Category Archives: SEC

Yeah, the World Really Needs Another SEC-Big Ten Matchup

So I read Georgia Tech sports message boards. This is oftentimes a mistake, but sometimes has a payoff.

So I was just reading the latest about how ACC leadership is screwing the pooch and thinking it’s the usual amount of hyperbole and, as one poster once said, “hand waving freak-outery”. The problem is that this time it’s completely justified:

The Gator Bowl is returning to what its chairman considers “Jacksonville’s roots,” with the announcement Wednesday that the game will match a Southeastern Conference team against the Big Ten beginning with the 2010 season at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.

So if you’re the ACC, you just lost your only traditional New Year’s Day bowl outside of the BCS. What do you do to make up for this? You, uh, decide to replicate the Gator in the Champs Sports, just for old time’s sake:

The Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando has been elevated to the number three spot in the ACC’s contracted bowl selection order for 2010 through 2013, conference officials announced Wednesday.

That article also notes that the Gator wanted the ACC to drop its team selection rules, which I generally support. But the ACC needed to replace the Gator on the New Year’s day schedule, and needed to schedule someone other than the Big East. Don’t worry though, the ACC was right there to sweep the SEC’s crumbs in the lovely destination known as Shreveport: Wright told the club it looked like the 2010 matchup in the AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl would match teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Mountain West Conference.
Well, I guess you could argue that the Mountain West is somewhat more prestigious than the Big East at this point.

Anyway, back to my original point. Provided the SEC keeps the rest of its current bowls, they’ll have the following lineup next year (not necessarily in order, as the slots are still being worked out):

  1. Capital One (vs. Big Ten)
  2. Cotton (vs. Big 12)
  3. Outback (vs. Big Ten)
  4. Gator (vs. Big Ten)
  5. Chick-fil-a (vs. ACC)
  6. Music City (vs. ACC)
  7. Liberty (vs. C-USA)
  8. Papajohns.com (vs. Big East)

Yes, this world really needs three SEC-Big Ten matchups on the same day. At least get a Pac-10 team in there or something just to mix it up a little.

By the way, here’s my projected pecking order for the ACC:

  1. Chick-fil-a (vs. SEC)
  2. Champs Sports (vs. Big East/Notre Dame)
  3. Music City (vs. SEC)
  4. Sun (vs. Pac-10)
  5. Car Care (vs. Big East)
  6. Independence (vs. Mountain West)
  7. Eagle Bank (vs. at-large)
  8. GMAC (vs. MAC)

At any rate, this is huge blow to the conference’s prestige and likely to be a huge financial blow in terms of TV contracts are negotiated and bowl payouts (with the Gator effectively replaced by the Independence, though the Sun will presumably pay more than the Emerald did). I can only hope that by 2014 the ACC’s situation has improved, which is something that is largely in their hands, both on the field and off.

Rating the 2009 Non-Conference Slate, Part 6: SEC

And finally, we wrap up our look at the college football’s non-conference scheduling with the Southeastern Conference.

