0 comments by TSS LOCKER on 8/5/2015
Presidential candidates and campaign managers think John Calipari’s spin needs to be a little more reasonable: The news value — if you can find any in this hilarious statement — is simply that Calipari felt the need to say this, whether or not he really believes it deep inside. Why exactly would he feel the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/3/2015
In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower won a second term as President of the United States. Don Larsen threw his perfect game in the World Series. America hadn’t landed on the moon. Vietnam had not yet begun. Don Draper’s life and times in Mad Men had not been explored — not until the beginning of the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/1/2015
At Big Ten Media Days, commissioner Jim Delany did something that should not surprise anyone. He announced a conference “strength-of-schedule commitment” as a way of improving standards and boosting the resumes of each member program: This development contains legitimate news value, but it is also carries significance primarily because of a structural adjustment the Big […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/29/2015
When learning to write about an athlete in a context far beyond game nights, journalism students or aspiring writers could find a far worse example than John McPhee’s profile of legendary college basketball star Bill Bradley. McPhee’s book, “A Sense Of Where You Are: Bill Bradley At Princeton,” set a very high standard for profiles […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/28/2015
Conference bylaws aren’t easily changed, but this year, the “bye-laws” of the American Athletic Conference are changing in a big way. This story from the Football Schedules blog site is definitely worth thinking about, roughly five weeks before the start of the new season: You can (and should) read the story to get every last […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
When morning dawned on Saturday, November 8, 2014, it was reasonable to think that Arizona State football was about to encounter a true “fork in the road” moment. Would, indeed, the fork need to be feared, or would the Sun Devils flinch in the face of a defining occasion? The question certainly needed to be […]
Woo pig, pay me!
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/27/2015
The early-1980s Miami Dolphins gave football the Killer Bees: Baumhower, Barnett, Blackwood, Bokamper, Bowser, Betters, and Brudzinski. The 2015 Arkansas Razorbacks carry just as many B-words, but the college football world is waiting to see if the Hogs kill or are killed. Either way, this team is going to represent one of the more notable […]
Mississippi State has to go to Tuscaloosa and Oxford in order to win the SEC West and punch its playoff ticket. The Bulldogs, as great as they’ve been, will have to continue to call forth all of their resources if this dream season is to end without a nightmare.
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/24/2015
The Mississippi State football program occupies a very unique and uncertain piece of territory this season. If that statement seems overly cryptic, no worries — an explanation exists, and it’s going to form the heart of this particular article. * Mississippi State had been part of the SEC’s football underclass for a good 70 years […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Everyone knew that heading into the 2015 college football season, the Ohio State Buckeyes were loaded with firepower. Explosive, high-octane, ready to blow up at a moment’s notice from anywhere on the field — the defending national champios were always going to be a fireworks show in football pads. Now, with the report by Pete […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/23/2015
Alabama is Alabama. Nick Saban’s the coach, fer cryin’ out loud. The Crimson Tide might not drown everyone else in the SEC West, but they’re not likely to be particularly mediocre anytime soon. Auburn has Gus Malzahn, one of the brightest head coaches in the country, and a track record of being a major national […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/22/2015
If you were on College Football Twitter in 2009 and 2010, “Clemsoning” — sometimes used as a participle but slightly more often used in its gerund form — was all the rage. Any failure on the part of Clemson football lit up Twitter, reinforcing just how snake-bitten and barren the program was since it won the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
When Steve Spurrier speaks, people laugh with him. When other SEC football coaches speak, people more often laugh at them. Such has been the case over the past week. Missouri’s Gary Pinkel made some well-intentioned but ultimately absurd comments about Notre Dame the other day. Last week, Nick Saban of Alabama — in public remarks […]
Gary Pinkel has coached the best short-field team in the SEC over the past two seasons. Missouri has squeezed more production out of this one stat than any other SEC team since the start of the 2012 campaign.
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/21/2015
For anyone who has followed the sport for more than a year or two, college football remains a theater of the absurd. College pigskin is an immensely entertaining and colorful part of our lives, blessedly spicing up everyday existence and blasting away the gray, the normal, the ordinary, the monotonous things that crowd our time […]
We are… waiting to see what James Franklin does at Penn State.
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Many people felt — and feel, and always will feel — that the NCAA took it easy on Penn State, and that the lifting of a bowl ban early in the 2014 season gave the program a rather soft landing after the events of the previous few years. You can argue whether the NCAA had […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/16/2015
Even when Brady Hoke saw his tenure go down in flames at Michigan, his offensive and defensive coordinators were generously compensated. This was not the case for Rich Rodriguez, whose coordinators — especially Greg Robinson on defense — made well below half of what Hoke’s coordinators pulled in. (You can see the figures in that […]
