Wednesday's Skull Session will offer some commentary on things happening in the world of college football and Ohio State football as you look forward to Ohio State's highly anticipated clash with the Wisconsin Badgers. A game, perhaps prematurely, billed as the de facto Leaders Division championship game at the beginning of the conference schedule rightly conforms well to its primetime 8 p.m. slot on ABC.
Plus, Eleven Warriors will be hosting Eat Too Brutus IV for that game. Hopefully, you got your tickets for the event. We're going to tailgate and pregame hard, then march to Ohio Stadium and beat the Badgers so badly that you are all individually going to get written reprimands from PETA.
It'll be fun!
NEW DEPTH CHART RELEASED. Ohio State released an updated depth chart for the Big Ten opener against Wisconsin. Unlike last week's depth chart for Florida A&M, this one features some noteworthy changes and is rather informative in own right. In this section, I walk through the changes and what they may mean.
For the first time this season, Kenny Guiton and Braxton Miller are listed as "OR" on the quarterback depth chart. Previously, Miller was the starting quarterback who was an eleventh hour scratch before the games against California and Florida A&M. Ohio State's coaches may still not have made a determination of which the two will start, though Braxton Miller is cleared to play.
This situation at least leads to flashbacks to the 2005 game against Texas, when Ohio State coaches were unwilling to reinstall Troy Smith as the starting quarterback after his two-game suspension for a $500 handshake iat the end of the 2004 season. Remember, material self-interest for college football players used to be a bad thing before it affected Johnny Manziel.
Juggling between Troy Smith and Justin Zwick led to inefficiencies in the offense that cost Ohio State would could have been another signature win in the Tressel era against the eventual national champions of that year.
While Ohio State fans will note that the situation is only slightly analogous because Guiton or Miller would be a much better option than Zwick if he were in the choice set, this situation is still enough to create some alarm in those of us who vividly recall Urban Meyer's last year at Florida. That Ohio State coaches have also hinted they may find a way to get Guiton and Miller on the same field at the same time reminded me of Urban Meyer's "three-QB offense" from 2010.
John Brantley, Trey Burton, and Jordan Reed would emerge from the huddle and execute a play that would garner two yards and look uncomfortable for everyone involved, and even those watching at home. Mostly it was Brantley at quarterback and Burton and Reed as tight ends/H-backs. Whatever the case, it was ugly and never quite thought out. That was the year where Florida could only muster one touchdown against Mississippi State en route to an 8-5 season. Mississippi State.
There are several other noteworthy changes. Carlos Hyde is now the second team tailback behind Jordan Hall. Reinstated for the game against Florida A&M, he was not on that week's depth chart.
Several first-year players were removed from the depth chart. James Clark will sit the rest of the season with an injury and was taken off the depth chart at the Z receiver position. Jalin Marshall, Mike Mitchell, and Corey Smith have been removed from the depth chart. Not one of these players saw the field of play against Florida A&M and the change on the depth chart suggests a redshirt year for all three in 2013.
PENN STATE WILL GET ITS SCHOLARSHIPS BACK. In a move that I didn't think would actually work some time ago, Penn State appealed part of the sanctions to wish an official representative of the university accepted in the wake of the Freeh Report. The verdict was returned, and in Penn State's favor. It is getting most of its scholarships back.
The sanctions, as they were originally given, limited Penn State to 65 scholarship players overall (almost equal to what FCS teams give), and no more than 15 scholarship additions in each recruiting class through 2017. Now, Penn State will be able to offer 20 scholarships starting in next year's (2015) recruiting class. It can go to 25 new additions the year after. Penn State will also graduate to 75 overall scholarship players starting in next year's recruiting class. It will be at the full 85 in 2017. Essentially, the revision to Penn State's scholarship reductions will now leave it at 9/10th what a normal program can have. This is huge for player development at Penn State and may have the positive side effect of giving Bill O'Brien more incentive to stay in Happy Valley.
The reactions in Troy were, well, tongue-in-cheek. USC was rocked with almost equivalent scholarship reductions, which took effect after USC served its two-year postseason ban.
I asked USC AD Pat Haden about the Penn State decision. He forced a smile and said, "I'd love to have some scholarships back."
