SB Nation Atlanta: All Posts by Michael Bird

• The program with the country’s strangest recruiting Photoshops

• Bill Connelly: Yep, Notre Dame’s going to be really good again

• SB Nation interviews Mike the Tiger’s handler

• Penn State players support trainer after SI story

Dying a good death in college football: 5 teams who lost with honor

2013-05-13T14:12:10Z

"I'm so afraid. Give me the strength ... to die well."

- William Wallace in Braveheart

"I knew a man once who said, 'Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.'"

- Maximus in Gladiator

"[Ida Blankenship] was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She's an astronaut."

- Bert Cooper in Mad Men, "The Beautiful Girls"

There's luck, there's dumb luck, and then there's my alma mater's basketball team making its first Final Four in two decades in my hometown. Add in the good fortune that I am friends with an Ohio State fan who had tickets to sell after the Bucks fell short of Atlanta while their arch-enemy made it, not to mention the fact that Michigan beat Syracuse on Saturday night to make the NCAA title game, and I had a very good weekend.

The Wolverines blowing a twelve-point lead and ultimately losing the national title game to Louisville did little to dampen my happiness with the experience of going to the Final Four or my feelings about this Michigan team. As I drove home through the empty streets of Atlanta, unable to turn on the radio or plug in my iPod because I was too deep in a mental zone, I was thinking about why I was so non-plussed by my favorite basketball team coming so close to a national title and falling short. Why was I more saddened by the fact that I would never see this team play again than I was by the fact that every time I look at the Georgia Dome from here on out, I'll think about what could have been instead of what was?

It was at this point that I started hatching the elements of a good death for a sports team. A good death should have some or all of the following elements:

The team exceeded expectations, both over the course of the season and in the final game;
The team lost to a worthy champion;
The defeat in the final game was neither a blowout nor was it so close that the team's fans will kill themselves with what-ifs for months and years after the game;
The team played well in the final game, providing a spectacle that allows the team's fans to tell themselves "neutral fans watched this game and will think well of our program because we entertained them"; and
The final game entailed extenuating circumstances that allow its supporters to rationalize the defeat, such as bad calls or a key injury.

So what are some college football teams that looked at the grim reaper's face and smiled back? Which teams bellowed "Freedom!" with their last breaths? And am I going to keep asking melodramatic questions? Did the combination of Michigan-Louisville and a two-hour episode of Mad Men about dealing with death make me impossibly sappy? Let's address the first two questions:

1988 Auburn

In 1987, Auburn won the SEC Championship, one of four conference titles they would win under Pat Dye in the 80s. The Tigers tied Tennessee early in the season and then Syracuse in the Sugar Bowl. Their one blemish, though, was a doozie, a 34-6 loss at home against Florida State. So when the Tigers met up with the Noles at the conclusion of the 1988 season, there was some skepticism as to whether Auburn could play with Florida State. Auburn had allowed 79 points in eleven games with their only loss by a count of 7-6 in Baton Rouge, but they hadn't played an offense on FSU's level.

The game started with Florida State jumping out to a 13-0 lead early in the second quarter. However, the Tigers didn't lose control as they had the year before, clawing back to 13-7 by halftime. In the final two minutes, Auburn drove deep into Florida State territory before Deion Sanders picked off a pass in the end zone to seal the win.

However, two factors gave Auburn fans a sense of righteous indignation after the game. First, Florida State safety Dedrick Dodge had interfered with Tigers wide receiver Freddy Weygand at the one-yard line on the play before Deion's interception. Second, Deion's participation in the game was dubious to begin with after he had been arrested days before the game in Fort Myers after an altercation over a pair of earrings.

In this case, the loser of the game emerged with more honor than the winner.

1993 Nebraska

Coming into the 1993 Orange Bowl, Nebraska was unbeaten, untied, and unfancied. After No. 2 Notre Dame upset No. 1 Florida State in the penultimate game of the regular season and then got upset at home by Boston College on the following week, the Huskers entered the bowl games as the No. 2 team in the country.

However, their defeat against Florida State was a foregone conclusion, and most of the discussion was whether the Noles would be No. 1 after that win or whether the Irish would win the national title with a win over unbeaten, untested Texas A&M. Nebraska was a 17-point underdog. The fact that Nebraska had lost their last five bowl games - two apiece to Florida State and Miami - by an average of 20.6 points factored into the pessimism.

Instead of the blowout that everyone expected, Nebraska stuck with the Noles from start to finish. The Huskers led for long stretches of the game, re-took the lead with 1:16 remaining, saw FSU go ahead with :21 remaining, and then missed the potential winning field goal on the last play of the game. Nebraska fans could point to a phantom penalty that cost their team a touchdown in the first quarter.

The game transformed Nebraska's reputation. They went from being seen as a paper tiger - one that could ring up impressive records in the Big Eight, but couldn't compete with elite programs - to being seen as elite themselves. And they accomplished this feat in a game they lost.

1995 Northwestern

To use a term from the Passover Seder, if Northwestern would have upset Notre Dame in South Bend in the opening game of the season, dayenu. If Northwestern would have beaten Michigan for the first time since 1965, dayenu. If Northwestern would have beaten Penn State in Evanston, dayenu. If Northwestern would have gone 8-0 in the Big Ten, dayenu. If Northwestern would have gone to the Rose Bowl by virtue of Michigan upsetting unbeaten Ohio State on the back of 313 yards from Tshimanga Biakabutuka, dayenu.

And with all of that in the rear view mirror, Northwestern fell behind USC 24-7, stormed back to take the lead in the fourth quarter, and only succumbed to the Trojans late in the game. Most Wildcat fans didn't expect that they would ever go to Pasadena to watch their team. Not only did they get to go, but they saw a terrific rally before Keyshawn Johnson finally proved to be too much. 1995 Northwestern had a great life and an honorable death.

Brian Bahr, Getty

1999 Virginia Tech

Every so often, we remember a big game more for the team that lost than the team that won. I doubt that I am alone in thinking of Michael Vick's third quarter as the indelible memory of the 1999 Sugar Bowl. Virginia Tech entered the game as a 5.5-point underdog after having gone unbeaten against a less-than-rigorous Big East slate. The Hokies were newcomers to the national stage. In contrast, Florida State was at the apex of its dynasty, as it was playing for the national title for the fourth time in seven years.

