Before we start once again pestering the Googoracle (the Gooracle? Googlecle? Oragle? Making a portmanteau out of "Google" and "oracle" seemed like such a good idea until I actually put it into execution) about the various recruits Auburn has added to its rapidly-swelling list of verbals, it's probably time to ask some questions about the ... deeply interesting way the Tigers' recruiting season has progressed to this point.
The unfortunate part is that, as I'm the only one here, I'll have to make an attempt to answer said questions as well as ask them despite being a total novice at this whole "following recruiting" thing. I am an Auburn Blogger, though, and this is Important to Auburn, so here's two pressing ones ...
1. Dude ... 16 commitments? In June? Tubby knows Rivals doesn't actually give out a prize for getting to 25 first, right? Obviously, it's hella unlikely that all 16 players on Auburn's current verbal list are going to both live up to their commitment and get all their academics in order and enroll as part of what might ultimately be a 25-person 2009 class. But for the sake of argument, let's assume they did: Auburn would have spent just the first quarter-plus of the recruiting year signing nearly 2/3rds of the class, then taking the other three-quarters of the year just to sign nine guys. I certainly don't blame any Auburn fans who think this feels a little bit too much like plunking down $784 for an eBay Furby and overnight supershipping two days before Christmas. Was it really necessary to lock down the guy whose only other firm D-I offer was Tulsa at the very first opportunity?
This being a recruiting post, I really wish I could Photoshop "Scout.com" into the corner of this.
Um ... it might have been. Maybe. Jay G. Tate had an interesting look at the current number of commitments at programs across the SEC and the country, and the evidence is that offering early is a matter of personal program taste; it's an excellent bet both Ohio St. and Illinois are going to have rock-solid classes in the Big 10, but as of now one is a verbal ahead of even Auburn's manic pace and the other has fewer commits than Vanderbilt. Somehow I doubt there's any inherent, automatic downside to offering a kid early if that's the approach Jim Tressel is taking.
Of course, Tressel essentially has his pick of any player he likes between Des Moines and New York. He can afford to rely on his "hunches" when the hunches are all chiseled 6-4 manbeasts who were All-State in the 100 dash. As Tate concludes, Auburn has to be careful, and that's where a downside does indeed come in:
If the programs scout juniors closely, it makes sense to use that advance scouting to your advantage by earning summer commitments. Then again, it'll be a mess if some of these kids bust as seniors.
So, finally, whether or not you think it's a good idea for Tubby and Co. to have held "First 50 Players Under 18 Get a Free Scholarship Offer!" promotion at their summer camp depends on how much you trust their scouting ability. Given Tubby's long track record of unearthing Sen'Derrick Marks-es in the great unwashed, guru-unapproved masses, I believe this is generally a good idea--though I can't quiet the little (admittedly uninformed) whisper in my head that says 16 commits at this stage really might be a bridge one or two offers too far.
Caveat: It's probably an outright bait-and-switch to even discuss "25" as a guesstimate at the class size, since recent Auburn recruiting history of course shows that Tubby will sign several more players than that*, and that a handful fewer will actually make it to campus. Combine that with any potential decommits (obviously a huge issue with Signing Day still a galaxy far, far away in football time) and Tubby's still got a goodly number of offers to play around with.
2. What's with all the, you know, short dudes? What inquiring minds want to know this week is the last time Auburn received three commitments in two-dayspan from guys listed at 5-9, 5-10, and 5-10. Early commit Brandon Heavens also checks in at 5-10. You know all those stories about how football players have to stick extra furniture at the end of their hotel-room bed so their feet don't hang over? Yeah, not a problem here. Anyone who thought Tubby was going to tie Franklin's hands is now more-or-less officially wrong, because this kind of jitterbug philosophy couldn't scream "SPREAD! SPREAD! SPREAD! SPREAD!" any louder if you handed it a bullhorn.
There's some understandable apprehension out there amongst Auburn fans about how wise a strategy this really is--watching four guys spread across the field who are all shorter and smaller than the corners covering them won't exactly give Auburn a look of physical intimidation, it's fair to say--but the JCCW casts its vote in favor. I would much, much rather have coaches who draw up a blueprint for the team and work to build that particular blueprint than ones who collect the best spare parts they can find and weld them together. Even if the directions Mapquest gave you don't take you where you want to go, it's better than just driving around hoping you see something familiar, right? Citing something as motivational poster-esque as "Vision" feels all kinds of wrong, but I don't think you can get around the fact that no coach in the SEC has a clearer vision of what he wants his offense to look like than Urban Meyer. And for all the Gators' struggles against Auburn, the truth is that if all the Spread Eagle becomes is a poor man's version of the machine Meyer's created, that's still going to be pretty damned good.
Every football fan on the planet likes to talk about aggression: aggressive defense, aggressive play-calls, aggressive running. The flood of early commitments and the devotion to what Franklin wants for his offense strikes yours truly, at least, as aggressive coaching.
Not that it's a guarantee or anything.
One last note: Auburn is far from alone these days in chasing what MGo calls the "electron-sized" class of athlete. (You'll note on that link that Auburn wanted that kid, too; you can console yourself that ESPN seems to like LaVoyd Jamesbetter.) Skepticize all you like, but even three or four years ago there were no Noel Devines starting for the likes of West Virginia, no Percy Harvins terrorizing the SEC, no Trindon Hollidays skipping track world championships to return kicks. Obviously whether any of Auburn's pick-ups are even remotely in that class is very much TBD, but regardless, this is the trend, and it's probably a good thing that Auburn seems to be closer to the forefront of it than most.
The other pressing question is, of course How good are these guys? We'll do some more Googling soon in a pointless effort to "answer" that as well.
*Though Auburn hasn't yet come too close to being the subject of posts like this one, I remain opposed to oversigning and really wish--to invoke Tressel again--the SEC would adopt the Big 10's "no more than three over the limit, and you gotta have a reason" regulation as outlined at the bottom of the potentially familiar post here. Bloodlettings or not, having signed a ton of extra dudes was not what made the difference for Florida/LSU against Ohio St. Michigan has enjoyed all the bowl success against the SEC it could possibly want for years. I certainly don't have a problem with going over by a non-qualifier or two or three every other year, but if the Buckeyes and Wolverines can win without signing annual 30-kid classes, I don't see why SEC teams can't, too.
Ed. note: Yes, I'm reposting this, over the well-meaning objections raised in the comments. (Two votes "against" there, but there was a vote "for" via e-mail which combined with my vote in favor tied it 2-2 and sent the motion to the JCCW Board Chairman for a tiebreaking vote. The Chairman is also me, so here's the post. Democracy!) There's a few tweaks, but it's pretty much the version I originally put it up a week ago. My defense for it, if you feel I need one, is in the comments. Suffice it to say that if no one was reading CR, their talk radio-style flimflammery wouldn't be an issue. But people are, so it is.
To paraphrase one well-known quotation, nobody ever went broke underestimating the willingness of Tide and Tiger fans alike to give their undivided attention to any damn fool thing said or written about either their team or the team on the other side of the state.
The best example of this doctrine--its patron saint, its unrivaled champion--is, of course, this gentleman:
who has built a long and lucrative career for himself by ignoring those nettlesome questions of "accuracy" or "insight" that usually apply to legitimate media in favor of whatever tall tale the ratings fairies whispered in his ears the previous night. Why, we had a textbook example just last week, when Finebaum spun a yarn about "conflicts" between Tubby and Franklin--even going so far as to speculate on the potential for Franklin's firing--when the closest thing he comes to actual evidence for said conflict is Franklin saying he'll run "whatever works" as opposed to parroting word-for-word Tubby's (hardly counterintuitive) claim that they won't throw the ball 40 times a game. "Whatever works" ... man, is Tubby going to be furious about that! He hates things that work!
