Author: Stagger Lee

Don’t know that I’ve ever done so much sports blogging, but it is November after all.

Nothing good to say about Vandy today. Plain that they miss Festus Ezili down low, but more obvious that they still lack that certain something that has been missing as they crashed out of their last three tournament appearances. This should not be a problem for a team with this many seniors – someone has to step it up and make things happen. I’m still waiting for Jeffrey Taylor to answer the bell…

And Boise State drops out of the national title picture.  Live by the -and-0, die by the -and-0.

The thing that has become truly irritating about Boise State is that as soon as LSU beat Alabama, the conversation was immediately “does a one-loss Bama deserve a rematch over Boise State?”  Not a mumbling word about newly-#2 Oklahoma State, nor a Stanford team that will jump from 4th to 3rd if they beat Oregon tonight.

Boise State has milked the Cinderella shtick long past its sell-by date, and spun a one-point overtime win over the most overrated BCS team of the 2000s into some sort of argument that they are America’s True Undefeated Uncrowned Champions.  Despite playing a schedule that usually consists of “beat one middling BCS team to open the season and then run the table through the WAC”.

The downside, of course, is that we’ll go through all this again next year.  But the rule is simple: if you are going to complain about the SEC’s out-of-conference scheduling, you cannot advocate Boise State as a national contender, and vice versa.  Either strength of schedule matters, or it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, I’m afraid to say anything about Vanderbilt for fear of breaking the spell…

It’s not easy to come up with something every day. Even when I think of an idea, it goes right out of my head if I’m not careful – I have to write things down.

Last night was a good time, though – Vandy event, Bourbon and Branch, five cocktails on a school night. Getting there early is always good because you get to the Library early and have time to consult with the bartender. And yes, I do write down what I drink there. I should be making better notes than just the name of the drink, but I’m not that sharp.

I may be organizing the gathering for February when the Commodores come to town to deal with Stanford – I saw them three years ago, but we’re coming back as a College World Series team with the top recruiting class in the country. It might be nice to be the host. I need to find out where Dan Brown is plying his trade.

And meanwhile, despite some shaky play, Vanderbilt basketball won and covered tonight against Oregon. Any win you can walk away from…

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

The news of the day from Nashville is that a local five-star recruit has opted for Kentucky over Vanderbilt, and years of recruiting by Coach Stallings and the ‘Dores have gone down the drain.  Instead, Alex Poythress will head for Lexington and a program which, under John Calipari, seems to have become ground zero for “one and done” players – kids playing out the string until they reach the mandatory minimum requirements for NBA draft eligibility.

We’re never going to be a one-and-done school.  That’s fine.  We ought not be a one-and-done school.  It’s not who we are, it’s not what we stand for.  But we still have to play those schools – with one hand tied behind our backs. I don’t blame Alex for making his decision, at all.  I don’t blame any kid for going to school wherever he wants to go, and God bless him – and that’s why I don’t care about recruiting until our guys are in the fold and on campus.  But as long as there are schools willing to serve as the green room for the NBA draft, and we aren’t one of them, we are objectively placing ourselves at a competitive disadvantage.  We’re playing the same sport, but we’re not playing the same game.

We found out what kind of program we have back in the mid-1990s, when Ron Mercer was being recruited.  Nashville kid, from Goodpasture.  Best friend of Vandy player Drew Maddux.  Five-star talent.  A sure thing on the court.  A no-brainer get for us, right?  Except that the admissions office declared that he couldn’t get in, and he wound up – wait for it – at Kentucky.  And played only two years there before going pro, but not before Kentucky won another NCAA basketball championship in 1996.

Now to some extent, this sort of thing has always happened.  The occasional kid has come out after two years, or even one, for decades – but ever since the NBA mandated no high-school drafting, we know more than ever when kids are only stopping by for their one-year minimum. Kentucky may be the most prominent example – John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins – but consider that Kyrie Irving played less than half a season at Duke due to injury before being drafted.  Or that Harrison Barnes at UNC was a pre-season All-American before taking a single dribble – and shocked the college basketball world by coming back for his sophomore year.