In the end, the Noles won 46-29, but the performance of Michael Vick against a typically great Seminole defense was the story of the game. It was one man against an army and the former led after three quarters. No Hokie fan could have left the Superdome that night with anything other than a sense of optimism about the future with a quarterback who had just completed his redshirt freshman season.

(Notice a theme with the good deaths? Three of the first four came against Florida State. During the Noles' dynasty, the most honorable demises were achieved by teams that could stay close to FSU.)

2009 Texas

Texas entered the BCS National Championship against Alabama as a four-point underdog. They were up against the champions of a conference that had won three straight national titles. While the Horns had barely escaped an upset bid by Nebraska in the Big XII title game, the Tide had demolished Florida in the SEC title game, ending the Gators 22-game winning streak.

Expectations were low for Texas, and if you just looked at the 37-21 score by which the Horns lost the game, you would think that they died poorly. That conclusion would miss two rather salient points. First, Texas lost Colt McCoy, its star quarterback, on their first offensive series. Second, Texas dug themselves a significant hole with true freshman Garrett Gilbert under center and then rallied back to within 24-21 in the fourth quarter before running out of steam. All things considered, Texas acquitted itself quite well in the game, which is an odd thing to say about a major program losing a title game by 16 points.

The Texas example reminds us that a good death does not necessarily augur a glorious resurrection. Nebraska parlayed their good death into a run of three national championships in four years. Texas parlayed their good death into a 5-7 season in which Gilbert squandered all of the goodwill that he built up in the Rose Bowl rally. Sometimes, one good demise is followed by a whole bunch of bad ones.

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Big Ten football's new divisional power balance: Lessons from the SEC and Big XII

2013-05-06T14:40:16Z

Big Ten fans had a number of reasons to feel aggrieved by the divisions that their league office spat out upon the splitting of the conference into two sections going into the 2011 season.

Most notably, the monikers Leaders and Legends will be taught in business schools for years as a case study in a ham-handed attempt at overly haughty branding. Additionally, fans could not remember the rosters of the two divisions, mostly because the split made no sense at all. And of specific concern to Michigan and Ohio State fans was the fact that their teams’ rivalry game – one that has been an late-November fixture for eons – could've either been moved to October or could just become a prelude before one or both teams play a more important game on the following Saturday.

More: Big Ten fans celebrate sanity Praise the B1G's newsdump skill

The addition of Maryland and Rutgers to the conference, while met with yawns at best and disdain at worst by Big Ten fans, has allowed the league to reach the end of an error in one important respect: the league has fixed its divisions. Abandoning a setup that lacked rhyme or reason, the Big Ten has now settled on a basic East/West structure, one that is easy for fans to remember and ensures that the league’s signature game will not be moved or marginalized.

However, the new divisions raise the one concern that caused the Leaders/Legends debacle in the first place: three of the league’s four historical powers are now in the same division.* Put another way, the most fertile recruiting grounds in the Big Ten are almost all in the East, while the West contains mostly talent-barren states. If geography is destiny, then the Big Ten has a good chance of ending up lopsided.

* - The fact that this split was only possible because the league added a pair of football bantamweights to slot in below Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State in a potentially loaded Big Ten East is itself a comment on the fact that Big Ten expansion may end up being remembered as Delany’s Folly, a move driven by TV households and little else.

Broadly speaking, there are two historical lenses that we can use to evaluate the likelihood of Big Ten power being concentrated in the East. One is simply to look at the teams’ ranks over the entirety of college football history. The assumptions there are that one ought to use the biggest sample size to judge college football programs and that the institutional factors that are expressed and/or accumulate over time – proximity to talent, fan interest, tradition, facilities, etc. – tend to be constant. A second approach would just be to look at the last 10 years. The reasoning there is that the distant past is meaningless and that a blue chip high school star will only be interested in current facilities, recent results, and the coaches on staff now.

So what do those lenses tell us about the balance of the Big Ten going forward? Thanks to Chris Stassen’s invaluable database, here are the numbers:

Team	1869-2012 Rank	2003-2012 Rank
Michigan	1	29
Ohio State	4	3
Nebraska	7	19
Penn State	11	17*
Michigan State	28	45
Wisconsin	41	14
Minnesota	42	78
Purdue	58	64
Iowa	60	31
Maryland	63	68
Illinois	67	108
Rutgers	70	37
Northwestern	101	53
Indiana	105	111

* - I did not adjust Penn State’s all-time record to remove the effects of the NCAA-mandated forfeits. Penn State would rank in the top 10 if so. I did, however, recalculate Penn State’s record for the last 10 years because otherwise, the Lions would be the worst team in the conference. Even those who expect the sanctions to take a massive toll would refrain from putting Penn State in the Marianas Trench with Indiana.

Our frame of reference gives us two different answers. If we use all of college football history as the yardstick, then we do expect the East to be strong and the West to be weak. Four of the conference’s five historical top-30 programs are in the East. On the other hand, a 10-year frame of reference makes the league look balanced because it captures Iowa’s and Wisconsin’s ascents.

Thus, our view of the Big Ten’s future balance depends greatly on whether we think that two programs that have some of the hallmarks of major programs – attendance, revenue, players in the NFL – but lack others – proximity to talent – will remain in the top third of college football.

But the Big Ten is hardly the only league whose fans wondered about whether their splits would end up looking like Germany after 1945: one side vibrant and growing, the other most noted for building a wall to keep its citizens from fleeing.

When the SEC split in 1992, the divisions looked fairly even initially, but the East quickly asserted control, winning six straight conference title games after losing the first edition. In short, Tennessee and Florida were way ahead of the rest of the league for the better part of the 90s. When the Big XII formed in 1996, the North looked stronger initially, as Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas State were all excellent programs while Texas and Oklahoma were years removed from being consistent contenders. As time passed, the dynamic switched as the programs of Big XII South took advantage of being close to Texas high school talent and won the last seven Big XII Championship Games.

So based on the all-time and 10-year lenses, were the SEC and Big XII balanced when they split into divisions?

Team	1869-1991 Rank	1982-1991 Rank
Alabama	3	14
Tennessee	10	13
LSU	12	28
Georgia	17	18
Auburn	19	8
Arkansas	25	23
Florida	38	15
Ole Miss	47	56
Vandy	59	98
Kentucky	69	72
South Carolina	79	48
Mississippi State	89	78

By either measure, the SEC looked good when it became the first league to go to the divisional format. If one uses the all-time yardstick, then the West was slightly stronger than the East, although that is only true if one does not account for the fact that Arkansas had played slightly weaker SWC schedules over its history. If one looks at a decade of results, then the West is also slightly better, but the shorter frame of reference incorporates Florida’s rise, which was the biggest reason why the East dominated the league for the initial years after the split.

