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Around the SEC: Florida poised for Kentucky showdown, Nick Saban fired up for Texas
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Around the SEC: Florida poised for Kentucky showdown, Nick Saban fired up for Texas
The Swamp will be rocking in an SEC East Division showdown with Kentucky in Gainesville.
Comments
After a pretty good - but not great - opening weekend, the two biggest games this weekend are Pitt/Tennessee and Florida/Kentucky. After that take your pick: Baylor/BYU is fascinating for reasons. Which makes it an excellent weekend to do shopping and chores. Everyone else in the top 15 - I get that the four above are flirting with the top 15 as is Arkansas - is playing cupcakes. Sadly that does include USC-Stanford (would have been a great game 10 years ago) and Texas-Alabama.
I believe we are playing Samford, not Sanford.
We are the Bulldogs, playing the Samford Bulldogs in Sanford stadium. Confusing, Mike, I know. I’m sure the error will soon be corrected.
As happens every year, there's been discussion on the worth/point of playing these FCS games. The utter lack of appeal from a competition standpoint gets weighed against the financial benefit to the smaller programs, and everyone just sort of shrugs in the end. BA was taking about it on the podcast the other day, and it's all got me thinking...
Since these games are just glorified charity cases anyway, why not just remove the veil? Take the national yearly average spent on these games over, say, the last 5 years. Average that amount out over all P5 teams, and say this is what you owe every year. It would be an outright charity designed to promote and maintain program development at the smaller level. Give the fund a name like For the Love of Football or something, and let the FCS decide how to divvy it up. Once the fund is established, the next step is to simply ban Power 5 vs. FCS games.
Now, obviously, way too many people would have to agree to this for it to ever happen. But I think that's a shame. I mean, if the powers that be don't believe in the altruistic benefit of these games enough to merely continue the payments that they would normally be shelling out anyway, while getting better games for their programs every year in exchange, then they're basically conceding that that was always a BS excuse to keep scheduling these games that nobody wants to watch.
The real question for the Florida game is, who has a better rushing attack. Gonna be a real swamp there tomorrow night, lol.
I wonder if Utah (PAC12) was as over-rated as Oregon (PAC12) was.
I find the "overrated" thing unfair. No other conference puts an emphasis on paying top dollar for coaching staffs, facilities and recruiting budgets in order to attract and develop the best athletes. Some individual programs do: Ohio State and (depending on who is the AD) Southern Cal. FSU and Miami did in times past, as did Texas during the early Mack Brown years, but who knows what they are doing now. Because of this, there is going to be a massive gap between the best of the SEC and everybody else.
So after you get past the top 2-4 teams in the SEC, where do you put everybody else? Another way of putting it: say Utah and Oregon was overrated. (This applies more to Oregon, as Utah beat them twice last year, and by 4 TDs each game. Plus Utah still has their coaching staff from last year, returned their starting QB and RB etc.) Who else are you going to rank in front of them? The #1 and #2 teams in the ACC last year: Pitt and Wake Forest. Enough said. Notre Dame? Cincinnati clearly beat them in South Bend - no, they didn't get lucky and if anything the referees were trying their best to help ND - and you saw what Alabama did to Cincinnati. Michigan and Ohio State? Well you saw what UGA did to Michigan. And both Michigan and Oregon beat Ohio State.
You have to put SOMEBODY at #7 and #11. That the best of the SEC outclasses everyone else doesn't change that.
Saban is a "masterful leader" because he has the best players to lead.
I'm hoping Kentucky wins.