Defensive end Robert Nkemdiche from Grayson High School in Loganville, Ga., no longer plans to announce his college decision on May 18.

“I’m just not ready yet,” Nkemdiche told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is one of the biggest decisions of my life. I want to go see some new places, and go back to some other places to spend more time with the coaches and to check out the campuses. It’s a big decision, and I want to get it right.”

Nkemdiche, who’s ranked the nation’s No. 1 prospect by ESPNU, has maintained a top five list of Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss and Clemson. Many analysts have called Alabama the leader with Ole Miss in play because his brother (defensive back Denzel Nkemdiche) is a member of the Rebels.

Other schools, such as Florida, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and Southern California, have remained in contact with Nkemdiche with the hopes of entering his recruitment.

The long list of suitors is a reason Nkemdiche has decided to delay his decision.

“I’m probably going to try to take all my official visits and then pick the best school,” Nkemdiche told the AJC. “I probably won’t take any visits during the season because I want to stay focused on my main goal – and that’s helping our team win another state championship. I’ll probably wait until after the season and then go visit schools and stuff.”

Every year we like to have a little fun by looking back over the past few seasons and determining which SEC schools have had the most on-field/on-court success against one another.  Who are the real football schools?  Who have become basketball schools?  And most importantly, which SEC fanbases have had the most opportunities to gloat in recent years?

Below you’ll find what we call our Brag-O-Meter.  (Pet peeve: People who say “oh-meter” as if the thing in your car is a “speed-oh-meter.”)  We’ll show which programs have won the most SEC football games the past four seasons (2008 through 2011).  We’ll show which programs have won the most SEC basketball games over that span, too (2008-09 through 2011-12).  We’ll total ‘em all up and we’ll even award bonus points for SEC titles and national crowns.

First, a few ground rules:

1.  Since the SEC plays eight regular-season football games each year and 16 regular-season basketball games, we multiplied the number of football wins by two.  That way league football wins and league basketball wins will count just the same.  So again: Two points for a football win, one point for a hoops victory.  (And all games count, even the non-division contests.  Sorry, Coach Spurrier.)

2.  We’re not including non-conference wins because some schools dare to play big-time foes while others feast on cupcakes.  Plus, SEC fans will taunt Ball State and Alabama A&M fans anyway.  This is about SEC on SEC warfare.

3.  Sorry, but we don’t include baseball, women’s basketball, softball, or any other non-revenue sport.  If it’s not football or men’s basketball, we’re not counting it.  (This is your cue, South Carolina fans, to add up the Cocks’ baseball wins and add them in via the comment boxes.)

4.  To add some spice, we’re handing out a five-point bonus for SEC regular-season titles in football and basketball.  We’re also tossing out 10-point bonuses for BCS or national basketball titles.  Let’s face it, if a league team wins a national crown, there’s gonna be a whole lot of crowing done by its fans.

5.  We aren’t giving added points for division titles in football or basketball or for SEC Tournament titles in hoops.  All are nice, but the regular-season crown is the goal and that’s what takes the most work from the start of the season to the finish.

With all that said, here’s how the SEC’s football programs stacked up from 2008 through 2011.  (And remember, all league win totals have been doubled to equal basketball.)

And now a look at the basketball results (which did not have to be multiplied by two).

Interesting.  So if we compared the two sports for each program (example: Alabama equaled 22 more football points than basketball points over that four-year span) and then spread them out on a grid, the SEC’s schools — at least for the past four seasons — would line up as football or basketball schools thusly:

Since the 2008 football season, only five SEC fanbases have actually had more reason to cheer in basketball than in football: Kentucky (obviously), Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Mississippi State (who just ran their coach out of town) and Ole Miss.

But now let’s cut to the chase.  Below are the combined points (2 points for a regular-season football win, 1 point for a regular-season basketball win) for football and basketball with the bonus points (five for an SEC title, 10 for a national title) tacked on for good measure.  These are the programs whose fans have had the most to boast about over the past four seasons:

And there you have it.  By our way of tallying things, the top four combined football and basketball programs over the last four seasons have been Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and LSU.

Only three school won multiple SEC regular-season titles in that period: Florida (one in football, one in hoops), Kentucky (two in basketball), and LSU (one on the gridiron, one on the court).

Five national crowns were nabbed in all: Alabama (two in football), Auburn (one in football), Florida (one in football), and Kentucky (one in basketball).

And the dregs of the conference over the last four years?  Well, that’d be Ole Miss (dead last), Vanderbilt, Arkansas and Mississippi State.

That leaves Auburn, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina in the middle of the pack, though the Tigers’ dual SEC and BCS crowns in football — “Thanks, Cam Newton!” — give them a leg up on their rather average brothers.

(If you catch where we’ve transcribed a number incorrectly as we went from our Excel sheets to the site, just make a note of it.  Like I had to ask.)

Last week South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier suggested that the SEC become the first major conference or league  – college or professional — to count only division games when determining its division champions.  All East versus West games would be tantamount to exhibition games.  There would be no difference between South Carolina playing Alabama and South Carolina playing Wofford in terms of the SEC standings.

