With the stink of the last two games still freshly in the air, and the team (in my warped mind, anyway) barreling towards a 100-loss epic failure of a season, I'm curious as to what some of the story lines will be when our local nine are 24-58 at the All-Star break and our venerable burg hosts the world for this year's All-Star game?

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Someone else brought this up a few weeks ago with respect to basketball (and if this has already been covered for football I apologize), but I'm intrigued by the possibility of operating a "relegation" system for football, similar to what is done in Euro soccer leagues.

I've played around with different numbers in my head, but with 120 1A teams, it seems as if this could set up nicely with four sets of "conferences" with 30 teams each.

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With recent talk now swirling about OU and possibly UT (along with OSU and one other school) heading to the PAC-1x, I thought it might be interesting to just lay out the landscape of what could be coming should full conference realignment happen.

My assumption is that conference realignment is going to end up with four 16-team conferences, split into two eight-team divisions, which would give us a nice, neat eight-team playoff tournament (with the potential for two or four wild-cards) to determine a true national champion.

I am also assuming that our very own Big ? does not survive in this scenario, leaving the following conferences:

• B1G
• SEC
• PAC-16
• A fourth conference, which for now I will call Conference X.

Right now, in the six BCS conferences, there are a total of 65 teams (including TCU), plus BYU and Notre Dame, for a total of 67. Villanova has been mentioned as a team that might jump to 1-A as well, but I'll ignore them for now.

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I initially was very hesitant to mention this at all as I don't like to kiss and tell, but I met a guy yesterday who is VERY close to the Royals' situation, who CONFIRMED that the Royals are very involved in using advanced statistical analysis, to the point that various statistical services (specifically, SportVision and Stats, Inc.) indicated that the Royals are one of the more proactive teams with respect to this...indicated that DM is very open minded about any and all ways to evaluate major-league talent, including advanced stats...said the Royals have been chasing Paulino for a couple of years.

It may sound somewhat unbelievable, but given the fact that there are others that I know that are close to the Royals that know this individual, I believe what he's saying, especially when I discovered this individual's background.

I hate to be so cryptic but I don't want to compromise anyone's confidentiality and I thought it would be an interesting nugget for discussion.

As I sit here crapping my pants over the Royals' total lack of legitimate pitching options for 2012 and beyond, I thought that it might be instructive/helpful/soothing to take a look at some other teams to see how they have built their pitching rotations.

I wanted to focus on contenders and/or teams that are in a similar market situation to the Royals...teams like the Yankees really don't have much of a bearing on what we can do here in KC, so I picked the following teams to take a look at:

• Atl
• Fla
• stl
• Mil
• Cin
• Ari
• Col
• TB
• Tor
• Bal
• Cle
• Min
• CHW
• Tex
• Oak
• Sea

This pretty much covers over half of the teams in MLB, most of which are at least nominally in contention or at least competitive. My hypothesis before looking at any data is that on average, half of a team's starters are coming from outside the organization. For my purposes, "outside of the organization" means anything other than a draft or international signing.

I have broken the data into three segments: Free Agents (FA), Trade (T), or homegrown (HG). Also provided  are the averages for the whole data set, plus the three different "tiers", which I pretty much just arbitrarily assigned.

So, what does this tell us? On average, teams are getting 2-3 starters from their own system, 1 from free-agency, and 1-2 from trades. It also tells us that teams have been successful in a number of ways in building their rotations.

What does this mean for KC? Chances are, DM is going to have to make at least one trade and one FA signing to supplement what we've got in the system. On one hand, this makes me feel somewhat better that our farm system is not really that much out of the ordinary as far as how it produces pitching prospects. On the other hand, DM's track record with trades and FA signings has been mixed.

Right now, the Royals have 2 homegrown pitchers...getting a third (Monty, Lamb, Odirizzi, Dwyer) would put us above average, even for a small-market team. However, with limited resources, getting that third homegrown pitcher is imperative if we want to put out a legitimately competitive rotation.

I was going to put this in the comments but thought it worthy of it's own post...a lot has been made of the state of the Royals' rotation for this year and going forward...with one of the "fantastic four" currently up, the other three are taking steps backwards, either because of injury or ineffectiveness.

What has been shown is that the organization is still woefully thin on starting pitching depth at the upper levels...there are really no pitching prospects that are chomping at the bit at AA or AAA to come up and help this team next year.

Even if Montgomery turns things around and pushes for a spot in mid-2012 or 2013, by my count we need AT LEAST two more quality starters to fill out a competitive rotation. Currently, assuming that we want a competitive team, I would project the Royals' 2012 rotation as follows:

#1 OPEN

#2 Duffy

#3 Hochevar

#4 OPEN

#5 Random guy, such as Chen/Francis/Mazzaro

I am going to take the liberty in this post of saying that one of Montgomery/Duffy will not pan out as a legitimate #2/3/4 starting pitcher...for now, I'll put say that Duffy makes it and Monty doesn't. So, how do/will the Royals go about filling the remaining spots?

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I'm purposely posting this outside of the game thread because I don't want to bring everybody down...after all, winning the AFC West and hosting a playoff game is a good accomplishment for this team, especially after the past four years.

However, I've seen this movie before, and I didn't like it the last few times. This team, as currently constructed, is going nowhere in the playoffs-this year or any future year, until we get a legitimate, top-shelf QB.

As far as today goes, here are the stats:

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I thought it might be interesting to see what KU's first 5 opponents have fared, just to give some context to our season to date:

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I thought I owed it to everybody, considering what a demagogue I've been over the past week regarding Turner Gill, to say, I was wrong...not wrong that he may or may not be the right coach for KU, as I think the next few seasons will tell us that, but wrong that Gill was in over his head as the head coach at KU.

I was in the stands today, and while I fully expected to be permanently hitting the exits at halftime, I am so proud to be a Jayhawk right now...today's team made me proud....and hopefully, over the next few paragraphs, I can explain where my absolutely venomous anger over the NDSU loss came from.

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Sitting here thinking about what the 2011 Royals will look like and where we may need to fill some (short-term) holes on the roster. Someone else did a fanshot but thought I'd go a little deeper:

Salary numbers approximate; I did my best estimates of arb values

C Kendall (2.75)

C Pena/May (400k)

1B Butler (3.00)

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