The point: if you've ever wondered what the hell kind of people would look at a manatee and come away telling everyone they'd seen a mermaid, the answer is the ancestors of Paul Finebaum.
None of this is news, of course. Nor is it news that Finebaum is perfectly aware of what he's doing, or that nobody comes close to doing it half as well. (Witness the wonderfully contradictory conclusion to the "Tony the Tiger" piece above; after spending 97% of the column explaining why Tubby and Franklin won't work out together, he suddenly claims they'll succeed, purely to toss Tide fans a bone they can pick with him as well. Genius.) What's new is that despite his long-held "Yes, there is such a thing" distaste for blogs, the Master has seemingly adopted a kind of Internet protege in 'Bama propagandists Capstone Report, who he quotes extensively in his Franklin column.
It's easy to see why the Capstone Report would earn Finebaum's seal of approval: whereas his media duties require him to make googly-eyes at the Lowest Common Denominator but retain some measure of balance the Tide homer in him would rather ignore, the Capstone Report is free to wallow in as much bias, hyperbole, and cutting-edge "Rosie O'Donnell is overweight!" jokes as they like. And boy howdy, wallow they do: the Capstone Report is the blog the Lowest Common Denominator would write itself if it became person--specifically, the sort of person who wears "Got 12?" shirts and chants "Rammer Jammer" at his girlfriend after he beats her in ping-pong.
If you wanted an example of said wallowing, you could pick out any post in which the Capstone Report discusses Tubby, Auburn, or pretty much anything Auburn-related. The problem is that this gives you way too many potential options to actually pick from: 11 CR posts this month alone (of 23, nearly half)* deal directly with Auburn in some fashion, despite the fact I've read in many different places it's Auburn fans and Auburn blogs who are obsessed with the Tide, rather than the other way 'round**.
Despite that hurdle, the prosecution would like to present as Exhibit A this post, your honor, entitled
Tuberville is one desperate cowboy
Which makes sense, when you consider the impact of corporate-owned farms on traditional grazing territory, the rapid increase conservation efforts have had on predator populations, the rising price of even the lower-grade heads of cattle ... any cowboy would be desperate these days.
Except, of course, that Tommy Tuberville is a college football coach, and not a cowboy. And that if we're discussing college football coaches who are "desperate," maybe instead of discussing a coach who's enjoyed more success against his school's archrival than any other coach in his school's history, we should discuss the coach who was paid $6 million last year and still managed to lose his entire conference's only game to a non-BCS program, despite the fact that said conference included Ed Oregeron, Sylvester Croom, and the Vanderbilt Commodores? Eh?
Then again, maybe author "Shane" is using one of those so-called "metaphors" the cool kids are talking about these days, in which one thing is called another for the purposes of comparison. Perhaps the first paragraph will clear up the confusion:
The latest public relations maneuver (his high-profile trip to the Middle East) by Auburn head coach Thomas Hawley Tuberville spotlights his classless style. The trip should have been about honoring our great soldiers across the world in the Middle East. Instead, Tuberville – as he is prone to do – seized the opportunity to pull a sales job on the public.
Hmmm. No mention of spurs or horses or the Wild West or anything. I'm still confused.
Which I'll let Ray Melick and Kevin Scarbinsky respond to***, being the lazy type myself:
Moving on, "Shane" writes
I’ve heard nothing from the media about Tommy’s perception of the experience, because his “seven finger flip-off” is the hottest topic on all the airwaves.
What this sentence literally says: "Because the media is so intensely discussing the seven-finger incident, the media has been unable to discuss the seven-finger incident with Tommy." At least, I think that's it: trying to follow this sentence's internal logic is like walking the stairs in that one Escher drawing.
Somebody will have to explain to me what that childish act really has to do with comforting our armed forces - but whatever floats his boat…
Funnily enough, despite the difficulties "Shane" mentioned the sentence before in finding "Tommy's perception of the experience," it was right there in a Scarbinsky column published a week before he posted. That's really weird he totally missed it.
Anyway, Tubby said the troops asked him to, so there's "Shane"'s explanation. I suppose he can be skeptical of the "the Alabama fan said it was OK" disclaimer if he likes, but somehow I don't think we're stretching the bounds of believability too thin to think the soldiers carrying Tubby off the football field might have been excited enough to ask Tubby to do something he's famous for doing when going off a football field.
(As an aside: I wish I could offer a precise measurement of the amount of irony generated by a 'Bama fan accusing an Auburn fan of blind faith in his head coach in the link above, but when I tried to get a reading my Irony-o-meter's needle jumped around all over the place and the screen shattered. Sorry.)
Everybody and anybody who can grab a mike, camera, or a pen seem to be convinced that Tubby’s actions will aid his recruiting efforts. Tuberville was recruiting? Apparently Tommy’s campaign to promote and highlight his trip in order to spread recruiting propaganda using certain media outlets has been somewhat successful.
In the future, when one of "Shane"'s inner voices interrupts his train of thought with a question like that, he probably shouldn't actually type it out.
As for Tubby using the trip for recruiting purposes, you know what I bet would have been an even more efficient way of working on Auburn's recruiting? Actually working on Auburn's recruiting, instead of going to freaking Iraq. (Also, even assuming Tubby agreed to come on this trip solely for illicit reasons (doubtful, given his family history), I find it hard to believe that if you asked the soldiers on that field if they'd rather have A) a popular, gregarious football coach join the tour because he could maybe get some kind of recruiting advantage out of it or B) not have the popular, gregarious football coach come over at all, that too many of them would pick option B. I would much rather have U.S. soldiers made happy for a few hours for the wrong reasons than soldiers not made happy for the alleged right ones.)
(Also also: if there are so many oodles of pieces out there arguing that this trip will help Tubby's recruiting, why are none of them linked?)
Face it – the man is desperate. Earlier this year Tuberville sends Jason Campbell and Brandon Cox (two former starting quarterbacks) to the top sports radio show in the South ...
Why, whatever show could he mean?
... with back-to-back interviews, while pitching the same message. Cox and Campbell were emphatic about their former coach’s ability to control his players and instill discipline. Each left the audience with the impression that coach Tub was “Bear” Bryant reincarnated as far as tough expectations are concerned. Ironically those appearances coincided with the recent arrest of an Alabama player. Who could blame them? There’s nothing like seizing an opportunity.
You have to give "Shane" credit here. In the interest of fairness, he's noted that Tubby smartly seized a public relations opportunity, even though that kind of cool calculation actively works against his portrayal of Tubby as a crazed, out-of-control recruit-at-all-costs gunslinger. That's what you call journalistic integrity. (You could also probably call it a screw-up.)
Finally, ole’ Hawley’s made the single-most radical move of his career. Tommy (or somebody) ...
... decided that “turn them in” Tony Franklin and his “Spread”, formerly the pride of the Troy Trojans, is going to enhance Auburn’s image enough to attract top offensive talent. It’s hard for those who’ve been familiar with Tuberville’s philosophy to believe he’s made such a strange hire. Even the most ardent believers in Tommy’s leadership capability have to be puzzled by this bizarre maneuver.
"Shane" should probably name or link to these alleged individuals who are "familiar with Tuberville's philosophy" and find the Franklin hire "hard to believe." Same goes for the "puzzled" "ardent believers," because as is, I'm guessing they don't actually exist. I believe this paragraph is an example of an ancient rhetorical device used by Plato, referred to by most language experts as "just making crap up."
Lately, every move that coach Tubs makes seems to be designed to counter the dynamic recruiting machine that Nick Saban is running across the State.
