Slight Hitch

Today's promised scheduling rant is a bit delayed.  My apologies, but this also means it will be a bit more complete than before.  For various reasons, I hesitate to publish items like this, as afterwards I often feel I've omitted many other points out of forgetfulness.  It's probably something we all struggle with when we are writing.

Scheduling Rant

Last week I threw a fit over an LSU press release that got picked up by ESPN.com, related to LSU's 2005 home schedule.  Subsequently, I promised one or two more posts about scheduling, that have yet to be delivered.

Expect one post and a lot more tomorrow.  Be prepared to download a Microsoft Word document, because we're at a word count of over 2,500 and that's really not a good fit for the tight format of the blog.

Coach Interview

Because we are CollegeFootballResource:

Here is an interview with newly-hired North Carolina State defensive coordinator Steve Dunlap.  He's been around the block a bit and remembers the Lou Holtz days there.

And he can talk a little bass fishing-

GOPACK: So what is the biggest bass you have ever caught?

DUNLAP: The biggest smallmouth bass I ever caught was six pounds, six ounces. I caught it in Lake Erie. I don't know what the biggest largemouth bass I ever caught was. I used to fish a lot down in Lake Ocachobee in Florida, and I could never catch anything down there.

GOPACK: So do you have that smallmouth on the wall somewhere?

DUNLAP: No, I couldn't do it. I released it. I have a great picture of it though. I always said I wanted to put a 10-pound largemouth on the wall and a five-pound smallmouth, but when it came time to do it, I just couldn't it.

Invasion By GoogleBot

Looking at Resource's visitor statistics, Google's Google Bot has been crawling around quite a bit the last two days.  In fact, it has generated several hundred "hits" as it clicks on the various levels of this website and blog. 

Be sure and take a look at that link to better understand the GoogleBot, but on balance it is very good for us here because many if not all our links and pages will be indexed in the ever-powerful Google search engine, and more people can stumble upon the Resource and all its great benefits.

President's Day

Today is Presidents Day, generally viewed as a celebration of the lives of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Of late, it has become a day to recognize the contributions of all American presidents.

I am listening to an interesting radio program right now, the host Hugh Hewitt is discussing all 43 presidents with presidential historian and biographer Richard Norton Smith.  Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, there are some college football connections with American presidents.  Gerald Ford played football at Michigan, one of the alltime great programs in this sport.  And I believe current president George W. Bush was one of those male cheerleader/rally types while enrolled at Yale.

Be sure and think back on the contributions of these men (and maybe women in the future) today.

News Updates

As stated earlier, we are trying to do brief daily news updates.  Stop by our latest news section under navigation, at left, for more.

And bookmark us if for some insane reason you haven't already!

Resource Comes in Handy!

I mentioned earlier tonight that I was going to watch the movie Rudy.  Needless to say the experience was enjoyable.  But thanks to the research capabilities here, I was able to do some research about some of the more general college football claims of the movie.

Two items particularly interested me.

When Rudy loses all hope for suiting up for the final game of the season, one of the players to vouch for him was an "All-American" defensive back and team captain.  Coach Dan Devine was incredulous at the player's request to have Rudy dress in his place, and Devine counters by saying something to the effect of, "you're an All-American, and Georgia Tech is one of the country's best offenses, you can't do this."

The year was 1975.

I don't have a direct link to the various All-American lists on here, but using the links directory at left I quickly found a linking of consensus All Americans from the various years.  It was under "Heisman Trophy and Awards" under "Award Winner Databases."

The link I was looking for was consensus All-Americans 1937-1976.  According to that list, Notre Dame did not have a consensus All-America defensive back in 1975.  Defensive tackle Steve Niehaus was Notre Dame's only consensus All American.  That year, the All America defensive backs were Navy's Chet Moeller, Texas A&M's Pat Thomas and Ohio State's Tim Fox.  As an aside, look at the All America backfield in 1975; Ohio State's Archie Griffin, USC's late, great Ricky Bell, Pittsburgh's Tony Dorsett and California's Chuck Muncie.

Wow.

The second bit of trivia I was after was the scoring total for Georgia Tech's vaunted offense.

This time, I went to "Tradition and History" and found an excellent link under "Historical College Football Information" titled All-Time NCAA D-1A Standings Since 1950.  That link provides not only information about standings, but you can click on a small button to bring up a team's entire schedule from year to year with the score totals.

In 1975, Georgia Tech went 7-4-0, scoring 270 points and allowing 200.  That translates to an average score of 24.5 to 18.2.  For that era 24.5 points per game was fairly good.  Certainly not incredible, but perhaps Dan Devine's character was justified in his claim.  Upon further inspection, Georgia Tech had an inconsistent offensive season, opening with just 17 points against South Carolina before rattling off four straight games over 30 points, including 38 twice.  They then scored 27, 23, 21, a season-low 3 against Notre Dame in the "Rudy" game, and then 14 and 26.  Whatever magic they had during the early-season scoring binge was lost after a disappointing 31-27 loss to Auburn.

