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SEC officials keeping the college game exciting
Embrace the Blind Mice ... Hell, It's All We've Got
Barring a miracle upset in the coming weeks, the BCS Championship Game picture is already pretty much set; an expected three-horse Heisman race between last year's winner, 2007's winner, and the '08 runner-up hasn't come close to living up to its preseason hype; and the usual suspects — Al Groh, Charlie Weis, and Ralph Friedgen — are on their respective coaching hot seats. Again.
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| You have good reason to be upset, Les. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images) |
Top quarterbacks have been sidelined with injuries, top running backs have been stuffed at the line and top receivers have been quieted by defensive backfields from coast to coast ... or suspended by the NCAA for talking with Deion Sanders.
Dominant defenses and the race for the third at-large BCS bowl bid seem to be the most compelling storylines of the season.
Ho hum.
The conspiracy theorist and muckraker in me yearns for the controversy of years past. Where's the nine-team sludge of one-loss BCS conference teams fighting for those BCS Championship Game bids? Where are the hundreds of armchair pundits and college football talking heads demanding for their self-concocted versions of playoff systems to be put into play ASAP? Where's Mike Gundy challenging a room of reporters to a fight or John L. Smith smacking himself upside the head at the podium? Where are the BCS antitrust lawyers?! Guys, we miss you and your doctrines and your fancy legalese talk. Fellas? Come out, come out, wherever you are.
2009? Eh. Everything's just so . . . calm. Too calm.
You see, we college football fans are no different than the teenage girls clicking refresh on TMZ.com 10 times a day for the latest Taylor Swift gossip. We're no better than the middle-aged couch-bound women obsessed with Jon, Kate and the Ed Hardy wardrobe and the rooster hairdo that accompany them.
We love dirt. We love juice. And we love controversy.
This year? Well, we've been stripped of pretty much everything worth screaming about.
Thank the football gods for SEC officials. At least we've still got them.
Depicted in just about every SEC town outside of Gainesville and Tuscaloosa as blind mice dressed in vertical stripes over Crimson Tide red and Gators orange, the officiating in the SEC has been the saving grace to what's been a rather controversy-free college football season.
Sure, LaGarrette Blount threw the sucker punch felt 'round the world on Sept. 3, but he's back on the Oregon squad now, and just about everyone outside of Pete Fiutak is treating it as some inspiring story of redemption. Yawn.
Where would we be without those bumbling SEC refs, their horrendous officiating, and the fans and coaches who despise them?
After last week's all-too-obvious Patrick Peterson interception, in which the LSU cornerback confirmed that he not only had one, but both, feet inbounds (and had the divot marks to prove it), a new suggestion was made — that SEC officials were protecting Alabama and Florida, ensuring that at least one of the two teams would be playing in the BCS Championship Game, and thus earning the conference big bucks for the fourth straight year.
I've read the sentiment on numerous SEC message boards this week and received countless emails about the subject from readers, and though I've yet to hear it come out of the mouth of a player, coach or member of the media — the fact the thought is even out there is . . . well, a welcomed breath of fresh air.
We need controversies in this sport. It's what makes it so much more exciting than the No Fun League. You can have your storybook seasons out of Duke and Temple. I'll take the nation's college football hotbed up in arms about crappy officiating, instead.
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| Is there a Tony Soprano-esque agreement among the referees? (Jim McIsaac / Getty Images) |
The fact that there are now rumors of some Tony Soprano/Johnny Sack-esque agreement among the $500-a-week part-time SEC referees is music to my muckraking ears.
In truth, I know SEC officials aren't really on the take or in cahoots. They're too consistent for that. Consistently incompetent.
Based on their 2009 performances thus far, there's simply no way these guys are capable of ever pulling off something so intricate, so interconnected, and so complicated.
I'm allowed to say this. Mike Slive can't fine me.
SEC coaches aren't as lucky.
Though Lane Kiffin and Urban Meyer have been the most vocal against the officials this season — Meyer's recent criticism cost him $30,000 — there have been plenty of other critics.
Vanderbilt coach Bobby Johnson lashed out on the officials after two reviews went against his Commodores in a 14-10 loss to South Carolina in October. Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen called for disciplinary action against the Southeastern Conference replay official who worked the Bulldogs' 29-19 loss to Florida, after a Gators touchdown that might have been a fumble was not overturned. And Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino openly questioned the 10-3 penalty differential following the Razorbacks' 23-20 October loss in Gainesville.