  1. Georgia (2.5 legit, 1 DI-AA): @Oklahoma State, Arizona State, Tennessee Tech, @Georgia Tech. It pains me once again to say something good about UGA, but they have recently started to make an effort to schedule some decent teams. Many SEC schools would be content to go with their OOC rival (see: Florida, Kentucky, usually USC) and call it a day, but UGA has not one but two legit OOC opponents outside of GT. Good for them. While it gets a little easier next year I’m surprised they allowed this year to happen at all.
  2. South Carolina (1.5, 1): @NC State, Florida Atlantic, The Citadel, Clemson. And it immediately starts to go downhill. While the SEC wasn’t the lowest rated conference this year, UGA’s score does have a strong effect on the average. At any rate, this follows the formulate for the SEC: rivalry game (if applicable), OOC game with school from neighboring or same state, and two patsies, one of which should be DI-AA.
  3. Alabama (1, 1): N-Virginia Tech, Florida International, North Texas, Tennessee-Chattanooga. I may write an article later on the return of the “kickoff classic” type of game that we all thought died 9-10 years ago, but for now suffice to say I like these types of games, even if this particular series does take place in Tech’s backyard. Bama-VPI in particular is a huge deal for both teams. VPI can get on the map and start their darkhorse run for the title with a win, while Alabama can show they haven’t lost a step since last year by starting with another whipping over an ACC team. The rest of the schedule, of course, sucks very thoroughly (I may also write an article on Bama paying San Jose State a million bucks to get shallacked next year, we’ll see).
  4. Mississippi State (1, 1): Jacksonville State, Georgia Tech, Houston, @Middle Tennessee. Miss State makes the return trip to Atlanta, outside of that there’s not much to get excited about here unless Houston is decent again.
  5. Vanderbilt (1, 1): Western Carolina, @Rice, @Army, Georgia Tech. This is the 5th-ranked schedule in the SEC, and there’s only one legit team on here. It only gets a one (along with Miss State) because of our bias towards Tech, otherwise these would probably be ranked much lower. That said, they do get a trip to Rice’s historic stadium, which has to be the most diproportionally sized stadium in the country. (The stadium seats 70,000 while the university has a total enrollment of 6,392 which also makes it (along with Vandy and Wake Forest) one of the smallest schools in DI-A, period.)
  6. Tennessee (0.75, 0): Western Kentucky, UCLA, Ohio, Memphis. Tennessee avoids a DI-AA team thanks to Western Kentucky’s newfound status this year as a full DI-A member, and also gets a return trip from our favorite football trust busters. Outside of that, well, they play Memphis which I guess is sort of interesting.
  7. Auburn (0.75, 1): Louisiana Tech, West Virginia, Ball State, Furman. Well, good thing WVU is on this schedule. I think the main trend for both teams “What the hell is going on with our program” as I’m pretty sure there are segments of the Auburn fanbase that still think the Gene Chizik hire was some sort of practical joke.
  8. Florida (0.75, 1): Charleston Southern, Troy, Florida International, Florida State. Two Sun Belt teams, a DI-AA team and a mandatory rivalry game. Your defending national champions, folks! I wonder if in reference to the FIU game Florida people say, “Well, we played a team from Miami this year!”
  9. Arkansas (0.5, 1): Missouri State, N-Texas A&M, Eastern Michigan, Troy. Arkansas and TAMU are looking at making the their neutral-site get-together in the Cowboy’s new intergalactic space palace (which I saw from the air a couple weekends ago, and I’d say it’s a pretty accurate description) a regular thing, which I’m totally a fan of. The rest of this schedule, not so much.
  10. Kentucky (0.5, 1): N-Miami (OH), Louisville, UL-Monroe, Eastern Kentucky. Yes, that is an “N” next to the Miami game, as the game is being played in Cincinatti. My guess it was probably supposed to be the Redhawk’s home game in the contract and it was moved there so they could get 50,000+ folks in blue and white there to watch the ceremonial beatdown.
  11. Louisiana State (0.25, 0): @Washington, UL-Lafayette, Tulane, Louisiana Tech. In fairness, LSU didn’t know that Washington would be so terrible when this game was probably scheduled. That said, was UL-Monroe not available? Seriously, this schedule is patently ridiculous for a team with national title aspirations.
  12. Mississippi (0, 2): @Memphis, Southeast Louisiana, Alabama-Birmingham, Northern Arizona. This schedule is also patently ridiculous, mainly because it happens to have both SE Louisiani and NAU on it. Ole Miss was also supposed to play a home-and-home with GT starting next year, but backed out and replaced us with either UL-Lafayette or Jacksonville State. (GT replaced them with Kansas.) Just pathetic, but I imagine it will help accomplish Ole Miss’s goal of getting some mentions this year (as the pre-season hype train seems to love them).

