Yes I understand it’s not the morning. This isn’t Monday Morning … it’s Monday Mourning. The college football season is over, so we’re sad. Since we’re all pretty broken up about it, we’re going to bring in some interesting and quirky news headlines from the weekend every Monday in hopes of cheering ourselves up. Hopefully this can be a weekly thing throughout the offseason to keep us a bit occupied. Let’s get to it.
Tommy Tuberville is once again continuing his savagery into his reign as Cincinnati’s head football coach. According to reports from Bearcat commits, Tuberville is not communicating with players who were committed to Cincinnati under coach Butch Jones, but is simply giving them the cold shoulder. Tuberville was hired at Cincinnati on December 8 and according to a few high school recruits, they were never contacted by the new coaching staff. What’s even worse is that when the recruits called the football office to talk to someone, they were told to look elsewhere. That’s right, Tubby appears to be hoping that players just figure it out on their own that they’re not welcome on his team. The disappointing part of this ordeal is that players are now being left out in the cold because their second and third school choices have filled their recruiting classes. It’s no surprise coming from a coach who would only leave Ole Miss “in a pine box,” spent his final days as Auburn’s coach out duck hunting, and left Texas Tech literally during the middle of dinner with recruits.
With the end of the college football season there comes another end to something equally as awesome: the Western Athletic Conference, also known as the WACky WACtion. As terribly as we all thought of the WAC, they actually ended on a really high note. Utah State finished the year ranked #16, the highest of any mid-major team. San Jose State finished 11-2 and just a few spots behind them at #21. They also had Louisiana Tech who peaked at #20 in the BCS standings. That’s three quality teams out of seven total in its final year. In fact, the conference seems to have been severely under appreciated. Since 2000, it has been home to Tulsa, TCU, SMU, Nevada, Hawai’i, Fresno State and Boise State. You can make a pretty fine conference with those teams. Let’s all have a moment of silence for what once was…the WAC.
Believe it or not, the top team in the BCS era of college football is the Oklahoma Sooners. Yeah, I don’t believe it either, but it’s all done very scientifically by Al.com’s Alex Walsh in this article here. According to Walsh’s calculations in this system, the winner of three of the last four BCS titles only finishes ninth for the 15 year history of the BCS. Walsh then went back and mixed his numbers up and re-did the system to find which overall state is the best in the BCS era, which he reveals to us here. In this piece, the state of Florida is far and away the top state during the BCS era with three of the top 13 BCS teams in the last 15 years. Texas and California come in second and third places, respectively. Meanwhile, Alabama, the state that has won the last four BCS titles, came in sixth place. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the formula is a little off, but it is what it is.
The Miami Hurricanes may have a bright history with the BCS, but that probably won’t continue in the near future with their coming notice of allegations from the NCAA. They’re supposed to receive this notice within the next 72 hours and then the university will have to go in front of the NCAA infractions committee to address it. Unfortunately for us though, Miami is a private university and is not obligated to release all the information in their NCAA notice. According to the report, they will release most of the information though and there have been over 100 players in multiple sports investigated, mostly concerning Nevin Shapiro. It’s gon’ be real bad down on South Beach.
Drugs are bad, mmkay
TCU will now have two starting quarterbacks on next year’s roster as Casey Pachall has been reinstated after his dismissal and bout with rehab. Trevone Boykin took over for him midseason this year but he wasn’t nearly as good as Pachall’s 35 TDs to eight interceptions in his 16 games as a starter. TCU had a pretty large drug ring going on over there so, in good taste, let’s hope Pachall can stay clean and bring the Horned Frogs back to the point they were the year before.