Of course, we should note that Saban built his dynamic recruiting machine to counteract Tubby's dynamic beating-the-tar-out-of-Alabama-every-single-year machine.
Also, the comprehensive list of "every move" Tubby has made in the offseason apparently consists of:
1. Hire Franklin 2. Go to Iraq 3. Send Cox and Campbell to do the top sports radio show in the South
Tommy has definitely modified his style in an attempt to compete with the biggest challenge he’s faced since his arrival on the Plains.
Many Auburn fans claim Tubby isn’t worried and that everything is business as usual. They point to his recent record and the fact that Tommy just reloads athletes on a whim. However, there have been far too many new techniques deployed by Auburn’s head man and his crew since the last signing day for any reasonable person to believe that it could possibly be true.
Franklin hire date: Dec. 12. Signing Day: Feb. 6.
Revised comprehensive list of "new techniques":
1. Go to Iraq 2. Send Cox and Campbell to do the top sports radio show in the South
Yes, Tommy Tuberville is nervous. In the past he’s been called “The Gambler”, because he always knew when to hold them or when to fold them.
I would have said it had something to do with his penchant for calling fake kicks and whatnot early in his career. Is "know[ing] when to hold them or when to fold them" supposed to be an analogy for calling fake kicks? Because otherwise, I'm not sure what "Shane" is talking about here. Unless between this and the "desperate cowboy" title, he's making a convoluted reference to the 1994 Mel Gibson vehicle Maverick.
Holy crap! That's exactly what he's doing!
This time around, the evidence indicates something far different - - - he’s already laying all his cards on the table. His latest “seven-finger-flip-off”- in front of a world audience - is yet another publicity stunt that serves as a clear sign that Turberville [sic] is willing to do anything to regain recruiting momentum in order to chase down the master.
Or, he could have just thought it was something fun to do for the troops. You know, one or the other.
What's ... unfortunate is that this is pretty much the standard level of discourse at CR. Witness the post just a few days prior labeled "Tuberville: misanthrope," based on a couple of mild quotes about the media and recruiting services said during the same tour on which he was, you know, carried off an Iraqi field on the shoulders of a group of gleeful American servicemen ... that misanthrope.
To be fair, I think this particular subject line (and post) was delivered tongue-in-cheek, but just in case, I've come up with a few more topics for CR posts that will be just as accurate and insightful as "Tuberville is a desperate, misanthropic cowboy":
Tuberville: King of Prussia Is this plague of frogs good for Tuberville? Tubby is one talkative cosmetologist Tommy "Can't Tie a Tie" Tuberville Tuberville: Paper, or Plastic?
You get the point. I don't think much of the Capstone Report.
But there's a larger point here, too. There's a lot of blogs out there I don't think much of. But the JCCW hasn't made--and isn't going to make--a habit out of giving them the same treatment, since in 99 percent of cases, bad blogs simply don't get read and quietly sink into the Internet ether. (Hell, that's happened to any number of good blogs, too.) There's no point.
The CR, on the other hand, isn't sinking. They've succeeded, though not through providing quality writing or honest, insightful analysis, but through one provident connection and the blog equivalent of prolonged talk-radio screaming. And now the state's most followed, most widely read media presence has presented that screaming as the face of the Alabama blogosphere.
To put it as politely as I can: thatsucks. The standard of discourse and analysis from any number of blogs on both sides of the Iron Bowl divide is so far beyond CR's brand of tripe, labeling the source of posts like "Tuberville is one desperate cowboy" "highly respected" (as Finebaum does) is nothing short of deliberate misrepresentation.
Because, honestly, what reason do the likes of "Shane" give us to respect them? Finebaum is free to send his many, many readers the the Capstone Report if he likes. But I am likewise free to scrape CR posts like the ones above off my shoes and ask the few readers I have, Tide and Tiger alike: Please, from this point forward, for the good of this medium--go elsewhere. Finebaum has already poisoned the well for Alabama's college football followers at the MSM level; I, for one, would really prefer to see the third-rate Chinese knockoff version of Finebaum stopped from doing the same to the blogosphere.
*At the time of the original posting. To be fair, CR primary author, um, "CR" has shifted focus a bit since then.
**Not that we're not, of course, this post itself being a prime example. I just tire of the idea, so popular amongst Tide supporters, that Tiger fans are irrepressibly 'Bama-fixated while Tide fans keep their minds and attention perfectly Auburn-free until they (oops!) happen to read the wrong Auburn-related website, come across the wrong Auburn-related newspaper article, accidentally listen to the wrong Auburn-related radio program, etc. Both sides are always going to be rabidly, insatiably interested in what the other is up to, particularly during the long and arduous offseason; we should just admit it and enjoy our, uh, rabidity.
This series of near-substanceless, air-injected preview puffery should in no way be mistaken for actual preseason football nutrition. Nonetheless, the hope is that you will find the series unaccountably tasty and even habit-forming, and as such it is unofficially sponsored by:
Auburn opens their season August 30 at home against the Louisiana-Monroe Warhawks, your basic run-of-the-mill Sun Belt cuppity-cake, casually indistinguishable from their equally nondescript, anonymous conference brethren. Sister Louisiana-[Location goes here] school UL-Lafayette at least has the "Ragin' Cajun" thing going for them, but with ULM forced to bear an Arena League-esque nickname so generic they likely bought it in a black-and-white box reading "Nickname," I don't know how Auburn fans are supposed to keep them straight from the Arkansas St.'s, North Texas's, Tennessee Southwest's, or Northeastern Mississippi St. Tech--Pascagoula's of the world.
If only they'd been able to pull off some memorable upset, some recent surprising victory that humiliated some other SEC team, maybe then they'd would stick out in the mind a bit. Oh well. Hopefully, Auburn will be able to focus on the, the things ... the, um ... Hawks. Warhawks.
Man, I sure wouldn't want the Tigers to lose to a team so unmemorable. Can't imagine how embarrassing that might be.
Last year: ULM continued a prolonged-but-steady ascension from a 1-10 record in 2000 by finishing 6-6 and, yes, recording a rather-memorable upset of a certain SEC West team late in the year. They even posted a winning record in Sun Belt play at 4-3, tying Middle Tennessee for third despite a general uptick in the league's semi-respectability. The downside? Games against certain SEC West teams aside, ULM was thumped by an average of 27 points in their nonconference outings and somehow contrived to lose 31-21 to North Texas in what would be the Mean Green's only DI win.
Meanwhile, behind a frightfully green-but-improving offensive line, Auburn rebounded from early upset losses to South Florida and Mississippi St. to upset top-five Florida on the road, take eventual national champion LSU to the wire, and stretch their school-record Iron Bowl winning streak to six on their way to a satisfying 9-4 final record.
Notable previous meeting: Many longtime college football fans will remember that ULM was formerly known as Northeastern Louisiana University, and that their athletics teams were known as the Indians. NLU came to Jordan-Hare Stadium for Auburn's second game of 1994, and though Terry Bowden's Tigers rolled to a 44-12 victory to give the baby-faced coach his 13th straight win in as many tries at the Auburn helm, the contest is still remembered in Monroe for the antics of the Indians' then-mascot "Chief Goldfeather."
The game was held in boiling afternoon conditions, and as the second half dragged on, the intense sun and heat began to melt Chief Goldfeather's elaborate maroon-and-gold facepaint. Egged on by the NLU cheerleading squad--who'd informed him of his face's disfigured and borderline-frightening appearance caused by the running makeup--Chief Goldfeather decided to "cheer up" a four-year old Auburn fan in the front row who had grown audibly unhappy as the temperature continued to rise. The Chief snuck along the wall surrounding the Jordan-Hare field, waited until a particularly silent moment in the stadium, and then unleashed a blood-curdling war cry as he leapt into the air in front of the boy and his family, rubber tomahawk drawn.