Well, that’s a wrap! Well, not quite, as we’ve got a summary coming up pretty soon, so stay tuned!

There Goes Another Piece of My Childhood

I was perusing my RSS feed for Dr. Saturday, whom you may know better as the Sunday Morning Quarterback, and I noticed two interesting articles.

He’s written extensively about Georgia Tech’s new offense, which I find great of course because he’s a lot better at this than I am. And he wrote about it again yesterday, adding onto the AJC’s coverage in the Sunday edition. But that’s not what I’m here to discuss.

I saw the news first on EDSBS, but the good doctor summed it up best, I think:

It won’t mean much for the rest of the country, but for anyone in the South who came of age during the last 20 years, the grainy, potato chip-and-blue jeans-sponsored “SEC Game of the Week” brought to you by Raycom Sports, nee Lincoln Financial Sports, nee Jefferson Pilot Sports, was one of the cultural signifiers that brought you closer to your fellow rednecks-in-arms, and, on certain days when the weather was right, the potbellied turkey hunter within yourself. Essentially, it was a full-fledged Jeff Foxworthy joke: “You might be a redneck if you can accurately quote the Yella Fella.”

Basically, if you grew up in any state that had a SEC school you got the so-called Jefferson Pilot SEC “Game of the Week”. That is in quotes not because it is the title of the show but because it was usually the bottom-of-the-barrel matchup available in the conference that weekend. In other words, you had to be the kind of person that enjoyed watching Mississippi versus Vanderbilt at 11 in the morning (Central Time, yo) to really derive enjoyment out of this network.

And I did. I enjoyed the fact all the men involved in talking on air were named “Dave”, and they kept this intact when the original Dave Color Guy left for health reasons after 2006. I enjoyed the fact that I could probably do their jobs better than any of them, that they often were confused about the rules of the game despite covering it for a living, and that the coverage was probably shot using cameras as old as I am.

“So wait,” you say, “the production values were terrible and the announcers were incompetent. And it all happened before noon, which is early by any definition for a Saturday. Oh, and the games oftentimes were terrible. What was so great about it?”

Well, Dr. Saturday hit several of the high points (including Vandy upsetting UGA two years ago), but he left out this gem that contains in a nutshell everything this JP/Raycom was about:

This has everything. The quality you see there is about as good as it was when it was first broadcast. They flash the wrong final score as the LSU WR runs into the end zone. Dave Neal explains to us that not only did LSU win “the game”, they won “the football game”, thus clarifying it for those of us who thought we were watching a cricket match. And, of course, the only reason they’re there at all is because it was LSU versus Kentucky, a game LSU was probably favored to win by at least 3 or 4 touchdowns. In a way, that was the great thing about JP Sports – it was crap 90% of the time, but as they say, there’s a reason they play the games, and 10% of the time those of us who woke up early enough got to see why.

Edit: Orson urges you to write in and Save the Daves.

Rating the 2008 Non-Conference Slate, Part 6: SEC

Sorry for the delay, but real life and its associated things got in the way of me finishing this. So let’s wrap ‘er up.