The preceding is just a small example of the power this website can have for a fan of the game.  I strive to categorize the links as intelligently as possible.  This is all to your advantage if you take the time to learn what is available here.

One More Update

We have just added no less than 30 links to Resource, and in the process unearthed many many more links.  That's kind of why we call the link adding process "tedious".  For every one link we can find a category for, we find a new link with several other worthy links.  It's kind of that exponential effect happening on a small scale here.

Anyway, feel free to stroll around.

Or just take a look at our recent activity/updates section for the specifics.

We don't have any advertisers yet here, and aren't quite sure how that would work anyway with the current software we're using, but I think its unfair not to include a few links to various vendors and merchandisers that sell interesting college football items.  Thus, we now have added a merchandise links section under Resource Links to the left.

And just a heads up, our host is doing some kind of update tonight, so from about 12 PM EST to 1215 PM or so, the site might be down.  Our apologies in advance.

Another Assignment

Be sure and stop by our homework section at Resource for related requests from the friendly management here at Resouce.

Today's assignment is relatively easy.  Simply reply to this post or send us an email with the names of any college football movies you are aware of.  We may combine titles and create some kind of master list on here, maybe even publish an Amazon list that people can use to look at what types of college football movies are available out there.

I mentioned Rudy in an earlier post, but there are many more movies, both good and bad out there that can be of use to a college football fan.  Please be sure and give us a year or prominent actor's name if you think the movie may be a bit more obscure.  Basically, if IMDB struggles to find it, we here at Resource will definitely have little awareness of the movie.

Thank You.

Update on Friday, February 18, 2005 at 07:04PM by CFR

If you are a bit confused by the "homework" concept, here is an explanation.  The goal is to gather information that is useful to this website and its mission, by pooling the collective knowledge and resources of the readership.

And it's an opportunity for participation in this fine democracy of ours.

This and That

Some quick things...

I am watching Rudy, one of my favorite movies of all time, tonight.  Regardless of your views on Notre Dame, this is a good movie, with an excellent although repetitive soundtrack.

Related to this, check the homework section at Resource in a few moments.  What other college football movies are there out there?  Name some for us, either by replying to the post or via email.  Let's get a list going that we can archive on here and maybe make another section of the website for.

I've also updated the about section here at Resource.  I discuss two websites that, at least conceptually, gave me some direction for my overall design plans here at Resource.

There is also a new section called tailgating found on the menubar at left that should be a fun way to connect this site's readers and fans of the game from across the country.  Be sure and contribute to that if you can.

Also, I will try to post daily news updates on here from now on.  Tentatively, I'll keep them off the blog unless they strike a particular interest of mine, but otherwise just click on latest news at left under "navigation".  We'll track ongoing news items on there as well as brief daily roundups.

Lastly, last night's rant about LSU's schedule had me thinking about the overall college football scheduling concept all day.  If I'm diligent I'll post some more on that topic either tonight or tomorrow.

Fell For It... Sigh

Ahhhh the college football media.  You gotta love them.  Mostly, I admire their laziness and otherwise ability to be manipulated.

Here's an AP story picked up by ESPN.com about LSU's 2005 home schedule.  It's basically an LSU puff piece arguing that it's schedule is beefed up.

Now, why would this piece ever appear on a major college football media website?  College football in general has the most rabid, knowledgeable (about their teams at least) fans.  They know the schedule, they've planned their tailgates and road trips well in advance.  That's why college football schedules are posted years in advance.

To answer my question, the article is up there because it is a defensive salvo from the SEC camp.  You see, SEC teams have taken a beating in recent years about their various scheduling practices.   Auburn was universally mocked last year for playing weak sister The Citadel, among other cupcakes.  The schedule cost them a shot at the Orange Bowl.

To their credit, nobody circles the wagons like the institutions in the SEC.  So there's no doubt we'll see more articles like this and some spin from the conference's defenders (ahem, Tim Brando) once the season starts about revamped scheduling practices.

For years college football fans have been told the SEC is the best conference, bar none.  Not just in any given year, but every year.  And the college football media buys it.  Is it the best conference some years?  Arguably.  It's mostly a weak argument at that, but one that can be made.  Unfortunately for the conference, one of its greatest strength is also its greatest weaknesses.

Scheduling.

We will go into much further detail at a later time on here, but there is a fancy SEC scheduling myth that few people really understand, and fewer take the time to criticize.

Some of the criticisms include the following:

• Weak out-of-conference (OOC) schedules
• OOC slate never leaving the geographical south
• Bifurcated conference setup that allows for few matchups of the conference's top teams

There are many more.

