the West Coast Conference tournament, Lucille climbs on a plane and travels to California.

******

There are 13 minutes and 34 seconds left in the first half. Hank Gathers has just dunked off an alley-oop pass and is running up the court. The cheers from inside the gym are still loud and cresting when Gathers falls to the ground.

Gathers' maternal aunt, Carol Livingston, is the first to arrive alongside Hank's prone body. "Somebody do something! Somebody please do something!" she screams.

Lucille, in shock, arrives on the court later. Her son has a pulse, but is incapable of speech. His eyes flutter, doctors attend to him and then rush him to the hallway to use a recently purchased defibrillator.

Lucille's son is rushed to the hospital where doctors work on him for over an hour, attempting to save his life.

Multiple teammates arrive at the hospital still wearing their uniforms.

Just over an hour after his collapse, Hank Gathers is pronounced dead.

******

Hank Gathers was funny. That's what his coach Paul Westhead recalls 20 years later. "He had an incredible wit," Westhead says. "On the team bus, he'd take the microphone and talk about every player and coach as we got on the bus." Westhead, now the women's basketball coach at Oregon, pauses for a moment, laughs softly, "No one escaped the humorous wrath of Hank Gathers."

And opponents didn't escape him on the court.

"He didn't have the size of Karl Malone, but he played like Malone could," Westhead says. "He'd get rebounds on anybody and could score on them too. Like Malone at his best, he was unstoppable. Against LSU and Shaq he had 48 points and 20 rebounds."
"When [Gathers] fell down, I wanted them to get him back up. I always thought he would get back up. "
-- Paul Westhead
Westhead is silent for a bit longer, "When he fell down, I wanted them to get him back up. I always thought he would get back up."

******

Lucille flies across the country to bury her son. Thousands turn out for his funeral in Philadelphia. So many people pile into the church that they play the service for an overflow crowd standing outside in the cool air.

"I flew back with his body on the plane," Lucille says, "they didn't tell me he was with us."

So overcome with grief is Lucille that she can't attend her son's burial. Instead, she's at the hospital, being treated for a racing heartbeat.

******

The West Coast Conference suspends the tournament and awards Loyola Marymount, the regular-season champion, the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

Seeded 11th, Loyola Marymount faces a first-round game against sixth-seeded New Mexico State. Just 11 days after Hank's death, Kimble, Hank's teammate and best friend, leads Hank's team onto the court.

In memory of Hank, Kimble shoots the first free throw of that game left-handed. "It just came into my mind," says Kimble of the idea. "Hank had struggled so much at the free throw line that he'd switched to left-handed. His form was better then."

To Kimble it didn't matter if the shot went in. "I didn't care if it ended up like that old Larry Bird commercial, with the ball bouncing over the backboard and going on down the street. The message was to Hank: I love you, I respect you, and this is for you."

Against New Mexico State, Kimble toed the line and lifted the ball with his left hand.

Nothing but net.

Loyola rushes past favored New Mexico State, 111-92.

Back in Philadelphia, Lucille catches a few moments of the game.

"I cried through most of it, but I tried to watch," she says.

******

Remarried since Hank's death, Lucille says that occasionally her second husband finds her crying. "He understands that sometimes I have to cry it out. Sometimes I just miss him more than other times. I don't know why."

In her bedroom, Lucille keeps a photograph of her son in his Loyola Marymount uniform. He inscribed the photo to her, "To Mom, I love you very much," Hank has written.

"I look at that photograph all the time," Lucille says.

After Hank's death hundreds of letters pour into the family from all over the world. Lucille reads them all. She has her pastor get a copy of the photograph and she writes back to every person who sent her a letter.

She signs Hank's name alongside her name, and the name of her other three sons.

"The letters made me feel better," she says.

Still, she lies awake at night wondering, among other things, how much different Hank's son's life would have been had her own son lived.

"Hank's son, Aaron, is 26 now. He still lives in Philadelphia, but every time I see him I wish he'd have really known his father."

******

First-round winners, Loyola Marymount faces the defending national champion in the second round, third-seeded Michigan.

Once more, Kimble toes the line for the first free throw of the game, the left-handed shot.

Nothing but net -- again.

Heavy underdogs once more, Loyola could not miss, pounding the Wolverines, 149-115.

That's right, 149 points.

In the process, Loyola sets 11 NCAA tournament records.

The team was into the Sweet 16 and the entire nation was rooting for them. Kimble's picture graces the cover of Sports Illustrated. On his left shoulder is a number, 44, an emblem for Hank.

Twenty years later, Kimble, who will be drafted eighth by the Los Angeles Clippers, will have visited 40 countries, including Africa three times. Each time he visits Africa, locals approach him. They know the Loyola Marymount story, they want to talk about the left-handed free throw, they want to touch his hand.

"It's simply amazing," Kimble says.

******

"I have a Hank room in my basement with all his trophies," Lucille says. "I've also got lots of videos that the school sent me. I watch them all the time."

Lucille says she has 20 or 25 videos, but that the one she watches the most frequently is of Hank at an awards banquet.

Her 6-foot-7 son stands before a microphone. He was a communications major and after his death Lucille would accept his degree. "I almost fell because the sun was so bright," she says of graduation day.

In the video, Hank stands before the team and calls out each player's name, number, and where they were from. After each player is introduced he tells a funny story about them.

Hank saves himself for last.

"The tape's faded," says Lucille, "but his voice is so great."

"He says, 'Well, I guess I have to do myself now. This is Eric Hank Gathers and you really don't know it, but I used to be a good foul shooter."

The room erupts in laughter, Hank's troubles at the free throw line are well known.

"He was like that," says Lucille, "even when he was a little boy he could always make you laugh. You could never get angry with him."

Read the rest here.

Kentucky Hits a Wall of a Different Kind: Tennessee

2010-02-27T19:01:00.002-06:00

Hit the full column here.

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.

Blazing is the answer.

(Not that kind of blazing Brian Williams.)

Read the rest here.

Colonel Reb Is Down: William Faulkner's Time To Shine

2010-02-24T23:04:00.003-06:00

Read the full column here.

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.

Plainly, that's not true.

(Wrings hands while thinking of the children.)

Dan Issel and Pete Maravich Duel: Forty Years Later

2010-02-19T16:47:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

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."

Read the rest here.

Joe Pa's Eyeglasses Are No More: College Football's new top coaching fashion trends

2010-02-15T21:37:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

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.

This is a man who is made for his team.

Read the rest here.

Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas Video: Twenty Years Later

2010-02-11T17:01:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

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.

I turned to my dad then.

"I can't believe Mike Tyson lost," I said.

"Eventually everyone loses," my dad said.

And that was news to a 10-year-old.

Vanderbilt-Tennessee Game

2010-02-10T10:06:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

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.
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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.

Super Bowl Ads: An analysis

2010-02-08T08:48:00.002-06:00

Read the full column 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.

Read the rest here.

Lane Kiffin is Paris Hilton

2010-02-05T16:46:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

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."

Read the rest here.

ManifeSECt Destiny: Signing Day Domination

2010-02-04T16:36:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

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.

Consider this a vote for ... never will.

9. Successful SEC programs recruit themselves ... flip side, ask Dan Mullen.

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.

The Bulldogs are the latter.

Read the rest here.

SEC West Is Too Weak; Disband Divisional Alignment

2010-02-02T15:49:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

(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.

Read the rest of the column here.

Radio show interviews from first week

2010-01-29T16:51:00.003-06:00

Here's the link to several of the first week's interviews. Click here. The interviews linked are Gregg Williams--the one that led SportsCenter yesterday--, Barbara Dooley, Carl Pickens, and former Saints wide-receiver Joe Horn.

If you're not listening, we had an awesome time in studio the first week. We stream online every day from 12-3 central.

For those of you who are listening thanks for the calls and emails.

Jason McElwain Story

2010-01-28T16:04:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

GREECE, N.Y. -- It's a winter morning in Rochester, N.Y. Dirty, ice-caked snow rests up against the side of cracked concrete sidewalks. Old buildings, once bustling, are silent, as dim sunlight spills over the windy roads that lead from downtown, 15 miles west, to the suburban town of Greece. It was here, almost four years ago, that a young, autistic basketball player named Jason McElwain, then a senior manager, stepped off the bench and into celebrity.

Then, as so often happens, the attention faded.

Now, it's morning in Greece and outside his home an old basketball hoop where Jason learned to shoot, chipped black paint on the pole revealing the rust underneath, rises into the clear blue sky. The hoop is weathered, the lower left part of the backboard chipped away, and there is no longer any color at all on the backboard, it's faded white, the paint rubbed off from overuse.

