Losing big money - now that's G!

One of the storylines everyone is going to be sick of leading into the upcoming NFL Draft will be what happens with Tim Tebow. The real focus point will be whether Jacksonville will draft Tebow or not and whether doing so will save the franchise. Those things you can count on, but I find columns like this one from Yahoo's Charles Robinson pretty irritating. Calling a Tebow to the Jaguars scenario "disastrous", Robinson proclaims...

"I don’t think Moses and the Israelites shared such an obsessed and needy relationship as the one between Tebow and the state of Florida. I can tell you what will happen if Tebow stays in Florida. Fans will expect immediate greatness. They won’t stay patient and wait for what is likely to be a protracted period of development if Tebow does indeed play quarterback at the next level. And when Tebow struggles – and he will struggle – they’ll point a finger at the franchise and wonder who is damaging the kid’s shot at NFL greatness."

because all of them Florida hicks is just a bunch of dummies. Most people I have talked with about Tebow are well aware he needs work to succeed as an NFL QB. If Robinson had paid attention to what Gator fans had to say about Tebow this season, he might realize they understand he's far from perfect or NFL ready. On the other hand, the kid is a winner. If used creatively, Tebow certainly is a powerful enough runner and a hard enough worker that he could do some good things for a team next year to help them. Maybe he can eventually develop into an NFL QB, but fans in a city that saw Byron Leftwich get drafted as a "franchise" player at the position can grasp that it's no sure thing. Especially given the amount of information available today, fanbases are generally smarter than the Charles Robinsons of the world think.

Alabama is unhappy that six of the teams they'll play in SEC action next football season are scheduled to have bye weeks before they go against the Crimson Tide. As a result, the Tuscaloosa News reports the SEC wants to change the schedule to placate them. The conference has always had the image of dancing to Bama's tune - this certainly won't help that go away anytime soon. As for the Crimson Tide's lament, I'd be more willing to consider this a problem if they were losing games to better rested opponents. When you've gone undefeated in back to back regular seasons, it's hard to see where the supposed harm comes in. Mississippi State will have two whole weeks to get ready for Bama - ooooh, scary! Each school's AD designed their schedules and placed their team's bye weeks where they did based on their own needs. If one of them loses out on that privilege because Alabama's unhappy, that's disgraceful.

Tennessee has a gigantic question to answer leading into their next season: who's the quarterback with Jonathan Crompton gone? Senior Nick Stephens has virtually no experience and is so unimpressive he couldn't beat out Crompton for any playing time at all. The Vols signed a crappy junior college QB last summer who's made minimal impact, and now they've signed another JUCO in Matt Simms. This would be of little note, except that Simms is the son of Phil Simms. A few of the items on Matt's resume include:

1. flicking off opposing fans and cursing at them after winning the state title his senior year
2. a four game suspension after a photo showing Simms preparing to smoke pot hit the web
3. quitting the team at Louisville when he wasn't promised to be a starter for 2009 despite having completed 4 of 10 with one touchdown pass the year before.

Sounds like just the kind of winner Lane Kiffin is looking for to lead the Volunteers to greatness! Because his dad's famous, expect this signing to be built into a lot more than the actual ability of Simms warrants.

If you have a successful and established brand name, it turns out to be a bad idea to ditch it just to try to sound hip and appeal to the youth market. "G"'s volume dropped 18 percent in the first half of the year, costing the company four percent of market share. Maybe that's because people were looking for Gatorade and had no idea what the heck G was? Before this idiotic name change was made, I would have thought someone was discussing a club drug if they'd asked me whether I used G. Sounds like I wasn't the only one.