Archives

Short paths and a simple conclusion: College basketball is cluttered

College basketball is, by nature, crazy and hard to sort out… but this season is already pushing the boundaries of what’s so fascinatingly fragile about the sport. You don’t need to write elaborate explanations in order to capture the up-for-grabs nature of this season at its Janus-inspired midpoint, with two months of regular season action […]

Coordinated chaos: The SEC is awash in coordinator changes

The Southeastern Conference was and is a hard conference to assess this college football season. There’s no way to reasonably refute that claim — not when considering the contradictions which exist in the league. The SEC’s most fundamental contradiction at the end of the bowl season, one which will exist whether or not Alabama wins […]

Bowl Coaching Case Studies: Tom Herman

A total of 80 men coached teams in the 40 bowl games which have just run their course. No man coached a better game than Tom Herman of Houston. The commander of the Cougars had his team ready to compete, hit, and perform at a desired tempo against Florida State in the Peach Bowl. Houston […]

Cotton Bowl aftermath: Michigan State was so close, yet ultimately so far away

Michigan State this season was described with all the adjectives football types like to use for teams deemed “tough.” Hard-nosed. Physical. Full of grinders. High compete level. Except this team hadn’t played anyone like Alabama, and the Crimson Tide whipped the Spartans every which way for 60 minutes. The final score was 38-0, but it […]

Alabama sticks to the game plan and reaps the rewards

Each team entered the Cotton Bowl with a different game plan. However, one was clearly more effective than the other. Despite the fact that Heisman Trophy winner Derrick Henry entered this game with 90 carries in his past two games combined, the Tide’s coaches were convinced that the way to beat Michigan State was with […]

The most important college football games Alabama ever played

Roughly 90 years ago, the Alabama Crimson Tide established themselves as the signature program of the Southern United States. Today, a second straight appearance in the College Football playoff — following three BCS national championships and a full-fledged revival of the program under Nick Saban — has reaffirmed Alabama’s place as the South’s ultimate program… […]

The 50-year wait is over for Michigan State

Think of the many long droughts which still exist in modern American sports. The Chicago Cubs’ World Series dry spell is number one. The Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions failing to make any of the first 50 Super Bowls would also rate highly on the list of parched-earth portraits. The city of Cleveland’s professional sports […]

Semifinal differences: coordinator continuity

If the College Football Playoff semifinals share a fundamental similarity, they own a basic difference as well. The Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl are both revenge games for the lower seeds: Oklahoma will try to wash away the bitter taste of a 40-6 loss to Clemson in the 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl, and Michigan […]

Semifinal similarities: Revenge looms large for the lower seeds

There are so many ways to crack open and compare the College Football Playoff semifinals. You’ll get all the angles in due time over the course of the next two and a half weeks. Today, consider one of the foremost similarities between the Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl: the presence of revenge as a […]

2015 in review: for the four playoff teams, fragility was a friend

What to make of the now-concluded push for the College Football Playoff? Four teams clearly made the cut, but that’s not the same thing as saying that we know these are the four best teams in college football for the 2015 season. Is Alabama better than 11-1 Ohio State? Is Oklahoma better than 10-2 Notre […]

Saturday’s biggest winner? Nick Saban

It was a very good Saturday for Nick Saban. See that photo above? That’s Saban taking the team picture with the 1998 Michigan State Spartans. The 1998 Spartans did not possess championship aspirations, and they did not fulfill them. Michigan State lingered in — if not obscurity — “second-class status” for quite some time following […]

MADISON, WI – OCTOBER 03: Head Coach Kirk Ferentz of the Iowa Hawkeyes stands on the sidelines during the first half against the Wisconsin Badgers at Camp Randall Stadium on October 03, 2015 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photo by Mike McGinnis/Getty Images)

13-0 — if it was so easy, we’d see it more often

Hitting a baseball. Winning 70 NBA games. 16-0 in the NFL. Winning the Grand Slam in golf or tennis — ask Serena Williams. These are some of the hardest things to do in sports. We know this intellectually, on a “head level,” but do we really appreciate the enormity of the task and what it […]

STARKVILLE, MS – NOVEMBER 14: Jonathan Allen #93 of the Alabama Crimson Tide tackles Dak Prescott #15 of the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Davis Wade Stadium on November 14, 2015 in Starkville, Mississippi. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

The Pac-12 is done, and clarity has been added

Deep into Saturday night, Utah lost to Arizona when Arizona couldn’t throw the ball forward other than for one play in overtime. It was preceded by an equal parts stunning and bitter loss for Stanford at home to Oregon … a team the Cardinal tortured when the stakes were switched and one was the hunter […]

The Playoff Committee must evaluate the Army-Navy Game

Houston, we have a problem: The Army-Navy Game is making college football respond poorly to a logistical squeeze. Houston does not currently refer to the Cougars, but if Tom Herman’s team goes 13-0 and makes a case for the fourth playoff spot, we might really have a problem with the Army-Navy Game. If Notre Dame […]

Quantcast