Below, my temporary EDSBS colleague Senor Westerdawg, drawing from ratings of which I have no knowledge, has identified "The Most Underrated Revenge Game of 2006" from among a pack of likely contenders, including Oklahoma-Texas, Florida State-Florida, Michigan-Ohio State and Notre Dame-Michigan State. Out-vengeancing all of those annual hate-fests in Paul's estimation, however, is the typically tamer Auburn at South Carolina throwdown on Sept. 28 - not because, as one might suspect, impatient, grudge-holding SMQ fave Steve Spurrier will have his charges geared to atone for 2005's horrific 48-7 loss on the Plains, in which the 'Cock-N-Fire offense failed to enter Auburn territory before well into the fourth quarter. Rather, Westerdawg forecasts revenge will be sweetest for the Tigers' eerily-well rounded, all-SEC back du jour, USC transfer Kenny Irons, who had not yet emerged as one of the most unstoppable weapons in the league when he faced his former team in '05 but will not spoil this final chance to cement said status by galloping for hundreds upon hundreds of yards against his old mates (and against Carolina Defensive Coordinator Tyrone Nix, former Southern Miss linebacker and coach and very large human for whom I have too much, um, respect to second Paul's prediction).

I will make another prediction, though, itself related to a "Revenge Game of the [Insert Appropriate Amount of Time Depending on Your Well-Reasoned Perspective]": Louisville, triple OT losers in Morgantown last year, will beat West Virginia and win the Big East's automatic Mo' Money bid.

This would not seem to be very out on the limb at all, as the Cardinals were monster favorites in the league in '05 - after displaying monster juggernaut status in C-USA in '04 - and mostly played like it, save an early, completely inexplicable wipeout versus South Florida and the very end of the game against West Virginia, when U of Hell blew a 24-7 fourth quarter lead - with a little help, it should be noted, from later-reprimanded Big East officials on a critical onside kick. Louisville also returns the Big East's leading passer, leading rusher (and two more who combined to top 1,100 yards), leading receiver (and another in the top five) and seven starters on defense. The Cards also led the Big East in scoring (29 points more than WVU in league games, 136 more in all games, with seven straight games over 40, two games over 60 against BCS conference opponents and 30 and 24, respectively, in two games against top 10 national defenses without its starting quarterback) and outgained conference opponents by almost 175 yards per game; they outgained the Mountaineers by 60 yards head-to-head, the difference in that game turning on a +1 turnover advantage and a failed two-point conversion to tie on the final play of the third overtime.

I.E., Louisville is about to blow the fuck up. Again. And West Virginia is standing a little too close.

Don't you know who I am? I'm the juggernaut, bitch!

Not that West Virginia didn't deserve to win - but look what that victory, along with the stunning Sugar Bowl upset of Georgia, has wrought when projecting the upcoming season: the 'Neers got early smooches from Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel, then full-on, under-the-skirt petting from ESPN's Pat Forde, who proclaimed WVU No. 1 in May. Preseason magazines came out shortly after, all ranking West Virginia in the top ten, from 3 (Lindy's) to 5 (The Sporting News) to 6 (Athlon, which also rated it the No. 1 "Program on the Rise") and this week topping the Big East media's preseason polls.

So does anyone else get the feeling this team's going down to Maryland in a Sept. 14 Thursday night game, with at least two more humiliating defeats to follow? It's easy to forget, with the way it started flattening folks later in the season, how much of a defensive team West Virginia was, and half that unit - and just about all of its principles - are gone. It's also easy to forget how one-dimensional the team was, and I'll will believe this team is some '95 Nebraska, run-for-280-at-will steamroller when I see it; it is sophomore slump time for Pat White all the way. I won't go as far as (apparently) the only other 'Neer skeptic this summer, Phil Steele, who picks WVU third behind Pittsburgh (though his top, uh, 47 has West Virginia No. 17, slightly below my projection, and Pitt way down at 39), but I've already elucidated the historical warning signs, all of which point to "bust":

Mediocre program with little to no recent championship success + Low to moderate expectations in Year X + Quietly unexpected success (one-two losses) in Year X + Shocking postseason upset + Returning starting quarterback= Inflated expectations, inevitable disappointment in Year Y

That formula was fleshed out with "Recent Bust Corollaries," examples of similar recent hype cum ineptitude from Arizona, Texas A&M, Oregon State and, just last year, Purdue. It happens on smaller scales, too - like, what was Iowa State doing at the top of the preseason polls in the Big XII North last year?