Team	1869-1995 Rank	1986-1995 Rank
Oklahoma	4	16
Texas	5	36
Nebraska	8	2
Colorado	20	8
Texas A&M	23	4
Texas Tech	53	41
Missouri	57	94
Baylor	58	32
Kansas	75	77
Oklahoma State	89	71
Iowa State	92	88
Kansas State	108	74

Oddly enough for a league that was lopsided to the North for the early part of its history and then reversed field in the Aughts, the league looked balanced when it split into divisions. Looking at the all-time numbers, the conference had five top-30 programs, three in the South and two in the North. In fact, if you expand the analysis to top-60 programs, then the South looks even better, as it had five of the eight programs who met that criteria. And although one would think that the North would look better using the 10-year frame of reference – the last year before the formation of the Big XII saw four future North division teams finish in the top ten of the final AP Poll – the South actually had five of the top seven teams in terms of winning percentage from 1986-95.

So what can we learn from this little historical exercise? There are a few points to be made:

1. A track record is no guarantee of future performance. Looking at the historical numbers, there was no way to predict that the SEC East would do so well in the first years after the SEC split into divisions. Florida’s rise was partly predictable, based on population and economic growth (not to mention the success of Florida State and Miami in the '80s), and partly unpredictable, based on the fact that the Gators hired a future Hall of Fame coach in 1990. Likewise, the Big XII North turned out to be a little better than the historical numbers would have predicted, in no small part because those numbers do not capture the strength of a Kansas State program coached by Bill Snyder. That said…

2. The historical data are useful. As things have played out in the SEC, the West is a little stronger than the East, which is a result that would have seemed likely in 1992 when Roy Kramer changed the structure of the conference. The West has been led by Alabama, LSU, and Auburn in that order, just as the 1869-1991 numbers indicated. As things played out in the Big XII, the South turned out to be stronger, led by Oklahoma and Texas. Again, this is the result that the historical numbers would have predicted.

In the end, the Big Ten looks fairly similar to what the Big XII was. Michigan and Ohio State play the roles of Texas and Oklahoma, the two most historically successful programs in the league. Nebraska is … Nebraska, the anchor of the other division. Penn State is Texas A&M, albeit with an NCAA-imposed millstone around its neck. Iowa and Wisconsin look like Kansas State and Colorado, two programs without proximity to talent that were punching above their historical weight. Kansas State was able to sustain their success and then return to prominence after a fallow period because of Bill Snyder. Colorado has gone in the tank.

The conclusion is that the programs in the West will need to be run very well in order to bring balance to the Big Ten. Otherwise, the related factors of historical success and proximity to talent that favor Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State will lead to a lopsided conference, just as they did in the Big XII.

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2013 NFL Draft: The system quarterback problem hasn't been solved after all

2013-05-03T13:52:48Z

The big story of the NFL Draft was the absence of quarterbacks being taken in the early rounds. It's not that NFL teams have stopped putting value on the quarterback position. After all, the league is in a passing-friendly era in which 4,000-yard passing seasons are no longer rare.

The combination of greater emphasis on passing, schematic evolution that make pass offenses harder to stop, rules that make pass defense more difficult, and colleges that throw frequently and therefore produce pro-ready quarterbacks have all caused the NFL to become air-obsessed.

And it's not that the current crop of quarterbacks is so deep that very few teams are looking for a talent upgrade at the position. In an era in which 4,000-yard seasons have become the norm, bad quarterbacks are even more obvious.

More: 2013 NFL Draft grades Why the SEC won the Draft Every team's best pick

So despite the facts that the NFL is in a pass-heavy era and at least 10 teams entered the Draft needing an upgrade under center, there was only one quarterback taken in each of the first three rounds. The near-consensus top three pro prospects before the season -- Matt Barkley, Tyler Wilson, and Landry Jones -- all waited until the fourth round to come off the board.

Maybe this was just a weak class of quarterbacks. It wouldn't be the first time that NFL teams were unimpressed with the quarterback wares in a given year. In 2000, only one quarterback went in the first round and three went in the first three rounds. Likewise, 1997 saw one first-rounder and only two in the first three rounds. Years like this just happen.

A second possibility is that NFL teams have gotten better at accounting for the effects of systems and surrounding talent. Think about the quarterbacks who plummeted from first round status:

Geno Smith comes from a version of the air raid in which one-third of his passes were thrown behind the line of scrimmage. How much of his success was his own talent and how much was the result of Dana Holgorsen (or Tavon Austin)?
Barkley spent his career throwing to Robert Woods and Marqise Lee. How much of the struggles of USC quarterbacks in the pros has been the result of no longer playing with the talent advantage that comes with playing for the dominant program in the nation's most populous state?
To a lesser extent, the same could be said about Jones. He played in an offense-friendly conference in a well-coached attack for a program that has more talent than almost all of the teams that it plays. Is that good preparation for the NFL?
Wilson regressed without the benefit of Bobby Petrino running the offense. Was the Wilson who looked like a first round pick just an example of Petrino CGI?
Ryan Nassib played for a coach whose system got him the Buffalo Bills' head coaching job. That coach then promptly took a different quarterback in the first round, one who had played in the underwhelming Jimbo Fisher offense.*

* - This is a pet theory of mine. NFL teams should look for quarterbacks who did not play in advanced schemes and who did not have a massive talent advantage in college. Which major program has produced the best NFL quarterbacks? Michigan, a team whose offenses were predictable enough that bowl opponents would routinely say things like, "we knew what was coming." You want to give a quarterback the experience of throwing under NFL conditions? Let him play against opponents who can guess the play based on formation and personnel.

The simple fact is that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate a quarterback from his system. College offenses have made massive strides over the past two decades. From the variants of the air raid and the spread-to-run attack to the pistol and the various tweaks of the pro-style offense, college coaches have gotten very good at putting their players in position to succeed. So when a quarterback like Smith throws for 8,590 yards and 73 touchdowns in two seasons, how much credit do we give him as opposed to the scheme and talent around him?

How does one isolate the value of Smith's numbers?

In fact, college offenses have gotten so good that NFL teams have started to incorporate their concepts. In prior decades, a "college offense" was the wishbone or the power-I, which had limited passing games. NFL teams could safely ignore James Street and Darian Hagan as they continued to look for pocket passers.