Not only did the boy immediately fall into uncontrollable hysterics, but the boys' parents also confessed to receiving what they called the "shock of their lifetimes." It might still have been no more than a laughing matter had the boy's father not also been recovering from a recent heart procedure, a fact that drove the family to file a lawsuit claiming "mental and physical duress" against both the student playing Chief Goldfeather and NLU itself. Though the case was settled out of court for what is believed to be a minor financial sum and the incident was never officially cited by the then-ULM administration as a reason for the removal of the "Indians" nickname, "Chief Goldfeather" was retired less than a year later and some believe the suit to have sparked the first preliminary discussions amongst the school's trustees about a possible rebranding.
Actual series history: Auburn is 6-0 against NLU/ULM with all six meetings coming since 1994, including a 31-0 drubbing to kick off Auburn's mildly successful 2004 campaign. The only one of the six decided by fewer than 24 points was the 1996 match-up, won by Auburn 28-24 for reasons I confess I have no recollection of whatsoever.
Causes for Alarm 1. As any devoted reader of the Auburn blogosphere could tell you, ULM head man Charlie Weatherbie was Division 1's lowest-paid head coach last season. He got a raise (I think; his salary at time of the big late-season win was listed as $130,000, and is now apparently up to $205,000) and is out of the coaching-salary basement. But still--once you're being paid less than any other coach in D-I to coach at freaking UL-Monroe (where, in a just world, you're being paid more than any other coach in D-I, given the 9.9 level of coaching difficulty) and you've suffered through a season (2003) where your team finished -19 in turnovers and lost six games by a touchdown or less*, do the football gods ever really stop smiling on you? I wouldn't think so. Auburn should make sure to bring their horseshoes, rabbit's feet, and Les Miles's in response.
2. Weatherbie told Athlon that "[t]here's no doubt we have some good swagger heading into this season." Which is important--when a football team has bad swagger, it risks hyperextended elbows, tweaked hamstrings, and other injuries of overexertion that can occur when its swagger gets out of control. What you want is to have a good, confident swagger, but a swagger that's under control. You want to swagger within the system. That's what wins football games, not to mention, dude, totally getting that one girl at the bar to check you out as you walk over to play "Kryptonite" on the jukebox. Yeeeeeeah, swagger. That's what she likes.
Causes for Confidence
1. ULM has a starting linebacker named Cardia Jackson. Cardia is one simple, easy letter away from having his name be "Cardiac Jackson," making him sound like a '70s cartoon superhero or--at the very least--a role player for the old Bad Boys Pistons with a reputation for big fourth quarters. Instead, his name sounds like ... well, like just another football player with an unusual name. What a wasted opportunity. This is the kind of failure that can poison a whole roster.
2. Auburn beat ULM 73-7 in 2003. 73-7. 73-7. A 66-point victory. The widest margin of victory in the Tubby era, and it's not even close. It's my professional opinion that once Team A has beaten Team B by that kind of margin, Team A has effectively claimed permanent ownership of Team B. Auburn has already signed the deed to ULM, filled out all the paperwork, built four houses on the Warhawks already, and it's only a matter of time 'til they add the hotel. (If you doubt me, don't you think Kentucky should have logically gotten their revenge on Florida by now for Spurrier's unholy beatdown of Mumme all those years ago? And yet they haven't. Ownership.)
Actual alleged analysis: The rational side of the JCCW isn't quite as confident as that last item might suggest, but it's awfully, awfully hard regardless to see ULM's best-case scenario as anything more than "close after three quarters." Late-season upset over a certain SEC West team be damned, it's still the same program that lost 54-14 to Texas A&M last September (in a good year) vs. an Auburn program that hasn't lost to a non-BCS school since 1991. If you're looking for any kind of historical precedent for a Warhawk victory, you've pretty much got a statistically fluky upset in T-town last November and precisely nothin' else.
It's even more difficult to think of ULM as a legitimate threat when considering the unspeakable crimes Auburn is going to perpetrate upon their offense. ULM was far from explosive last year even by Sun Belt standards, finishing in the bottom half of the league in both points-per-game and passing offense in conference play. Sure, they ranked second in the league in rushing and averaged 209 yards a game on the ground, but three starting linemen and the only running back of note are gone. Sure, they have a three-year starter at QB in Kinsmon Lancaster and the consensus best group of wideouts in the 'Belt, but how much better is a passing attack that went for 148 yards vs. Clemson and 133 vs. Texas A&M going to get? Unless Auburn gift-wraps a couple of scores, the Warhawks will be fortunate to get any more than, say, 13 points on the board.
It is possible, it has to be said, that Auburn will in fact gift-wrap a couple of scores. In my dream schedule, Kodi Burns' and the Spread Eagle's full debut comes against Hapless I-AA Snacky-Cake of the Year rather than a defense that returns eight starters from the unit that turned a certain SEC West team over four times and held them to 14 points at home. If Franklin and Co. still have any kinks to work out, on paper, at least, ULM might have just enough seasoning to turn those kinks into outright issues.
ULM's problem is that as experienced as it might be, as Acid Reign pointed out it matches up with Auburn's offense about well as Alan Dershowitz matches up with Heidi Klum. They have great safeties; Auburn could probably care less about throwing downfield. They have a great back seven, but are questionable up front; Auburn's offensive line might be its strongest unit on either side of the ball. Auburn won't have it easy early on, particularly if they still have that new offense smell, but by the late stages of the game ULM is going to need a hell of a chin to stand up to the heavyweight blows Ziemba, Green, etc. are going to deliver.
The bottom line: if Auburn takes this game seriously at all, it wins without breaking a sweat. This is why ULM's upset of that certain other SEC West team is the gift that just keeps on giving: that result alone will do more for Auburn's focus on the Warhawks than all the fancy speeches Tubby can give them between now and then. It's one thing to talk about a team being dangerous, it's another to see them prove that danger on the field. Thanks in large part to the Tide, Auburn will now be ready for ULM. Too bad for them I don't think it's possible for ULM to really be ready for Auburn.
*You get one guess where I got this information from.
You've got to give Tubby some credit. After all, knowing that his Middle East swing was being so closely followed back home and that (with the possible New Jersey wiseguy exception of Weis) none of the other coaches on the tour have anything like his southern Riverboat Gambler charm or penchant for manipulating the spotlight, he could have easily been turning the tour into a Tubby for Awesome campaign. Instead, seems like he's been keeping a fairly low profile, letting the focus stay on the troops, quietly letting his good deed speak for itself, not drawing attention to ...
Kidding aside, the JCCW's take is that Tubby flashing those lucky seven fingers neither deserved to be as overblown a story as some mewling Tide fans (or its national coverage) would have it nor as underblown as, well, Phillip Marshall would like it to be.
Would Tubby have done it if he hadn't been surrounded by the same soldiers whose morale he'd been sent to improve egging him on? Probably not. Did he know the cameras were on him and how it would be received on either side of the state back home? Oh my yes he did. Pretending as some 'Bama fans seem to be that Tubby was just waiting all offseason for the perfect moment to extend those fingers--and by extension, a single, middle finger--in the Tide's direction and saw a flag football game in the desert as his NOW NOW DO IT GO opportunity is silly; pretending Alabama fans should just shrug their shoulders when Auburn's coach essentially predicts a victory over them this fall in a public setting, no matter how unusual, is equally silly. It is a deal, just not a huge one.
