Holy crap! And he’s not a tall guy with a lot of leverage. Would have loved to see some better footage - especially the roll on that sucker. And my own game has degraded to hitting a 3/5 iron off the tee to keep it straight. Lotta respect, Johnny.

This article, like so many others previewing 2020 performance, depends on the historical norm of player availability. Positive tests and mass quarantines for COVID will be the wild card this coming season, assuming its played. Those teams that have the virus run through the team early - summer workouts, camp - may be in much better position once we’re in to the season. A top-ten unit is a totally different animal if portions of it are constantly rolling through two-week quarantines. If this season actually kicks off, it’s going to be a wild ride.

I think you can accurately say it’s not much of a SPECTATOR sport, but these kids are pretty darn fit. As to the logic of the virus’s danger in any of these three sports when compared to 22 guys all over each other for 3-4 hours - well, money talks.

Biden might have called him Knute Saban - after several attempts . . .

Ford was absolutely jobbed by the NCAA. Shameful. Met every criteria for family hardship transfer.

^^^ This ^^^ Ask any Kirby recruit. They’ll tell you he promises to try to constantly recruit over them. Don’t like that type of honesty? Head somewhere else - where your new coach might give you the you-da-man vibe while he’s attempting to recruit over you behind your back.

I’m with ya, but the varied and sundry chaos of past 4 months has put everyone on a hair trigger. I don’t think it’ll take more than a couple of moderately-sized outbreaks during August camp to torpedo the whole season for all. And those outbreaks are virtually guaranteed at this point. Once that happens, the dominoes fall rapidly, I think.

If a 10-game SEC schedule is implemented, it would likely take the next two season’s cross-divisional opponents for each school. For UGA, that would be Ole Miss and Arkansas. It definitely wouldn’t be LSU and A&M - those are the West teams we played most recently the past two seasons. It’s becoming moot though, I believe. I’m 75% convinced the season will be scrapped before we get to opening week.

A final Saturday with 14 SEC teams playing 14 ACC teams - intriguing. How the 10 teams with no annual cross-conference rivalry would be matched up could be very interesting. Bama-Miami? LSU-Va Tech? Duke-Miss? Pitt-Auburn? Tenn-NC? Some would be throwaways, but several potential matchups could be worth watching.

He’ll be practicing and scrimmaging from the jump against one of the best projected Ds in the country. I doubt he’ll see anything from Bama, Auburn, etc. early that he hasn’t seen repeatedly with UGA’s unit.

In the SEC, that fabricated SC-A&M “rivalry” takes the cake. Square peg hammered into a reluctant round hole if there ever was one.

I actually re-read 1984 every few years. Every time I see evidence of single-stream, correct-and-approved groupthink - and that’s virtually hourly at this point - I believe even more strongly in Orwell’s prophetic voice. I had only read BNW once, though, and that was many years ago. I felt this was a good time to get a refresher. BNW is frightening - and apparently impressed Orwell enough to pen 1984 - but Huxley’s BNW Revisited is even scarier. No literary mechanisms or plot to wrap the message up in - just “here’s what’s coming.”

I suspect there will be a whole ‘nother level of detail around this type of contract verbiage going forward. Cancel culture at it’s finest. Just finished re-reading Brave New World, and BNW Revisited. Eerily prophetic. Truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Who would have ever thought a twisted, modern version of Lord of the Flies would be broadcast live nightly into our living rooms like a reality series, courtesy of Seattle’s CHOP?

And FWIW, at the end of 2009 - finishing 5 decades since 1960 - there were actually 6 schools on the list. The three that fell off when this past decade (as defined by the NCAA) ended a few months ago were Nebraska, Texas, and Tennessee.

The point of the article was how difficult it is to sustain a solid winning tradition over a long period of time without falling into an abyss for several years. I was surprised to see both UGA and Auburn on the list, but when you look more deeply year by year you see that neither school has gone off the rails for any extended period. Just a different way of framing up the idea of consistency.

I read an article a few months back that had a very surprising NCAA stat: only 3 FBS programs have played the past 60 years of CFB while winning at least 60% of their games each and every one of those six decades. Two of the three are SEC teams: Auburn and Georgia. The other is Ohio State.

So many pitfalls in this reasoning. What’s the cut for “all time”? Rutgers’ first game? Post-WW II? Poll era? 1-A establishment?Nebraska and Tennessee are top-ten all time win programs, but they’re left out in favor of Oregon - a program with almost no history of achievement before 2000. Miami had a 20-year run of excellence that ended 20 years ago, but was irrelevant before and after. How does that make them different from Yale or Princeton? Although I generally agree with much of the list, using “best coach” to define a program is highly subjective and has land mines everywhere depending on the era of the game. Woody Hayes’ Buckeyes would take down Dabo’s Tigers “every time”? How do you compare “three yards and a cloud of dust” coaches, who were one-dimensional offensively, to someone like Mike Gundy or Chip Kelly? It’s an exercise in futility with the way the game and players and coaches have matured. Obviously this is more fodder for clicks, and retroactively determining “The All-Time Best . . .” has become almost an industry in recent years. It does what it’s designed to do - generate debate.