Pass the hoop and a two-car garage rises alongside a brick house with a blue-paneled second story. Inside the house a sock-footed Jason McElwain, who as a senior hit six 3-pointers in a little over four minutes, stands with a cantaloupe in hand. "Hi," he says, "I'm eating breakfast."

It has been four years since Jason, "My friends call me J-Mac," won an ESPY and was transported in an instant from a sleepy suburban town to the center of the sports universe. From anonymity to hanging alongside Kobe, LeBron, Shaq and Derek Jeter and back. Now J-Mac is a volunteer assistant coach for the Greece-Athena Junior Varsity sitting in his parents' quiet living room.

"We're 9-2," he says, "but last year we only lost one game."

The team has won two overtime games, "In both of them we were down four with 12 seconds to go," J-Mac says. He's taller than you expect, over six feet, rail thin, with a buzzed haircut. He's sitting in a brown recliner surrounded by the wood-paneled living room walls.

His feet, antsy on the cream carpet, bounce up and down. He's ready to ride to the gym with his father, David, who will drive since J-Mac can't, for morning practice.

"I think he could probably drive," his mom says, "but he gets distracted. He's always on his phone. People call me and say, 'J-Mac wasn't paying attention while he was riding his bike.'"

J-Mac is the second of David and Debbie's two children. Josh, J-Mac's older brother, is 16 months older. Despite their close age, J-Mac was different than his older brother -- for five years he didn't speak.

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Then came sports. J-Mac followed his older brother everywhere. Eventually, he started to play basketball too. And he fell in love with the sport.

The old basketball hoop outside had an adjustable height. "We started at six feet," says David, standing over 6-foot-4 and also thin. "As soon as they were tall enough they would dunk on it all the time, hang on the rim."

"He moved it higher with a broom stick," says J-Mac.

"Every boy in the neighborhood came over and played. We were lucky then, all the boys were the same age. Now it's different, but then ..."

Debbie, a short-haired woman who works as a dental hygienist, nods, "So much mud in the spring," she says, "the tracking."

Slowly, as sports suffused his life, J-Mac emerged from his shell.

"Do you know about autism?" Debbie asks.

"No," I say.

"He won't look at you when you talk to him, that's one of the signs," she says.

"I look," says J-Mac.

"You're better," she says. "Jason is a high-functioning autistic."

J-Mac works at Wegman's, a grocery store chain, a little over a mile from his home. He works in the produce department and specializes in making sure that the breads are stocked adequately.

"You've got to watch them," he says, "some days sourdough is popular."

He's been working at Wegman's for 3 1/2 years.

"How often do you work there?" I ask.

"Not enough," says Debbie, "he needs to work 20 hours to get benefits."

Currently, J-Mac works 14-16 hours. But his dream is to be a high-school basketball coach.

He's proud of the job. "Wegman's is a great place," he says. Occasionally, says his manager Peggy Allan, Jason sings the only song he knows ... "Sweet Caroline."

"He's an awful singer," Peggy Allen will say later.

Slowly, the talk turns to the February night when J-Mac, student manager for the basketball team, suited up and entered the final home game of the season.

"We had a huge snowstorm the night before, it was a Wednesday," David says.

The parents watched their son's performance from the crowd, jaws agape, as J-Mac rained in basket after basket. Entering the game with just over four minutes remaining, J-Mac, channeling his inner Pete Maravich, would take 13 shots, hitting six 3s and one two-point basket, en route to a team-high 20 points.

Greece-Athena head basketball coach Jim Johnson says the most remarkable thing of all was this fact, "No one told the kids to get J the ball or told them not to shoot. They did it all on their own."

Coach Johnson pauses for a moment, grins. "I tell J-Mac we're still looking for his first assist."

On Friday after the game, the local CBS affiliate ran J-Mac's story, featuring game footage shot from inside the gym. By Sunday, the national CBS reporters were in Greece-Athena and when the story ran on CBS' national news, the onslaught was officially on.

So many calls arrived for Debbie at the dentist's office that eventually Dr. Spinelli, seeing how overwhelmed his hygienist was, instituted a rule. "Unless it's the president or Oprah," he said, "she doesn't talk to them."

Shortly thereafter Oprah and the president called.

******

Downstairs in the family basement are J-Mac's treasures. His silver ESPY trophy, and a wallboard filled with pictures. There's J-Mac with Peyton Manning. The Colts quarterback invited him to preseason camp, and for the past four seasons J-Mac has worked the event, living in the dorms alongside the team at Rose-Hulman college.

"Peyton's really serious," says J-Mac in his husky voice.

"Every year in fantasy football he has to have Peyton and Adam Vinatieri," David says. "Every year."

Last year as soon as he drafted Vinatieri, J-Mac texted the Colts kicker to let him know about the draft. Vinatieri texted J-Mac back immediately and the other drafters swooned.

"He said, 'Good,'" says J-Mac.

As part of his duties with the Colts, J-Mac is not supposed to travel, but that doesn't mean he's not willing to pull a fast one on his parents.

As David and Debbie sat down to watch the Hall of Fame game to look for Jason on the sideline, Debbie suddenly sprang from her seat. "This game's from Ohio," she said, "he didn't tell me he was traveling outside the state."

"No big deal," deadpans J-Mac.

J-Mac and his dad travel to one Colts game every season, and a couple of weeks ago they went to Buffalo and stood on the sideline in the snow. The Colts, resting their starters for much of the game, lost.

"It was freezing," says David.

"It wasn't that cold," says J-Mac.

Back in the basement a collage of photos of J-Mac with athletes of every shape and size cover the wallboard in front of him. But also, J-Mac with President George W. Bush and Oprah, J-Mac with Jessica Simpson and the Olsen twins. Now, four years later, he's unimpressed as a visitor looks over his pictures.

"Dad," he says, "can we get to the practice?"

"Look at this," says David, handing me a binder from a Gatorade commercial shoot. J-Mac and his father traveled to Orlando to film the "What's G?" ad. Just before they arrived, Tiger Woods filmed his commercial.

"Nice guy," says David, "but he didn't have a lot to say."

"Dad, can we go now?" asks J-Mac, clutching his red basketball shoes, with the inscription "RIP Tom Bazold" on the right sneaker. Bezold is the sports editor for the Rochester Gazette who died suddenly last season.

"He was a really good guy," J-Mac says later.

J-Mac climbs the basement stairs, ready to leave for practice.

David continues to speak, "Gilbert Arenas called and asked for one of J-Mac's jerseys. But we only had one. I guess Gilbert collects jerseys. So I had them make a new one and we sent it to him."

Arenas returned the favor and signed a jersey for J-Mac.

David is silent as we climb the stairs. Finally, he speaks. "That story was better before the guns," he says.

******

The Greece-Athena junior varsity practice is in full flow by the time we arrive. Immediately J-Mac (above), wearing a white T-shirt, black basketball shorts, and a long, dangling whistle around his neck begins to stalk the sideline.

Mike Setzer, chemistry teacher, and Greece-Athena junior varsity coach, welcomes him.

"What's up J?" he asks. "Ready to coach?"

J-Mac blows his hands, the gym is cold because the heat is turned off on weekends. Gold and black pads, alternating colored stripes, ring the small gym. A large divider is down to close off one side of the court, the other sideline runs into a red line, and then, almost immediately, the folded-up bleachers.

Read the rest here.

SEC Season In Review and Early Preview

2010-01-27T11:04:00.004-06:00

Here's the link to the full column.

By now you're all still kicking yourselves because you don't have $64,000 in the bank from betting on the SEC in the past six BCS title games. (By the way, the most hardcore gamblers among you keep e-mailing about the vig. I've simplified the numbers, but the fact remains that the SEC has not been favored in three of these games. So betting on the SEC to win, as opposed to just taking the line, would actually have netted you more than 64K. Please stop with the gambling e-mails now.) Another year, another SEC champ in college football. Ho hum. Some things never change. And, like it or not, I'll probably be able to write the same column in 2011, after the SEC wins a fifth in a row.

Notwithstanding the SEC's continued dominance, some things did change this year. And that's why we're bringing you a very special end of the year Starting 11 focusing on the season that was in the SEC. But before we do that, it's time to bring to a close the picks challenge with my family's former French exchange student, Audrey. You'll recall that we picked games against the spread all season, and as a grand finale we both picked all 10 bowl games featuring SEC teams.

