So Dabo Swinney is meeting with reporters yesterday and he's talking about the upcoming All In Ball, by all accounts a great event that raises money for a worthy cause.
A number of cool experiences are up for auction, including an "honorary coach" for the spring game.
He says: "Larry, this will be your chance right here, man. You can call some plays!"
My response: "And you can second-guess my play-calling!"
Him: "That's right! I'll write the article! That would be fun!"
Talk about turning the tables. Truth be told, he'd probably do a much better job in my shoes than I in his. The most worn-out button on my keyboard is the backspace key, and there's no such function when you're calling plays or making plays in front of 80,000 fans.
After spending a few hours watching my X's and O's, he could blare a "Fire Williams!" headline with 100-percent justification.
And they'd probably have to re-classify it as a "dishonorary coach."
On to some Thursday linkage:
-- Officials are weighing changes in college football's Bowl Championship Series, and USA Today managed to obtain the outline of the options.
Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated likes one of the ideas, that being a model closely resembling the NFL playoffs.
Over the years we've heard presidents and conference commissioners use "NFL-style playoff" as if it's a bad word, and I'm really not sure why. Because it'd be an excellent way to determine a champion in college football.
Higher-seeded teams playing host to playoff games eliminates one of the few legitimate criticisms of a playoff system: the inability of large numbers of people to travel across the country at the spur of the moment on back-to-back weekends.
As Staples notes, imagine Brent Musberger calling a playoff game featuring Alabama and Wisconsin in Madison. Pretty cool, huh?
The only drawback to this that I can see is a team having to hit the road after finishing a half a percentage point behind another team. Home-field advantage seems so pronounced in college football that surely some gripes and controversy would come from such cases. But compared to the gripes and controversy with the current system, I'll take it.
-- Tony Barnart talks with Coach Boom after a difficult first season in Gainesville.
"We lost to two great teams in Alabama and LSU [in back-to-back weeks] and they were just better than us. It doesn't take a genius to see that Alabama and LSU are just different than everybody else," Muschamp said. "But in three of the other losses we have an opportunity at the end of the game to win with one score or one stop. And we don't get it done. That is where we are."
The tape does not lie, Muschamp says. With a roster that was 70 percent freshmen and sophomores, Florida simply didn't have the bodies up front that are necessary to play at the highest level of the SEC.
"It was a very frustrating year in terms of our numbers on the line of scrimmage," he said. "We had to change the way we practice. We had to practice like a pro team, and that's not going to get it done in the SEC."
-- Barry Jacobs looks at ACC basketball by the numbers.
-- This dispatch says E.J. Manuel is making legitimate strides in Tallahassee. I still question his ability to make big throws in clutch situations.
-- In Atlanta, Paul Johnson talks about growing pains.
“The ball was on the ground a zillion times,” Johnson said. “When you play a lot of guys, that’s going to happen."
-- And 145 miles down I-20 in Augusta, it begins.
-- By the way, anyone ever tried monkey gland sauce?
LW
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