Which is why in this case, I'm all for it. I didn't like Tubby's t-shirted approval of "Fear the Thumb" or the Baton Rouge cigar smoking or a handful of other gestures that crossed the line from needling our rivals into outright taunting them, but here Tubby:
a) has the built-in (and legit--even if you're a 'Bama fan, would you have told those soldiers "Sorry, can't help you here, I have to worry about what Paul Finebaum would say," or even want Tubby to?) excuse that he was fulfilling a request
b) was in freaking Iraq, rather than, say, Bryant-Denny
c) was in the middle of a freaking weeklong tour of goodwill for American soldiers
so it's awful hard to see any real criticism from Tide fans and/or the media sticking. He was always going to get a free pass. So as an Auburn fan who couldn't help but say War Eagle, coach when someone forwarded me the video, no, I don't see why he shouldn't have used it.
Anyway, now that that's past, Tubby can get back to his usual off-season routine of prepping for the fall and quietly going about his business without going all Les Miles on us about, say, how good teams from other conferences would fare in the SEC.
Two other links of interest on the topic: as usual, TWER has two sterlingresponses ("I knew they were ahead of us over there, but I didn’t know it was six months ahead"); Capstone Report has a point when he says Tubby's association with President Bush could hurt recruiting, since he's going to have to work a lot harder now in the fertile recruiting grounds of San Francisco, rural Vermont, and France.
Hey, did you hear Auburn had hired a new offensive coordinator? The general media/fan preference for offensive matters over defensive has been on full display in Auburnworld over the past couple of months, as everybody wants a piece of Tony Franklin and barely a drop of ink has been spilled over Paul Rhoads.
Not that I care; with all due respect to Rhoads, knowing that he's going to have the likes of Sen'Derrick Marks and Antonio Coleman at his disposal, I'm more worried and interested in the OC position (don't call it that) myself. So, hopefully we'll get even more of the kind of quotes we got here and here, my favorite of which is:
I hate having to listen to a coach come in and say 'To get what I want, it's going to take us a couple of years.' Players hear that and go, 'Well, I don't guess I'm a very good player then.' Then they have built-in excuses. And you give your assistant coaches built-in excuses. I don't believe in it. I believe whatever is there is good enough to be successful with.
Great to hear you say that, coach. That's exactly the kind of attitude we Auburn fans like to hear. Do you think you could explain that one more time for us? Because, if you could step over here, we'd like to introduce you to Auburn head men's basektball coach Jeff Lebo ...
What's that? What, this?
That's a wickedly cool chart put together by recently discovered part-time Auburn blog Grotus' Acorn, who uses it here to explain why Tide fans who mow their back lawn into a portrait of the Bear you could only see from space might not be completely insane. It's worth taking a few minutes to read more of Grotus' work even when it's not Auburn related, thanks to prose like this:
I managed to demonstrate exactly NOT what to do, which is:
1. hold the lime in your hand 2. place a gigantic turkey-carving fillet knife against the lime where you wish to make the cut 3. think you're really cool 4. apply downward pressure with your thumb and upward pressure with the machete you've chosen to mutilate produce with 5. half cut your damn thumb off 6. better get sewn up, you chump.
"Better get sewn up, you chump" is now my go-to Mario Kart Wii battle mode smack, and yes, that's supposed to be a compliment. Anyways: read the whole thing.
Credit where it's due. Much as I would like to see the Tide's coachbot caught drinking a quart of oil by Ian Rapoport, subsequently fired, and have the school taken to court for "lifeist" discrimination, I have to admit he and I apparently see the Iron Bowl the same way:
One team doesn't have to be good and the other one be bad ... our game is not rated that highly anymore and it should be rated very highly. It should be the game that everyone wants to watch at the end of the year because it's a great rivalry, there's great tradition and passion and it should be the greatest game in college football. To do that, you have to have two great teams. We have two great schools. We need to have two great teams.
Preach it, brother! I agree. Though I am required by Auburn Blogging law to point out first that one team of the two has been much closer to greatness in recent years than the other (not that Saban would disagree, I'm sure) and that the ellipsis above contains the following piece of wisdom:
This is what I believe for this state. I believe we should be one and they should be one, and another one should be two and us have a great game.
Um ... what? (FWIW there's yet more Franklin in that same article.)
Lastly: The following video (HT: BS's Jeff Bull) is not recommended for those at work, the elderly, women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, or anyone, in fact, who is not an eight-year-old boy or possesses the sense of humor of one:
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, which is awesome in that a) veterans b) holiday c) seriously, veterans.
The only thing about it that might be less than awesome is that it's the deadest possible period of the college football year. The season is still nearly three agonizing months away; Signing Day is rapidly fading into the rearview mirror; spring ball is done and dusted. What's a college football blogger who's looking to swing back into the, uh, swing of things to do?
Well, in this case, finally dip a toe into the slimy, overheated pool that is recruiting. There's never been too much recruiting talk here at the JCCW, since I tend to take the glass-half-empty-if-this-even-is-a-glass approach--a given commit can jump through each of the various academic, good-behavior, and "On second thought, that football team and/or institution of higher learning looks like the one for me" hoops to arrive on campus, and it's still even money whether he'll ever play a meaningful down or not. The view here is that recruiting is mostly about putting as many bullets in the chamber as possible; the macro-level developments I can get excited about, yessir, but at the micro-level of individual commitments, I'm still mostly Eh, Whatever--particularly since Tuberville's staff seems to have such a relatively high success rate with its "flyers." I often feel more than a bit ridiculous for having invested so much in the performances of college kids playing an essentially meaningless game, so investing the slightest dollop of time and mental energy into learning about 17-year-olds who may never even play for my meaningless-game team strikes me as a perfectly good candidate for an entry in the DSM-IV.
But considering that 1. it's May. 2. as an Auburn Blogger, I should theoretically be as informed as possible 3. I would think there would be some demand on the part of some readers for someone to do the work of plugging in a given recruit's name into Google and synthesizing the tidbits of information that trickle out ... that's what the JCCW is going to do. Even if I have to shower afterwards.
In fact, there's the possibility that I'll eventually make my way through the entire class. But today, we're starting with ...
Basics: Cotton is a 6-4, 215-pound quarterback who accounted for more than 2,100 total yards and 25 TD's in leading Mobile's Faith Academy to the AISA AAA championship game in 2007. He'll spend his senior season at Meade High School in Fort Meade, Maryland, after his father, an officer in the Coast Guard, was transferred there. He creates fun unintentional double-meanings in headlines by being both a Mobile quarterback and a mobile quarterback.
Recruitnik hoo-ha:: Rivals doesn't have a rating as of now, but Scout gives him four stars and ranks him as the #24 QB in the class--the last four-star, one spot ahead of some kid Tedford's signed to Cal, if you're the sort to enjoy such comparisons. ESPN rates him a 77, which I the recruiting n00b think means "good, not elite." They call him a "fantastic-looking prospect on the hoof," with all the physical tools "mobile 6-4, 215 QB" implies, and add he could be an especially snug fit in the Spread Eagle. But they also say that mechanics-wise, he could use more polish, in words somewhat stronger than "he could use more polish." Cotton also had offers from Kentucky, Mississippi St., Stanford (?), and Troy, but his potential in the spread is likely best exemplified by the fact that Purdue had offered as well.
Links of potential interest: The article out of Annapolis I linked above humorously overstates Cotton's accomplishments a bit, since playing in AISA AAA is not playing in a mythical "Alabama state tournament" in football or an equally mythical "Alabama state track championship" in, uh, track. Still, those third-place finishes in the 100- and 200-meter dash don't exactly mean he's slow; he ran 11.47 in the 100 and 23.45 in the 200.