Now, the most common "college offense" is the Rich Rodriguez/Urban Meyer/Chip Kelly spread-to-run attack, which has a significant passing component. Thus, many NFL teams have incorporated parts of these offenses, as well as the pistol, which also allows the use of the quarterback in the running game. These NFL teams now have to consider quarterbacks running a college offense, which means they have to wade deeper into the "is it the system or the player?" question. (The underlying assumption here is that spread-to-run is a better way to skin a cat and is therefore more likely to generate distorting statistics than a pro-style offense will.)

Also, it's interesting to note that none of the players listed above were spread-to-run quarterbacks. After the success of the 49ers, Seahawks, and Redskins in 2012, maybe this was the wrong year to be a quarterback in the Draft who did not have much in the way of rushing yardage in college?

More: A statistical survey of air raid quarterbacks in the NFL

Now put yourself in the shoes of an NFL GM whose team has a need at quarterback. If you take a signal-caller in the first round, then the success or failure of your pick is going to be evident every time your team takes the field. Even the most casual of fans can judge whether the quarterback you drafted is playing well. And yet this decision that is going to have disproportionate impact in terms of how you are evaluated is marked by inherent uncertainty. There's no good way to predict how a quarterback is going to do when he moves from the air raid to a pro-style offense.

Contrast the guesswork that is required when drafting a quarterback with the relative certainty of taking an offensive tackle. While a quarterback's performance in college is heavily dependent on the scheme and the surrounding talent, a tackle's tasks can be isolated almost like a hitter's in baseball. Did this tackle keep the opposing defensive lineman or outside linebacker away from the quarterback? Secondarily, when the tackle is tasked with blocking an opponent on a running play, can he push the opponent out of the way or at least shield the opponent from the ball carrier? Playing offensive tackle is a mentally complex position, as evidenced by the fact that tackles collectively have the highest Wonderlic scores, but the tasks that college tackles perform translate closely to what they are asked to do in the NFL. It's no accident that offensive tackles have a much lower bust rate than quarterbacks. This has been true for decades, and the phenomenon will only get more pronounced as college offenses evolve.*

* - One counter: we are one year removed from a Draft in which three quarterbacks were taken in the top eight picks. Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III were the top two picks and proceeded to lead their teams to the playoffs. It's quite possible that the tackle-heavy, quarterback-light approach in the first round this year was just a blip. On the other hand, Luck and Griffin ended up taking a back seat to Colin Kaepernick (a second-round pick) and Russell Wilson (a third-round pick) by the end of the season, which may illustrate the value in waiting to select a quarterback.

For college football fans who like points and yards, this is a golden era. The Pac-12, which was always an offense-friendly league, has retained that status and has been joined by the Big XII as conferences where games played in the 30s and 40s are the norm. The Big Ten has imported a spread innovator as the head coach at Ohio State and a pro-style expert at Penn State, the latter of whom managed to turn an offense with a walk-on quarterback into one that scored 29 points per game. And the SEC, long thought of (at least in the imagination of Gary Danielson) as a defense-first league, just produced an air raid Heisman winner, and two of its teams - Georgia and Texas A&M - tied for the national lead in yards per play.

But while the array of clever offensive schemes is fun for fans, it makes life harder for NFL GMs. A top-level quarterback is an absolute must for a team to win in a pass-friendly era, but the process of drafting a quarterback has never been more fraught with peril.

If Dana Holgorsen can produce an assembly line of 4,000-yard passers, then how do we know whether his latest quarterback is anything more than a product of an offense that creates open receivers and easy reads? If Bill O'Brien can get 3,217 yards, 24 touchdowns, and only five picks out of Matt McGloin, then how can an NFL GM be confident that another quarterback's similar numbers (for instance, Matt Barkley threw for 3,273 yards, 36 touchdowns, and 15 picks) are worth consideration? You're damned if you take a quarterback on little more than a wing and a prayer, but you're also damned if you trot out Mark Sanchez for another season.*

* - This conundrum also extends to college awards voters. How much value should they put on the stats produced by Wisconsin running backs or Oklahoma quarterbacks when those numbers are consistently high? Again, how do we separate the player from the context?

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An open letter from Jefferson Davis to Jim Delany

2013-03-20T13:58:10Z

Commissioner Delany,

Greetings and salutations! Imagine my surprise when I put on my robe and slippers this morning, went to the gates of Beauvoir to pick up the morning Sun Herald, and read that you are considering leading a secession of the Big Ten from major college sports in the event that Ed O'Bannon's lawsuit against the NCAA is successful. Perhaps a collection of drubbings at the hands of some Southerners has you thinking about surrender? Sure wish that Abe Lincoln would have had the same thoughts after Billy Yank's Chickahominy Blues. But I'm not bitter. Life on the Gulf Coast suits me, and you should see what they've done with Biloxi.

Anyway, when I read about your situation, it really struck a nerve with me. You're feeling concerned about the federal government telling you that you have to pay the guys working for you. Providing food and shelter just won't cut it anymore according to that dictator in a black outfit. Your whole economic model is based on this source of unpaid labor and now that model is threatened. I know where you're coming from. You want to opt out of the system so you can do things your way, right? I've gone down this road, and if you aren't careful, you end up wearing your wife's coat in Irwinville, Georgia.

Let me give you some pointers on how to handle a secession the right way. You're a fan of open letters, so you'll surely take this seriously.

More: Explaining the O'Bannon suit Pay-for-play can work Big Ten fans not buying it

1. Line up some allies.

I spent a good portion of my time as the President of the Confederacy trying to get Great Britain and France to aid the South. You would have thought that the English and their vast appetite for Southern cotton would have come in on our side. Frickin' replacement imports from Egypt and India. I digress. Anyway, my point is that America would have lost the Revolutionary War without assistance from France, and the South's chances to prevail in the Civil War would have been greater if Great Britain or France would have come in on the side of the Confederacy.

So think about outside powers who could help you if the Big Ten chose to stop giving athletic scholarships. The SEC would no longer have a rival for the richest conference in America, so maybe Mike Slive could do for you what Lord Palmerston could not do for me. There will no doubt be professors and administrators on Big Ten campuses who will be pleased by the idea of their charges opening a book on a fall Saturday instead drinking themselves into a stupor.