It's not that West Virginia is going to be bad - it's not impossible, but very unlikely it will miss a bowl game, and probably will play in a decent. But over the long haul, the major arc, what's the high point of that program? Can it do better than an 11-1, conference-title-winning, Sugar Bowl-upsetting season? I see no reason yet anyone outside of the state of West Virginia should believe it can.

Given the general attitude of this site towards him in the past, I'm not sure if I as a guest am allowed to say good thing about Heisman Pundit here, but what the hell: his idea for a "football major," with a few core classes in general subjects, sounds like a pretty damn good one:

"
Here is the freshman curriculum for a music major at Auburn University:

Core History
Core Math
English Composition
Core Fine Arts
Performance Attendance
Music Theory
Music Skills
Performance
Piano Skills
Ensemble

Granted, the music major must take a group of core classes and I am not advocating that the general classwork be thrown out. But take note that the music major is also taking classes that apply to his particular skill--playing a musical instrument.

Here is what a Football Major curriculum could look like for an Auburn freshman:

Core History
Core Math
English composition
Football practice
Film Study
Weight Training
Sports Management
Sports Media
Nutrition

Basically, the player would get course credit for the activites he already participates in, plus there would be a special curriculum to educate them on how to be a professional athlete down the road.

Now, I can hear you saying already "But HP, a lot of these guys aren't going to play pro ball. They need something to fall back on."

Well, I can say the same thing for the Auburn cello major. What are the odds that he goes on to play for a major philharmonic? Many music majors end up doing things completely unrelated to their field because, like in any field, only the best make it to the top. The vast majority end up teaching.

For those players who don't make it, there is always teaching and all kinds of related fields, from strength coach, to personal trainer, to agent, to sports marketer, to sports commentator, that a player can get in to.

And a player wouldn't have to major in football. If he was still interested in economics, he could go that route.

But for the player that does have a pro future, he gets to the NFL as a more mature product with a better understanding of how his career works. He would have a clue about everything from contracts to agents, to how to deal with the media, to how to learn various offensive or defensive principles.
"

Both of these guys should be be PhDs.

Given that so many players, even ones who don't become long-term pros, are going to stay in the game in some capacity because it's what they know and love - like a music major knows and loves music - this proposal makes sense. It's not as if there's no living to be made in sports outside of an NFL uniform.

Of course, this will never, ever happen, not in the productive lifetime of anyone reading this blog, and the many legions of James Gundlachs in the academic world - nice people, certainly, smart, hardworking people, but ones who do not like athletes getting sweat and dirt on the ivory tower, much less actually coming inside of it - will continually ensure this, even if the physical and sports industry training one could get by studying, and then successfully executing at tremendous speeds, the intricacies of the cover three zone blitz from a base nickel set against a trips hi-lo read off of play-action probably matches the social and eventually professional value of, say, a course that asks, "Is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony a marvel of abstract architecture culminating in a gender-free paean to human solidarity, or does it model the process of rape?"

And who wants to argue against that?

So NCAA Football 2007 is exciting! And, er, well, pretty much exactly the same as NCAA Football 2006. Which was itself pretty much the same as NCAA Football 2005. But look at all the new, temporarily accurate rosters and ratings to obsessively tinker with over the next eight months!

I really do update the rosters and numbers to my own standards with single-minded, rabid compulsivity, a habit I first tried to hide from my current NCAA-playing roommate but now don't even bother to conceal. The continued improvement of the EA Sports games has had the side effect of making me crazy about getting every element of the virtual game as close to the real game as possible: if the quarterback from Akron is rated four points too high, my entire dynasty feels fraudulent and uneasily teetering on the edge of absurd unreality.

Which is one reason I'd like to see both NCAA and Madden - which I barely even looked at last year - drop the number ratings altogether and go to a player evaluation system that looks like what they currently do for the draft and recruiting: list player 40 times, bench press and squat numbers and generic descriptions for certain abilities, i.e. "great hands" or "poor arm strength," etc., rather than be so specific as to say "78 speed," as the former is what a coach actually has to work with (and will not make me say, "Hey, Video Brady Quinn should be a 65 speed, not a 62!")