The inevitable result of all this is that the rich will get even richer.  Kentucky, UNC, Duke – these are the perennial powers, the Mount Rushmore, the Yankees-Red Sox, the Manchester United of college basketball.  And inasmuch as the top talent – the guys who would have turned pro right out of high school when that was allowed – have to go to some program, they will go to the ones that can catapult them straight to the professional ranks, the established superpowers, the sure things. And the rest of us then have to compete against them.

That’s half our problem.

The other half is occasioned by considering John Calipari, coach of Kentucky, who has left both his previous big-time coaching jobs (UMass, Memphis) with a Final Four banner and a cloud of scandal in his wake.  Memphis had an incredible run a few years ago. 33 wins, into the national title game – and had it all stripped a couple years later on account of irregularities around the SAT scores of Derrick Rose.  Who played, that’s right, one year before being drafted #1 overall.  Now Calipari is gone, Rose is gone, the banners are gone, and the 2007-08 season of Memphis basketball officially never happened – but there are over two dozen teams from that year who have losses they shouldn’t have had.  There’s some team that should have gotten to the tournament, or the Final Four, or the national title game, or might have beaten Kansas and actually won the whole thing.  But they didn’t, because Memphis was there instead.

Or look at California’s football team in 2004.  The Golden Bears went 10-1 in the regular season, behind the kind of Aaron Rodgers performances we’re all accustomed to seeing on Sundays now.  Very nearly beat USC, in Los Angeles – probably would have done if the special teams hadn’t gone pear-shaped – and finished ranked 4th in the country…but behind the Trojans.  And when Mack Brown begged the Texas Longhorns into the Rose Bowl, and the Golden Bears missed out on their first trip in four decades, Cal got sent to San Diego and phoned in a soulless loss in the Holiday Bowl.  And five or six years later, USC was stripped of the title, of the bowl win – it never happened.  But Oklahoma and Auburn didn’t retroactively get matched up in the BCS title game, and Cal didn’t retroactively get to go to Pasadena, and the Cal Band didn’t retroactively march up Colorado Avenue on New Years’ morning.

Hell, just look at last year.  When the saga of Cam and Cecil Newton broke, the firestorm was immediate, and people started questioning whether Auburn would sit their all-everything quarterback.  But Auburn didn’t hesitate – one 24-hour burst of ineligibility and reinstatement, and they decided, damn the torpedoes, we’re going to ride this thing out and take our chances.  And for their trouble, they ended up with a 14-0 record, a Heisman winner and a BCS title.

We have reached a point in college athletics where the dominant ethos appears to be “it’s better to get forgiveness than permission.”  I’ve joked in the past that if Vanderbilt is going to remain in the SEC, we need to get out the checkbook and take this thing as far as it can go, and spend 2013 watching Mario Edwards and Eddie Goldman kill and eat quarterbacks while Johnathan Gray rips up the turf and Jameis Winston throws lightning bolts to Dorial Green-Beckham and Stefon Diggs.

And I was kidding.  Mostly.  But what can you do?  If you play by the rules, and try to honor the front part of “student-athlete”, you’re going to be playing shorthanded.  And if it turns out one of your opponents did wrong in the course of beating you, you’re not going to be made whole by the NCAA in any meaningful fashion – if at all.

Look, we are an anomaly.  Big-time.  We’re the only football team in the conference without a major violation in the last twenty-five years.  We’ve graduated every men’s basketball player who exhausted his eligibility for thirty years.  We’ve never had a single athletic program placed on probation.  So what do we do? Do as well we can and hope for the best?  Hope that we – and the rest of the world – will take pride in fifth place, earned on the square and level?  If the game is fixed, how can we not just check out altogether? Isn’t there some way we can still play big-time major-conference college sports without selling our soul or preemptively conceding defeat?

If anyone has an answer, I’d love to hear it.

Something has changed in college football as of this season.  With the addition of Nebraska to the B1G, even if it came with a measure of buyer’s remorse, we have reached a point where all six of the BCS automatic qualifying conferences either a) have a championship game or b) play a round-robin schedule.

This opens the way to tweak the +1 formula that I’ve advocated for some time now, and the tweak is this: you take the top four teams with the caveat that they must be the champion of their conference (unless independent).  No more taking two bites at the apple.  This would cut Alabama out of the setup this year, and that’s fine.  College football sets great store by the sanctity of the regular season, and a second bite at the apple is not proper for a team that didn’t take the chance the first time.

