Are my eyes really blue?

…when they shrinkwrap your car on your last day.

So I see the usual suspects down South are up in arms again about how Vandy should be playing Middle Tennessee. This is hogwash, and rather worse than hogwash, for reasons I will now enumerate.

Let’s start with the obvious one: whenever your opponent is giving you advice, it would generally be a very stupid thing to take it. That is a fact of life and it’s one too many people (especially media types) don’t pay enough attention to. The fact that the Blue Raiders think a game with Vandy would be a good thing for the Dores DOES NOT MEAN that it would be a good thing for the Dores.

Second fact: Vanderbilt is in the SEC East, which might be the hardest division in sports right now. Let’s do the rundown, courtesy of the AP:

Kentucky (8)

Florida (9)

South Carolina (11)

Georgia (12)

Tennessee (NR)

Go back and look at that again. Four of Vandy’s five divisional rivals are RANKED IN THE TOP 12. Add in Auburn, Alabama, and Tennessee, and seven of Vandy’s eight conference games are against teams that are either in the top 25 or have been there at least once this year. At this point, we could schedule the Poor Claire Sisters and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and nobody could say a damn word about it.

(As an aside, it’s a show that the AP has Steve Superior’s Gamecocks at 11 and the coaches’ poll has them at 18. Proof, if any were needed, that the coaches’ poll isn’t worth the paper I used to wipe over it. But I digress.)

Anyway: we’re NOT a top 25 team. We may never be a top 25 team in my lifetime. We don’t even have the luxury of the pity vote that Spurrier throws Duke every season. We are going to struggle like hell just to clear .500 every single season. We’re not competing for a conference title, we’re not contending for a BCS berth, we’re not going for a national championship. We’re just trying to break the cycle.

So when we have those four non-con berths to fill every year, there is only one criterion: WILL THIS GAME CONTRIBUTE TO RAISING THE PROFILE OF THE FOOTBALL PROGRAM?

In the case of a Michigan, sure. Absolutely. Play Michigan in Ann Arbor on ESPN, and you get the opportunity to be seen nationwide, to hang tough the whole way, to make people give you a second look. You don’t think Vandy could pull the same thing that some I-AA school seems to do annually now? I guarantee you we’d beat Stanford if we played them tomorrow. In Palo Alto. You play games like that, you stand a chance of a good loss, one that makes you look better for having made the effort and gives you something you can take away.

So if it won’t be a good loss, it had better be a sure win, because if you want a bowl game, you need six of them. Six wins to play in December, take a trip, be the only game on TV while kids throw the snow around (or the leaves and mud, whatever). You can probably get one win every year in conference – beat Ole Miss, or Kentucky, or maybe get an upset off Georgia or Tennessee. If you’re really lucky, you can string two of them together. But go back and look at that list of teams again. Tennessee tends to be ranked. And if Alabama and Auburn aren’t there, those seats go to Mississippi State (ask Auburn or Bama what pushovers Croom’s boys are). Or Arkansas. Or LSU. It would take a miracle to piece together three conference wins out of eight. Which means that out of those four non-conference games, you basically need to win exactly four. Every profile-elevating loss you risk means that you’re probably putting your six-win bowl season in a blender and pressing PUREE.

What, then, does Vandy have to gain by playing MTSU? Nothing. “Oh, it’s a natural rivalry!” So why aren’t they playing Memphis or UT every year? Proximity isn’t rivalry, or why doesn’t UAB play Samford every year? Hell, why doesn’t UAB play Auburn again? “It’ll build interest!” No it won’t. MTSU might someday be the 3rd most prominent college program in Tennessee, but probably not, and once you get more than 30 miles outside Nashville, nobody else gives a damn. “Vandy’s scared to play us!” I wouldn’t say scared, but it hasn’t gone well lately – but here’s the point: if there is an outside shot of a bowl, of a non-losing season, of breaking the biggest streak of futility in major college football – is it worth taking a chance on throwing that away for the sake of playing a non-BCS team from nearby just so they can say they played against an SEC team?

HELL no. If you said yes, take a cinder block and drop it on your head. Vandy gains NOTHING by playing MTSU except a handful of gate receipts and the opportunity to piss away a shot at something approximating success.

Maybe someday when the Commodores have been to more than one bowl game in a generation – hell, maybe when we can go less than a decade between winning seasons – when one loss isn’t enough to completely derail the program for the year, we can consider changing our scheduling for the sake of 30 extra seconds on the Channel 4 highlights and another 5000 single-game tickets. But the program keeps hovering right there at 5 wins, with something always bouncing just the wrong way to prevent 6. Until we break through on a semi-permanent basis, it’s not worth risking a single shot at Big Six on Little Middle.