Ultimately, Audrey and I both went 6-4 in those games.

Meaning, drum roll, after picking 70 games against the spread this season, Audrey, who has never watched a college football game in her life, went 32-34-4.

Meanwhile, in a triumphant turn, I routed her with a record of 36-31-3.

That's a prodigious 3.5 game victory.

I take my bow.

And now with my bona fides as a football picks genius validated by my victory over a French girl, here is the Starting 11 (plus one) wrap-up and look ahead on the SEC.

1. With a wobbly 2009, Les Miles confirmed that 2010 will be his final year at LSU.

I know, I know, LSU fans will point to close losses to Alabama, Ole Miss and Penn State as evidence that the Bayou Bengals are on the comeback trail.

That the Tigers were almost 12-1, 11-2 at worst.

I feel differently. And in your heart so do you, LSU fans.

Why?

Because change a single play in the Arkansas, Mississippi State, and Georgia games and the Tigers lose three more SEC contests.

So, lucky for them, LSU split their close games this season.

Miles is now 8-8 in the past two SEC seasons. 2010 will be the season that breaks him. Especially with Nick Saban and Alabama running roughshod over LSU in the SEC West.

2. Nick Saban proved that he's the best coach in college football.

There are conferences where you can have a life off the field and still win. The SEC is not among them.

If I give him five years, a BCS level conference, and a top 50 team from those conferences, does anyone believe that Nick Saban wouldn't have that team in the BCS title game in the next five years?

I'm convinced he would.

3. Georgia's continuing decline will be the story of the SEC east in 2010.

Like 2009, the Bulldogs will go 7-5. Only this upcoming season the schedule is much easier. No matter. The Bulldogs are taking on water and they can't bail out fast enough.

Both the offense and defense will be weaker. And even in a weakened SEC east, the Bulldogs will be in trouble.

At some point this offseason, I'm going to chart the top six programs in the SEC by wins, and measure the relative strength of those six. I've got a theory that the total number of wins among those six stays pretty constant and that what we see is a fluctuation among which teams in the SEC are in the top of the mix.

Basically everyone makes their run, and then returns to the average.

Right now Florida and Alabama are ascendant.

LSU and Georgia are in decline.

Tennessee and Auburn are in holding patterns under new coaches. One of these will rise and become dominant. The other will remain left behind. Given that no one has any idea what to expect from Derek Dooley, the early money is on Auburn reclaiming some past glory. At least assuming that offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn returns.

4. Ole Miss is still Ole Miss and consequently, the bottom half of the SEC is still the bottom half of the SEC.

This was going to be Ole Miss' year to return to SEC prominence, right? How quickly did those dreams die? I'll tell you, they were dashed before September ended.

Quick, which programs in the SEC have not won an SEC title since before the Civil Rights movement?

Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, South Carolina and Arkansas.

Quick, which three programs have never won an SEC title?

South Carolina, Arkansas, and Vanderbilt.

Granted two of those teams are the new additions, but we're moving up on two decades since the SEC split into two divisions. That's plenty of time for a football program to demonstrate it belongs among the championship contenders.

Which of these six teams have never even been to the SEC title game?

Ole Miss, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, and Kentucky.

What's my point in asking all of these questions?

Pointing out that none of these six programs in the SEC are ever going to be relevant for more than a one season spurt. Ole Miss had their chance this season.

The Rebels failed.

Arkansas, who admittedly has been to the title game more than the other teams listed here, will have their chance in 2010.

But odds are they'll fail too.
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5. After a 2-10 season will Bobby Johnson spend all his free time wondering why he stayed at Vanderbilt after a bowl win?

Yes, sigh, yes, he will.

We all agree that Bobby Johnson is a good coach, right? I mean, Johnson is probably questioned less than any coach in the entire SEC.

Yet what is Bobby Johnson's record at Vanderbilt after seven complete seasons?

29-66!

He's 37 games under .500!

And his record in the SEC? 12-52!

Yet everyone assumes he's a great coach.

Just how poorly does Vandy have to perform for someone to be a bad coach?

Anyway, things were bad in 2009, 2-10, but they're about to get worse. In fact, what's the most brutal thing about Vandy's upcoming schedule? For some reason the Commodores continue to schedule like madmen.

Take a look.

The Commodore non-conference?

How about: Northwestern, at UConn, at Wake Forest, and Eastern Michigan

Yep, Eastern is the only guaranteed win on that schedule.

Fact is, the Commodores are going 3-9 at best next year even if they are massively improved. Thank the schedule. No matter the circumstances, Vandy is never going to get to more than four wins in the SEC.

The Commodore schedule should reflect that fact so the team can have a realistic chance at getting to 6-6 and advancing to a bowl game.

Unfortunately it doesn't.

There is a zero percent chance the Commodores are in a bowl game in 2010. And after eight years Bobby Johnson is likely to be 31-77 or thereabouts.

Good Lord.

6. Kentucky was relevant for the fourth consecutive season under Rich Brooks, will that change under new coach Joker Phillips?

Wildcat fans are nervous that Charlie Strong will make inroads at Louisville. After all, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that the state of Kentucky can't support two bowl-winning programs. Meanwhile, Joker Phillips has brought out the scythe and fired two coaches for not being committed enough to recruiting.

With the weakest SEC East in recent memory coming in 2010, this would normally be Kentucky's year to sneak toward the top and make a run at 5-3 or better in conference. Even with the bowl wins, Kentucky still has not done better than 4-4 in conference in over two decades.

If they don't do it now, when?

7. South Carolina finished its fifth consecutive disappointing season under Steve Spurrier.

It's time to pronounce Spurrier's tenure at South Carolina what it is: a failure.

Spurrier is now 35-28 overall in five seasons in Columbia. In that time he's lost three bowls and won a single bowl game, the Liberty Bowl. That season, Spurrier's second in 2006, is also the only time the Gamecocks have managed to finish with eight wins under the Ole Ball Coach.

As if that wasn't enough, Spurrier is now 18-22 in the SEC and, wait for it, he's lost more games at South Carolina in just five seasons than he lost at Florida in 12 seasons.

Maybe it's finally time to go ahead and bury the Gamecock football program. No matter who is the coach, they aren't winning.

Period.

Not unless the Gamecocks join the ACC, anyway.

8. Florida will win the SEC East again with a much weaker team than it fielded in 2009.

In fact, given his success in the NFL this season, does anyone think Florida would have gone 14-0 with Percy Harvin back last year?

I do.

I think he would have made the Gators offense explosive, and provided necessary playmaking both in the backfield and at wide receiver.

But that was last season.

With five early entrants, and a questionable head coaching commitment during the offseason, the Gators will take some lumps early in the season. But Urban Meyer will be on the sideline for all of those games. After an early loss at Alabama spells doom, the rest of the SEC East will be so down no one can take advantage of Florida's returning to the middle of the pack. In fact, it's hard to imagine anyone in the East knocking off the Gators head-to-head and managing to get to six wins in the SEC.

The Gators will go 6-2 in the SEC east and no one else will get to 5-3.

Read the rest here.

AFC Championship Game: Peyton Best Ever?

2010-01-25T17:36:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

How well is Peyton Manning playing? He can take a second-year D-III wide receiver and a 25-year-old, blonde-haired rookie Mormon against the best defense in the NFL, and turn those players into Randy Moss and Terrell Owens. In the AFC championship game, no less. Think about that for a moment, we're not talking about a great quarterback surrounded by unbelievable talent. We're talking about a quarterback performance the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time ... if ever.

Right now, Peyton Manning is playing quarterback better than anyone has ever played the position in the history of the game. And all over the country wide receivers for the 28 teams who entered Sunday already eliminated from playoff contention sat in front of their television screens and cursed their misfortune over not being drafted by the Colts. "Damn," they all thought, "I'd be in the Pro Bowl if I got to play for Peyton Manning."

Hell, you or I might be in the Pro Bowl if we got to play with Peyton Manning. He's so good, that everyone around him becomes cloaked in his aura of greatness. Here are 15 other things that jumped out at me from the televised AFC championship game.

1. I think Mark Sanchez's beard deserves more attention.

Why?

Because only the power of the beard can explain how a rookie quarterback can win two playoff games with only one go-to pass play, the one-step slant.

How in the world did no one jump this in three playoff games? It's Sanchez's only consistent throw, his go-to play call on third and anything.

Granted Sanchez has a laser of an arm -- if Marcia Brady had gotten hit by a Sanchez football pass her nose would have exited the back of her head -- but you still have to jump this at some point, right?

