It’s a sad day for the SEC.  Longtime Mississippi State play-by-play man Jack Cristil announced last night that he is retiring Saturday after nearly 60 years as the voice of the Bulldogs.

Cristil said that a “deteriorating health situation” will require him to go on kidney dialysis.  “Doing this treatment will restrict me to the point where I cannot represent this university the way it should be represented.  And when I cannot do that, I have told many people over the years that I would step aside.  Now it’s time to step aside.”

Any time one of the league’s long-tenured announcers retires it’s a loss for the entire conference.  Fans literally grow up and grow old with men like Cristil serving as a neighborly connection between themselves and their favorite school.

In Cristil’s case, he called 636 Mississippi State football games from 1953 through 2010.  According to The Jackson Clarion-Ledger, that’s 59% of all the football games ever played by State.  His final call at Tennessee on Saturday will be his 1,538th men’s basketball game.

Unreal.  Best wishes to Cristil as he leaves the SEC to take care of his health.

Below are a few of his most-famous calls.  And you can wrap it in maroon and white.

The SEC might not have the best RPI among America’s conferences but the league sure put on an entertaining roundball exhibition last night.  Three games.  Five points difference.  One overtime game.  One last-second tip-in to wrap up a division championship.  Good stuff.


* John Pelphrey got a much, much-needed overtime win over Kentucky last night 77-76 at Bud Walton Arena.  The Hogs snapped a 10-game losing streak to the Wildcats… who continued to have their own problems on the road.  The Wildcats are now 1-6 in the league away from Rupp Arena, but once again, the loss came down to the final seconds.  And again, UK couldn’t connect on a game-winner.

“Our guys are going to be able to take this with them and they’re going to talk about this for a long, long time,” Pelphrey said. 

“If you’re not angry by this, like angry that (road losses are) happening and that we’re going to stop this from happening, it won’t change,” said John Calipari.  “I know I’m angry.”


* Yesterday, the big talk in Louisiana went something like this: “What do the Tigers have to play for at this point?”  Well, snapping a string of 10 consecutive defeats for one.

Trent Johnson’s Tigers knocked off Mississippi State 84-82 in Starkville last night.  The loss drops State to 14-13 overall and 6-7 in the SEC West.  In addition, you can bet that losing to a (now) 3-10 SEC team at home won’t help to cool Rick Stansbury’s seat.

MSU shot 56% from the floor, held a 13-point lead in the first half and got 24 points from Renardo Sidney.  And still lost.


* Alabama toppled Auburn at home last night to secure the West Division title outright.  No surprise there.  But the manner in which they had they won was a surprise.

JaMychal Green sank a tip-in with 0.3 seconds remaining on the clock to give the Tide a 51-49 close-shave victory over its rivals.  At home, playing against a team that is now just 2-11 in the SEC, the 11-2 Tide narrowly avoided a loss that would have been devastating to its NCAA tourney hopes.

“If you look at the numbers for us, it equates to a loss,” Anthony Grant said.  “We got stops from a defensive standpoint.  We found ways to chip away.”  That defense is what makes Alabama so dangerous.  Even on a night when Bama shot 26% from the floor, the Tide still managed a win thanks to the fact that it held its opponent to just 49 points.


The Division Races

As a result of last night’s action, Kentucky’s hopes for landing the East’s second seed in Atlanta dwindled.  The Cats are just 7-6 tied with Tennessee for fourth place.  Georgia (7-5) is a half-game up and Vanderbilt (8-5) has a full-game lead on UK with a week and a half remaining in the season.  Florida is atop the East with a 10-2 mark.

In the West, Alabama has secured the title outright.  No other team in the West even has a winning league mark.  Arkansas’ win and MSU’s loss have moved the two schools back into a tie for second place in the division.  Both squads are just 6-7 in the SEC, a full five games off Bama’s 11-2 pace.