For a glimpse of Cotton's demeanor and an exhibition of strength involving the first use of the word "Power Ball" I've ever heard outside of the lottery or American Gladiators, you can check out this video. Apparently, he throws the Power Ball real far. So he's got that going for him.
The recap of Faith's 35-27 loss to Bessemer Academy in the AAA title game unfortunately doesn't do much to dispel the "incredible athlete, could be a better overall quarterback" scouting report. Cotton pulled off a 45-yard run and a TD sneak, but completed just 2 of his first 10 and finished 6-14 for 70 yards with a pick.
What conclusions, if any, we might draw: If Cotton has enough potential to draw an offer from a school that's produced two consecutive record-breaking, NFL quarterbacks and is about to graduate its third (however overrated he might be), yeah, I think he's got enough potential for Auburn, too. Also: he's a 6-4, 215-pound fast guy. Those guys tend to be useful.
There are fewer than 100 days until the start of the 2008 season. 2009 recruiting is in full swing. Why is our head football coach spending a week halfway around the world?
Partly to honor his father. Partly because, as he tells Scarbinsky, he's "gotta get away from it," meaning the coaching grind. Mostly because, I think, they asked and Tubby--for all the less-than-nice things I have occasionallysaid about him--is generally, as they say, Good People. All of these reasons kick ass.
I doubt very much that every Division 1 head football coach would have accepted the offer. "I think a few people said no," Tubby told Scarbinsky, and given the timing and length of commitment to the tour, that doesn't surprise me. Taking the pressures of coaching at this level into consideration, I can't say I blame them too terribly much.
But: for obvious reasons it remains an unapologetic point of pride for me that Auburn's head football coach did say Yes. For equally obvious reasons--namely, that I openly despise the man--I have to wonder: would our state's resident Coachbot, the sort of man who has come to embody the polar opposite of "getting away from it," have said the same?
It's quite possible, maybe even likely, he would have. It's not like Saban doesn't have a charitable background. It's not as if he hasn't been willing to make appearances for good causes and been gregarious and engaging in doing so. Scarbinsky suggests Tubby's "people said no" quote may have been in jest and besides, it's not like we have any idea who got asked and who didn't. This (as far as Google can tell me) is the first year of the program, so maybe in 2008 it's Auburn's guy, in 2009's it's 'Bama's--and if Saban does go over next year, this blog will be more than happy to give him his due credit.
However: boil down Tubby's and Saban's respective offseasons into a single lingering image, and Tubby's will very likely be the one sent back from Kuwait; Saban's will be yet another reporter* bullied from behind a press conference podium. Forgive me my orange-and-blue-tinted glasses, but once again I am glad we have our coach, and they have theirs.
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*Admittedly, the barely-disguised glee said reporter takes in needling Saban is less than professional. I can't blame King Crimson for disliking the guy. But is the high road still so difficult to take? Is asking Saban to show the same professionalism towards the reporters he dislikes as well as the ones he likes (or comes closest to liking, I should say) really asking too much?
APRil showers. For all the endless LOLlygagging out there about Auburn football's academics--hyuck hyuck they take sociology classes hyuck hyuck hyuck they're the only ones hyuck--the NCAA's APR hammer has not only passed the Tigers by for another year, it wasn't even close. The team's 953 was well above the 925 scholarship ax-point and the fourth-best score in the SEC, behind Georgia, Florida, and Vandy and three spots ahead of ... let me see ... just want to double-check ... I mean, I'm just curious, that's all ... hmm, seems to be the Tide.
Actually, I think what might be most impressive about that is that it was he fourth-best score at AU, behind only golf and the two cross country teams. (Let's also give it up for the golf team. I think if there's any group of athletes we'd expect to struggle academically after their hardscrabble upbringing on the mean and ruthless links of the Robby-J,it's the golfers. How many kids like them do we lose every day to the temptations of the beverage cart?)
No, the APR isn't perfect but it's still a decent rough guide to how well a given program is keeping its kids in school and keeping their grades above the waterline. Auburn football is keeping its kids in school. It's keeping their grades above the waterline. I'm not suggesting we throw a party over it, but a nice round of applause is probably in order--particularly when, loopholes and all, a couple of what might be considered Auburn's peer institutions (Kansas and Washington St., the latter from a conference you may remember as the one that enjoys shoving its alleged academic superiority in the rest of the country's face) haven't been able to manage even that.
(As a quick aside: I'm with the Senator/Brian/SMQ when it comes to the APR and its potential weed-whacking of the bottom rung of DI. DI college football, hours-wise, is a full-time job. Like almost anyone with ties to Birmingham I like seeing UAB do well, but if they can't give their football players the help they need to both do their "job" and earn their degree, they need to get out of the business.)
As for Auburn hoops, since APR grades out a four-year period and the most recent year reported is still just '05-'06, that unsightly 905 is still mostly the result of Cliff Ellis's recruits fleeing the program like the proverbial light-sensitive cockroaches Ellis got dumped. I wouldn't blame Jeff Lebo for that. Well, mostly.
Because of course, there are some things you probably can blame Lebo for. Jay Coulter raised an issue worth discussing recently: clearly, the "success" "enjoyed" by Auburn "baseball" and men's "basketball" the last several years would have Jay Jacobs' head on a pike somewhere if repeated on the football field. So should Jacobs really show the same kind of lenience towards Lebo and Slater he never would towards Tubby? Why is the kind of floundering we've seen the past several seasons on the hardwood and the diamond tacitly accepted when it's unforgivable on the football field?
And wellllllll ... in Lebo's case, I think it's fair to make a brief, meek case for "extenuating circumstances." When you're dealing with a sport in which only five of your guys take the court at a time and only nine or ten at the most are going to play at all, losing several of them to flukish injuries (as Lebo did in '07-'08) is going to be a tough row to hoe for any still-wobbly program. I'm OK with Lebo getting a mulligan on last season given that the program had shown progress--however snail-paced--his previous three seasons.
That said: that's his last one. The counter to the injury-pity argument is that Lebo's had four years to build the kind of program that could withstand those injuries without sinking to the bottom of a division so putrid in '07-'08 I could smell it from Ann Arbor. Like Jay, I'm not willing to give Lebo the benefit of the "just wait until the new building opens!" kind of doubt; Mississippi St. was the second-best team in the SEC this season and I refuse to believe it's any easier to build a team in Starkville than it is on the Plains, gym quality be damned. Five years is enough. If Lebo doesn't get it done in '08-'09--"it" meaning a finish in the top half of the division and at the very least consideration as an NCAA Tournament team--it's time to move on.
As for Slater, well, there goes that debate. Methinks that Jacobs' willingness to give Slater the gentle -yet-firm push out the door means Lebo's leash has run pretty short as well.
UPDATE: OK, so I wrote that last bit Sunday night and have been battling internet issues to get it posted ever since, so that's why it doesn't take into account that the alleged jewel of Lebo's 2007 recruiting class just walked out on him after one sea-- ... actually, you can't even call Sylla's time with Auburn hoops a "season" can you? Yeah, I'm still willing to give Lebo his last-ditch effort, but it's awful hard to find reasons at this point it'll work out.
Oh yeah, football, right, right. So, there was this A-Day thing you might have heard about. Part of me feels irresponsible that, as an Auburn Blogger, I haven't said anything 'til now about the only thing resembling Auburn football between January and August, despite the wedding and the basketball and the whatnot. Part of me also feels like, damn, it's not like without the aid of television (or, obviously, being there) I was going to improve on what friend-o'-the-blog Acid Reign put together over at Track 'Em Tigers, so maybe no harm, no foul this time. (There will be coverage next year, I swear by my copy of this year's Phil Steele.)
