40 Acres Sports

College football season is officially upon us as Saturday morning ESPN’s College Gameday aired their preview special. I didn’t even know it would be on, luckily the TiVo caught it and I saw it on there this morning.

In the first ten minutes of the show, the Gameday crew talks about Vince Young leaving and the remarkable 2005 Longhorn season, the quarterback situation, the many returning studs, and who will step up to fill Vince’s leadership role. Probably the most interesting comment comes from Mark May, he essentially says a two-quarterback system can have some success but it won’t win anyone a national championship. Kirk Herbstreit also brings up the need for offensive consistency without the explosive ability of Vince Young. Texas is going to have to put together some longer scoring drives and not put themselves in 3rd and 27 situations. Both are valid points.

May definitely appears to still be on the Texas bandwagon again this year. It seems he was big on the Horns every year except last season until real late. Whoops.

Click here to watch the entire 4+ minute segment. (Note: Video playback requires Flash Player 8.)

It almost sounds like there will be no QB rotation at all, even against UNT.

Despite going to I-AA, the NCAA should force him to sit out the year.

This is getting out of control. How many things can we be #1 at?

Good article on Mack and his brother Watson Brown, the head coach at UAB.

It will be harder for UT students to get tickets this upcoming basketball season as the athletic department has announced they would be cutting 1,600 guaranteed seats. There will still be the same number of student tickets for the lower bowl (1,200) but only 840 in the upper mezzanine level. According to senior associate athletic director Doug Messner only twice in the last two seasons would students have used all 2,040 of the tickets still guaranteed for them.

I’m encouraged that the athletic department is taking steps to improve attendance and game atmosphere, but I’m not completely sure this is the answer. The reason student attendance is low for most games is because those upper mezzanine seats are terrible and even the majority of lower level seats are behind the basket and high off the court. If they designated more lower level seats for students then student attendance would increase. Put students behind the opponent’s bench and the Erwin Center is immediately a louder and rowdier place to play.

Source

Hopefully no one will get knocked out while running with the ball and trying to watch the screen.

Houston came in at #18 and DFW came in at #27.

Don’t worry though, it is just a bruise. The x-rays were negative.

In an effort to measure which college programs have been the most successful over the last five seasons, the Wall Street Journal has come up with The Dow Jones College-Football Success Index. I’m not sure why, but they have chosen to use a formula that calculates the success of college football teams using only NFL information. They use the number of players starting/contributing on NFL teams as one factor, which also includes how many games their NFL teams win. The other factor is a team’s “draft success” which attempts to determine whether a team’s players have lived up to their draft promise.

The Longhorns land at number sixteen, which isn’t too low except for the fact that teams like North Carolina and Texas A&M land ahead of the Horns. That’s a pretty tell-tale sign that your ranking logic is horribly skewed. They list only [tag]Derrick Dockery[/tag], [tag]Casey Hampton[/tag], and [tag]Derrick Johnson[/tag] as standout players. I guess Pro Bowlers [tag]Nathan Vasher[/tag] and [tag]Shaun Rogers[/tag], who might be the best defensive tackle in the league, don’t count as standouts.

Here’s their comment on Texas:

National champs sent only three players to the NFL this year from the nation’s top offense. One problem: Longhorns’ shotgun formation isn’t popular in the NFL.

Not a very good argument there. I’m guessing a better reason we only had three offensive player’s drafted is that the team has seven returning starters this year on that side of the football. It’s kind of hard to be drafted when you’re still in college. [tag]Vince Young[/tag] went third overall, tight end [tag]David Thomas[/tag] went in the third round to the Patriots, and tackle [tag]Jonathan Scott[/tag] was the Lions’ fifth round selection. Guard [tag]Will Allen[/tag] signed a free agent deal with the Saints and backups [tag]Matt Nordgren[/tag] and [tag]Ahmard Hall[/tag] also found teams despite not being starters at Texas. Actually seems like a pretty good success rate to me.

So basically they took a faulty premise and backed it up with terrible analysis. There’s a lot of ways to determine a successful college football program, but how many backups a school has in the NFL is probably one of the last things you should consider.

Via: The Wiz