2. Peyton Manning gets sacked like you or I shop for lingerie near Valentine's Day.

Namely, he knows he's not supposed to be there and he just takes a dive and avoids punishment as best he can.

You know what I'm talking about, right? You have about four minutes to be in a lingerie shop by yourself without looking like a complete idiot. Otherwise you turn into the creepy old guy making jokes with the sales associates about what they would look like in the lingerie.

So you make a beeline to one thing that you saw in the window, it's probably pink and made of silk, rapidly assess the size and then get the hell out of there.

Manning does the same thing in the pocket. When his internal clock expires and there's a defender near him, he takes a dive.

3. Pierre Garçon is the most successful man with a cedille on his name in the history of football.

Prior to Garçon being drafted, I can picture NFL execs looking at the list of draft eligible players and having this conversation with their scout.

Exec: "Hell, what's that squiggly thing? Is he French?"

Scout: "Yeah, his last name is French for boy, but he ..."

Exec: "Boy!"

Scout: "Yes, but ..."

Exec: "Where did he play in college?"

Scout: "A Division III school ..."

Exec: "Next!"

Also, if you've ever doubted the quality of high school football in Florida, it's that a guy like Garçon could be overlooked. Remember that Chris Johnson, a fellow Floridian, only had three scholarship offers: East Carolina, UConn, and Eastern Kentucky. Well, Garcon was even more overlooked. He ended up playing at Norwich University in Vermont.

Think about that for a moment, a six-foot receiver with 4.4 speed would be hard to ignore in most states because this combination is a pretty rare commodity in high school football. But there are so many kids who fit that bill in Florida that a bunch of guys get overlooked.

The wonder on Garçon isn't that he set an AFC championship game record for receiving yards, it's that if he doesn't love football so much that he's playing at a 2,000-person military school in Vermont, this game never happens.

4. Does Colts head coach Jim Caldwell speak during games?

Because I swear every time the camera cuts to him, he looks incredibly morose, like he's listening to Muddy Waters on his headset.

Has there ever been a head coach who showed less emotion and spoke less while he was on the sideline? Keep a running tally in your head during the Super Bowl of the number of times he's shown on camera and the number of times he's not speaking when he's shown.

If you want to get wasted beyond belief, make this your Super Bowl drinking game: If Jim Caldwell is shown on television and isn't speaking, then drink for 10 seconds.

You'll be drunk by the end of the first quarter.

5. How many games would you or I have won as the head coach of the Colts this season?

Only two requirements: A. you are of average intelligence and B. you can get along with people at your job.

I think you or I get 10 wins.

My rationale: Manning and Tom Moore determine just about everything the offense does in a given week. All you'd have to do is get out of their way. Coming into the season, the only real question was how Larry Coyer would do with the defense, and he came in with great experience under Tony Dungy and as his own coordinator with the Denver Broncos. So you could piddle around over on the defensive side of the ball, but basically you could stay out of that way too.

Basically, you'd just have to be egoless and of average intelligence and you or I would have had this team in the playoffs as well.

And 10 games might be an understatement.

6. After he makes a big play, I keep expecting to see Braylon Edwards on the sideline sending hate texts to LeBron James.

I'm starting to think Edwards is a mad genius and punched the little man in LeBron's entourage just to get out of Cleveland. Think about this for a minute, has anyone ever emerged in better shape after punching someone outside a nightclub?

Following the incident, Edwards is traded in early October from a team headed nowhere to a playoff team, gets to leave Cleveland for New York City, and will get a lucrative extension after this offseason because he's played well in limited passing opportunities.

All while trading Brady Quinn for Mark Sanchez.

If LeBron ends up joining the Knicks, Edwards is going to punch LeBron's little man again and end up Secretary of State under Obama.

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7. Rex Ryan reminds me of a fatter Teddy Roosevelt.

And now that I've said that, you're not going to be able to forget it, either. Imagine if he started wearing those old-school spectacles on the sidelines, he'd be a dead ringer. At least a fat ringer, anyway.

This offseason Ryan needs to go to a Washington Nationals game and stand-in for Roosevelt in the President races.

8. What are the odds Peyton Manning knows the Jets' defense better than many Jets defenders?

During his pre-snap reads you halfway expect Manning to start gesturing to the Jets defensive end, "Your spacing's off. You're faking the blitz and dropping into a zone coverage in this defense. From that angle you're not going to get your proper depth."

As is, you can actually hear Manning calling out the numbers of Jets defenders and making sure his offensive linemen have them picked up for the blitz. If you're the blitzing player, how crushing is this?

9. How amazing was the fake option, pass play with Brad Smith?

I'm convinced it's the play call of the playoffs. In fact, credit to the Jets, both of the big plays they dialed up worked, the Braylon Edwards double move, and this play.

It looked just like Nebraska in the late '90s. So much so that I'm convinced that somewhere Eric Crouch was watching this game and thought, "See, I could have played quarterback in the NFL. I knew it."

10. Stat of the year: In eight out of 18 games this season, the Colts have scored a touchdown in the final two minutes of the half.

Think about how hard this is to accomplish.

First, you have to have possession in the final two minutes of the half. Second, you have to manage the clock such that your possession has time to end in a touchdown. Third, you have to drive the field and, you know, score a touchdown, one of the most difficult things to manage in all of sports.

Yet after his score at the end of the half that made it a 17-13 game, Peyton Manning has done it in almost half the games he's played this season. Just more evidence, if you needed any, that Manning is playing at a higher level than any quarterback ever has.

But even that wasn't enough.

Want a higher degree of difficulty in the AFC championship game?

Okay, you have to complete every pass to the same receiver for all 80 yards. And that receiver has to be a rookie Mormon wide receiver.

What odds could you have gotten on this in 2008, four million to 1?

Read the rest here.

Radio Show Debuts Today on 104.5 at 12 central

2010-01-25T10:22:00.003-06:00

For those who aren't aware, the good news I hinted at a while ago, is that we're debuting a daily radio show on Nashville's 104.5. It's going to be me, former Titans safety Blaine Bishop, and Brent Dougherty.

We'll be on every day from 12-3 central.

And you can listen to us live here.

Needless to say, I'm pumped about this and think it's going to be a lot of fun. Even Connie Britton is pumped.

Stripper Coaches

2010-01-24T23:18:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

In the past decade, college coaches have become strippers. Words like loyalty, commitment, and honor are out the door. Nope, major college athletics has become nothing if not a strip club. Coaches work the floor like colorfully clad dancers late at night, waiting for a welcoming glance of interest before sashaying over and plopping themselves down at your table.

"Wanna dance, baby?" coo strippers in clear heels and thongs. "Wanna coach, baby?" coo college coaches in pinstripe suits and Italian loafers.

Perpetual free agents, once seated, these stripper coaches whisper sweet words of endearment to a willing fan base. "My family loves it here. I don't want to be anywhere else," is coach speech for "Wanna buy me a drink? Don't you want to get somewhere more private?" Past championships are the coaches' cleavage, the glittering, powdered flesh that fans can't look away from.

Just like in a strip club, the coaching intimacy is false, every word a calculated attempt to make you open your wallet one more time. Have a stripper coach sitting with your program, reveling in fun, swimming eye-deep in wins? All it takes is a nod from another table and your coach or stripper is up and gone, off to the next willing participant.

In my last book, "On Rocky Top," I referred to the present state of coaching in college sports as a mercenary era. But I think I was too kind. Mercenaries are more straightforward in their dealings; pay them and they're yours. But there's no expectation of intimacy or loyalty, it's all about the money. Our present era is dirtier, seamier, like a gentlemen's club full of coaches during a two for one special dance. It's not just getting the new jobs that this generation of coaches have perfected, it's the soundbite of seduction, saying just the right things to make your union seem more permanent than the short lap dance that is really taking place.

The result?

The college coaching business has become the dirtiest and least loyal part of sports in America. Part of the reason is contractual -- I'm sure that NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL coaches would leap at the opportunity to double their salaries on a mere offer, but all of those leagues are subject to collective bargaining agreements that keep coaches in place once they sign contracts. It's why, say, Phil Jackson doesn't jump to the Boston Celtics in the offseason for more money and why Bill Cowher, for instance, had to sit out a year before he could even contemplate another NFL job. Once you sign a professional coaching contract, you are tethered to that team for the length of the deal, so long as the team wants you to remain.

But college coaches?