The issue at large is scheduling practices, something that's finally starting to catch up with the SEC as fans like myself call them on their shenanigans.  And this article is one way the SEC tries to control the public debate on the issue.  It's one-sided, and aims at spinning away a weakness.  This isn't to say the SEC is the only conference guilty of scheduling shenanigans.  Only that they are the masters and aren't taken to task about it.  It benefits them at the expense of other conferences, which is the part that bothers me.

College football doesn't have a regulated schedule the way other major sports do.  So its up to the member institutions, voluntarily, to create competitive schedules.  Many teams avoid that task, and in the case of the SEC, an entire conference has undertaken a deceptive scheme to prop up 3-4 of its "best" teams in any given year, giving them inflated records.

As said before, we'll detail this in much greater detail down the road, so our apologies for any confusion.  But for tonight we'll glance once more at the aforementioned schedule, LSU's 2005 home slate.

North Texas (9/3)
Arizona State (9/10)
Tennessee (9/24)
Florida (10/15)
Auburn (10/22)
Appalachian State (11/5)
Arkansas (11/26)

Funny, but in the gushing praise for the schedule in that article, nowhere was North Texas mentioned, or Appalachian State.

That's TWO cupcakes on a single schedule.  Worse, they're home games.  Worse, they're out-of-conference.  If you hadn't taken the time to find LSU's full schedule, you very likely would have fallen for the wool-over-eyes spin coming from Baton Rouge.

Yes, four teams were in the AP top 25 last year.  But a lot of that has to do, again, with the SEC scheduling myth we'll detail down the road.  The lone exception is Arizona State.

To bring up one more criticism, the only major name out-of-conference teams playing the SEC with any consistency lately is the Pac-10 slate.  LSU hosted Oregon State last year.  This year it's Arizona State.  Alabama hosted UCLA a few years ago.  Auburn hosted USC in 2003.

I have a strong hunch this is because the SEC has long perceived the Pac-10 as the weakest big-name conference, and given the Pac-10's willingness to not only play difficult OOC slates, but make road games out of those slates, this was an easy grab for SEC teams.

To the SEC's credit most of these games against the Pac-10 have been season openers or very early games, when teams are at their most vulnerable (especially upper-level teams).  But they also are usually home games, a huge advantage in college football.

Reading the AP release, I had the sense that LSU should be given credit for its home schedule, but it is in fact is only responsible for its out-of-conference opponents, as an SEC team's conference slate is decided by the conference.  So although Auburn looks like a hell of a test, LSU plays Auburn most years anyway.  That's like Oklahoma talking up its game with Texas.  They are conference foes, that game happens every year.  LSU also gets to play SEC cellar-dwellars Vanderbilt, Mississippi State and Ole Miss in 2005.  That's what happens when you are a member of a conference.

LSU fans should be excited to have some fun home games, but this schedule is nothing out of the ordinary.  Unless it's the SEC and anytime a Pac-10 team that's on your OOC slate suddenly makes the top 25 the year before.  Then you send out a press release for the AP and ESPN.com to pick up.

A Few Less Heisman Voters?

Found this on SportsByBrooks-

In a letter to readers on Sunday, ATLANTA CONSTITUTION Sports Editor Ronnie Ramos reported that the newspaper will no longer allow its sportswriters to vote in polls or for awards.

Ramos: "We have determined this is no longer appropriate. Our writers need to focus on bringing you the news, not determining which sports figures ought to win awards."

The exception will be AJC columnists, who will be allowed to continue voting for the Pro Football and Baseball Hall of Fames

This has the feel of the AP's BCS-pullout. I don't know how many Journal-Constitution writers are Heisman voters. Maybe I should send in an email to HeismanPundit and find out?

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentines Day to our Resource readers out there.  Be sure and make nice with your significant other out there, or if you're on the single side, let your friends know you love 'em.

I'm enjoying cupcakes right now that my friend Stephanie made.  Isn't that nice?  I think so.  And that's all it takes.

Trent Digiuro

I'm watching an interesting program on the cable channel, A&E, called "City Confidential".  Right now it's profiling the city of Lexington, Kentucky, and leading up to the investigation of the murder of walkon-turned-starting offensive lineman Trent Digiuro in the early 1990's.  Looks interesting, they've interviewed former UK coach Bill Curry, and there are lots of details about the city's athletics heritage, including horseracing and of course, Kentucky hoops.

If you're a college football fan, this might be an interesting program for you, so be sure and check local listings to see more of it.  Now, back to the TV.

Update on Sunday, February 13, 2005 at 01:03AM by CFR

Apparently Trent was murdered in a sniper style shooting, by the son of a prominent Kentucky businessman who was blackballed from a fraternity after revealing to one of Trent's friends an escapade with a sorority girl who was in some sorority fundraising calendar.

Very confusing, yes.  And a very petty motive.  Trent merely stood up for his friend, and was killed for that conviction, it appears.