  1. Florida (2 legit, 1 DI-AA): Hawaii, Miami (FL), The Citadel, @Florida State. Thanks to rivalry games, this is probably the most intriguing OOC schedule of any SEC team. Other schools (UGA, Auburn, Tennessee) have a single intriguing OOC game (well, for most folks) which puts them further down the list. Also, it’s interesting to see that Hawaii can get teams to schedule them now.
  2. Georgia (1.75, 1): Georgia Southern, Central Michigan, @Arizona State, Georgia Tech. Georgia Southern fans are, of course, licking their chops for another shot at the in-state favorites. While I’d love to see it, I’m not nearly as optimistic as them. I’ve said a million times in this space how amazing it is to see UGA travel further west than Fayetteville, Arkansas for a regular season football game – again, the first time since 1965. And, of course, there’s that pesky contest two days after Thanksgiving…
  3. South Carolina (1.5, 1): North Carolina State, Wofford, Alabama-Birmingham, @Clemson. NCSU is a good OOC choice, and Clemson is, of course, the rivalry game. A little meatier than the fare The Visor typically puts on his OOC plate, but overall still pretty mediocre.
  4. Arkansas (1, 1): Western Illinois, Louisiana-Monroe, @Texas, Tulsa. I always like seeing the old SWC rivalries renewed, Texas-Arkansas being the chief among them. I don’t know if Arkansas fans consider LSU or Texas a bigger rival at this point, but it’s always a treat regardless. The rest of the schedule is a joke.
  5. Auburn (1, 1): Louisiana-Monroe, West Virginia, Southern Mississippi, Tennessee-Martin. As most folks probably now by now, Southern Miss fired their long time coach after last season. I expect to see morale fall off the table at USM and it will probably be a long time before they start scaring the heavyweights again. UL-M and UT-Martin and the typical joke options here, but it was a real toss-up for me whether to put West Virginia ahead of Texas or not. Either way, WVU is not typical SEC fare so this should be an extremely interesting game on the Plains.
  6. Tennessee (1, 0): Alabama-Birmingham, @California-Los Angeles, Northern Illinois, Wyoming. Tennessee once again schedules a Pac-10 team, and also manages not to play any DI-AA teams. A commendable thing to be sure, because while UAB, NIU, and Wyoming may not be much more likely to beat the Vols than the Samfords of the world at least they have something of a chance.
  7. Alabama (1, 0.5): N-Clemson, Tulane, Western Kentucky, Arkansas State. Huge neutral site matchup versus Clemson at the Georgia Dome to open up the season for ‘Bama. Fun fact: did you know that Tulane was one of the original 13 members of the SEC? Indeed they were, leaving the conference in 1966 due mostly to being terrible. (The other original members were Suwanee and Georgia Tech.)
  8. Vanderbilt (0.75, 0): @Miami (OH), Duke, Rice, @Wake Forest. Vandy schedules to their level, but also lacks DI-AA teams. A good job here. I would expect them go to 3-1 against this schedule, but I don’t know for sure how they’re going to fare this year.
  9. Mississippi State (0.75, 1): @Louisiana Tech, Southeast Louisiana, @Georgia Tech, Middle Tennessee State. Remember how I said GT used to be in the SEC? And that only 3 schools have left? So, you may be thinking that GT-MSU will be restoring some ancient rivalry that dates back to the very beginnings of college football, having been in the same conference all those years. And you would be wrong. Georgia Tech and Miss State have played each other twice, in 1908 and 1929, while both were still members of the Southern Conference. (Tech won both games.) How was this possible? Until relatively recently, SEC teams could set their own conference schedules. Tech gained nothing by traveling to Mississippi to play Miss State or Ole Miss, and so they simply didn’t schedule them.
  10. Mississippi (0.75, 1): Memphis, @Wake Forest, Samford, Louisiana-Monroe. We’re starting to get into joke schedule territory, but at least Ole Miss is terrible. Also, the sports writing world misses you, Coach O.
  11. Kentucky (0.5, 1): @Louisville, Norfolk State, Akron, Temple. Kentucky was pretty bad for a long time, so they probably set their schedule accordingly. Nonetheless, when your OOC rival provides your only legit game you may want to re-examine your scheduling philosophy.
  12. Louisiana State (0.25, 1): Appalachian State, North Texas, Troy, Tulane. And I’m looking at you LSU. Seriously, who are you trying to fool here? App State (last year’s DI-AA champs) may actually be the toughest team on this schedule, depending on if Troy can recover from their last game collapse last year. Looking at this slate too long makes me physically ill, so let’s move on.

So that’s all for now. If I can get the numbers worked out, I’ll get you the hardest OOC schedules on a subjective and objective basis, at least as much as I can. This may take awhile (as in, a month). So, until next time folks.