College coaches can take jobs anywhere at any point with virtually no contractual recourse. In the past, coaches were constrained by a genuine love for the places they worked, a recognition that as college coaches they represented something more than the dollars they earned; they worked for a university as molders of young men, and that required a degree of decorum.

No longer.

Now all our modern coaches are strippers and your school's fight song might as well be the prelude to Chastity taking the stage: "Hail to the Victors" followed by "Pour Some Sugar On Me."

Ultimately, fan bases across America end up infuriated at falling for the seduction, listening to those magic words that made us give up our better judgment and pay for Coach Cal's lap dance. If you aren't convinced yet, then follow me along a greatest hits routine, the most stripper-level moves by coaches in a stripper coach era.

As a prelude, there are a couple of ground rules to the stripper coach: A.) The coach has to be moving from one place where he could win a national championship to another; leaving a mid-major job for a big-time job doesn't qualify and B.) The departing coach has to be in some form of physical danger upon his first return to the scene of his former job.

Without further ado, here are the 10 biggest stripper coaching moves:

10. Roy Williams takes the North Carolina job after spurning Bonnie Bernstein in his famous postgame interview.

Remember that?

"I don't give a [expletive] about North Carolina."

It's hard to call Ole Roy a stripper coach since he spent 15 years at Kansas before leaving for his dream job at North Carolina. But I'm sliding him into the picture based on his answer to the interview question, the way he left Kansas fans twirling in the breeze while he made his decision, and the anger that resulted from his leaving. That's started to wane now thanks to Kansas winning their own title, but it has been six full seasons now.

Not to mention the fact that ole Roy waited until Matt Doherty had blown up the program to leave for the Tar Heel state, having spurned the Heels following Bill Guthridge's retirement in 2000, which struck many as a pretty calculated move.

9. Nick Saban leaves the Miami Dolphins for Alabama, spurning LSU in the process.

Once more, Saban, I think, is a coach on the fine line between mercenary and stripper head coach. Saban covered his move among SEC rivals with a brief trip to the Miami Dolphins after leaving LSU, and he's not exactly the most charismatic talker out there. If he were in the strip club, Saban would be the angry, drunk stripper, who doesn't seduce you into a lap dance so much as she angers you into one. The kind of stripper who walks up, sneers at you and says, "You spilled my last drink when you moved your seat. Buy me a new one. Move over."

By the way, if you think about the stripper analogy and actually start picturing the coaches in clear high heels, everyone loses. (Except possibly Marv Albert.)

Finally, LSU is, at best, Alabama's third biggest rival in the SEC after Auburn and Tennessee. So it's not like Saban pulled a Pitino and went to the biggest rival.

8. Rick Pitino accepts the Louisville job leaving Kentucky fans furious.

Even with the buffer of the Boston Celtics between jobs, Pitino inaugurated the era of the stripper coach with his decision to join up with Kentucky's biggest rival, the Louisville Cardinals. In fact, Pitino might be the ultimate picture of the stripper coach because he's so well-manicured. His hair is perfectly adorned with gel, his suits are specially fitted, his fingernails are always immaculately groomed. Pitino might as well be an old male stripper.

It's the height of the stripper coach era to move from one blood-feud rival program to another. The decision shows a degree of tactless disloyalty that hits right at the heart of the stripper coach mantra: I do what I want when I want, consequences be damned.

Pitino is now in his eighth year at Louisville, and his dalliances with women in restaurants somehow seems perfectly appropriate given it was his move to the Cardinals in the first decade of the 21st century that helped to unleash the stripper coach phenomenon.

It's only the Boston Celtics job in between these two positions that keeps Pitino from being No. 1 on our list.

7. Houston Nutt bails on Arkansas for Ole Miss.

Ten years after Tuberville pulled the ditch job on Ole Miss -- higher on our list -- the Rebels get their revenge by stealing Arkansas' coach. Granted, Houston Nutt left with a small lynch mob already chasing him in Fayetteville, but the decision to jump ship within the division is the ultimate stripper coach move.

Why?

Because it's such a calculated attempt to make a move, you clearly know the strengths and weaknesses of every team. Moving within a division isn't a wild and outlandish maneuver or a decision predicated on loyalty. It's completely and utterly stripper-esque, hopping from one couch to the next because you know the situation is better for you.

Plus, Nutt even looks kind of like a Saturday Night Live skit version of a male stripper with his frantic twitching antics. Can't you see him alongside the now deceased Swayze and Farley, swaying to the Chippendale's beat?

6. Dennis Franchione leaves for Texas A&M after turning down a 10-year contract extension from Alabama.

How does Coach Fran notify his team of the offer he accepted at Texas A&M?

Via video conference.

Yep, he doesn't even have the decency to return to Tuscaloosa.

It's like Fran wrote the entire script for "Up In The Air" before the novel was even completed and the movie was released in theaters.

5. Tommy Tuberville tells Ole Miss, "They'll have to carry me out of here in a pine box." Two days later he accepts the Auburn job.

With nary a pine box to be seen anywhere, Tuberville leaves after spending four seasons at Ole Miss, during which time he runs up a 25-20 overall record. Anytime there is no buffer between your coaching moves, i.e. you take another job, and you end up coaching against the team you previously coached the next season, you're the definition of a stripper, hopping from one client to the next between songs.

Tuberville pulled the classic stripper move on Ole Miss. "I'll be right back, hunny," before vanishing for the fat man in the next booth with the fatter wallet. And, let's be clear, Tuberville's jilting of Ole Miss was worse than Nutt's jilting of Arkansas because there was no real heat on Tuberville from an angry fan base and because of the pine box quote.

A quote, mind you, that deserves to end up on Tuberville's gravestone.

4. Bobby Petrino moves to Arkansas in the middle of the NFL season and ditches the Atlanta Falcons.

Petrino's stripper coach move hits at a major theme, the enabling nature of college contracts. As I stated above, college contracts don't restrict the movement of a coach from one job to another within college sports. But they also offer immediate escape valves for any coach on a professional level, who would otherwise have to sit out once they abandoned their contract.

Witness Petrino.

Petrino, after flirting with Auburn about replacing Tuberville -- oh, the irony, one stripper trying to snag another stripper's sugar daddy -- bolts from the Atlanta Falcons in the midst of his first season coaching the team, a 3-10 disaster.

How did Petrino depart?

He left a note for the team in the locker room.

Seriously, you can't even make this stuff up.

Before the ink on the note was dry, Petrino was in Fayetteville, Ark., calling the Hogs at the Razorback press conference.

Read the rest of the column here.

Lane Kiffin, Finally Some Humor

2010-01-19T13:44:00.003-06:00

Here goes. I wrote this Wednesday of last week, and it went up on FanHouse yesterday. We were backlogged with articles thanks to all the news.

Read the full column here.

If you date strippers, sooner or later you wake up one morning and it hurts to pee. Last Tuesday night it hurt to pee for Tennessee fans. That's the lesson of Lane Kiffin and UT, a program without a previous history of stripper loving. Nope, in the past we've gone with the down home good ole boy as our coach. Phil Fulmer and Johnny Majors played and coached at Tennessee, they weren't flashy but you were sure they weren't going anywhere else -- Tennessee was their dream job.

Lane Kiffin's dream job?

Lane Kiffin's dream job is wherever winning football games is easier. And he made a calculated decision that it's easier to win championships at USC than it is at Tennessee. Given the Pac-10's weakness and the sunny Los Angeles locale, I think that's true.

So am I surprised that Lane Kiffin left for USC? No. Am I surprised that USC, given its looming NCAA issues, hired Lane Kiffin?

Hell, yes.

But if you needed any single event that better symbolized the massive difference between the mercenary/stripper era of college football and the era that ended in the SEC with the firing of Coach Phil Fulmer, how both men made their exits summed it up best.

Phil Fulmer wore a suit, prepared his remarks, sat at a table next to the man who was firing him, Mike Hamilton, allowed the event to be carried on live television, fielded questions from the media, and cried on his departure from Tennessee. The entire Volunteer team was there to support their coach.

Lane Kiffin showed up in a white polo shirt -- short sleeved -- and jeans. He had no prepared remarks, refused to allow the media to carry his statement live, talked for just 90 seconds, took no questions, and not one single player was there to support their coach. How could they be? The departing coaches were too busy trying to convince them to skip across the country to California and join them there.