And I'm sure you'll find some allies in the Northeastern media who have never liked college football. Maybe start with that Bissinger guy?

2. Pay attention to morale on the home front.

Bless his soul, Robert E. Lee could not be beaten by the Union Army. Even U.S. Grant was having a hard time topping the Army of Northern Virginia until Lee's men started losing numbers as a result of the letters they were getting from home. Letters that said things like, "our money is worthless because of inflation and the kids are going to starve." Or, "the Yankees are burning everything in their path and they're headed straight for us." Or, "the only military-age men in the area are the sons of the local planter." Go figure, these sorts of statements hurt morale and cause soldiers to desert.

it turns out that printing money isn't a solution for everything

So Jim, you might want to think about keeping your constituents happy. For instance, your stance against paying college football and basketball players on the grounds that there is no room to do so in athletic department budgets would cause the Big Ten to drop down to a lower level of competition ... which would reduce revenues on a massive scale as 110,000 Ohioans aren't going to pay to see a D-III football game ... which would cause you to have to lay off the athletic department employees whose jobs you were trying to protect in the first place? It's almost like seceding to protect an economic system and then seeing that system banned four years after seceding, whereas it would have taken decades for the political process to have banned that system had we not seceded in the first place. Irony abounds.

Did I have a point? Oh, yeah: think about the financial implications of your course of action because it turns out that printing money isn't a solution for everything.

3. Managing people is important.

Seems pretty obvious, right? Well, I made a total hash of it in the West. I let Braxton Bragg remain in charge of the Army of Tennessee despite the fact that everyone reporting to Bragg hated their boss. I didn't have the stones to replace Bragg with Joseph Johnston, a general whom I later fired and whose firing contributed to the loss of Atlanta and Lincoln's reelection. I endeared myself to the population of Vicksburg by putting a Philadelphian in charge of the Army of Mississippi. I then compounded my error by not reinforcing the Army of Mississippi or coordinating forces in that area, thus leading to the loss of Vicksburg and the entire Mississippi River.

Man, it feels good to get that off my chest in a succinct fashion as opposed to that two-volume morass of legalistic arguments that I dumped onto posterity.

My point is that you have to make sure that you have the right people in place when you willfully destroy millions of dollars in equity that you have built up in your management of the Big Ten during your tenure as commissioner. For instance, that guy who paid Kirk Ferentz $981,250 per win last year and who gave Ferentz such unassailable job security that Ferentz can retain Greg Davis and hire members of his immediate family with impunity? There's your Braxton Bragg. Don't trust him with moving the paper clips as you move the Big Ten to athletic irrelevance. And that guy who didn't take a bowl ban when his team went 6-6 and thus deprived it of the chance to play for the national title when it went 12-0? Stonewall Jackson he's not.

When you have decades to ruminate on your mistakes as I have, you know how to spot a bad general or two. You have a couple on your roster.

And for the love of all things holy, neither I nor the Railsplitter were cursed with a general or colonel as offensively challenged as Jim Bollman. (Although come to think of it, Bollman's mustache would have fit in nicely in my era.)

So there you have it. I respect your strong stance against paying those who work in the fields. If you start paying them, then what's going to be left for the guys in charge? The world can use more principled stands, like the one that the Confederacy took that left 625,000 people dead and most of the South in ruins. A leader has to follow his moral compass, regardless of the destruction that results. With your declaration to the Northern District of California, you are on the right path.

Unless, of course, you were just engaging in a case of puffery to help defend against a legal claim.

Yours faithfully,
Jefferson Finis Davis

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What college football's playoff should learn from March Madness

2013-03-18T15:17:20Z

College football resists math...

If you haven't already listened to it, the recent episode of the Solid Verbal with SB Nation's Bill Connelly is well worth your time. Dan Rubinstein spends close to an hour talking to Connelly about Connelly's views on where stats are in college football and where they are going.

One prevailing theme that came out of the interview (for me, at least) is that the use of advanced math in analyzing college football has a long way to go. Connelly is doing yeoman's work, but he is only at the stage where he and some dogged volunteers can chart roughly an eighth of the total games played in FBS last year. Most of us love the unruly, anarchic element of college football, the fact that there are so many teams and conferences that the sport rejects standardization and encourages creativity by its nature. However, that quality also means it is hard to get a grasp on the sport from a statistical sense because there is just so much to love.

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Aside from the fact that it is hard to obtain granular information on a large scale, Connelly also had only a few examples of major programs using advanced stats to analyze themselves. In fact, his two examples both related to Texas, a program that would never be analogized to the plucky Oakland A's, who make more out of less. Maybe college football programs are behind the curve in terms of their use of advanced analytics. Maybe coaches are doing a good job of hiding their methodology from public view.

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Or maybe college football lends itself to fancy numbers less than other sports do. As Marc Tracy writes in the New Republic, football is a tough nut to crack when it comes to reducing the results on the field to numbers:

Much work has been done in football, both at outside sites like Football Outsiders and, much more quietly, within teams. But some of football's top analysts said that the incredible intricacy of football-the different types of scoring, the uncountable potential game situations, the byzantine mess of eleven men working in tandem, intangibly but undeniably dependent upon each other-means that only so much can ultimately be accomplished. "The sheer complexity of football makes it to my mind the hardest," said Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats.

Two people I spoke to, one from football and one from baseball, argued that football teams might be particularly stubborn about adopting analytics because of the number of people that must sign off on virtually anything.

"There's so many people involved in decision-making," said Grantland football writer Bill Barnwell, who got his start at Football Outsiders. "You can get one person in the front office to buy in, one coach to buy in. But it's hard to get seven coaches, and the G.M., and the owner." Farhan Zaidi, Oakland Athletics director of baseball operations, said, "In soccer and football, the on-field manager has more influence"-and, therefore, stats have less room to thrive. The exception, he noted, is when the on-field coach and front-office manager are the same person, the most prominent example of which is the New England Patriots' Bill Belichick. Not coincidentally, the Pats would make anyone's list of the top five teams most interested in analytics.

And then beyond the general difficulties of analyzing performance on a gridiron, you have specific problems in college football. A college program generally does not have anything like a general manager and a front office to pore over numbers. There are coaches who are pulled in a million different directions during the season and there are athletic department personnel who have multiple responsibilities, but there is not as much of an administrative structure that would lend itself to data analysis.