In fact, consider some of the logjams of years past.  In 2003, this would have meant that USC, Oklahoma and LSU would have been joined by Michigan.  Easy peasy.  In 2004, with multiple undefeateds?  USC 1, Oklahoma 2, Auburn 3, but not Cal at 4 (lost to USC) and not Texas at 5 (lost to Oklahoma) – so Utah, at 6, climbs on board.  Simple.

This new formula will go into the reckoning this year come second week of December, as I do the annual “why we should blow it all up and go back to 1990” breakdown.

Meanwhile, I don’t have anything to say about the rapidly developing nightmare up in State College, PA, other than to borrow a quote from Battlestar Galactica: “Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore.”

Last home game of the year Saturday at Kentucky.  First basketball game of the year Friday at Oregon.  And the best part is it looks like this.

I was a grad student for only three years, and it was well over a decade ago, but when autumn rolls around I can’t imagine a more beautiful place on the face of the earth.

 

 

It was two decades ago today that Magic Johnson announced he had HIV and was retiring from the NBA.  Of course, he would come back to the All-Star game, the Dream Team, and eventually to play and coach again in brief stints.  He would also turn into a mogul – one of the most successful African-American businessmen of our era, if not ever.

Oh yeah – and he’s still alive.

Magic changed the paradigm for HIV.  It was no longer a gay problem, it was no longer a white problem, it was something that could hit the healthiest person imaginable, and it was something that didn’t have to be a death sentence.  Who among us, on November 7 of 1991, would have predicted that Magic would be alive in twenty years – let alone filthy rich, running businesses and raising literally millions of dollars for AIDS research?

The fact that the most terrifying illness of my adolescence has become something you manage and live with – if that’s not proof we live in the future, I don’t know what to tell you.

Where is Vanderbilt to go if not the SEC?  Cuz suggests a trade – we go to the ACC for Miami or Florida State, and that makes perfect sense; our situation is not dissimilar to Georgia Tech’s own departure in the mid-60s.  But then, the ACC is at 14 teams and will probably make a run at 16 sooner rather than later (UConn for sure – maybe Notre Dame? How about Navy?) so it’s possible we find ourselves stuck in the machine again.  What I’m looking for is a return of the Magnolia League concept – some way to play football at a serious level while not giving in to the arms race of BCS-era money and bullshit.

I say “Magnolia League” because Vanderbilt chancellor Alexander Heard’s original concept involved Vandy, Tulane, Duke, SMU and Rice.  Tulane was game, but Duke didn’t want to give up the UNC game (why they thought they would have to is beyond me, but whatever, typical Duke) and SMU and Rice didn’t want to give up the Cotton Bowl, either as an opportunity or as a cut of revenue.  And so Tulane pulled out of the SEC about the time Tech did.

The problem now is that football has trumped everything else.  Reorganizing around football has a deleterious effect on everything else – it turned the Great Midwest into Conference USA and eventually a disaster area, it’s wrecking the Big East right now – but for our purposes, assume football has become a separate entity and nothing else is affected.  Everyone can keep their conference for hoops, baseball, etc etc.  So.

For starters, it’s no longer possible to keep this just to the South.  Even if you could peel away a big chunk of the ACC, it still doesn’t get you to eight.  Duke, Wake, Georgia Tech, Vandy, Tulane, Rice and SMU – even assuming you want SMU, and I’m not convinced you do.  Bring in Miami?  Technically it’s a private school.  It’s also the poster child for everything wrong with college football, so forget that.