And there you have it, Tennessee moved into the fast lane and got burned. But it's not all depressing, there's been an awful lot of high comedy the past few days. Let's dive in, shall we:

By the way, as a preliminary, some people have e-mailed and asked about my story that went up last Tuesday night, about how it came to be so quickly. The answer is pretty simple. I've had most of that information for some time, but prior to last night I didn't have anyone who was willing to attach their name to it, and I didn't want to write an entirely anonymous piece.

It's fairly common for college athletes to be unwilling to go public with criticisms of their coaches while they're still college athletes.

Why?

Because they have no power in that situation. As soon as Lane Kiffin left, the power dynamic switched, and the story opened up.

So that's a prelude, now on to the departure, the coaching search and whatnot.

1. My favorite quote from this whole imbroglio?

Even in the midst of police protection being deployed for him, Kiffin still took the time to take a shot at Urban Meyer. Asked if he was going to cease his criticism of Urban Meyer, Kiffin told Volquest, "No, it's good. Now I can do it and not get fined for it."

The fact that this quote hasn't gotten any attention is criminal.

2. How much is Lane Kiffin tarnishing his dad's legacy?

If Monte never leaves Tampa Bay, he coaches five or six more yeas, retires, and probably gets inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.

Now he's jumping from one college job to another after years of stability.

Plus, from everything I've heard, Monte is a class act.

Unlike Lane, Monte made the rounds apologizing to UT officials for his son's decision to bolt to Los Angeles. Monte even let it be known that he didn't agree with the decision.

3. I can't let this go: Who shows up in an oversized, short sleeve, untucked polo and jeans for their farewell press conference?

It's incredibly disrespectful.

And this is coming from someone who wore flip-flops while he worked in a law firm.

It's not like Lane Kiffin didn't know the media was going to be there or that he might have to talk to someone before leaving for USC.

Plus, it was 20 degrees in Knoxville, why was he in short sleeves anyway?

4. Best tweet received on Tuesday? "Should Mike Hamilton show up to his presser with an old Starter jacket and an overhead projector?"

That would have been epic.

What if Hamilton had said, "I've sought and received permission to be added as a third-party plaintiff in Oakland Raiders v. Lane Kiffin?"

5. Is Ed Orgeron the dirtiest recruiter in college football?

Yes.

Consider this.

He calls guys who become Tennessee students at midnight, at 10 in the evening, telling them not to go to class. And he did this while the head coach was addressing the team abut leaving.

Then someone at Tennessee has to get his phone shut off!

How does this happen?

I'm picturing a UT underling rushing down the hall, arms pumping, screaming, "Get Sprint on the phone! Push the red button, push the red button!"

There are so many questions about this: Who can you immediately call and get a phone disconnected? Does that also kill your address book in the phone?

You couldn't make this up if you wanted to.

Also, am I the only person who can't stop thinking about how funny it would be to have Tennessee rehire Coach O and have USC have to turn off his cell phone when he started calling recruits from USC to get them to go back to Tennessee?

"Uh, hello, dis Coach O, I'm back with the Vols. Come to Tennessee."

He's like a big, dumb recruiting robot.

6. The Knoxville police had to be posted outside Lane Kiffin's house.

That's not a joke.

What's even more incredible?

They had to call-in the national guard to watch the Knoxville police to make sure they didn't shoot Kiffin.

7. What's up with Kiffin leaving behind David Reaves, his brother-in-law, Layla's brother, in Knoxville on the UT staff?

How has this not gotten more attention? And how can the other coaches left behind trust him?

That's like Fidel Castro jumping to the Florida Keys and then telling the Cuban people, "Don't worry, Raul is harmless. He's a good guy. He loves free speech."

Yeah, right.

How awkward is Christmas going to be in that household?

Your brother-in-law and father-in-law hop on a plane for Los Angeles and leave behind the wife's brother to take all the crap in the city of Knoxville for their decision?

Scene: A Kiffin family Christmas. David Reaves hands present to Lane.

Lane Kiffin opens Christmas present: "David, is that Smoky's feces?"

8. The only thing that could have made this entire situation better is if Nu'Keese Richardson had shown up at the airport and robbed Kiffin before he could leave town.

Even better, what if he'd shot him with the pellet gun?

Kiffin would have crumpled and gone down like Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oh, stop it, he would have been fine. You probably used to shoot your friends with pellet guns too.

You didn't?

You're not from the South then.

9. Find me another person who has been less successful in life and kept getting promoted?

George W. BushOkay, other than George W. Bush.

Kiffin is now 34 years old, and 12-21 as a head coach with three different teams.

Let me repeat that: Three different teams have hired him!

Think about how hard that is to manage. How many coaches pour their heart and soul into coaching and never even sniff one head job? And yet Kiffin gets three before he's even 35?

This entire process has me convinced that most football coaches aren't very smart. Otherwise, how can a guy of medium intelligence run absolute circles around them?

10. What if Lane's last name wasn't Kiffin?

He's probably still toiling away somewhere as a wide receivers coach at a non-BCS school.

Even more incredible, now that he's in a great situation at USC, isn't he likely to succeed even if he isn't that great at coaching?

Yeah, he is.

Because a huge part of being a success anywhere is the quality of the people around you. After all, if you put someone who is average at best in a great job, they'd be successful too. For instance, if you put The Situation in a Martin Scorcese crime drama, he could get nominated for an Oscar.

Okay, maybe a stretch.

11. Thank God for T.J. Simers of the LA Times and his questioning of Lane Kiffin at the USC press conference Wednesday.

With his pointed questioning he turned Kiffin into Richard Nixon. He also demonstrated the difference between the press corps in big cities and in small Southern cities.

Kiffin is hired at Tennessee: "Lane, is your grandmomma happy to see you with this job?"

Kiffin is hired at USC: "How can you say you run a clean program when your top recruiter is telling recruits not to go to class?"

Also, someone please explain why people say Kiffin is great at interviewing when he can't respond to questions without using the word "umm" or "okay" 4 billion times.

12. Monte Kiffin went on Knoxville radio last week and committed a secondary violation by naming an unsigned recruit, Jacques Smith.

Whose violation is this?

I'm serious.

It's like the black hole of secondary violations. Does USC have to take this one or does Tennessee?

13. In leaving, Kiffin said over and over that he'd been at Tennessee for 14 months.

Not quite.

Kiffin was offered the job on November 28, 2008, the Friday before the Kentucky game, but he wasn't introduced until November 30th.

So he's officially been at Tennessee for 1 year and 13 days. (Evidently I missed a month in my calculations here, he's been at Tennessee for 13 months. This is why I took a course called Mathematical Ideas in college. One of our exam questions involved coming up with an imaginary formula to count how many squares there were on a soccer ball. Also, we had to answer an essay question about whether we liked addition or subtraction better. I am not making this up.)

Even giving him 13 months is rounding up.

But I love that he chose to go with 14 months instead of just saying a year, as if 14 months is a commitment and one year is much less so.

Although, credit to Kiffin, he could have claimed that he'd been here 3 years, 2008, 2009, 2010, thanks to the quirks of the calendar.

14. Did Kiffin leave the program in better shape as he asserted throughout his USC press conference?

Not hardly.

Let's review.

When Phil Fulmer was fired, Fulmer had the No. 7 recruiting class in the country committed. Lane Kiffin finished with the No. 7 recruiting class in the country.

Kiffin made a big deal of turning a 5-7 team into at 7-6 team, but the reason Fulmer was fired in 2008 was because the offense sucked under Dave Clawson. That 2008 team, which finished third in the nation on defense, had quite a bit of returning talent, they just had an awful offensive system.

The expectation was that with a new offensive coordinator who simplified the system things would work out much better.

And a new offense helped.

So Kiffin turned a 5-7 team into a 7-6 team, but that 5-7 team was the defending SEC east champs. To hear Kiffin tell it, he walked into a program with no talent whatsoever. News flash, an untalented team wouldn't have been favored in nine of last year's games by Las Vegas.

Kiffin won seven.

So did this 2009 team really overachieve with him at the helm?

And can you possibly argue that leaving your second class, and the only one you recruited in its entirety, three weeks before signing day leaves the program in better shape?

The fact is, the program is in worse shape now than it was in when Kiffin took over. Any other argument is laughable.

Read the rest here.

Tim Tebow's Super Bowl Commercial

2010-01-18T13:28:00.002-06:00

Read the full column here.