More importantly, college football's talent acquisition process mostly defies rigorous analysis. An NFL team needs to quantify what a player is worth in terms of contract value, and it needs to do so in manner that allows it to compare those players relative to others on the market. Should the Falcons pay Steven Jackson $5 million per year or is Jacquizz Rodgers' production sufficient, especially if combined with a bigger back taken in the fourth round? In short, the NFL requires asset valuation skills in order to assemble the best roster possible under the salary cap. A room full of quants can be very useful for an NFL team.

In contrast, college football's talent acquisition process is about marketing instead of accounting. A major program brings in as much top talent as it can. It doesn't have to worry about allocating cap dollars (insert Ole Miss joke here); it just worries about building relationships with recruits and making the right pitch. There is analysis regarding allocation of time and scholarships, but the roster still gets built by the non-quantifiable recruiting process.

We are starting with a game that doesn't lend itself to precise, number-heavy conclusions, and then we remove most of the market elements that exist in the NFL.

Additionally, there is greater potential for using advanced data analysis in scouting NFL Draft prospects than there is in scouting recruits because college stats are more meaningful than high school numbers. For instance, Football Outsiders has contributed to the pre-draft discussions by creating the Lewin Career Forecast. Using regression analysis, Lewin was able to identify certain college numbers as being predictive of NFL success for quarterback prospects. Fans who were familiar with the forecast were not surprised when Russell Wilson burst onto the scene in the NFL last year, as Wilson was off the charts in the two categories that Lewin identified as being the most important: games started and completion percentage.

Doing something like the Lewin Career Forecast for high school recruits would be an exercise in futility. High school stats vary wildly because of the different classifications and therefore, the differing levels of competition. College coaches can scout high school quarterbacks just like NFL coaches can scout college quarterbacks, but the latter can supplement their scouting with data analysis, whereas the former have a hard time doing the same.*

Thus, in two major respects - assigning player value and analyzing lower level stats - college football resists the influence of sabermetrics.

* - Or maybe this is just wishful thinking by a Michigan grad who is familiar with Shane Morris's high school stats.

But college football fans should embrace math.

That said, there is one obvious area in which college football's use of numbers should improve: ranking teams.

Our sport gives itself an impossible challenge in that it has a small playoff in which the participants are selected based on subjective polling, and the data upon which the pollsters base their decisions consist of disparate schedules with few common opponents, along with a healthy dollop of the subjective mental images that come to mind when we think of teams.

And despite the futile task that the BCS gives itself by its own structure, it makes matters worse by: (1) relying on human polls composed of overworked coaches and the bizarre roster that makes up the Harris Poll; and (2) castrating the computer rankings by preventing them from using margin-of-victory. It's hard enough comparing an 11-1 Alabama team with an 11-1 Oklahoma State when there are precious few direct connections between their opponents; it's far worse when the people making the decision are addled, data-averse voters and computers that are forbidden from relying upon a source of information that anyone with skin in the game (read: oddsmakers and Vegas sharps) would consider.

This past bowl season drove this point home. Why was Alabama preferred over other candidates for a spot in the BCS National Championship? I would like to think that it was not their reputation and that of the SEC, but rather because the Tide dominated their opponents in almost all of their wins. Why were people like me regretting the fact that the Tide were playing Notre Dame in the title game instead of Oregon? Because the Ducks, like the Tide, put up impressive scores in their wins. And what did Alabama and Oregon do in their bowl games? They vindicated math by playing up to the faith that the more sophisticated computer ratings placed in them.

Conversely, you have Florida, a team unlike Alabama and Oregon that had a more impressive collection of scalps, but had a series of narrow, unimpressive scores attached to those scalps. What happened to the Gators in the Sugar Bowl? (A smart ass would point out that Florida lost to another team whose record was inflated by a number of close wins.)

The coming of the NCAA tournament and Stewart Mandel's comparison of Boise State in football and Gonzaga in hoops drives this home. Gonzaga gets the opportunity to play a number of games against major programs because of college basketball's longer regular season, and then they get an equal shot at a national title because of the Tournament. (Personally, I'm a fan of cutting the Tournament from 68 to 16, but I'm a curmudgeon like that.) Boise State plays only a smattering of games against top competition, and then everything has to go perfectly for them to make a title game. Boise State's 2010 and 2011 teams would have been aided by computer rankings that could account for margin of victory. What made those teams legitimate contenders was the fact that they beat up on weaker opponents by scores that one would expect from Alabama or LSU playing the same schedule. However, the system was stacked against them in more ways than one, as the BCS made a political decision to exclude margin-of-victory.

Thankfully, we are coming to the end of the BCS era. The decisions that were previously made by suspect pollsters and denuded computer programs will now be named by an as-yet unnamed roster of committee members. College football's innumeracy will no longer be written into the rules. Instead, we will just have to hope that the individuals tasked with selecting four teams will do a better job of utilizing mathematically sound reasoning. It would be something new for college football to go down that path. (Bill Hancock's comments on the composition of the committee are not confidence-inspiring.)

Baseball has made major strides and yet even now, we are far more likely to see batting average on the screen when a batter comes to the plate as opposed to on-base percentage. How long are we going to have to wait for college football to make similar progress and where will that progress be reflected? In baseball, the use of outdated numbers does not affect the competition. Because of the subjectivity inherent in picking teams to play for the national title, it potentially matters when ESPN uses bad numbers to analyze teams and then Hancock's "retired ADs and coaches" form their beliefs based on those numbers.

Who here is confident that Pat Dye would watch Mark May criticize Oregon for being 44th in total defense and then intone from his La-Z-Boy, "yeah, but they are only 26th in yards per play allowed; the total defense number does not account for pace?"

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Why Big Ten football coaches should listen to the hive mind before hiring

2013-02-28T16:07:00Z

Did you ever encounter a sports story that just confirmed everything you thought about someone or something? A perfect illustration as to how you feel about a figure? A representation of Plato's Theory of Forms?

Michigan State hiring Jim Bollman as its offensive coordinator fits that description for me. Dour Mark Dantonio, a coach who learned from Jim Tressel, the master of the uninspiring win, hires the inventor of Walrusball, an offensive mind whose plaid efforts in Columbus led to some of the best mockery on the Intertubes. The head coach wants to win with a Cheescake Factory serving of defense and a Happy Meal serving of offense (minus the toy, of course, because smiles delay character) finds the offensive coordinator who will best exercise portion control of points and first downs.