The NCAA letter of allegations to Tennessee yesterday brought very few surprises:


* UT’s baseball program was not accused of any violations.

* Instead of handing UT a “failure to monitor” charge regarding football, the NCAA mailed one to Lane Kiffin instead.

* Bruce Pearl and Tony Jones were listed for a violation of the so-called “bump rule” for running into a recruit at Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy just four days after UT announced the program’s self-imposed penalties last September.


If anything, the surprises were mainly positive.  But re-reading the letter, it’s clear that the violation of the “bump rule” — usually a secondary violation — is a bigger deal than initially thought.  Why?  The NCAA listed that as one of the seven major violations Tennessee stands accused of.

The letter states that Pearl and Jones spoke with a recruit for “two to three minutes” at Oak Hill.  That’s a bit more than a bump.  Being that Pearl and UT officials had just finished coming clean and promising “never again,” NCAA officials are clearly of the opinion Pearl and his aide should have run screaming in the other direction when they accidentally (?) bumped into recruit Jordan Adams.  And the NCAA is right.

Everything else in the report was already known — Pearl misled NCAA investigators, he called a recruit’s father in the apparent hopes of getting him to aide in a cover-up of Pearl’s barbecue, the coach was hit with an unethical conduct charge.  Bad, bad and bad.

But all those “bads” could equal a worse. 

The day before UT’s allegations arrived, UConn received its penalties for basketball violations.  Former assistant Beau Archibald was hit with a two-year “show cause” penalty, which basically acts as a two-year ban from NCAA coaching.  (And that’s after Archibald lost his job at UConn, something that didn’t happen to Pearl at Tennessee.)  Head coach Jim Calhoun received only a three-game suspension by comparison.  Why the difference?  According to The Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy, NCAA infractions committee chairman Dennis Thomas said that Archibald was found to have engaged in “unethical conduct.”

“Unethical conduct” charges are serious business.  As in death penalty serious.  ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil did the legwork yesterday to find that of the last 20 “unethical conduct” cases to go before the NCAA’s penalty panel, 19 resulted in at least a two-year show cause penalty.

Under such a penalty, Pearl would not only be banned from coaching at Tennessee for two years, but he couldn’t gain employment elsewhere without that new school going to the NCAA and making a darn good case to hire him.

As we’ve stated on numerous occasions, it’s not easy to predict which charges will stick and what penalties the NCAA will hand out to schools and individuals.  Trying to compare one school’s woes to another’s usually provides a poor road map of what to expect in the second school’s case.

But when 19 out of 20 unethical conduct charges result in a two-year show cause ban?  Well, I think Vol fans have a pretty strong indication of what Pearl is facing.

Of course, the NCAA could show lenience.  Pearl did serve an 8-game suspension.  It’s just that in cases of lying coaches, the NCAA has rarely shown lenience.  (And don’t expect Pearl’s salary reduction to count for much at all, by the way.)

At this point, it appears the questions we’ll be asking after Tennessee’s June date with the NCAA are these:


* Will the NCAA hand Pearl a one-year ban — rather than two — because of the 8-game suspension already served?

* Will Pearl resign?

* Will Tennessee fire him?  (They say they won’t now, but…)

* Will Tennessee try somehow to survive a multi-year suspension to Pearl?  (One year, maybe… more than one, near impossible.)

* Will athletic director Mike Hamilton be the man to pick Pearl’s replacement?

Last summer, Mike Slive made it clear at SEC Media Days that he wanted the SEC to start cleaning up its act.  But here we are half a year later and the SEC is instead cleaning up its messes.

NCAA investigators finally delivered a letter of allegations to Tennessee yesterday.  While the Vols’ football and baseball programs got some unexpected good news, the basketball program did not.  The league can expect the Bruce Pearl Saga to continue to play out in columns and blogs across the country all summer long.