Besides, how many definitive statements can be made on the basis of spring ball? (Line of the spring from TWER: "Franklin’s candor has moved beyond refreshing to almost exhilarating and his straightforward style is especially on when answering questions concerning the quarterback situation, which reporters seem eager to put to bed. Franklin just keeps feeding it candy.")
What I would want to know is: did Franklin and Rhoads have the look of guys who know what they're doing? Do we have enough guys who can actually catch a pass to run the offense Franklin wants? Not that I would ever expect him to be, but Burns doesn't look so hopelessly lost in the passing game we're going to see the same third-grade "Burns = Run, Todd = Pass" offense again this fall, does he? (Not that that offense wasn't hella effective against Clemson, but long-term ... ) And did anyone turn their various cruciate ligaments into spaghetti?
With the answers on Acid Reign's good authority being Yes, Looks That Way, No, and No, I'm ready to go. When even OTS at RBR acknowledges Auburn had a good spring, it's probably safe to call it a good spring. (Also worth clicking: OTS's breakdown of the SEC's noncon schedules. I hope LSU's appropriately ashamed--just because we want them to beat Big 10 teams doesn't mean we want them to schedule like them.)
No. Sorry. (Please read that in the style Alex Trebek would when responding to a wrong question on Jeopardy!. It's more gentlemanly that way.) I would consider myself a reasonably staunch playoff advocate--2004 just confirmed what I'd long suspected, that 11 or 12 games will never reliably whittle down 100-some-odd teams to exactly two qualified national title game participants--but I can acknowledge that there are some compelling arguments against a playoff and that Kyle King has put forth many of these before. Rather than compile shortcuts to said arguments myself, Kyle has already done that recently in this response to Garnet and Black Attack's pro-playoff platform. (That response has since continued and spawned a generous and healthy comment thread I would recommend.) I can buy Kyle's argument here that the BCS has yet to produce an out-and-out fraudulent champion, even though my gut says this comes awfully close to tautology*; part of the reason these champions are legit is because they received the opportunity to end their season against other top-of-the-polls opponents as opposed to, I don't know, Virginia Tech. Still, OK, I can deal.
But this:
"[T]he Southern California squad that pulverized previously unbeaten Oklahoma in a game that wasn’t even as close as the 55-19 score indicated wouldn’t have lost to Auburn, even though the Tigers likely would have given U.S.C. a better game."
is ... absolutely right! After all, even if Auburn was good, it's not like Pete Carroll and his gold doubloon-crapping Trojans would ever be the sort of team that might suffer an upset. Not even on the road ...
... and definitely not with a national title shot on the line ...
... and if you're some bottom-rung program like Stanford, you'd best not even show up ...
... so yeah, even though the SEC is now 4-0 in BCS title games with an average margin of victory of 654 points, I still think it's safe to assume the greatest SEC team of the BCS era wouldn't have really had a chance against those guys.
Look, kidding aside, even I can agree that if the 2004 Tigers had gotten their date with the Trojans, a USC win was the likely outcome. But I would think last season and its endless carousel of Appalachian St.'s and Kentucky's and Pittsburgh's would have put to bed forever the idea that a "likely" win was even distantly related to an actual win. Discussing who would have won a USC-Auburn title tilt might be fun, but it has the same practical value as discussing what would have happened if, like, Dude, you went back in time and gave Robert E. Lee the secret of how to make an army of clone soldiers out of corn husks and tobacco.
But that doesn't keep Kyle from, essentially, arguing that it's OK to use our perpetually woebegone assumptions about who-wins-what-matchup to measure and retroactively justify the injustice inflicted by the BCS. Yes, the BCS was wrong about Auburn, Kyle argues, but not that wrong. Kyle and all anti-playoff advocates have my sympathies for their efforts in preserving our sport's tradition, regular-season punch, etc., but there's a point at which the injustice outweighs the tradition and all that other stuff. And that point is when your team has gone 13-0 and virtually no one outside of its own fanbase truly gives a crap that it won't get its fair shot, because, oh, it wouldn't have won anyway.
At that point, trust me, the BCS is very much that wrong.
As I said: I know no one cares at this point, if they cared ever. But when the Internet archaeologists from the year 4031 find the JCCW, I don't want them to think I didn't have anything to say on this year's NCAAs. Next post is 100% Auburn content, guaranteed.
Era of the Supermids
For the first 14 years of the modern NCAA Tournament (i.e. 1985-1998), Cinderella was pretty good in the first round, relatively speaking: 3's fell with regularity, 12's took home at least one victory every single year save '88, etc. They could have been better in the second round, maybe, but 13 double-digit-seeded mid-majors made the Sweet 16 in that period of time--almost one a year.
But Round 3 was a wasteland. Precisely one of those 13 teams pulled the upset and found their way into the Elite 8--the justifiably legendary Bo Kimble-led Loyola-Marymount team that (now here is something that should be remembered more often) blitzed defending champion Michigan 145-115 in the second round before surviving Wimp Sanderson's slowdown tactics in the Sweet 16. (A victory that says something as well. As an aside, that team might have been Wimp's best: Robert Horry, Latrell Sprewell, an SEC tournament championship, and a dreadful shafting as the seventh seed out West. They crushed the 2-seed, Arizona, by 22.) Still, 1-for-13-- a winning percentage of 7.6%.
Then in 1999, things changed. Gonzaga took down Florida on Casey Calvary's tip-in to become just the second Cinderella to survive the Sweet 16. (Navy also made the Round of 8 in 1986, but did so as a 7 seed, had only to beat 14-seed Cleveland St. in the third round, and had David Freaking Robinson manning the middle. They weren't Cinderella.) Since then, we've had three more: Trevor Huffman and Antonio Gates' Kent. St. team survived Ok. St., Alabama, and then Pitt in 2002; George Mason (duh) toppled Michigan St. and UNC before winning the all-mid clash against Wichita St. in 2006; and just a few short weeks ago now, Stephen Curry strapped Davidson to his back and marched them past Georgetown and Wisconsin, improving Cindy's record in Sweet 16 matchups since 1999 to 4-14, or 29 percent.
In other words, we have entered the era of the Supermid. For 14 years, Cinderella couldn't manage to win even one Sweet 16 game in 10; for the last 10, they've won nearly one in three. From one Cindy in the Elite 8 in those first 14 years, we've had two in the last three.
Why? Hell if I know. All four of these teams essentially won in different ways--the Zags with the 3-point gunning of Richie Frahm and Matt Santangelo, Kent with their MAC-honed ruggedness, Mason with their half-court precision, Davidson with Curry's all-encompassing brilliance. Faced with this same question I suspect John Q. Columnist would jerk his knee, scream Parity! and blither about more talent being available in The Game Today, but the unprecedented levels of chalk in the bracket the past two years suggests the opposite. High-seed power conference teams are better than they've ever been at seeing off third-round challenges from their power-conference brethren (or highly-seeded mids like SIU '07 or various late-era Gonzaga squads); but for whatever reason, they've gotten much worse at doing the same to Cinderellas.
It should also be noted that none of these Supermids made their runs via a "collapsed bracket" fluke. All four did so by beating three straight higher seeds, at least two of which hailed from power conferences. They were--are--legit.
And I think it's highly possible Davidson was, for lack of a better word, the legitest of the four. Consider that they first beat a Gonzaga team (still) laden with NBA prospects playing likely just about as well as they could play. The Wildcats then overturned a 17-point second-half deficit against the Big East's regular season champion, a team whose defense and slow tempo should have made them impregnable--and did so in no more than 12 or 13 minutes. And then they faced the Big 10's double-champion, a Wisconsin team that 100-percent deserved a second seed and had the efficiency margin of a 1-seed.