But the "that's typical!" response extends beyond what the Bollman hire says about Dantonio's personality and the way he views offense, football, and the reality that life is nasty, brutish, and short. The hire is everything that's wrong with the Big Ten in a nutshell. Dantonio individually can point to his record in East Lansing and say, "trust me." Regardless of whether this decision makes no sense in light of Bollman's resume in Columbus, Dantonio is the same guy who went 22-5 in a two-year stretch before losing a metric ton of narrow decisions last year. He's earned the right to make a mistake.

The conference that Dantonio beat up to get those 22 wins in 2010-11 has not earned the same benefit of the doubt. When Big Ten fans are confronted with the gaping maw between the league's strong revenue and attendance on the one hand and its middling results on the other, the smart ones point to the lack of proximity to talent. Full stadia, a thriving cable channel, palatial facilities, and attractive traditions are all helpful when it comes to luring four- and five-star recruits, but they take a back seat to Mama being in driving distance. The Big XII can pull talent from Texas. The Pac 12 can pull talent from California. The SEC and (to a lesser extent) the ACC have strong recruiting regions throughout.

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The Big Ten doesn't have any of these things. Ohio is the league's epicenter for talent, but it isn't on the same level as Texas, California, or Florida.

So what should programs do when they are confronted with a talent disadvantage? There are a couple possibilities.

One is to hire coaches with connections to fertile recruiting fields. Louisville has succeeded with that approach, as Charlie Strong and his staff have made up for the lack of blue chip talent in Kentucky by mining their contacts in Florida.

A second approach is to emphasize a unique offensive scheme that can compensate for a lack of talent. Oregon is the best example of this phenomenon right now, but West Virginia, Oklahoma State, and Missouri (when they had a functional offensive line) are also relevant. Closer to home for Big Ten fans, Northwestern has ridden a spread offense to results that are better than one would expect for a school with a small fan base, significant academic restrictions, and no natural recruiting base.

To put it bluntly, a conference that has seen two of its upper middle-class programs hire Greg Davis and Jim Bollman in the past year is not taking either approach. Big Ten programs have to make up for their recruiting disadvantages by spending money on attractive coaches, guys who: (1) coach schemes that will entice players; (2) have recruiting relationships and abilities; and/or (3) can put up yards and points without a talent advantage.

Do Davis and Bollman sound like the kind of coaches who can check any of those boxes? Neither guy was noted as an especially good recruiter at Texas or Ohio State, so they relied on their schools' prestige and the other coaches on staff to recruit so well that their offenses could out-talent their opponents. Does that sound like a viable strategy at Iowa or Michigan State?*

* - To a lesser extent, this criticism can be made of other coaching hires in the conference. Ask a Bears fan if John Shoop is the best offensive mind that one could want at Purdue. And while the comparison between Bollman and Michigan's Al Borges demands nuance -- it gives Bollman credit for Jim Tressel's recruiting and play-calling, it penalizes Borges for Tommy Tuberville's meddling, etc. -- it's probably fair to say that the jury is out on whether Michigan has an offensive coordinator who reflects the school's ability to pay for the best.

So how do we know that guys like Davis and Bollman are bad hires? I like data-driven explanations, but this is an instance where there are too many variables to take a statistical approach. Did an offensive coordinator have talent at his disposal? Was it the right talent for his system? Did he play in an offensive environment? Did he have autonomy? Was he reliant on the coat-tails of the head coach? Is the sample size big enough to make definitive judgments? These questions make it very hard to use output statistics with any degree of accuracy.

No, this is an instance where reliance on the hive mind is valuable.

Take Davis, for instance. On the surface, he could seem like a good offensive coordinator. The Vince Young offenses put up epic numbers en route to Texas losing one game in two years. Then, after a short retooling period, the Colt McCoy offenses had a productive stretch before the bottom fell out. And yet Texas fans increasingly grew disenchanted with Davis, dismissing the successes as the result of talent and the failures as the result of coaching. When Davis moved to Iowa, the criticisms of Horns fans -- both the general criticism that Davis was not a good coach and the specific criticism that his offense eschewed deep passes to a remarkable degree -- all proved true as the Hawkeyes plummeted to the bottom of the Big Ten offensively.

The Ohio State hive mind is even more negative about Bollman, holding that he was a disaster as an offensive line coach and as soon as Tressel was removed from the equation, Bollman was exposed as being useless as a coordinator. If Buckeye fans are right about Bollman the way that Texas fans were right about Davis, then next year's Michigan State offense is going to make the 2012 attack, one that finished 10th in the Big Ten in both yards per play and scoring (with Greg Davis's Iowa and Illinois' homage to Chernobyl as the two teams below the Spartans), look like the Air Coryell Chargers.

The more I thought about it, the more I struggled to come up with instances in which college football hive minds have been wrong about coaches. There are plenty of instances of fan bases that warmed to guys on staff as time went on. The evolving feelings of Georgia fans about Mike Bobo are a testament to the fact that feelings can change. Likewise, there can be sample size issues where a coach is a disaster for a season and then turns things around somewhere else.

But when I think about instances where a fan base was exposed to a coach for an extended period of time and ended the period with feelings of universal disdain, subsequent events have usually proven that fan base right. Look at Randy Sanders' career after Tennessee. Or Lou Tepper's career after LSU. Or Bill Diedrick's career after Notre Dame. Or Jeff Bowden's career after Florida State. Or Rob Spence's career after Clemson. Or Willie Martinez's career after Georgia.

There are two possibilities here. One is that I am a victim of confirmation bias, conveniently forgetting the coaches who were reviled by their fan bases and then ultimately gained vindication. The second is that athletic directors would do well to figure out a seismograph for hive minds.

Why college football hot seats are only getting hotter, SEC edition

2013-02-19T14:16:51Z

As college football fans, we are obsessed with head coaches. The rosters of our favorite teams are constantly undergoing significant turnover, so the guy on the headset is the one constant that remains. Brian Phillips wrote a great column yesterday at Grantland about this phenomenon with respect to college basketball. Here is his first-person recounting of his defense of the sport to his NBA-loving friends:

"It's a different experience," I would say. "The arenas are tiny, and the best players don't stick around very long. The coaches are the only faces that repeat from year to year, and you see them a lot. And in the era of fantasy sports and Football Manager, we're all thinking like coaches anyway; we just don't realize it. So why not have one sport that celebrates team building and, like, prudent squad management? Why not make Tom Izzo yelling his throat raw on the sideline your marquee highlight?"