Rating the Non-Conference Slate, Part 6: SEC

We haven’t exactly been saving the best for last here at asimsports. In fact, I’ve just been going in alphabetical order, or if you really want to use a big word to use at cocktail parties, lexicographical order.

So, here we go with the Southeastern Conference:

  1. Georgia (2 legit, 1 DI-AA): Oklahoma State, Western Carolina, Troy, @Georgia Tech. It pains me to say a team that has not traveled outside of the South for a non-conference game since 1965 when they visited Ann Arbor has the toughest OOC schedule in the SEC, but here it is. They are one of only 3 SEC teams to even play 2 BCS opponents of any sort, much less two legit BCS teams. Next year, however, UGA will actually be going to Arizona State with the return trip to Stillwater in 2009.
  2. South Carolina (2, 1): UL-Lafayette, South Carolina State, @North Carolina, Clemson. Actually going to UNC is a nice touch here – too bad UNC kinda sucks.
  3. Auburn (1, 1): Kansas State, South Florida, New Mexico State, Tennessee Tech. If you recall my statement from earlier about 3 SEC teams playing 2 BCS opponents, you’ll know it’s all downhill from here. There’s some marquee matchups below, sure, but still. Also, I was going to make fun of USF here, but then I remembered they’re probably better than Kansas State. Alas.
  4. Tennessee (1, 0): @California, Southern Miss, Arkansas State, UL-Lafayette. Zounds! A SEC team traveling not only out of the South, but clear across the damn country! Unbelievable! Of course, it rapidly goes off a cliff after Souther Miss with two Sun Belt teams, but hey.
  5. Louisiana State (1, 0): Virginia Tech, Middle Tennessee State, @Tulane, Louisiana Tech. Perhaps the best OOC matchup for the entire SEC is LSU-VT. Absolutely nothing after that, though. Also, “at” Tulane? I’m sure the Green Wave will be the ones filling the Superdome to capacity. Yeah.
  6. Alabama (1, 1): Western Carolina, Florida State, Houston, UL-Monroe. The FSU game is actually going to be in Jacksonville, a move I wholly commend. I’m all for neutral site marquee matchups and I hope that series continues.
  7. Mississippi State (1, 1): @Tulane, Jacksonville State, Alabama-Birmingham, @West Virginia. @WVU isn’t bad, but is overshadowed by the better and more interesting matchups above. Also, Miss State is really bad and probably got scheduled as a BCS conference patsy.
  8. Mississippi (1, 1): @Memphis, Missouri, Louisiana Tech, Northwestern State. You know, I (and some other Tennesseans I know) consider Memphis part of Mississippi anyway, so is that really much of a road game? Between that and Mizzou is a nice attempt to make this look like a real schedule, but I know better. Also, 2 Louisiana schools and the UL-UM pick’em isn’t one of them? Shocking.
  9. Florida (1, 1,): Western Kentucky, Troy, Florida Atlantic, Florida State. Shame on you, UF. 2 Sun Belt teams, a DI-AA team that is moving to DI-A in football in 2009 because of Title IX. (You read that correctly.) If you didn’t have to play FSU every year, who would you play as the 4th team? (I firmly believe UM, FSU, and UF should all have to play each other.)
  10. Vanderbilt (1, 1): Richmond, Eastern Michigan, Miami (OH), Wake Forest. The Vandy of the ACC meets the Wake Forest of the SEC! Exciting! At least they’re not being scheduled as a BCS patsy this year.
  11. Kentucky (1,1): Eastern Kentucky, Kent State, Louisville, Florida Atlantic. Once again, if they didn’t have to play Louisville….
  12. Arkansas (0, 1): Troy, North Texas, Tennessee-Chattanooga, Florida International. 3 Sun Belt teams and a DI-AA Team. This may the worst schedule in major college football. I’m pretty sure there’s a Houston Nutt cellphone joke to be worked in somewhere, but I just can’t muster the spirit for it.

Well, that was depressing. Conclusions in the near future.