Nick Saban and Les Miles came out and defended the officials after Saturday's weekly nationally televised SEC officiating bloopers tape, but the performance was enough to garner a statement from Rogers Redding, the Southeastern Conference's coordinator of football officials.
"This is not broke," Redding said of the SEC's officiating on Monday. "It doesn't need fixing. ... I think we've had a really good season so far."
Ah, good ol' Rogers Redding! You gotta love the guy. Such a jokester! You need someone to speak at the next Comedy Central roast? Get Rogers Redding! Need an emcee for your corporate event? Get Rogers Redding! The guy's like Dane Cook, Larry David and Larry The Cable Guy all in one — he's pure comedy gold!
Oh, wait. He's not kidding? Never mind.
Redding noted on Monday that with practically all of the SEC's games now on TV — and many getting national coverage through the SEC's deals with ESPN and CBS — the conference's officials are under much more scrutiny than ever before.
"It comes with the territory," he said. "There's going to be more scrutiny" in the SEC than in most other leagues.
So, it's like a tree falling in the woods thing. Because more people are watching these games, the unacceptable job these men are doing on a weekly basis is being noticed more. In other words, they've always been bad. We're just more aware of it now.
Either way, I'll take it. I love the SEC officials because — not despite — of all their bumps and bruises. They add some excitement to our Saturdays. As if watching weekly SEC showdowns wasn't enough, we now have the added element of predicting when the first horrible call of the day will be made.
The SEC officials aren't what's wrong with college football this season. Rather, they're everything that's right. Without them, we'd have nothing worth screaming about. And what fun would that be?
The Pick: SEC officials make their first bad call of the day six minutes into Saturday's Tennessee-Ole Miss game.
It's That Time of Year Again ...
It's mid-November, which means three things:
In a world mired in turbulent times, it's comforting to know that some things never change.
Unless, of course, you're a fan of the Gamecocks. In that case, it's just another winter of duck, cover, and wait 'til next year. Like they seemingly always do, the Gamecocks entered the calendar year's 11th month as a 6-2 bowl eligible team with an outside shot at an SEC East Division title.
Yet, after back-to-back embarrassing road defeats at Tennessee and Arkansas in which they were outscored 64-29, the Gamecocks proved that this season's squad is no different than the ones before them: in the middle of the SEC pack, looking uglier and uglier each week and all but completely irrelevant on the national scene by the second weekend in November.
The Gamecocks looked horrendous in Saturday's 33-16 loss at Arkansas. On top of sloppy play on the field, the coaches seemed to struggle getting the plays in, resulting in several unnecessary timeouts and one notable delay of game penalty.
On the field, the Gamecocks were even sloppier. With the game still in contention, an errant snap was heaved into the end zone for a safety and there was a missed extra point. In classic Gamecocks November fashion, USC went on to give up 23 unanswered points in the second half.
For the first time since he arrived in South Carolina in 2005, there are legitimate calls for Steve Spurrier's head in Columbia. The Gamecocks haven't scored more than 16 points in any of their last four SEC games and the defense — usually the strength of these Spurrier teams — has regressed mightily over the past few games.
South Carolina's ranked 98th in the nation in offense, and put up only 16 points on the second-to-worst defense in the SEC. After Saturday night's loss, tight end Weslye Saunders questioned receivers coach and co-playcaller Steve Spurrier Jr., saying the WRs are the assistant's "priority" in the passing game.
With Spurrier Jr. now calling some of the offensive plays — and not everyone so happy about that — the whole situation has a very Lou/Skip Holtz era feel to it. We know how that ended. Could the Spurrier era be headed down the same path?
In 2007, the Gamecocks started the season 6-1 with wins over No. 12 Georgia, Mississippi State, No. 8 Kentucky and on the road in Chapel Hill vs. North Carolina, only to lose their last five games of the season and finish a mediocre 6-5.
In '08, South Carolina closed out the season by being outscored by Florida, Clemson and Iowa by a combined score of 118-30.
Another November, another tailspin. Here we go again.
It doesn't help the Spurriers' case that across the state, Clemson's 39-year-old wunderkind coach has his Tigers playing high-quality football and ranked in the Top 25. Is The Ol' Ball Coach suddenly just another old football coach?
Of course, it can all be salvaged in South Carolina's final two games. With wins over Florida and/or Clemson, the Gamecocks would not only be shocking the college football world and saving their own seasons, but they'd be throwing major wrenches in the storybook years of two of their top rivals.
You'd hate to think of a program with as much tradition as South Carolina's dismissed merely as "spoilers", but at this point in the season — that's just what the Gamecocks will be.
