Geographically, it’s preposterous, but make no mistake: In today’s landscape, Texas is a much bigger fish than Notre Dame in almost every other significant way — competitively, financially, as a fertile recruiting ground and most of all for all the tiny explosions the Longhorns’ exit would set off in the Big 12. UT is an anchor to any heartland superconference: Subtract the most successful program in the conference, the richest athletic department in the nation and the focus of the state that supplies a huge percentage of the league’s total players in one fell swoop, and what’s left in football looks like Oklahoma, maybe Nebraska, and a wheat-covered version of the Big East or Mountain West. The dominoes that could fall in the absence of Texas — beginning with Colorado bolting to the Pac-10, one of the de rigeur scenarios out West — could leave the conference a shell of its current self.
“No one seems to recognize the genius of this suggestion, which may be evidence of its genius,” DeCourcey wrote. “Everyone else seems to be thinking small and boring, but as I suggested not long after the Big Ten Network was conceived, Texas is the one program that could dramatically expand the money-making power of the league’s cable operation.”
Much later than DeCourcey offered the suggestion, the two parties finally have inched toward each other with “preliminary exchanges.”
Would Texas move to the PAC 10?
I expect Texas to use the Pac-10 for a better deal from the Big 12, leaving the Pac-10 with the two largest television markets available: Denver (Colorado) and Salt Lake City (Utah).
The Dawg’s View has a playoff plan.
A couple of years ago, I came up with a formula in which there would be only 96 D-I teams, in 8 conferences of 12 teams apiece. The playoffs would consist of 8 conference championship games (round 1) and then a 4-week seeded tournament of those conference champions.
All playoffs are on neutral sites, (aka “bowls”) and the “big four” would become the “big six”, including both the quarter and semi final rounds. The National Championship game could then either find a permanent home, or continue to rotate among those big six stadiums.
Bulldog’s Blog has a chart comparing coaches salaries last year with this year. I expect these numbers to change dramaticly next year. Current offensive coaches will get big raises on get gone.
Before long football statues will be attractions across the South – anyone remember the old alligator wrestling/reptile farms. Let’s put the Herschel statue in Wrightsville – right by the Confederate monument.
Not content to let Alabama steal all of the SEC’s idolatrous mojo with its pantheon of championship coaches, Florida forged ahead last week with a plan to erect statues of all three Gator Heisman winners, Steve Spurrier, Danny Wuerffel and Tim Tebow, outside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Another fine idea to honor a trio of Gator greats, on one hand — on top of the Heisman display each already has in the UF athletic complex, and Tebow’s immortalized “You will never see a team play harder” speech — but maybe also just a tad premature, according to some campus critics, because who knows how this Tebow character is going turn out in the long run:
College football is a cheering passion sport not given to idolatrous stature worship. There should be a revulsion rejection of student and coach statures. How about statures to professors who bring honor and research money to the campus? I can see it now as students wind their way through the vanguard of statures surrounding each building going to and from classes mindful of a similar appearance of statues surrounding a Chinese emperor’s tomb. Elevating a sport to a worship level reduces the tolerance of individuals to each athlete’s input and place on the team. Last I heard, football and many other sports are team sports and to ignore all individual’s input toward the success of any team member is mindless and ludicrous. I hope that no half-starved, bearded player with an idiosycratic penchant for wearing a white robe about campus ever wins the Heisman.
We at UGA should resist the shortsightedness of other schools in their journey toward institute of higher learning idiocy that promotes them only to higher levels of laughing stock among their sister institutes. Elevating players to the level of Knute Rochne will only leave tablets of broken prose about campuses, notably one with the initials of FU to the south, that read, “WIN ONE FOR THE NIPPER!”.