Vandy: plays their worst game of the year, but saves it for Eastern Michigan and manages to steal a win. Bama: loses their second in a row, proving that while Nick Saban has effected change, a national title in the first year is probably too much to hope for. Cal: gets the win they had to get, on the road, against a ranked opponent – and winds up #3 in the nation for their trouble. Now every game is a trap game, all the way to November 10 and USC…it’s going to be a little bit more berserk than usual.

Well, my job change is officially public. I don’t know what to expect, and I’m honestly trying not to expect anything. All I’m looking for out of this next job is a reduced amount of manual labor; everything else is up in the air and I’m amenable. I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will make me crazy after six months or so, but the whole “new start” thing should keep me going for some time.

The things I’m worrying about now aren’t related to health insurance, or salary, or anything like that, which I guess is a blessing – I’m worrying about where my coffee is going to come from and what lunch arrangements are like. Not that I eat a lot of lunch. I’m also hoping against hope that I’ll be able to stream Virgin Radio at work, which is something that has gone by the boards in recent months because of all the running around, phone time, and dockwalloping I’ve been doing lately.

At some point I’ll be doing a post on memories of working here, although I don’t know if it will be public. I might want to come back someday, after all. =)

I know it was what, 13 years ago now?

Continue reading “Viva Nash Vegas”

…the 21st of September?

Continue reading “Do you remember…”

OJ is the national news media’s original sin. In 1994, we had a debate over national health care and a crisis in North Korea. And yet, CNN – the international gold standard for news, the channel that was in China long before and long after the June 4 slaughter, the channel that put three guys in a hotel in Baghdad while bombs rained down and fitted one of them with $100,000 sewn in a leather jacket to bribe his way out if needed – chose to spend literally every single day in live gavel-to-gavel coverage of a celebrity trial. In doing so, they lent their prestige and authority to the idea that this sideshow was something worthy of the kind of coverage given to outbreaks of war.

That summer, CNN destroyed news. You can draw a straight line from OJ to our current state, where “cable news” is nothing of the sort and “reality” television is the farthest things from reality imaginable. Now people actually think a bunch of yowling harpies or two screaming spittle-flecked morons equals news. Talking about what happened gets precedence over what happened. The fate of a bunch of coked-out sluts or some adorable missing moppet from another country leads the news. And now, the media totters on the brink of orgasm because they might get another crack at the whole OJ trial, with a whole new cast of characters and the irresistible lure of vengeance and retribution for having screwed it up the first time.

No. No, no, no, a thousand times no. Anybody who seriously considers themselves in the “news” business should want to vomit at the mere idea of devoting column inches or airtime to this copious horseshit. We. Are. At. WAR. Remember how September 11, 2001 was supposed to be the end of our frivolity and shallowness, how irony was dead and we would be devoted to the sincere and the serious? Well, it didn’t happen, and this is proof.

It’s not often I say this, but I mean it: if you disagree with me at all about this, keep it to yourself. If you seriously think OJ is important, worthy of news coverage, that it’s anything other than proof of our long slide into the abyss, then shut your mouth about it, bury it down deep, and never speak of it again, because if you honestly think it’s news, we cannot be friends. Period. Paragraph. The End. “I love OJ News” = “SHUT UP OR PISS OFF.”

1) Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I was wrong about the Jason Campbell pick – after sitting him for the better part of two years, he’s now at the controls with a reasonably sound line (at least until tonight completed the collapse of the right side), three talented receivers at once, two solid backs, and an offense committed to keeping it simple. And Jason Scramble (as he will inevitably be known after tonight) did just about everything you could hope for from a QB who is still in his first ten NFL starts.

2) I still think the Skins need a prototype pass-rusher. That said, the Gregg Williams system seems to work from the secondary forward: shut down the receivers and get coverage sacks, use mixed blitzing and hard-hitting safeties to make up for the lack of a standard front-four push, and keep enough guys moving in space to shut down screens, sweeps and outside runs. Last year it was a bust. This year? So far so good, it seems. Donovan McNabb was getting hit almost constantly. However, the most gratifying part was 4th and 6 inside the red zone with the game on the line: no blitz, tight coverage along the down line, and when the pass came over the middle into the arms of a receiver, LaRon Landry was there to de-cleat him (and knock the ball free) before one foot even touched the turf.

3) It’s not time to get cised yet (although God knows Bickel will be crowing about the Upersay Owlbay in the morning on 106.7), but this is an extremely promising start. Wins on the road at Philly have been hard to come by in the last decade-plus, and if we can beat the Eagles at their house, we can sure as hell beat Eli “White TO” Manning and his band of morons in New York. Hold serve at home, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t win the division. The fact of the matter is that any horrible NFL team who makes one good off-season of improvement should be able to contend for a playoff berth, thanks to parity scheduling.