While the most popular point of debate regarding this year's NFL draft will be how Florida star quarterback Tim Tebow projects for pro football, come Sunday, Feb. 7, Tebow will already be on the Super Bowl telecast. That's because Tebow and a faith group, Focus on the Family, will be debuting a 30-second commercial that utilizes Tebow's own life story to make the case that abortion is wrong.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past four college football seasons, you know that Tebow is an evangelical Christian who sees football as a platform that allows him to spread his Christianity. For most of his four years that message has resounded throughout the South, and I've argued Tebow's passionate Christianity is one reason that he became popular not just with Florida fans but with many other Southern football fans.

Now that he transitions to a larger stage outside the welcoming footprint of the most religious portion of the United States, the question has to be asked: How will Tebow's evangelism be received?

In many ways, Tebow's ascent in college football is unique. Thanks to his 48-7 career record, including three 13-1 seasons, two national titles, Heisman Trophy, and consistent exposure on ESPN and CBS national telecasts, there are few, if any, college athletes in the country who have ever received more attention during their careers. The result is that before he even takes a single snap, Tebow is already more popular than at least half the starting quarterbacks in the NFL.

Tebow's on- and off-field popularity has been firmly focused on his own personal biography, his mission trips, his family's faith and even what is likely to be the focus of the television ad during the Super Bowl, the fact that Tebow's mother was told to have an abortion rather than carry her fifth child to term. Pam Tebow became sick during a mission trip and rejected doctor's advice that she have an abortion. Ultimately she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Tebow.

Now the 30-second Super Bowl ad, which will cost around $2.5 million, is being paid for by Focus on the Family, a religious organization that opposes abortion. In a release the organization stated as follows:

"Tim and Pam share our respect for life and our passion for helping families thrive. Focus on the Family is about ... strengthening families by empowering them with the tools they need to live lives rooted in morals and values."
The Super Bowl ad will just be the latest surge of attention for the most famous college athlete ... ever. With that attention has come fawning cover profiles in Sports Illustrated, countless television stories, and the seduction of yours truly into the camp of devout Tebow fandom. As I stated in my Sugar Bowl column, I love Tebow. But little to none of that media attention has been critical. Indeed, in the annals of American sporting culture, it's hard to find a player who has received more positive publicity in comparison to negative publicity.

The old cliche is that all publicity is good publicity. But with Tebow all publicity truly is good publicity.

In fact, I dare you, find me an entire article about Tim Tebow that has been written by anyone, anywhere and has a negative tone.

Those stories don't exist.

Will that change now that Tebow is becoming a pro athlete?

I think so.

Why?

Because our society doesn't view religious pro athletes with the same level of deference. We view their sincerity in a more questionable light, raise issues with the proselytizing they do in post-game interviews. Whereas many Southerners, the largest audience for his college games, felt Tebow's religiosity was a welcome departure for a college athlete, many feel hearing a multi-millionaire pro athlete espouse his religious views to the entire nation crosses the line from welcoming to hectoring.

That's why few, if any, pro athletes have approached Tebow's level of influence. Not only is our society too cynical to accept the legitimacy of the pro athletes' beliefs, we expect that the athlete is living a double life, hypocritical to his core. The result is that most pro athletes have a negligible influence on cultural mores.

Don't believe me? Who is the pro athlete most famous for his religion in the present day?

Probably Kurt Warner.

Tim Tebow is already far more famous than Kurt Warner.

In fact, let's be clear, the moment he is drafted Tim Tebow will be the athlete most famous for his religion since Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.

And suddenly multicultural America, with a variety of religious beliefs, will come face-to-face with a man whose strict adherence to a muscular form of Christianity, despite his personal charisma, isn't all warm and fuzzy. Especially when that statement of religious values comes not at the close of a game in a short on-field interview, but in a contest that the athlete is not even competing in. Focus on the Family, the right wing non-profit funding Tebow's ad, isn't a middle-of-the-road religious organization. Tebow's Super Bowl ad, for instance, will embrace a pro-life stance, which is the position of Focus on the Family, but something that half of America will disagree with.

Will that stance be controversial?

Certainly it will in many cities across the length and width of our country. And certainly it will be for many sports fans who sit down to watch the Super Bowl as an escape from the more serious issues facing our society. We come to watch football and funny ads, not be convinced that our view on abortion is wrong or right.

But opposing abortion isn't the most controversial of Focus on the Family's stances. The organization also opposes all forms of gambling, the theory of evolution -- preferring intelligent design -- premarital sex, and the so-called "homosexual agenda."

How many fans watching the Super Bowl will be able to raise their hand and assert that they've never gambled or had premarital sex or supported the theory of evolution? (Heck, some may do all three during the telecast)

Not many.

Read the rest here.

Derek Dooley Breakdown

2010-01-15T16:38:00.003-06:00

Read the full analysis here.

In the wake of Lane Kiffin's unexpected departure Tuesday, Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton found himself in an extremely difficult position. In less than a week he had to hire the man who would be responsible for ensuring that the engine for the nearly $100 million Vol athletic budget, the football team, didn't crumble. Hamilton moved quickly, rushing off in pursuit of both Will Muschamp, Texas' coach in waiting, and Troy Calhoun, Air Force's coach, to offer the Tennessee job to them.

Both men, who Hamilton had previously interviewed before hiring Lane Kiffin in 2008, turned down Hamilton's overtures. But Muschamp recommended Derek Dooley very highly. And Hamilton was left with a real decision, turn back into the direction of the man he fired, Phil Fulmer, and hire former offensive coordinator David Cutcliffe, or make another attempt at a bold and risky hire.

To put it in baseball terms, Hamilton could take the line-drive single to left, and hire Cutcliffe, or he could buckle down and swing once more for the fences.

Hamilton swung for the fences, reportedly hiring Dooley. And now we have to wait and see whether he made any contact at all.

1. But first, we have to see whether or not Hamilton or Dooley gets Chizik'd on their arrival in Knoxville.

You'll recall the specter of a lone, angry fan haranguing Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs as he arrived back in Alabama after hiring Gene Chizik.

Hamilton and Dooley have to avoid this shot. And I'm not even joking about that. So much of Chizik's early trouble was the perception of him as a desperation hire.

What fueled that desperation hire? The antipathy of Auburn's reaction to his hiring.

But what crystallized that antipathy in 20 seconds? The video of a lone fan ripping the decision.

Remember how they snuck Abraham Lincoln into Washington via a train ride with only one plainclothes officer for protection?

This is how Dooley needs to get to Knoxville ... quietly.

2. Hamilton also has to overcome this detail, he hired an unknown head coach.

Lane Kiffin hadn't really done anything, but he was a sexy hire because the media had built him up to the point where everyone knew the name. Kiffin was the youngest coach in NFL history and he'd been the recruiting coordinator for USC; both of those details conspired to create an aura of competence.

Even though, you know, Lane Kiffin had a career head-coaching record of 5-15. Once Tennessee had the opportunity to craft Kiffin's story, he appeared to be a good fit.

You can make the same argument here. You point to the law degree for Dooley's brains, you point to the top recruiting classes in 2001 and 2003 under Nick Saban at LSU when Dooley was recruiting coordinator, you bask in the glow of a Southern icon in Vince Dooley (Derek's father), and you point to Dooley's role in helping to resurrect Louisiana Tech.

How so?

By pointing out that prior to Dooley's second season at Tech, the school had not won a bowl game since 1977. It's not like was coaching at a football powerhouse.

After all, Gene Chizik won more games in his first year at Auburn than he won in two seasons at Iowa State.

3. In the wake of the Kiffin departure, Tennessee fans wanted a name we could bask in the reflected glory of. Derek Dooley is not that name.

That doesn't mean he can't succeed, but it does men that in this business, where thanks to the long layoffs between games, perceptions of success sometimes end up governing success, he has to win the press conference.

And then he has to prove that he's not Mike Shula, another heir to the coaching throne who was the spawn of a big name.

4. Detail that I like the most: Derek Dooley left a big Atlanta law firm to take a $10,000 grad assistant job at Georgia.

As someone who doesn't practice in a law firm despite having a law degree, I admire the guts that takes.

Especially if you're already married.

If you haven't left a law firm and the guaranteed income, prestige, and lifestyle simply because you didn't like your profession as much as another one, then that won't be a big deal to you.

But, trust me, it is the definition of guts.

And you have to be fearless to do it.

5. Early thesis: This restores Tennessee to the good graces of the SEC.

For two reasons, one cultural and the second competitive:

First the cultural. After the Kiffin tornado where Tennessee attempted to become the USC of the South and eschewed all tradition, Dooley is steeped in SEC lore. His daddy won a national championship at Georgia, and Derek worked as a graduate assistant there. Both of his parents are Auburn grads. Derek Dooley was an assistant with Nick Saban at LSU.