Well, with the exception of a few very vocal Carolina fans — who would no doubt back Spurrier at this point if he said “let’s secede!” — the rest of the world laughed at the coach’s short-sighted, self-serving proposal.

You see, USC failed to reach Atlanta last year because it lost a game against Arkansas (from the West) while Georgia — a team the Cocks did beat — toppled woeful Ole Miss (from the West).

Despite the fact that if Spurrier’s plan were implanted it could result in a 5-3 SEC team reaching the title game over a 7-1 SEC team, the coach is still banging his toy drum today:

“I think the athletic directors and even the presidents are going to discuss it a little bit. What it does is it just takes out the scheduling as who determines the winner of the divisions. Sometimes like for example last year Tennessee and Florida both played Alabama and LSU, obviously two of the best teams in the country, maybe the two best teams. Us and Georgia did not play them. So obviously, us and Georgia are going to probably win the division. We had the same schedule as Georgia except for one game—they got to play Ole Miss and we played Arkansas, but that’s just the way it has always been. You just eliminate scheduling as maybe who the champion of the division is. I think it’s a good idea. We’ll see how it works out.”

Not sure who Spurrier’s talking about because the commissioner of the league, Mike Slive, said last week that he’d have a hard time imagining an SEC game not counting in the SEC standings.  And Slive usually has the pulse of the league’s presidents pretty well gauged at all times.

Mark Richt was asked during today’s SEC post-spring teleconference if he thought Spurrier’s proposal would get much support at the SEC Meetings in late-May.  His take?

“No, I don’t think it would.  All I know is tell me what the rule are at the beginning of the season and we’ll play by them.”

Amen.  Spurrier should follow that plan, too.  So far he’s done a darn fine job in Columbia… better than most anyone would have predicted.  With his track record and the roster he’s now put together, he shouldn’t have to pimp for changes unheard of in the rest of the sports-playing world.

1.  Alabama’s football team did the traditional Rose Garden at the White House thing yesterday…

2.  But for some reason a broken — yet fully replaceable trophy — remains a hot topic.

3.  More details have emerged regarding the fight that left Tide receiver DeAndrew White hospitalized.

4.  Auburn’s new coordinators found some surprise and intrigue this spring.

5.  Scot Loeffler’s in no rush to name a starting quarterback for the Tigers.

6.  Current interim coach Taver Johnson says things aren’t as messed up at Arkansas as they seem.

7.  Okay, enough with the Twitter hashtags on football fields.  (Did no one think to put “.com” on every field during the 90s?)

8.  Ole Miss made some progress this spring, but the Rebels are still “a long way from where we need to be.”

9.  Hugh Freezed delivered a little after-practice Q&A.  (I read those words to the tune of “Harper Valley PTA,” by the way.)

10.  Defensive end Jason Jones is the 23rd winner of the Rebels’ Chucky Mullins Award. 

11.  There’s some debate over who had the upper hand — offense or defense — at MSU this spring.  (And that makes me think of this.)

12.  Either way, the hard part of spring is over with just tomorrow’s Maroon-White game remaining.

13.  SEC commish Mike Slive will be in College Station today for a conference realignment “symposium” and then the A&M football team hold an open scrimmage for Aggie fans.

Well, as you can see we’ve jumped the gun and officially added Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC’s roster of schools before they officially join the league.

In doing so, I wondered what the first responses would be:

A.  Thanks from A&M and Mizzou fans?

B.  You’ve got the colors all wrong?

C.  Why don’t you just list the schools in alphabetical order?

D.  You shouldn’t use abbreviations?

Well, it wasn’t A.

Just so you’ll know, we’re still tweaking the placement of the tabs — all centered or all left-justified.

Also, the colors were plucked straight from the official websites of each SEC school.  So if the color looks wrong to you, email your favorite athletic department and ask them to fix their sites.

The schools are listed in alphabetical order by their usual name — Mississippi State, Missouri, Ole Miss — for example, but we chose to use abbreviations so the writing would be much larger and easier to read.

The abbreviations used are those used by the universities themselves, thus MU for Mizzou and UM for Ole Miss.

Finally, depending on your computer — Mac or PC — your browser and your computer’s color settings and pixel settings, your view of the page might look different from someone else’s view of the page.

We’ll keep tweaking where we feel we need to and we’ll do so in relation to the feedback we get from different computer users, different browser users, etc.

Many thanks… and welcome to MrSEC.com officially, Missouri and Texas A&M.

The Management

ESPN.com’s resident Bracketologist Joe Lunardi is pretty good at what he does.  In fact, like Mel Kiper, he’s kind of created his own field in which to star.  But even for a master bracket-predictor, lining up the 2013 NCAA Tournament field 11 months in advance might be just a tad silly.

Still, Lunardi’s done just that and he expects to see five SEC schools in the Big Dance next year:

Kentucky — a #1 seed in the West

Florida — a #2 seed in the Midwest

Missouri — a #5 seed in the East

Tennessee — a #9 seed in the South

Ole Miss — a #13 seed in a play-in game in the Midwest

Uh, yeah.  Mark it down.