NCAA snoops continue to probe into Auburn’s recruiting habits, too.  From Cam Newton to Thibodaux, Louisiana, each time an investigator pops up to ask questions, the blogosphere blazes with fresh headlines from Thayer Evans and the folks at SportsByBrooks.com.

Worse, the league’s dirty laundry could really be exposed at the end of March.  It seems HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” is focusing its cameras on the SEC.

Producers and reporters for that show initially set out to investigate the role street agents play in college recruiting.  Unfortunately for Slive, that investigation has led straight back to the SEC.

Yesterday word broke that former Auburn player Stanley McClover will be seen on the show admitting that he was provided illegal benefits by an assistant while he was a player on The Plains.  (McClover left Auburn following the 2005 season.)  Several sources have refuted McClover’s story, but that won’t keep it from airing before a nationwide audience next month.

But the HBO crew is also rumored to be digging into the recruitment of Chris Keys.  Alabama beat LSU in the recruiting battle for Keys, but the player never lived up to expectations.  He was eventually dismissed from Mike Shula’s team in the summer of 2006.

In addition, we know from former Mississippi State quarterback John Bond that HBO wants him — along with MSU booster Bill Bell — to chat about the Cam Newton situation on camera.  Further, if you believe the messageboards and rumor mills, Kenny Rogers — who acted as Cecil Newton’s go-between with Bond and Bell — has a tape in his possession that could expose MSU’s unseemly involvement in the Newton case.

Turning away from television, you can now toss in the fact that LSU is still waiting to learn if its self-imposed penalties for recruiting violations will be accepted by the NCAA.  With all that on the frontburner, it’s clear the SEC will continue to get the negative spotlight treatment for a while yet.

No doubt some will say that because the league is on top, outsiders will try to tear it down.  Unfortunately, most of the damage being down is being inflicted by insiders.  Which is why Slive has repeatedly suggested that only the SEC can mess up the SEC.

So is the league cleaning up its act as Slive had hoped last summer? 

No, it’s still busy trying to clean up its messes after the fact.  And there’s a big difference between the two.

While former Minnesota defensive line coach Tim Cross is interviewing at Auburn, another former Gopher aide is already signed, sealed and delivered to the SEC.

South Carolina has hired John Butler (left) to take over as the Gamecocks’ special teams coordinator, replacing Shane Beamer (who left to join his father’s staff at Virginia Tech earlier this month).  Butler served as Minnesota’s special teams coordinator and linebackers coach from 2007 through last season. 

Butler has also coached at Harvard and several small colleges.

The recruiting coordinator job — also left vacant by Beamer’s departure — will be filled by Steve Spurrier Jr.  Many had expected Jay Graham or GA Mangus to grab those duties, but they’ll go to the head coach’s son instead.

The search for Auburn’s next defensive line coach is kicking into gear today as multiple reports have Louisville’s Clint Hurtt on campus for an interview today.

Hurtt served as Charlie Strong’s D-line coach and recruiting coordinator last season after moving from Miami the season before.  His 2008 recruiting class at Coral Gables was ranked #1 in the nation (though it’s yet to actually play like it).

Hurtt was also just named ESPN’s National Recruiter of the Year.  Considering the recruiting success Auburn has had the past two years, Hurtt would seem to be a perfect fit.

If he’s not, there’s always Tim Cross.  Cross spent the past four years as the defensive line coach at Minnesota before the staff was fired at the end of last season.  He has also coached at Syracuse.  And he is believed to be next up on Gene Chizik’s interview list.

Two sports, 12 major violations. 

How in the world could Tennessee fans feel good in any way about that?  Because it could have been worse.

On the positive side of things for the Vols, the only surprises in the NCAA’s letter of allegations both went in UT’s favor.  First, the baseball program was not accused of any violations, when for months, at least one allegation had been expected.  So instead of three programs being in hot water, only two received a finger-wagging.  Second, instead of rolling up the football violations and leaving them on AD Mike Hamilton’s doorstep, the NCAA decided instead to dish most of them off to Lane Kiffin.