— Pete Thamel (@SIPeteThamel) September 24, 2013
Pat Haden also released a more formal written statement.
Kiffykin's reaction might be even better.
Congrats to Coach Bill O'Brien and his team!
— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) September 24, 2013
In some sense, I get the frustration (even if we are quick to forget how USC got its sanctions, and how it basically dared the NCAA to drop that hammer). Recruiting is a Bernoulli trial. If we understand, perhaps simplistically, that college football recruits have some objective probability of bearing out their star ranking, the only way to ensure more "successes" overall is to increase the denominator, or number of trials. This is the logic behind "oversigning", as practiced first by Houston Nutt and later mastered by Nick Saban.
If I were Kiffy, I may have attributed how awful that 2012 season was for USC to his inability to replace Aundrey Walker at right tackle. He was terrible, and Stanford, in particular, turned him inside out all game long. However, there was little USC's coaches could do about it, given the scholarship crunch. Walker had to play, and play at right tackle instead of a guard spot.
For the time being, Penn State's bowl ineligibility will remain through 2015.
Pulitzer Award-winning deep v sweaterWHY SI'S OKLAHOMA STATE STORY SUCKED. Remember that five-part expose that Sports Illustrated trotted out a few weeks ago? It was going to be a game-changer, using Oklahoma State as a case study for the negative externalities of a win-at-all-costs attitude toward college football. It was so grandiose, in fact, that SI offered it in five daily installments during the work week before the print edition came out.
The story flopped, hard. The primary investigator, Thayer Evans, is well-known as an Oklahoma troll whose objectivity toward in-state rival Oklahoma State was questioned from the very beginning.
Further, the expose on academics was quickly unraveled when it was clear that one of SI's key sources was telling stories inconsistent with his actual transcript.
Curious about how it happened, Deadspin released its own report on what went into making that dud. Here is a highlight.
Our source said the Oklahoma State officials asked for names of any players, coaches, tutors, or professors mentioned in the report. Dohrmann and Schecter did not provide the names of any players making specific allegations, nor did they provide the names of any tutors or professors. Once the stories were published, the source added, it was apparent that SI had talked mostly to "disgruntled" players prior to the meetings—players who the source said posed "very little risk" of informing school officials they were being questioned by a reporter.
"There were inferences made that players would recant," the source said. "They did not want us contacting them."
On one hand, SI was being prudent: The magazine clearly did not want OSU interfering with its investigation. Also, the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) prevents schools from releasing transcripts without the consent of a student over the age of 18. But SI's reluctance to name certain players, tutors, or professors also made it impossible for OSU to verify—or refute—some of the specific allegations being made.
This proved to be problematic once the series was published. Former safety Fath' Carter was quoted extensively in Part 2 of SI's series, which covered allegations of academic fraud. It turned out that several of Carter's claims didn't match what was in his transcripts, and SI was forced to amend Part 2 with a pair of corrections. But SI never bothered to corroborate any of Carter's claims against his actual academic record. (According to a source at the magazine, the reporters didn't ask the school for transcripts because they figured they'd be denied. Some transcripts were provided by the former players themselves.) "We had no idea Fath' Carter was part of the story," our source said.
This is all very interesting. It makes me wonder when we will get a similar report about how George Dohrmann, co-author of the Oklahoma State report, took "Ghosts of Youngstown" and added an anecdote of a rigged raffle from 1985 and got his own SI cover story. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
MISCELLANY. This Week in Schadenfreude... Archie shares his thoughts, briefly, on the Florida A&M coach who gave him his opportunity... I should hope we're not doing the alt uniform thing for Wisconsin. It's just Wisconsin, and we're already doing it against Michigan... Charles "Chip" Kelly, in longform... Out of morbid curiosity, I checked to see if Terrelle Pryor still has his Block O tattoo on his right forearm. He does... Speaking of which, Terrelle Pryor was concussed at the end of the game against the Broncos and does not remember the game now. Stuff like this is a pressing concern now... Bad gets worse for Ryan Braun... Florida thinks your state sucks at high school football, Kentucky... Throat slash at the peril of your own playing time... How not to get an Ohio State fan interested in what you have to say, in one tweet... Soccer player got pantsed like some nerdlinger... Marry me, Stanford... New South Park tonight.
