Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to your morning Skull Session. As the little blurb below this post has indicated, Storm Klein has been reinstated to the Ohio State football team, and no doubt you have a wide variety of opinions on the subject. That's cool. Maybe you're a fan of redemptive second chances, or maybe you feel like what he did (or is accused of doing) is beyond the pale of forgiveness. Or maybe you're just worried about linebacker depth, I don't know.
Whatever your feeling on the subject, I think this case, along with what happened to Bri'onte Dunn, illustrates exactly why it's so hard to enforce a singular code of conduct for such a large group of people. I'm not defending either Klein or Dunn here; from the police video of his arrest, it'd be hard for most people to say he was completely innocent of what he was accused of, and Klein has a not-so-positive anecdotal reputation which makes his alleged behavior unsurprising to an extent.
But that's what makes this so hard. Dunn was absolved of any drug charges, and Klein wasn't charged for any sort of violent crime. If you're Urban Meyer, what do you do? Ignore the conclusion of the justice system and continue to impose your own punishment based on your value system? Harsh, but honest to your personal system of values. Or do you accept them back, because they've been through the courts and come out mostly clean?
I know what choice I'd make. But I don't face the kind of pressures that Urban Meyer does.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN ROAD GAMES WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. Grantland has a neat little primer on how to survive a road game in a hostile environment, and in said article Bryan Curtis touches on his experience at Ohio State during the Texas game in 2005. Curtis is mostly positive about his experience, which is easy to say because he's not Ryan Hamby and Texas won.
Actually, Buckeyes fans became exactly what I wanted. They were nutso, semi-belligerent, and protective of their turf. If you go on a football road trip and you don’t see a burning couch, you’ve gone to the wrong place.
He also mentions the e-mail Karen Holbrook sent out about poor fan behavior, so that sound you heard yesterday afternoon was 700,000 or so Ohioans simultaneously rolling their eyes in derision.
SHOW ME YOUR SOURCES NEUHEISEL. Rick Neuheisel knows why the SEC is so good, and it's not because the conference has excellent coaching, a desire to cheat, longstanding policies of oversigning, occasional outright academic fraud, rabid fanbases, a great talent pool, and multiple states where football is more or less the only means to move out of extreme poverty.
Nope, it's ESPN, who apparently is so evil that they're controlling college football with the deft skill of an unholy combination of puppetmaster and maestro, leading to six straight SEC national titles. Look, I hate the SEC as much as any reasonable, non-horrible person. But as bad as ESPN is in general at reporting critically (especially where their vested monetary interest, the SEC, is concerned), the idea that the SEC is the be-all and end-all of college football extends far, far further than ESPN's reach.
He looks 12 but you don't have to handle him with kid glovesHAHA JUST KIDDING. I'm just gonna go ahead and copy and paste this heerrree...
Developing that kind of depth comes down to recruiting and to redshirting. Anyone can spot and sign a five- or four-star player. But that type of player has little to do with creating championship-quality depth.
"In a class of 25, how well do you evaluate Nos. 11-25?" asked Texas A&M special-teams coordinator Brian Polian. "The teams that do that really well are the teams that have quality depth."
It turns out that it's really easy to evaluate a class of 25 guys when there's actually 28 or 30 of them. Depth is super important, obviously, but equally important is your opponent's relative lack thereof. Sometimes I wonder if oversigning has a more pronounced effect during bowl season than during the regular season. In any event, it seems that the SEC has about a 1/3 chance to win another one in 2013, leading to even more gnashing and wailing from people who think the competitive advantage gained from selling rings for tattoos might be slightly less than repeatedly bringing on more players than is supposed to be allowed year after year.
2012 COACHING CHANGES. Some random observations on that subject:
- Turtlenecks do not have a slimming effect.
- I still think Gus Malzahn has some kind of moonshining operation going on.
- I hope John L. Smith loses his out of conference games by an average of 21 points, and then runs the table in the SEC.
- Norm Chow gets a head coaching job about 15 years too late.
- I hereby challenge Matt Campbell at Toledo to a Nicktoons trivia Olympics. No Doug questions though. Doug sucked.
- It may be difficult to maintain a low carb diet in Kansas.
THE LINKWARD SWORD. Samuel L, football fan... YES HE CHEATED IT'S CYCLING, EVERYBODY FREAKING CHEATS... Are you ready for some football?... Oklahoma might somehow suck more than Michigan... The best kind of fight (one I'm not in)... #FREEJNEW... This is the scariest thing I've seen in weeks.
