Thursday, January 7, 2010

Alabama 27, Texas 13

The SEC goes for its fourth consecutive national championship with Alabama against Texas tonight. I'm hoping we get a great game to close out what has overall been a pretty lackluster bowl season. For me it comes down to a couple of things: 1. Texas has only one wide receiver of any significance in Jordan Shipley and 2. Texas has no reliable running game. Nebraska and Texas A&M put serious scares into the Longhorns in their past two games. Couple that with the fact it's Mack Brown coaching in a big game (still only two conference titles ever) and it's very hard for me not to anticipate Alabama winning fairly comfortably. The winner will get invited to the White House, although there's a movement for President Obama to bring in Boise State as well. Perhaps he could arrange a touch football game on the White House lawn to settle the championship.

Jim Leavitt had circled the wagons and successfully kept any USF players from confirming that he had struck a player the way AOL's Fanhouse website alleged he had. The dam is cracking though, as a senior on this season's Bulls squad has now verified the original allegations. If what was alleged in Fanhouse's original report is what happened, Leavitt has to go. Getting a bowl win improved his status a little bit with the public, but shouldn't make any difference if investigators can verify this info. There were rumors on the college football scene over the weekend that this week might be it for Leavitt, but so far that hasn't been the case. Maybe this new confirmation changes that.

A school here in Columbia, SC is hiring a new football coach. The coach will be paid just over 104 thousand dollars a year, with incentive bonuses for postseason success. Sounds like South Carolina's hiring an assistant, right? No, that's what a local high school is spending on its football coach. This is completely insane. Lest you think this is a unique situation because of this particular coach's success rate, another school here has offered a coach 107 thousand to take their job. I've been bothered for a long time by the increasing commercialization of high school athletics, and this is what it's yielding. Unless a school has everything it could possibly need for educational purposes taken care of, there is simply no way to justify spending six figures on a coach in any sport.

The TV blog Warming Glow yesterday featured a clip from perhaps the worst looking pilot ever made. I can't begin to do justice to just how bad "Poochinski" is - you owe it to yourself to take the time to watch this. If this script actually got far enough along that it reached the point where someone paid for it, I shudder to think about what the network programming gurus rejected.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mack Brown is not a big game coach? Have you not been paying attention? Since 2004 he's 5-0 in bowl games (3-0 in BCS bowls). 6-3 against Oklahoma and Ohio State. 2-0 in the Big-12 Championship. 2-0 against the SEC. Funny how the missteps of Texas teams from 10 years ago still shape public perception of Mack Brown's coaching abilities to this day.

Anonymous said...

Dude, beating Arkansas doesn't exactly represent beating a conference. Further he was only 1-1 against Ohio St. and probably should have lost the game they won had it not been for a dropped TD pass by a certain OSU tight end.