So cast your eyes north and consider Notre Dame, and its rivals.  USC?  Would never give up the Rose Bowl spot.  Stanford?  Wouldn’t want to give up the Big Game, most likely, but might otherwise be amenable to something snotty and Ivy League-ish enough.  Navy?  Very respectable football team, and a great rivalry with Army, and hey wait a minute…don’t look now, but Army and Navy are exactly the programs you want for such a thing.  Institutionally immune to the crasser trends of college football, programs with tradition and history, with a Northeastern footprint and national interest…

So reshuffle.  Now you have Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Navy, Army, Georgia Tech, Stanford, Tulane, Rice.  Eight teams without having to take too big a bite out of the ACC.  Seven-game round-robin every year, and five non-conf spots open so Notre Dame can still play Michigan, USC and Purdue and still have two more spots free.  Or Vandy can keep playing Kentucky and Tennessee and maybe LOL Miss if they like.  Georgia Tech can schedule all the old SEC rivals they like.  Stanford keeps Big Game and the LA schools and has a couple more spots – and sure, they’ll get killed on plane fare, but I’m sure John Arrillaga will stroke another check and not think twice, so screw ’em.  Tulane and Rice get a shot at staying in Division I without having to bring back the “undergraduate studies” major.  And you get an eight team conference of actual student-athletes, liberated from having to play East Roast Beef and its army of well-paid adolescent golems.

It’s not perfect.  Hell, it may not be practical.  But at some point, somebody has to stand up and say “enough is enough, we’re getting off this carousel.”  And that particular combination of schools might just have enough credibility to make it happen.

Fuck the SEC.  I’m through defending this shitpile of a league.  I’m sick of the fact that nothing matters but football.  I’m sick of the fact that officiating is based on how high-profile you are and how good your national title chances are instead of what the fucking black-letter rules in the rulebook say.  But mostly, I’m sick of having to spend my Saturdays week in and week out watching my guys go up against a bunch of the best illiterate hyperthyroidal chuckleheads money can buy, all majoring in kineseology, playing in front of borderline-sociopath rednecks who only set foot on a college campus for games.

We’ve been there since 1933.  We’re competitive in every other sport.  We’re the only thing keeping this league’s dumpster-fire academic standards from straight-up Southwest Conference territory circa 1980.  We do things the right way, and have done, and all we get for our trouble is a cut of somebody else’s bowl money and a royal screwing anytime we show signs of being any good.

To hell with it.  Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, LOL Miss, Mississippi State, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Tennessee, South Carolina.  Joke institutions in a garbage conference.  We deserve better than your bullshit. If we’re going to play in college football’s whorehouse, at least let’s play in one that’s not crooked.

Three years ago today.

All day was nothing but anxiety. They lied to the pollsters. They’re going to panic at the last minute and go running back to Daddy. Something will go wrong, because we’re not going to be able to elect a black man President of the country while Selma and Birmingham and Indianola County are living memory.

And yet, when it went down, when the polls closed, there it was. National championship. The music hit in Grant Park – “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” – and our man walked out and cracked that grin, and we exploded. It had happened, and it really did feel like anything was possible.

That was three years ago.

Basically, it’s been downhill ever since. Not to say I told you so, but I totally did…

“If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress.”

That was two days after Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the RNC, when it became obvious that they were going to go the full Atwater with the fall campaign. And I nailed it. “Scorched earth” doesn’t even begin to cover the range of actions and initiatives that have drawn 100% opposition from the GOP from day one, whether it’s the stimulus package (now revealed as way too small for what was required), the health care reform bill, or even the most routine procedural matters. And it got worse in 2010, when the GOP took the house and got more than 40 in the Senate – thus giving them effective control of the chamber, since the current interpretation of the cloture rule basically makes everything a 60-vote threshold in defiance of the Constitution and two hundred years of history and established practice.

And now people are out there asking whether the Republicans are engaged in active sabotage. What a fucking crock. They’ve been engaged in active sabotage since November 5, 2008. From the day Barack Obama was elected, the GOP committed itself to one goal and one goal only: undoing the results of that election, in practice if not in fact. It should have been obvious to anyone, and it was easily preventable if only Harry Reid had the balls to lay down the law and order Senate Democrats to support all cloture votes – or better yet, to do away with the filibuster altogether. “But the Senate won’t be the Senate anymore!” – guess what, moron, it’s not the Senate now. Ask Sinclair or Ornstein or Oppenheimer or anyone with a pair of eyes and an IQ above room temperature.

Meanwhile, as respected a source as the Economist runs articles about “the missing middle”. Never mind the US media, in thrall to the golden mean fallacy. False equivalence plus scorched earth equals no future. I wish I knew the way out, but as good as I used to be, I don’t have one.