Continue reading this post »

The Birmingham News eats The Huntsville Times' dust this morning on the about-face of Auburn prof James Gundlach, chief whistleblower in The New York Times' initial indictment of the program's practice of steering athletes towards easy courses, who now says he will not participate in the investigation - though he was met with "heartwarming" applause by 10 or 12 faculty members in the parking lot Monday.

A quick follow-up to Monday's point about other colleges steering athletes in clusters towards one or two majors. I looked up a few old media guides and programs (which restricted themselves to senior bios only) last night and found that, in 2003, Southern Miss players were overwhelmingly majoring in coaching and sport administration or criminal justice by huge margins; UAB players were only slightly less likely to be in history (one of my two majors) or criminal justice, Memphis players to take "interdisciplinary studies" or Nebraska players business administration - though, to be fair, the Huskers have a ton of players and a pretty wide range of disciplines represented on the team.

A couple quick looks at random schools' online media guides this morning shows USC has a lot of sociology majors, including Dwayne Jarrett, on its roster; Florida State has an unusual number of players studying "social science"; and in 2005, Louisville players could be largely grouped into marketing or sports administration (or, even more often, "undecided," an option certainly not restricted to jocks).

I also quickly looked at other schools, including LSU, Tennessee, Ohio State and Texas, but the information on player majors in those guides was either too time-consuming to compile (as in Texas' case, because UT, like Ohio State, hasn't released its probably record-breaking '06 media guide, at least online) or not apparently available in the bios of many players (LSU and Tennessee presume, correctly in most cases, that the media cares not about this superfluous element of athletic life). The only two guides I glanced at that seemed to show a legitimate smattering of studies in a range of fields were those of Florida and Georgia - though UGA suspiciously offers the broadest possible major, presumably to all students, termed "Arts and Sciences," a colossally comprehensive combination that seems fairly impossible to adequately cover in a few years. Why not just let folks major in "Studies"?

Anyway: not scientific, small sample size, no evidence any of those courses were or are inherently easy, etc. etc., but the prevalence of this not-at-all new or secret trend is threatened only if the NCAA finds Auburn was wrong to steer athletes toward certain classes, which it seems a large number of major athletic schools have done for decades. Otherwise, it will have to be determined that these particular sociology classes were dunce-worthy on a fraudulent level, and probably also that the AU athletic department or the university itself (possessed by its evil, evil boosters) knew it. That won't be easy to do.

Today =

Ah-ah-ah-ah-aaah-meeeeennnnn

There's work, naturally, but come quittin' time the roommate will pick up his reserve copy at an undisclosed local outlet and we will commence to droolin'. And then, of course, to criticizin' - I hope to have a review of my initial opinions up here later on tonight. The only real OMG teh Ea SpOrTs RoX! changes as far as I've heard - and I don't keep up with these things, so there may be some other surprises in store for me - is that the crowd actually looks like a crowd and not an animated blanket designed by Atari via 1984.

Modest hopes: the addition of gang tackling - and more importantly the ability to make a tackle when the ball carrier is in the process of destroying some other defender, rather than just breaking the second hit as well by default - better response out of defenders on the deep ball (DBs tend to sit there and let well-covered receivers make a catch because they "react" like the ball's going to just fall into their hands, rather than do what every DB is taught and go up for it at the highest point) and maybe the ability to complete a quick slant or hitch, the easiest throws in reality but the most impossible on the game, even compared to bombs, which last year were embarassingly - and boringly - simple to connect on. And while I prefer a pretty high degree of difficulty, I'm sick of being out-pancaked 125-2 on Heisman level, too.

The ideal, end-all desire for a computer AI that even occasionally adjusts (in a fair, non-omniscient, I-know-your-play-cuz-I'm-the-computer sort of way) based on play-calling and formation tendencies and sometimes audibles or makes assignment adjustments when you blitz too much - leading to, you know, actual strategy, instead of allowing you to find the three effective plays on any given version and run the shit out of them over and over - is likely to remain but a dream. Oh, for the day when a virtual screen or draw looks remotely like the real thing...

Mere days after blowing up his university's athletic department, sociology department and general academic integrity in the pages of the most widely read and influential newspaper in the country, Auburn professor James Gundlach told a university investigative committee and The Huntsville Times Sunday the whistleblowin' scene is, like, dead, man:

"The committee has been in touch with me asking to meet with them tomorrow," Gundlach said Sunday in an interview with The Hunts-ville Times. "I e-mailed them and said my cooperation with them is over."