Dooley is steeped in SEC lore, knows why people care about the games and understands that being a football coach extends beyond the field down here.

Second, the competitive. Every other school believes they can beat Dooley and Tennessee.

6. Dooley's wife is a gynecologist.

Layla Kiffin was hot, but we never really learned much else about her.

Lots of coaches marry dumb wives, Dooley didn't. Again, as someone who has a wife smarter than he is, I think that speaks well of him.

Nevertheless Layla Kiffin became an internet folk hero that led to a Facebook group I founded, "Our Coach's Wife Is Hotter Than Your Coach's Wife."

I haven't deleted that group, but now it's very popular in Southern California.

I'm contemplating starting a new group: "Our Coach's Wife Is A Better Lady Parts Doctor Than Your Coach's Wife."

I don't think it will be as popular.

7. Having said that, this is probably going to lead to a lot of gynecological humor.

I mean, the Internet basically exists, as a medium, for genital-related humor and videos of cats wearing funny hats.

If the Dooleys have a cat that wears funny hats, the Internet might explode.

At least in Tennessee.

8. One concern: Is there a contractual provision keeping Dooley out of Georgia if that job ever opens up?

Because if there isn't, this could be the Kiffin hire all over again, right?

Young coach, great recruiter, who has probably always dreamed of being the head coach of another school, Georgia.

And Georgia has a head coach, in Mark Richt, who might bolt at any moment. The worst case for Tennessee is Dooley is an absolute bust.

The second worst case?

Dooley proves he's good, gets his sea legs in the SEC, and then departs for an SEC east rival.

9. As with Chizik, the coaching staff surrounding Dooley remains key.

If Lane Kiffin truly put together the best coaching staff in college football, than everyone remains but Kiffin, Monte Kififin, and Ed Orgeron.

Of those three, who is the big loss?

Monte.

Tennessee currently has six coaches under contract. The reason Cutcliffe didn't come was because Hamilton insisted those coaches remain on staff.

Who will be the defensive coordinator? How will the rest of the staff shake out?

It was Chizik's double hires of Gus Malzahn and Trooper Taylor that helped to quell the masses.

Will the Vols pull off the same?

Dooley has a pretty good core of coaches in place around him, his additions can send the signal that he's going to be okay.

Read the rest here.

Volunteer Sources Say Kiffin Never Embraced Tennessee

2010-01-13T03:07:00.003-06:00

Read the full column here.

By the way, as a preliminary, some people have emailed and asked about my story that went up last night, about how it comes to be so quickly. The answer is pretty simple. I've had most of that information for some time. But prior to last night I didn't have anyone who was willing to attach their name to it, and I didn't want to write an entirely anonymous piece.

It's fairly common for college athletes to be unwilling to go public with criticisms of their coaches while they're still college athletes.

Why?

Because they have no power in that situation. As soon as Lane Kiffin left, the power dynamic switched, and the story opened up.

In February of 2009, just a few months after Lane Kiffin's tenure began at the University of Tennessee, Vols senior center Josh McNeil walked into the Neyland-Thompson sports complex on the university campus. He paused alongside the Vols 1998 national championship trophy and shook his head in disbelief.

"They'd replaced our highlight video from the past season with Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, and Dwayne Jarrett from USC. I was like, 'Man, I know we were 5-7 last year, but this is Tennessee. Right beside our national title trophy? Come on, man.'"

Walking up the stairs, McNeil, a 6-foot-4 280 pound offensive lineman, says that all the televisions in the complex, at least 20, were tuned to still photos of stellar plays featuring USC athletes. In particular, McNeil paused in front of one photo of Reggie Bush diving into the end zone on a sunlit California field.

"I was thinking, 'Damn, Jamal Lewis went here. Travis Henry went here. It ain't like we never had any running backs of our own.'"

Within a day the pictures and video were down, but the message had been sent. A new era had dawned in Knoxville.

A few months later after witnessing what McNeil said he believed were affronts to the Tennessee tradition that upset him, the player confronted Kiffin. "Coach," he said, "I feel like you're intentionally not embracing UT's traditions."

Kiffin smirked. "Well, whatever Tennessee's been doing isn't working anymore, so we're coming up with something new. Get used to it."

When Kiffin said, "something new," he meant exactly what USC had already done before, McNeil told FanHouse. Multiple team sources confirmed McNeil's claims.

By Junior Day, March 2, 2009, Kiffin had his first crop of potential players, hundreds of then-high school juniors on Tennessee's campus.

The players were divided between offense and defense and placed in front of highlight videos that were designed to show them the Tennessee way of playing football.

As the offensive players sat down on the field, a video flashed on the screen with a word in bold:

DETERMINATION

McNeil watched. "I was thinking, maybe we're going to see Dan Williams block against Kentucky that got us into the SEC championship game (in 2007). That was a pretty huge play."

Instead a USC play featuring Reggie Bush opened the montage.

Another word flashed on the screen.

EXPLOSIVE

More USC highlights followed.

"All the way back to Carson Palmer," says McNeil. "I mean, really, Carson Palmer is explosive?"

At the end of the video, Lane Kiffin addressed the recruits.

"We're going to make this the USC of the South, and the USC of the East Coast," said Kiffin.

McNeil did not hide his disgust. "I was sitting right there and it broke my heart. I came to Tennessee because we were Tennessee, not because we were pretending to be somebody else."

McNeil paused.

"And you know what else? Out of all those clips there wasn't one Oakland Raider highlight. Not one. Now [the Oakland offense] is the same offense, you know? You ever think maybe it has something to do with the players?"

A drum begins slowly beating in the back of a Tennessee meeting room.

Ba-dum, ba-dum

Coach Ed Orgeron, UT's recruiting coordinator, steps to the front of the room.

"One heartbeat," he growls.

The drum beat gets louder and faster.

"I'm about to teach y'all our special team cheer," Coach Orgeron said to a gathering of Tennessee players.

Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.

"We're going to be crazy about special teams here."

"Now when these two Bushwackers run through the door, you rip your shirts off and scream as loud as you can. One side of the room yell, 'ST,' and the other side yell, 'wild boys.'"

The doors burst open, and two graduate assistants on the football team, walking like the Bushwackers from the old WWE wrestling days, arms gesticulating awkwardly in front of them, begin madly stomping about the room.

Coach Orgeron screams, "What's the first thing you do before you get in a fight?"

No answer.

"You take your shirt off!" he screams.

Then Coach Orgeron rips off his shirt in front of the team.

The drumbeat is incessant, loud. Players stare at one another.

Coach Orgeron begins to lead the cheer.

"ST!" he screams.

"ST," the team responds.

"Wild boys!" Orgeron screams.

"Wild boys," the team responds.

"Damn, I felt like an idiot with my shirt off," McNeil says. "So did lots of the older guys."

But some of the younger players believed the chant was very cool, McNeil said. It fired them up.

At least it did until they realized that the "new chant" the UT coaching staff introduced to the players was a retread.

"It was a USC thing," McNeil says, "I took an official visit there. They used to say, 'SC', and the other side would say, 'wild boys.' They came to Tennessee and they changed SC to ST for special teams. How lame is that?"

Eventually the shirtless drills fade out.

"We didn't get as hyped up as they wanted us too, Everybody would just laugh," says McNeil, "We just all kind of thought it was weird."

That year for spring practice, Lane Kiffin instituted a new rule, profanity was permissible in the songs they would play as the players stretched.

As UT players got loose and children visiting practice ran along the sidelines, hardcore rap lyrics blared alongside Kid Rock anthems.

The current players had no issue with the cursing, some liked it.

But several former UT players were offended when they brought their young children to the practice and heard the music, according to team sources interviewed by FanHouse.

Kiffin didn't care.

"He told me that's how they did it at USC," McNeil says.

As the start of a new season neared, Kiffin and crew focused on their continuing makeover of the Vols.

It was time to practice their team chants.

Kiffin said, "When we're on national TV about to come out of the tunnel, we've got to make it look good."

The entire team lined up in the end zone as part of fall camp.

One side would yell, "It's war time," while another side said, "Let's take it outside."

Tennessee players embraced the new tradition. They believed it was theirs and theirs alone.

Until one of the players found it on YouTube. (A similar video can be found here)

Another USC chant.

This time verbatim.

As the season neared, a new controversy arose: Kiffin did not want to say General Neyland's Game Maxims. The tradition, in which the Volunteer players chant the seven maxims beginning with:

Read the rest here.