Florida's the undefeated top team in the land, while Clemson's 4-2 in conference play and controls its own automatic berth destiny in the ACC. Though a loss to South Carolina wouldn't derail the Tigers ACC Championship dreams, it certainly would put a damper on what's being discussed by many in the state as the most successful Clemson season in years.
Based on the Gamecocks performance of late, it's difficult to imagine victories in either contest.
Though some would insist otherwise, I think Spurrier's currently on the "kinda warm" seat, if not fully perched on the "hot" one. In five years with USC, Spurrier has produced a 34-26 record and has sent the Gamecocks to bowl games in four of those seasons.
And though the team is rich with young talent on both sides of the ball, these Novembers — one after the next, after the next — puts him in the same pool as Charlie Weis, Al Groh and Ralph Friedgen, if not on the diving board, two losses away from jumping right in.
Perhaps Coach Spurrier said it best in his press conference after the loss Saturday when he told reporters, "We're just not very good right now."
No surprise, really. After all, it is November.
With two more bad November losses to close out the '09 season, there's a chance he won't be around to experience another bad one next year.
The Pick: Florida 30, South Carolina 7
The Case for Andy
With the Heisman race currently an all but open audition for someone to step up and grab the darn thing, there's a small(er) school quarterback worth taking note of.
His games aren't nationally televised on ESPN or CBS, his name wasn't mentioned in any of the preseason discussions on the award, and he hasn't been on the cover of any magazines. Ever.
And his name isn't Case Keenum.
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| Maybe it's time for TCU QB Andy Dalton to be listed among the Heisman hopefuls. ( Stephen Dunn / Getty Images) |
I present the case of TCU quarterback, Andy Dalton.
Who?
OK, so his name isn't as flashy as Colt McCoy or C.J. Spiller (with those names, were those two anything but destined for college football stardom straight from birth?), his stats aren't as mind-blowing as Keenum's and his national profile isn't as large as Tim Tebow or Jimmy Clausen's.
But in a year where "surviving and advancing" has been the name of the BCS game, perhaps it's Andy Dalton, the Horned Frogs' lightly recruited junior quarterback, who deserves some Heisman love.
In TCU's last four games, Dalton has thrown for 10 touchdowns and no interceptions. He hasn't thrown a pick in his last 111 attempts, the longest streak of his career. He's also fourth in the nation in passing efficiency with a 162.71 rating. He's turnover-free and he's the quarterback of the No. 4 ranked undefeated team in the nation.
In wins at Clemson and Virginia, it was Dalton's steely reserve that got the job done in the fourth quarter. He ran the offense to perfection in the Horned Frogs' eye-raising blowout of BYU a few weeks back.
Though best known for their stingy defense, TCU has posted back-to-back games of over 500 yards in offense for the first time since 2006.
Whereas fellow unbeatens Florida, Alabama and Boise State have struggled with some opponents of late, TCU seems to only be getting better and winning in more impressive fashion as the weeks progress.
Along with their big, bad state-brethren in Austin, the Horned Frogs are playing arguably the best brand of football in the entire nation.
Could Andy Dalton be the reason why?
Dalton was inexplicably overlooked by his hometown when the selection committee for the Davey O'Brien National Quarterback Award — named in honor of the legendary Frogs quarterback — neglected to name him a semifinalist.
It's nothing new. The guy's been overlooked all season.
He will have his hands full in Saturday's much anticipated clash with Utah. If he has a lights-out performance, it might be time to insert him into the Heisman conversation.
Even if his name isn't exactly Heisman-worthy.
The Pick: TCU 33, Utah 6
Schrager's current BCS projections
Title game: Florida vs. Texas
Rose Bowl: Oregon vs. Ohio State
Fiesta Bowl: USC vs. Pittsburgh
Sugar Bowl: Alabama vs. TCU
Orange Bowl: Clemson vs. Iowa
Schrager's current Heisman ballot
1. Colt McCoy, QB, Texas
2. C.J. Spiller, RB, Clemson
3. Tim Tebow, QB, Florida
4. Case Keenum, QB, Houston
5. Mark Ingram, RB, Alabama
Upset picks of the week
I went 1-1 last Saturday, falling to 7-11 on the season. I was wrong to pick South Carolina in a November game, but had Kansas State beating Kansas in Manhattan.
This week, I like Butch Davis' Tar Heels to beat Miami in Chapel Hill and for Cincinnati to fall to Noel Devine and the West Virginia Mountaineers.
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