In past cases, schools have more often than not paid the price for departed coaches who broke NCAA rules.  But while UT will still be punished for Kiffin’s deeds, it was Kiffin — not UT — who was tagged with a “failure to monitor” charge.  For Vol fans that’s a double-blessing.  Not only did the school avoid getting “failure to monitor” charges in two sports (they did land one for basketball), but their arch-enemy will have to deal with one.

If Tennessee had had three programs hit with allegations or if the school had been handed two “failure to monitor” charges, there was a possibility that the NCAA could have played the “lack of institutional control” card, too.  But since there was no A, there was also no B.

Overall only two violations were attached to the football program.  Both are considered major — impermissible contact with recruits and a failure to promote an environment of compliance (under Kiffin) — but the penalties will likely be lessened by the fact that Kiffin is gone and there was no failure to monitor charge brought against the school.

The fact that Kiffin landed the failure to monitor charge seems to show that the NCAA is out to get the gang that was at Southern Cal when that school’s violations were taking place in the mid-2000s (Kiffin, Ed Orgeron, etc).  The NCAA could have easily held Tennesee and Hamilton more accountable for hiring Kiffin, but instead, they went after the coach.  Again, that’s not often the way things play out. 

The fact that baseball and football caught some breaks from the NCAA also suggests that Hamilton and UT’s compliance office worked well with investigators behind the scenes.

Switching to basketball, the Vols were charged with eight violations, seven of which are major.  But seven of those eight violations had already been admitted by the university and reported by the press.  The only new issue concerned Bruce Pearl and assistant Tony Jones violating the so-called bump rule in relation to an Oak Hill Academy recruit last September. 

For an investigation that had dragged on for 22 months — and at least one month longer than Tennessee had expected — there were no “uh-oh” revelations in the NCAA’s notice.  UT fans should feel good about that.

Unfortunately for those who wear bright orange, this thing isn’t over yet.  Basically, Tennessee learned today that despite a bit more NCAA digging and some strong rumors of additional charges, UT will only face what most everyone said they would face when this whole scandal broke.

But the punishments for those violations — especially in basketball — could still be harsh.  Pearl still faces a charge of unethical conduct.  His assistants are accused of violating the principles of honesty.

So the “whew!” Vol fans are uttering this afternoon should be tied to the fact that the NCAA found no new dirt.  That “whew!” has nothing to do with the eventual penalty phase.

Pearl could still face anything from a multi-game to multi-year suspension or even a “show cause” penalty.  The school could still lose scholarships, be hit with additional recruiting restrictions or be banned from postseason play for some length of time.  There’s really no way to guess what type of punishment the NCAA will dole out to UT’s coach.

The NCAA writes in its letter to Tennessee: “Pearl failed to protect the integrity of the investigation when he placed a series of phone calls to John Craft,” the father of recruit Aaron Craft regarding the barbecue at Pearl’s house.  The letter also states: “Pearl’s conversation with J. Craft caused J. Craft to believe that Pearl was trying to influence J. Craft’s statements to the NCAA enforcement staff.”

Not good.  And that’s why we included the possibility of a multi-year suspension or even a show cause penalty being leveled against Pearl.  It’s one thing to panic and lie — if that’s what Pearl did — but it’s another to run a full-fledged cover-up.

Finally, there has to be some concern over what Kiffin will say when he goes before the NCAA to defend himself against those charges pinned on him.  It would likely be best for him to deny everything, but there’s nothing to say such a loose cannon won’t try to shift blame in one way or another to Tennessee.  And, if the man decides to have an Al Pacino “And Justice For All” moment at the hearing, he could try to burn everyone’s house down.  Bottom line: You don’t want your school’s fate tied to Kiffin in any way.

