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Rick Pitino and Louisville made The American a much stronger league in 2014 compared to the current 2015 version. Sure, SMU leads the conference this season, but it achieved a lot more in the 2014 campaign. Why is 2015 SMU’s RPI at 18 while last season’s team carried an RPI of 53 into Selection Sunday? The answer becomes very obvious as you continue to read this piece… and no, it’s not about winning games, either.

Rick Pitino and the shadows that never leave

0 comments by on 10/2/2015

Whether or not Rick Pitino knew what his former director of basketball operations was doing at the University of Louisville, many people seem to have made up their minds. * The investigation into allegations put forth by Katina Powell against Andre McGee — who was Pitino’s director of basketball operations from 2012 through 2014 — […]

Coaching Strategy: Al Golden’s decision to go for 7 against Cincinnati

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It’s not the rarest of situations. It’s not mathematically hard to figure out on an immediate level. You’ve seen plenty of football games in which a team, trailing by 11 points inside the final five minutes of regulation, kicks a field goal to trim its deficit to eight points. Thursday night, Miami coach Al Golden […]

Alabama-Georgia is far bigger than you think it is

0 comments by on 10/1/2015

Hype is a curious creature. Sportswriters are often guilty of applying it to games which don’t merit it. Pundits and bloggers have been known to create a narrative which so fully defines the buildup to kickoff that the postgame conversation is inevitably reshaped as a result. When that reshaping seems to ignore the facts on […]

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The ideal college football schedule: week five

0 comments by on 9/30/2015

Last week, the benefits of staggered start times were made very apparent, as the TCU-Texas Tech thriller — starting at 4:45 Eastern time — had its own stage when it ended. Only California-Washington also ended near the time Frogs-Red Raiders concluded. Yes, you missed the beginning of the 7:30 and 8:05 p.m. Eastern kicks, but […]

Arizona and Stanford meet again, tethered to a tenuous existence

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Two immortal college football coaches — you can debate which one said it first — popularized the notion that three things can happen when you pass, and two of them are bad. That saying from Woody Hayes (or was it Darrell Royal?) did indeed apply to the Arizona Wildcats in the 2012 college football season… […]

A coach, a quarterback, and a shared moment: Clemson stands in the spotlight

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It’s true that as recently as the back end of the Charlie Weis era, Notre Dame football wasn’t particularly relevant. However, if Notre Dame falls into a ditch, history has shown that the football program quickly extricates itself from that unfavorable position and — like Touchdown Jesus — rises again in an Easter of the […]

Moving parts: The art of assessing a college football season

0 comments by on 9/29/2015

Evaluating a college football season is a supremely delicate endeavor. On one hand, the small sample size provided by only 12 games makes it important to withhold overly severe judgments of teams, coaches and players in the first month of a season… the month (September) which has just come to an end as far as […]

Quietly, Missouri’s SEC East reign might have ended in Lexington

0 comments by on 9/28/2015

Saturday night, while the nation was stunned by the blowouts which emerged in the Pac-12’s stack of showcase games, and we all wondered how “Utah 62, Oregon 20,” could possibly happen, something else happened. This event should have a significant effect on the workings of a conference. It should also change how we view week […]

Coming to terms with week four: East Carolina ambushed Virginia Tech… again

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As Saturday afternoon blended into Saturday evening, huge developments caught the attention of college football fans and bloggers. Florida pulled off the grand Houdini against Tennessee and a bewildered Butch Jones. TCU created “The Flea Tipper” to steal one on the road in Lubbock against Texas Tech and Kliff Kingsbury. Oklahoma State escaped Texas after […]

Forget hot seats; many coaches are fighting for reputations right now

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Here’s a simple but big question to throw at you, right out of the gate: How much did you think college football changed this weekend? That question isn’t meant to be confined to the College Football Playoff race, or to the polls, or to hot seats. Think broadly. How did this weekend change the sport […]

Your conference-based argument is invalid: everyone’s struggling

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We preface this piece by saying that the American Athletic Conference’s West Division is not struggling this season. Memphis, Houston and Navy could be in the process of giving us three teams which will be in the Group of Five’s New Year’s Six bowl hunt when November begins. However, that’s not the realm of the […]

Retained character, changed character: a season in search of itself

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College football is predictable in its volatility. It is stable in its lack of rock-solid certitude for all but a handful of teams in most seasons. This sport is unsurprising in how often it surprises, routine in its penchant for the grand plot twist. Yet, even by those standards — even with decades upon decades […]

Duke picked up a critical win at Georgia Tech last weekend. The Blue Devils probably didn’t expect Virginia to be an equally consequential contest the following weekend, but the other teams in the ACC Coastal didn’t expect Duke to represent such a key game last season. Duke is now finding out what it’s like to be on the other side of the tracks. Virginia-Duke will do a lot to shape the evolving ACC Coastal race.

Georgia Tech, Duke, and the paradox of staying power

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On a Saturday with 50 or more games, it’s easy to identify certain contests as being more important or attractive because they’re top-25 games or in-division games. Yet, those games stand out BEFORE, not after, the final result. When one sifts through the whole of a weekend — and in mid-December, the full regular season […]

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