The result was a bona fide woodshed beating even George Mason never matched, a delirious runaway train of a middle finger extended to any one who said in the weeks approaching Selection Sunday the Wildcats might not deserve a bid. I'm not usually one for savoring a blowout, but in this case I had to make an exception; it wasn't just that Davidson won, it's that they flat flattened the Badgers.
They scored at will. They rebounded over guys a half-foot taller. They made them look slow and silly and hopelessly--um--Big 10. They toyed with Wisconsin--for what was Curry's iconic pump fake-flyby-and-swish three that Davidson fans are going to see in their dreams 50 years from now if not Team A playing cat to Team B's point-and-laugh mouse?
Me, I loved that second half every bit as much as I did Mason's shock-the-world moment against UConn two years previous. Because by that time, it was already painfully obvious that chalk was ruling the bracket again; that at least three if not all four 1-seeds were going to the Final Four; that the chaos we've depended on the NCAAs to provide is at its all-time lowest ebb; that it may never come back.
But all is not lost. We will still have Jason Richards channeling Steve Nash, still have Andrew Lovedale and Boris Meno out-rebounding NBA studs, still have Curry firing away with the kind of stroke J.J. Redick only dreams of.
Even in this period of money and Goliath and predictability, Davidson reminded us, we will still have Supermids and we will, in fact, even have them more often. Someone will still carry the flag. Always.
The Doomsday Scenario
That was the name Ken Pomeroy coined for the potential ascension of all four 1-seeds to the Final Four, which as most sea urchins, pine trees, and anaroebic bacteria living on asteroids circling Jupiter could have told you, had never happened before this year.
I like the term for a few reasons. First, I appreciate that Pomeroy agrees with me that this lethal a level of chalk is, Verily, A Portent That The End Times Hath Descended Upon Us All, like statues weeping blood or horses breaking out of their stalls or ESPN devoting SportsCenter exclusively to the coverage of actual sports. After so many years spent believing that "All four 1-seeds in the Final Four will never happen" with the fervor of your neighborhood cult's most recent convert (true story, I actually spent a summer passing out pamphlets at the airport a few years back that said "All four 1-seeds in the Final Four will never happen") seeing it come to pass doesn't seem so far removed from Apocalypse.
Second, the minute UCLA and Memphis survived their second-round assassination attempts from Texas A&M and Mississippi St., it seemed like you could pretty much set up a countdown clock 'til the (dooms)day arrived--with UCLA's region gutted, UNC just steamrolling people, no one remotely matching up with Memphis, and Kansas facing back-to-back double-digit seeds, there wasn't a whole lot of "tension" or "doubt" or "drama" in those Regionals, was there? (As an aside, I hope Texas, Xavier, and Louisville were appropriately shamed that the only Elite 8 opponent who put up a halfway serious fight was the 10th-seeded interloper from the SoCon.)
But most importantly, it works as the Doomsday Scenario because in a sense, I do think--provided there's no change in the laughably misguided NBA age limit or scholarship rules--this is the end of the 64-team NCAA Tournament giving us the same level of delirium and chaos as it's historically given us. 2007 was chalkier than antacid aftertaste, but it was just one year. Now it's two. Bleah. The presence of Supermids, hope springing eternal, sheer bloody-minded love of the sport, etc. mean I'll still be watching just as closely next year and the one after and the one after. I'm just not expecting things to be much different than they were these last two years.
I'm not sure why this bothers me so much. After all, again, in the overwhelming majority of cases it's not mids these 1 seeds are trampling in their Sweet 16/Elite 8 rush to the semis--it's their power-conference siblings. And though 2007 was less than thrilling, there was a reasonable amount of chaos in this year's first two rounds. Two 13 seeds won. Two 12's won. Two Cinderellas crashed the Sweet 16. And we were one Belmont shot, one Butler stop, one call in Texas A&M's favor from even more high-seed turnover. I feel like I should maybe quit all this complainin' and whinin' and embrace the Davidsons and Sienas and San Diegos we've got. Why should I care so much if 3-seed Louisville beats 1-seed North Carolina when I'd be rooting just as hard the other direction if the seeds were reversed? If UNC was battling, say, Southern Illinois, there's a perfectly good good-and-evil-based reason. Otherwise, it seems like it's just silly little numbers attached to the teams when you print the bracket out, right?
Maybe it should be, but it's not. Some of that, I can admit, is pure and undiluted snobbery; I've looked down my nose at the Digger Phelpses and Andy Katzes and That One Guy In Your Pool's of the world for years for their gutlessness and sheep-like tendencies in picking all four 1-seeds to make the Final Four, and I despise the idea of them finally being able to say they were right and the folks out on the limbs were wrong. Damn them damn them damn them.
But a large chunk of it is a straight-up need for unpredictability no matter its agent, mid-major or not. I get enough predictability everywhere else; I know what I'm having for lunch when I get up in the morning, I know I'm going to have X and Y done for work by the end of the week but not before then, I know I'm going to have to feed the cat when I get home from the office. I know those things will happen. Not to put too fine a point on it ("Way too late," you say, and I hear you), but one of the great big giant reasons I watch any sport is because there, I don't know what's going to happen.
So when it gets to the point that I know those teams with the 1 or maybe the 2 attached to their name are off to the Final Four before the first NCAA ball even tips, something's very, very lacking.
I'd like to think there's a few things that long-time readers of the JCCW (all seven of them) can count on this blog to provide, things you might say the JCCW """brand""" (because one set of sarcasm-indicating quotation marks isn't enough in this particular case) is "known" and "recognized" for after its two-plus years of existence. Like, say, witty-and-honest-but-far-from-libelous assessments of Auburn's performances. Wild mood swings as regards to the figure of Tommy Tuberville. Horrible puns. Laughably wrong NCAA Tournament bracket guesses.
And, of course, mysterious, unexplained weeks-long absences like the one the JCCW has just offered up since late March.
Look, I can be honest about this: some of those absences in the past have basically been the product of what most light bulbs would refer to as "burnout," in which an unfortunate confluence of Real Life and several weeks of serious blogging that would simply result in lighter posting on a more responsible blog has, here, resulted in the kind of silence in which you could give birth to a Scientologist's baby.
This time, though:
That's a view of the harbor outside Santo Tomas de Castilla, Guatemala, from the deck of a wondrous giant boat laden with steak and overpriced alcohol. I spent a week on said boat with this blog's favorite recurring guest star, the Mrs. JCCW, in mutual celebration of a procedure vaguely alluded to previously in which her "Soon-to-Be" was removed.
So: as you might imagine, said procedure, said celebration, and the time Real Life demanded first in preparation for the weeks spent, uh, proceeding and celebrating and then in making up for those weeks upon returning have bumped blogging pretty much to the bottom of the to-do list.
Forgive me for treading so relatively close to LiveJournal territory here, but the point is that just this once, it's not laziness or a sudden unyielding addiction to "Lost" on DVD. (Though I did go through that this spring. Been clean now for six weeks.)
And to prove it, the JCCW will be back in the swing of things starting ... now. The next few days we'll have a post with a few post-NCAA Tournament thoughts that no one in the world would care about but that I want for posterity, then it's full-on Auburn mode for the summer.
And while it doesn't look like I'm going to have the full-scale relaunch I'd kinda hoped for a few months back, the site's definitely going to get spruced up bit-by-bit and will likely look very different by the time ... well, by the next time I disappear for a month.
This being a recruiting post, I really wish I could Photoshop "Scout.com" into the corner of this.
Not that it's a guarantee or anything.