Tennessee fans should feel relieved today that the NCAA’s letter of allegations did not contain any revelatory allegations.  But Tennessee fans still need to worry about the Pearl violations that were already known, Kiffin’s response, and the penalty phase overall.

One step is complete.  But UT’s mess isn’t over yet.

Coming off the first losing season of his career, Mark Richt has heard more cat calls and criticism in the past two months than ever before.  For the first time, there were Georgia fans who believed he need to be out-and-out booted.

The good news for Richt?  It appears those who were calling for change were just part of the talk radio crowd and not part of the black tie and donations crowd.  Contributions tied to the UGA football program this offseason are right on schedule at about $22 million.

New athletic director Greg McGarity calls the stream of cash “encouraging,” though The Athens Banner-Herald reports that the number of individual donors has fallen from 14,002 last year to 13,705 this year.

“There was not an outcry of our supporters that were jumping ship,” McGarity said.  “You’re certainly going to have a small percentage that say that we just don’t care to follow the team any further, we’re frustrated, blah, blah, blah.  You’re going to have that with our economy as it is.”

It might seem a bit condescending for an AD — a fundraiser — to ever blow off any fans’ comments as “blah, blah, blah,” but McGarity’s overall message is a sound one.  “… It shows a resiliency with our boosters, our fans, our supporters that did not jump ship and see things in a positive way and signs of us getting back on track.”

It also shows that Richt has built up an awful lot of equity in Athens. 

1.  Florida has the toughest home stretch in the SEC.

2.  Urban Meyer might still receive a million-dollar bonus from UF on his way out the door.

3.  Georgia will have a lot of ex-Dawgs at the NFL combine this week.

4.  Mark Fox’s squad will probably make the NCAA tourney with wins over South Carolina and LSU.

5.  The University of Kentucky plans to establish a committee that will compare UK’s oversight of athletics to other major programs in the SEC and ACC.

6.  John Calipari credits “playing at home” with his team’s two-game winning streak.

7.  Starting tonight at Arkansas, the Cats still have a lot to play for.

8.  Sam Muldrow’s late 3-pointer helped South Carolina snap its five-game losing streak last night.

9.  USC showed signs of life for the first time in a month.

10.  This writer wants the NCAA to be tougher on Bruce Pearl than it was on Jim Calhoun.

11.  Pearl got a much needed victory at Vanderbilt last night… and then “blew a joyful, relieved kiss” to his supporters.

12.  The Vols outscored Vandy 29-9 in the final 13 minutes to steal the 60-51 win.

13.  Kevin Stallings said his Commodores “for some reason decided they were going to be individual players instead of team players.”

1.  Alabama’s basketball team can clinch the West title outright by beating Auburn tonight.

2.  The Bama-Auburn rivalry isn’t as big in basketball as it is in football.

3.  A lot of UA and AU talent will be on display at the NFL combine this week.”

4.  Auburn walk-on Josh Wallace is winning over Tony Barbee with his attitude.

5.  Harvey Updyke is seeking safety.  (From other nuts who might want to attack the original tree-killing nut.  Nuts.)

6.  Arkansas will look to break a 10-game losing streak to Kentucky tonight.

7.  Former Hog coach Nolan Richardson says he’ll be pulling for John Pelphrey and crew tonight.

8.  Ryan Mallett’s agent says he’ll be ready to answer difficult questions at the NFL combine.

9.  Does LSU’s basketball team have anything left to play for?

10.  The Tigers will try to break their 10-game losing streak tonight at The Hump in Starkville.

11.  Trent Johnson looks forward to having 6-11, 260-pound Iowa State transfer Justin Hamilton next year.

12.  MSU’s Ravern Johnson has responded well to the attitude adjustment he received from Rick Stansbury.

13.  State has Renardo Sidney taking part in mock interviews in preparation for meeting with the actual press. 

14.  Chris Warren high eight 3-pointers and scored a career-high 33 points… only to see Ole Miss lose 79-73 at South Carolina last night.