CFB coaching carousel

Anderson is starring in the remake of "Escape from Alvarez".

 

Bielema going to Arkansas was a situation where it was a lateral move to a tougher conference with better facilities and more money for him and for assistants. I don't think it was a smart move, but I can understand why he did it.

Wisconsin to Oregon State is a complete head scratcher. It will be interesting if anything comes out about why he left or if he takes the high road.

 

The stuff about academics as it relates to athletes is just so much more Big Ten excuse-making. There was a time not long ago that Ohio State's president, the always entertaining and clueless Gordon Gee, lamented the uneven playing field his school had against the SEC. Think about that -- Ohio State was claiming academic restrictions.

It's neat sleight of hand and the Big Ten uses it as an excuse often, but there is no public FBS school in America where the academic credentials of its football and men's basketball team have anything to do with the rest of the student body or with functionally literate society in general. (Exception: the service academies if you want to include those as public, which I guess technically they are but they're off in their own world too.)

 

People give the SEC a lot of shit, but the majority of those schools have tougher academic restrictions than about half of the Big 12. That's not to say they couldn't get a guy in if they really wanted to.

The Big Ten may have overall tougher academic standards than the other major conferences, but let's not pretend Ohio State, Michigan State and Nebraska are anything to crow about academically, not that any of them are terrible.

 

For athletes?

They do not. They don't at all.

 

Then he's really going to drown in a tougher conference at a school where it's harder to recruit.

 

You can hide a little better at Oregon State. 6-6 at Oregon State doesn't piss people off the way it does at Wisconsin. Basically you need to beat Washington State, Cal, Colorado, someone and play a few bags of dicks in your OOC to make a bowl at Oregon State.

 

The bag of dicks are surprisingly hard to schedule.

 

It is not uncommon for Florida or Georgia to lose a recruit for academic reasons.

 

That the big reason why talk a few years ago the Pac-12 was going to take Texas Tech and Oklahoma State to get Texas and OU was pretty ridiculous. I'm sure the academic folks at Stanford, Cal, UCLA were super excited about that idea.

 

In my opinion, the Big 12 is the worst academically of the major conferences. With the exception of Texas, most of the better schools academically in the conference have left over the last few years. That's not to say Baylor, TCU and Kansas aren't good schools, because they are, but you also have K-State, Iowa State, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech.

Nebraska is widely considered to be the worst school academically in the Big Ten and it was pretty middle of the pack when it was in the Big 12.

 

But who cares?

The quality of the school has absolutely nothing to do with the academic performance of the athletes. The recent travails at Michigan, North Carolina and Cal should make that perfectly clear.

I know the conferences like to group themselves academically. I cannot understand why they do that, or why we all should follow along.