4) Charles Barkley should be in the booth EVERY week.

Things are not going well right now for Auburn and Tennessee. (“Aw, that’s a shame.”) Tennessee probably should be at 1-2; they’re bloody well not better than Cal, as proven on the field, and they’re definitely not better than Florida. (In fact, why a Florida team who returns from a national title with a better quarterback wasn’t even regarded as the best team in their own CONFERENCE boggles the mind.) But for Auburn to lose to South Florida, and then lose to indisputably the worst team in the SEC…well, let the fears and doubts and rumblings commence in the land of Tuberville. Five turnovers against Sly Croom’s Bulldogs should give them a nice shot of terror looking ahead to Florida, Arkansas, LSU, Alabama – hell, even Vanderbilt, who hung 31 on Ole Miss today, has to be considered a threat.

And then there’s Tennessee. Maybe David Cutcliffe is the answer to their offensive woes, but he can’t do anything about the defense, and Tennesse can’t stop anybody. 45 points given up to Cal and 59 more to Florida, and they still have to play a resurgent Alabama, a South Carolina team whose coach seems to own them, an Arkansas team that they can’t possibly slow down, and Kentucky, who may have the best pure passer in the conference. And let’s not forget – they lost their last home game against Vandy. The long knives are out for Phil Fulmer, because the Vol faithful have looked up from their corn dogs and moonshine long enough to realize that the man everyone else in the league refers to as “Jabba the Coach” hasn’t won a damn thing since the ’98 title – and didn’t win a damn thing in the four years he had Peyton Manning at the controls. 12 seasons out of 13 without so much as a conference title are an awful lot to try to wash away with a national championship that was won when the current seniors were in junior high.

Meanwhile, Alabama did the one thing they could never do under Mike Shula: come back in the 4th quarter. Let’s look at Nick Saban’s “Crimson Comeback” to-do list:

1) Beat the teams you ought to beat, and without making it exciting: done.

2) Get six points when you get into the red zone, not field goals – or worse: done.

3) Play the full 60 minutes without running out of gas, time or hope: done, as of tonight.

4) Beat UT and Auburn…well, at 11:45 PDT tonight, you have to say that one is looking promising.

And as for those aforementioned Commodores: 14-3 lead at the half. 200 yards passing and 57 more rushing from the QB. 3 touchdowns from the primary running back. Six sacks of the Ole Miss QB. Never lost the lead, even punching in the comfort-margin TD with under 2 minutes to play. They got the Rebels down and kept them down, they capitalized on turnovers, they recovered from mistakes. This was a critical checkpoint: if this is going to be the 6-wins-and-a-bowl season, this game was must-win. Now a week off, then Eastern Michigan at home, and then at Auburn – which, despite being a road game, has to be considered winnable after the events of the last two weeks. Given the resurgence of Kentucky, the Dores will probably need at least one conference upset (although the Kentucky game at home still has to be considered leaning Vandy’s way). On paper, there’s still every possibility of 8-4 given the right breaks, and given that Earl Bennett had 11 catches for 100 yards when everybody knew the ball was coming to him, you have to think he could make some of those breaks.

Obligatory Cal remarks: yes, 42-12, but Cal’s 3-0 record belies the fact that they have played two very shaky games in a row. They’re showing the classic tendency to start slow and play to the level of the opponent, which is the sort of thing that will bite you in the ass on the road in the conference. The defense is young and vulnerable, and Longshore still has streaks of inconsistency which should make the Zachary’s pizza sit uncomfortably in the tummy of any Old Blue. However, the Bears still have their secret weapon: Jahvid Best, who may be the fastest man alive. Three weeks in a row, Cal has run a play where everybody pulls right, DeSean Jackson gets double-covered, and the ball goes left to Best on a blind flip – and he shifts into Tachyon Drive and rips off fifty or sixty yards before you can even say “HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT.” Cal has so many offensive weapons that the temptation to just make everything into a track meet will be huge…but it’s an urge they have to fight, because at some point, you’re going to need to stop somebody.

Just ask Tennessee.

Vandy just scored their first touchdown of the day. Now they’re only down 24-10 to Bama. I’m sad to see a break in the great tradition of the late-game back-door cover by the Dores – it’s a world-class investment strategy most of the time – but the improvements in Alabama are obvious and significant. For one thing, they are finishing plays – no more of the sloppy second efforts that let teams squeeze out a couple extra yards on every play. For another, they’re converting in the red zone – every time they get inside the 20, they come away with points, which is something you could never count on in the last half-decade or so.

I’m glad I’m not there, though – it’d be tough in person to have to pick one or the other. Besides, it’s raining like hell down there.