I found coach Curry's reactions quite sincere and humbling.  He took the death quite hard, and ended up cleaning up some lingering blood from the porch where Trent was shot a few days after the event when stopping by to comfort Trent's roommates.

Curry now does some commentary for ESPN, mostly about coaching and SEC football.

Norm Chow Leaves USC

USC offensive coordinator Norm Chow has left the Trojans for the NFL's Tennessee Titans.  It's part of a larger coaching exodus at USC, with offensive line coach Tim Davis taking a job the other day with the Miami Dolphins.

I wonder how that vaunted USC offense will look next year with Chow gone.

NCAA News

Replay appears to be in the works in the NCAA.

The Big 10 replay system has had mixed reviews, although publicly the conference has been enthusiastic.

I'm kind of neutral on this right now, let's see how they want to go about it.

New Links Added

After sitting on a huge pile of links, I've loaded about 70% of them to our various link sections.  I still have a few more to go.  As usual, some are pretty cool, so be sure and click around and find what's new.

For those lazy readers who feel like cheating, just click our recent activity link and bypass a few clicks.  Our name here is collegefootballresource.com, remember.

Enjoy!

Alabama Booster Trial and Impact

As noted earlier, a federal jury has found a prominent Alabama football booster (Logan Young) guilty on several charges related to his monetary involvement in luring prospect Albert Means to the Crimson Tide program.

Read this story for the mechanics of what went on.

I accidentally bumped into two different, but similar reactions to this trial.  Both understood the gravity of the charges, but did not agree with the overall prosecution efforts, and use of the RICO statutes.

The first reaction was from the Mobile Register's Paul Finebaum.

Finebaum admits a close association to Young, but raises the fairness issue-

So Lynn Lang, the former Trezevant High School coach, apparently held an auction -- with as many as half a dozen schools participating -- and Young, the defrocked Alabama booster, is facing time in a federal penitentiary because his favorite school won the services for Albert Means.
Young has been accused this week by the government of many things, ranging from being a heavy drinker to a gambler to a windbag, even of throwing around cash to perhaps influence where a 17-year-old high school player decided to attend college.
Where in all of this has this met a standard of criminal activity? Oh, don't read me the law book. How is this man a menace to society because he was passionate about his favorite football team? Did he ever raise a hand and threaten someone? Did he threaten to burn down Means' home if he chose another school?
Nope. He may have violated NCAA by-laws (of course, giving a player a $10 T-shirt qualifies for that), but how is society better off if he is sent to prison?

Then, I ran across this from one of my favorite sites, SportsLawBlog

The goods-

To fall under RICO, an individual or group must commit two or more of a certain type of crime (some state, some federal), including embezzlement, extortion and bribery. Without RICO, Young would most likely have been charged with violating a state law against bribing government officials. However, the government wanted to sentence Young under the harsher federal penalties, and thus, it brought the RICO charges...This seems like a lot of trouble for a college booster that paid off a recruit. Someone seems to want to make a statement about the corruption in college athletics (especially basketball and football) and so they have chosen to make an example out of Young. If convicted, he could face 15 years in prison and a $900,000 fine.

I don't profess to be a law expert, but it really looks like Logan Young was tried to be made an example of. I can't stand rampant boosterism, but by reading those two links I get the vibe it's better to simply sentence him on the basic bribery charges. The spirit of the law is to protect the young man, Albert Means from the exploitation opportunity his coach created along with (according to trial allegations) Logan Young and coaches at several other prominent colleges.

Update on Sunday, February 6, 2005 at 12:42AM by CFR

PS-Be sure and click around the various links on the SportsLawBlog in that specific article for more on RICO and the trial.  Good stuff.

Cool Signing Day Link

From the CSTV website-Signing Day

There are various stories about the various programs, and some excellent CSTV videos available for free of recruits signing, analysis by their experts about the classes, and more.

Top Recruiting Classes

I think what we may do is put a lot of recruiting information on a word document, and save it here for upload at a later time, I'll try and get that done this weekend.

Here is a brief comparison of the top 10 recruiting classes, as ranked by the two most prominent (in our eyes) recruiting services, Rivals.com and Scout.com-

Rivals Top 10 Classes 2005:
1-USC
2-Florida State
3-Oklahoma
4-Tennessee
5-Nebraska
6-Michigan
7-Miami-FL
8-California
9-Georgia
10-Texas A&M

Scout Top 10 Classes 2005:
1-Tennesee
2-Michigan
3-USC
4-Florida State
5-Georgia
6-Oklahoma
7-Ohio State
8-Iowa
9-California
10-Nebraska

Update on Sunday, February 6, 2005 at 12:01PM by CFR

I forgot to add the complete team rankings list.  My apologies.

Rivals Team Recruiting Rankings

Scout Team Recruiting Rankings