College Sports: Not Too Much Going on These Days

The Dead Guy SEC discusses happenings in the college sports world, including ESPN's list of top college basketball programs.

by The Dead Guy SEC (Analyst)

9

313 reads

Editorial

July 22, 2008

NCAA, College Basketball, College Football, SEC Football, Editorial

Other than what seems to be a twice-weekly occurrence of players being booted off teams, all's quiet for now. Well, except for Urban Meyer. Most of you have probably heard about this...

Simply calling Tim Tebow the best quarterback in college football apparently isn't enough. Gators coach Urban Meyer told a Miami audience that Tebow ''is the greatest player of our era.''

Tebow certainly has the potential to be the greatest player of this era, but I think it's premature to bestow that honor on him just yet. The MNC ring as a freshman and the Heisman as a sophomore put him in a class by himself, but he's got at least one more year in college, and SEC coaching staffs have had another full offseason to work on defensive schemes to slow him down.

There are plenty of defenders across the SEC who will take a little extra joy popping the defending Heisman winner.

* ESPN loves to make up new statistics and shove them down our throats—OPS anyone? Their latest is to come up with (in their mind) the definitive way to measure the prestige of all college basketball programs since 1984-85, the year the tourney went to its current format. They've listed numbers 41-50 here and numbers 51-300 here.

I love the reasoning ESPN gives as to how these numbers are indisputable:

"Normally when you see these rankings, they are the 'expert' opinion of one or more people whose knowledge (and sanity) usually is questioned by those who disagree. But with ESPN's Prestige Rankings, there is no such argument. We let the numbers do the talking.

We assigned point values for certain successes (win a national title, earn 25 points) and failures (get your program banned from the NCAA tournament, lose three points), put all the seasons through our big calculator and came up with the number one program (and the No. 300 program) of the past 24 seasons."

But I digress.

So far, eight of the SEC's 12 schools have shown up...
41. LSU
T-86. Mississippi State
T-90. Auburn
T-96. Vanderbilt
99. Tennessee
T-105. Georgia
T-185. South Carolina
T-192. Mississippi

...which leaves Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama. Without taking the time to do the math, It'll be interesting to see if UF or UK comes out on top for the SEC. Each has two championships and a title game loss. I'd imagine Alabama will be in the next group and Arkansas in the 20-11 group.

In the end though, it's just another excuse for ESPN to fawn over ACC basketball. Once the top 10 is unveiled Friday, you can count on Duke Vitale to show up on Sports Center and go crazy for Dook and UNC.

* Next time you think you're doing well at the gym, try not to think of UT OL Jacques McClendon and how he benched 645 pounds. And no that's not a typo...

* Fairly interesting read on Bleacher Report today: 30 Fearless Predictions for the 2008 season.

Editorial

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comments (9) write a comment »

  1. 645? I didn't even think the bar held that much? I'm trying to do the math in my head and I my right pectoral just exploded. Another reason to feel inadequate in the gym.

  2. mmmmmmm this article has no point

    1. thanks for the insightful feedback there Dave. This was posted on my blog and automatically published here as well. While I agree it makes more sense in the context of a random posting on a blog than here, I have to wonder why you took the time to post a bunch of "m"s and a snarky comment...

  3. This article is great and makes me think alot about the upcoming season

  4. does anyone know what the record bench press is?

  5. Got it, 715 pounds(drug tested record)
    1025 lbs for non-drug tested

    1. That is not human... got a link for that? I wanna know who benched 1/2 a ton.

  6. I saw a 165 lb guy bench press 450 lbs. More impressive than a 300 lb guy benching 645.

  7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlDWdfTAx8o

    this is the guy who benched 1/2 ton. 1010 lbs actually not 1025, what a wimp!

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