I spent a fair amount of time on SDS last year telling the Vol fans in meltdown mode that they needed to keep faith in Jeremy for this exact reason. He is a great talent evaluator and his history proves he can develop players, who usually become fiercely loyal to him. Patience was needed to allow him to grow into the HC job and fill the cupboard back up. Imagine if the knee-jerk “Fire Pruitt!” mob mentality had won out after the GSU loss. That top-ten 2020 recruiting class would never have happened, and it’s highly unlikely UT’s 2021 class would be sitting where it is today. Tennessee would likely be back to square one rather than positioned to stack two great classes back to back. Jeremy still has to hold this class together and show improvement on the field going forward, but at this point Pruitt as the umpteenth alternate choice for HC is looking pretty good.

Right, cuz football is such an individual sport. The difference between the two is that in 2020 you can say “Herschel” and a large percentage of people know who you’re talking about. You can then say “George Rogers” and many of those people say, “who?”

I believe this may get off to a slower start than previously thought due to the lingering financial impact of the virus. It will take several years of difficult recovery for many of the businesses that would traditionally throw money at college athletes to return to a level healthy enough to justify the expense. Undoubtedly there will be pockets of big spending where boosters control or influence marketing decisions, but a business generally needs a return on advertising dollars. It remains to be seen what impact a 19 YO kid hawking your product has on revenues. I do agree that the better-funded schools in more populous states will likely have an advantage. Dallas, Houston and Atlanta are 3 of the ten largest Nielsen media markets in the country, with Tampa and Miami not too far behind. To what degree schools in and near these markets get their arms around this new dynamic could be crucial in the first few years. That said, I still don’t like it.

And Cager hadn’t been hurt.

We’re absolutely getting a fairy tale out of the CCP. The leaks coming out of the Chinese epidemiological community are now telling the tale that Patient Zero was actually an employee at the Level 4 lab in Wuhan in early November. Of the Chinese data that we do have, 14 of the first 41 confirmed cases in Wuhan had absolutely no interaction with the supposedly central-vector wet market, or anyone who had - which makes the official story of the market being the original vector questionable. There’s also some very troubling genetic S-protein concerns with this virus - as in, it’s a 100% match to a rare COVID strain known to be kept at the Wuhan lab. Virtually impossible for that to happen through natural mutation without genetic recombination assistance. But, the original outbreak samples were ordered destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party, the entire scientific community in China is on absolute lockdown, and no foreign expert assistance is being allowed in. I’m certain it’s all just coincidence . . .

Nash, the R-naught in the twos is the current working number, but some recent studies show it could be more like 5-6, and even as high as 25. Most epidemiologists feel that, just from a logic and experience standpoint, a pathogen with a R0 in the twos or threes couldn’t possibly blanket the planet so quickly. It’ll be a while before we know the number for sure, but a higher R0 will get us to herd immunity a lot quicker.

Singapore, who had great mitigation early, seems to be beginning the second wave. Reports from Wuhan and Hong Kong - independent of the CCP narrative - suggest a second wave is well underway. It’s not a matter of if for most of the world, but when. It’s inevitable with this degree of transmissibility until there’s a vaccine.

I really hope we have a 2020 CFB season, but at this point I think it’s really unlikely. We’ve lost spring practice and are in an unprecedented state of worldwide lockdown. We’re living in a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode and civil liberties have been suspended to a degree never seen in this country. Nothing regarding this virus’s transmissibility will likely have changed come fall. We may have more effective treatment therapies available whenever we begin assimilating society again, but antibody and vaccine development take time. I just can’t see massive stadiums packed with people 5 months from now. A return to normalcy is still a long way off. Our national psyche has been shaken to the core as we’ve been overwhelmed with incessant doomsday predictions, valid or not. This virus is more contagious than anything we’ve seen in 100 years. When restrictions are eventually lifted without a vaccine in place, the infection curve will rise again - likely mid-summer. The response to that will probably be as panicked and draconian as we’re currently living through. Which, I suspect, will run right up against the beginning of fall camp. At that point, still with no vaccine or effective antibody treatment widely available, we’ll have to make a decision: plunge into a worldwide depression over a virus with what will probably be determined by then to have a true mortality rate below 1%, or accept that COVID can’t be effectively mitigated and take the herd immunity route with whatever therapies are available. Both choices are traumatic, but I don’t see a middle ground without some miraculous, unforeseen development. This virus will not “burn out” - it’s far too pervasive. We’re understandably focused on flattening the curve now, but that is really a delaying strategy to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed at one time. Second waves are already beginning in Asia. When our time comes, how we respond will dictate whether we see football at all this season.

I’ll say again, the schools to keep an eye on are the ones who don’t self-report.

Burrow was about the most cool-under-fire college QB I’ve ever seen. I lost track of how many busted plays he turned into big-gainers. He’ll do fine in the NFL.

14-6 vs UT this century, 8-2 the last ten. You may have a fifth-year senior or two that was alive when UT last won a natty. Maybe. Next year you certainly won’t.

And let’s not forget that during this critical early period you refer to, the country was distracted at every level by the impeachment circus.

Eight weeks ago the WHO was insisting that there was no proof the virus could be spread person to person. Six weeks ago after the US closed travel to China the WHO (and much of the world) accused the US of over-reacting. It was less than 4 weeks ago that the first confirmation came that the virus could be spread by asymptomatic carriers, which was a complete game-changer. During the entire time - now apparently dating back to November - China was deliberately repressing, downplaying, and dis-informing about the nature and severity of the virus. In light of those events and time frames, what would you have done as hypothetical Dictator In Chief?