Gundlach said he made his decision after reading a report in Friday's Huntsville Times that administration officials said he was motivated, at least in part, to make his allegations in a story released Thursday by The New York Times because he was passed over when Petee, a criminology professor, was promoted in 2002.

Gundlach said Sunday he never wanted the job and never told university officials he did.

"The only university officials I've talked to about this since the (New York) Times reporter first appeared on campus are two members of the committee that is supposed to investigate," Gundlach said. "I remember, at one time in that meeting, one of the two people asked me if I had supported Petee when he ran for chair. I said no, and we moved on.

"What seems to me is that somehow information from that got passed on somehow or someway to people that certainly shouldn't have been talking to you about what I said at that meeting. They are saying no talking until it is quiet, but apparently somebody on that committee and other people at the university saw fit to use that to, in effect, discredit me.

"It's a total falsehood. The only contested office I ran for was director of sociology, and I won that. There are no sour grapes here. It was a total fabrication."

Though the controversy has swirled around football players who took so-called "direct reading" or "directed study" courses under Petee, Gundlach said his main motivation was that Petee is "unfit as a department administrator."

"I have never said this was something that was done specifically for athletes," Gundlach said. "My concern was that the athletes were something that was going to call attention to it and lead to embarrassing situations. If the athletes weren't there, nobody would care.

"Since I've been thinking about the athletic rules and other such things, it is clear that everything Petee did for athletes was also available for other students. In terms of the letter of NCAA regulations, there are probably no problems."
(emphasis added)

Gundlach's retiring soon, and, man, is he burning bridges with everybody. Good thing he thought about "the athletic rules and other such things" before he took it someplace like The New York Times. Wait, what? Oh.

This news es goot, veddy goot for the university and athletic department, as their accusor is essentially admitting he succumbed to professional and personal motivations of the petty academic ego. He was pissed at his boss.

Initially, that anger seemed justifiable and born of integrity. Now, he's backtracking, ex-players are falling over each other to deny his charges and major schools everywhere hold their breath hoping this case becomes one of personal animosity and blows on over (check your media guides and programs for player majors, fans - odds are they're clustered in one or two fields. At Southern Miss, it was Coaching and Athletic Administration, where a disproportionate number of athletes actually makes sense, and Criminal Justice). This one's already going overboard on ambiguity and conjecture, and getting stickier fast.

Normally, I’d never watch the ESPYs, an award show made completely redundant by the fact that every sport already hands out individual awards – what, exactly, is the difference between the Worldwide Leader’s College Football Player of the Year and the Heisman Trophy? The answer, of course, is none: Reggie Bush won both, because the Disney-ABC-ESPN mega-sportstainment conglomerate – whether it actually casts the votes or not – ultimately make the decisions for voters based on which highlights it decides to show and which players it decides to fawn over and over-expose via the most horrible possible music and (oft-thumped Heisman voter Stewart Mandel, who presumably actually watches enough football to deserve a voice in choosing the MOCFPITN, makes a good point along these lines in an interview last week with the also oft-thumped – by me - Heisman Pundit, and also has a reasonable solution: fewer, better-informed voters). And "Best Moment," you know, must be the autistic kid raining basically uncontested threes - you cannot argue against that moment as the best, even if, say, your team won its first World Series in 89 years or you were moved by Adam Morrison’s genuine reaction when his team blew its big lead to UCLA in the NCAA Tournament or were roused, simultaneously with three friends, out of your seat, screaming "Oh my God!" when the ball suddenly popped out of Jerome Bettis' grasp on the goal line at the end of a playoff game. Those emotions did not measure up.

Anyway, when you’re getting smacked in pool in a bar during a weekend stop in New Orleans, you’ll watch even the darndest tape-delayed corporate schmooze-fests, "">risque" jokes and extended in-show commercials be damned. Oh, Neil Armstrong is Lance Armstrong’s dad? Ho ho. Wait, what, not really? And you mean the guy in the spacesuit’s not really Neil…oh, you’re good, ESPN. You are on top of your game. Matt Leinart takes home a mantelpiece for his role in a game ? He is one lucky man, I’ll tell you what. Even when he loses, he wins!

My real dad abandoned me when I was two.