With the exception of the tiny arenas -- a factor that is replaced by the facts that football players both have helmets covering their faces and are often cogs in a machine, running the plays that are sent in from the sidelines -- this statement applies just as well to college football. Phillips then explains that coaches are more familiar to adults than to the players are because their job duties remind us of what most of us do to pay the mortgage:

And the experience of the coach is simply much more accessible to almost every grown-up fan than the experience of any high-level player. And not just because so many fans go on to coach their kid's T-ball team or whatever; think of it as a lifestyle question. The coach doesn't have to be able to score from an overhead kick or throw a football 80 yards; he has to run meetings, make plans, juggle lists, and justify himself, same as anybody. He does paperwork. Maybe hops on the treadmill when he can. He's still connected to the magic of sports, but with him it takes the form of inspired halftime speeches and brilliant late-game stratagems - basically work e-mail lifted to a spiritual plane. More than anything, he has to watch a ton of games: obsess about what's not working, get mad at players who screw up, praise players who do well. When something good happens, he runs around and celebrates. When something bad happens, he flails his arms like an idiot. Sound like anyone you know?

So it would stand to reason that in an economic environment where insecurity about being laid off is at an all-time high, where even previously stable white-collar professions are seeing significant contraction that leaves thousands of recently-minted graduates unable to service their debt, we are interested in coaches being on hot seats. We all worry about getting the ax at work and know friends and family members who have had to deal with the same, so we get to displace that stress by fixating on highly compensated college football coaches facing the same stress.

Aside from the fact that hot seat discussions have a particular resonance to workers in the modern American economy, there is a trio of reasons why we are going to see more hot seat discussions and firings in the coming years. The first reason is common to all of college football; the last two are unique to the SEC.

1. The athletic department bubble

With very few exceptions, major athletic programs obtain the vast majority of their funding from football revenue, most significantly ticket revenue and the donations that fans are forced to pay for the privilege of buying those tickets. When the football program doesn't perform on the field, then the entire business is threatened because the coaching salaries and facility improvements that make up the expense side of a superpower athletic department budget don't go away, even as the revenue shrinks.

Look at Tennessee's precarious financial condition if you need evidence that even the most loyal fan bases will turn their backs on a bad product, thus leaving athletic directors trying to find solution for a tide of red ink. Even if Derek Dooley had been showing glimmers of progress, Dave Hart still would have been likely to fire his head coach because his department simply cannot afford to permit the current trend of declining interest in Vol football to continue.

The implication from Tennessee's predicament is obvious: head coaches are going to get a shorter leash because their employers literally cannot afford to be patient. In the old days when a season ticket for four conference games and a pair of interesting non-conference games would cost about $250, fans would be a little more forgiving. Now, a season ticket buys four conference games -- often against one or more new league opponents with whom the home team has no history -- and non-conference match-ups against tomato can opponents, only it costs roughly twice as much. Ticket prices (and the donations required to buy those tickets) have shot up despite the fact that Stubhub and 60' flat screens have given potential season ticket buyers other options.

The price is higher, demand is softening, and athletic departments are addicted to ticket revenue. Does this sound like a stable situation for a head coach at a major program?

2. SEC recruiting dominance

In case you've been shacked up with a hunter-gatherer tribe for the past month, the SEC dominated recruiting in 2012-13. For instance, Kentucky finished 13th out of 14 teams in the SEC. According to Rivals, it would have finished sixth in the ACC, fifth in the Pac-12, fourth in the Big XIII, fourth in the Big Ten, and first in the Big East.

Just about every team in the SEC is going to be able to put blue-chip talent on the field in coming seasons, although there are obviously differences in degree in terms of the amount of talent. How exactly is the SEC West going to play out with Alabama at dynasty level, LSU not far behind, Texas A&M deploying a Heisman-winning quarterback in a clever scheme with a top recruiting class coming to town, Ole Miss ascending on a wave of optimism and five-star talent, and Auburn pairing Gus Malzahn's offense with Rodney Garner's recruiting chops? Someone has to finish fifth, and that assumes no waves from Mississippi State and Arkansas.

College football fans often make the mistake of drawing a distinction between recruiting and coaching, the latter of which generally means coming up with a game plan and then making tactical decisions at the end of a close game. The former is a head coach's most important function, but because it occurs out of sight in dozens of prospects' living rooms and through thousands of phone calls and texts, fans don't see it and have a hard time evaluating it. Fans have an easy time judging whether a coach screwed up by punting on fourth and four from the opponent's 37. Likewise, they can tell when the opponent jumps out to a 17-3 lead that their team's preparations during the week were misguided, although the explanation is often that the opponent just has better players.

So what happens when a team has several top 25 recruiting classes, but achieves only middling results on the field? The fans decide that the head guy cannot coach (or at least they reach that decision after the most unpopular coordinator is replaced and the results don't change). Already angry that they are paying through the nose for tickets, a program's backers end up demanding a head coaching change because the guy in charge is wasting talent and the results on the field aren't what were hoped for on Signing Day.

If you think that most fans can respond to 7-5 season with equanimity, concluding that, "it's true that we have a lot of four-star players, but so do the opponents on our schedule," then you have more faith in humanity's rational thought than I do.

3. Nick Saban

Until he decamps for the NFL or otherwise finds something more interesting than collecting crystal footballs, Nick Saban is going to suck most of the oxygen that would otherwise fill the lungs of the coaches in the rest of the SEC.

How would LSU fans feel about Les Miles if he didn't have the general misfortune of coaching in the same division as the modern-day Bear Bryant and the specific misfortune of beating Saban in Tuscaloosa in an epic No. 1 versus No. 2 game and then having to repeat the trick two months later? Would the name Mark Richt and the term hot seat ever be used in the same sentence if Saban hadn't been in the way of the Dawgs winning Richt's third SEC title and his first national title this year? Would Derek Dooley's time in Knoxville have turned out different if the Vols weren't beaten senseless by their arch rival with Neyland Stadium one-quarter crimson?

With some exceptions (read: Gene Chizik), conference and national titles provide job security for the coaches who win them. If the guy in Tuscaloosa is stealing all the cheese, then everyone else's job security is just a dream. Short of the coaches in the league hatching a plan at the league meetings to kidnap Saban or the fans in the league suddenly developing an acceptance of their programs playing second fiddle, SEC head coaches are going to have to deal with hotter seats in coming years.

Like polar bears, these coaches are facing a threat from climate change.