Four SEC schools have momentum.  Three are stalling.  Two are surprising.  And a full five are — as Prince once put it — living in a state of “chaos and disorder.”

Such is the state of SEC football recruiting on this Tax Day 2012.  Below are the latest up-to-date commitment numbers for all 14 SEC programs (according to Rivals.com this morning).

As usual, we’ve ranked the schools by their total number of “talent points.”  Rivals hands out star rankings.  We give a point for each star, but we also give 0-star prospects a point because once they’re reviewed by Rivals they’ll get some stars thrown their way, too.

We also include a column showing you the average points per commit for each school so far.  You can use those numbers to determine the caliber of athlete each school is attracting at the moment.

First, the numbers:

Observations:

* The momentum gang is easily identified at this point.  Florida, Texas A&M and Georgia are piling up the commitments right and left.  They’re more than halfway done with their 2012 classes… aside from babysitting the guys who’ve already said “I do.”  In addition, Alabama has the highest average-point-per-commit score in the league.  By February, Nick Saban’s squad will likely be ranked #1 or #2 in the SEC again.

* LSU, Auburn and South Carolina seem to be stalling a bit compared to past performance and — in the Cocks’ case — their fine 2011 season.  At this point in the process, LSU is usually bunched among the top four in the league in terms of talent points and they’re currently only one slot off that pace.  Still, this a program we’re used to seeing closer to the top of our chart.  Meanwhile, gone are the Tiger Prowls at Auburn and in are two new coordinators.  While they’re still doing relatively well, to date AU isn’t snapping up commits as quickly as it did when Gene Chizik and crew first arrived on the Plains.  As for Carolina, Steve Spurrier’s bunch is about where they usually sit… and the Palmetto State is not the deepest talent pool in the USA, either.  Still, coming off an 11-win season and bowl-game beatdown of Nebraska, we expected a little bit more of an early bump for Carolina.

* The two big surprises in the SEC are the schools decked out in gold and black (and “anthracite” in one case).  Missouri has already grabbed eight commitments which ties the school with Auburn and is only one off LSU’s pace.  Either Gary Pinkel is getting up to SEC speed and offering scholarships earlier or the Tigers’ new conference home is already paying dividends on the recruiting trail.  We’ll guess it’s a little bit of both.  The other surprise is Vanderbilt which continues to pull in 4- and 3-star recruits.  Want to know the kind of job James Franklin is doing?  Just compare VU’s commitment numbers to Tennessee’s.  In historical terms, it’s astonishing to see the Dores with seven commits — seven good commits — so early in the process.

* Woe to those at the bottom of our list.  Four schools are facing the kinds of struggles and worries and concerns that negative recruiters prey on while another school just can’t seem to go outside its own state for recruits.  Tennessee and Kentucky are low on our board and that can be directly tied to the job security issues facing Derek Dooley and Joker Phillips.  Ole Miss is on the opposite end of that spectrum, breaking in a brand new coach and hoping Hugh Freeze can connect with Magnolia State recruits.  Dan Mullen cleans up on 3-star Mississippians each February, but at some point to really build that program he’ll need to start landing some 3- and 4-star talent from outside the Bulldogs’ backyard.  That or he’ll continue to lose when he faces SEC West programs that don’t feature the word “Ole” in their names.  As for Arkansas and the Hogs’ zero commits, well, is their really any explanation necessary?  The Razorbacks rarely start fast thanks to their own talent-poor state, but turmoil is making things even tougher at this point.

Running back Mark Dodson Jr. and athlete Gerald Perry from Memphis (Tenn.) Whitehaven High School will announce their college decisions on May 14.

Dodson will choose among Arkansas, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt while Perry is considering Ole Miss, Vanderbilt, Cincinnati, Memphis and Arkansas State.

Dodson told the Memphis Commercial Appeal there’s a “50-50 chance” that he and Perry will choose the same school.

Both Dodson and Perry should be able to help on the offensive side of the ball, according to Whitehaven coach Rodney Saulsberry.

“Gerald has extreme speed,” Saulsberry said. “Speed is something you can’t coach. He’s a speed-burner. Speed is what he brings.”

And what does Dodson bring?

“Mark truly is an all-purpose back,” Saulsberry said. “He does it all. He’s able to run inside and outside, he can catch the ball out of the backfield, and he’s very durable. He can carry the load. He’s all that wrapped into one.”

And both players will be down to one school on May 14.

Andy Kennedy just met his new boss — Ole Miss AD Ross Bjork — last week.  There’s currently an open position at his alma mater with his name written all over it.

But the Rebels’ basketball coach is staying put.  Both Kennedy and UM chancellor Dan Jones said so yesterday.  Here’s the coach’s statement:


“Despite reports to the contrary, I have had no discussions with UAB regarding their head coaching position.  I’ve put many years of ‘sweat equity’ into Blazer Basketball, and Birmingham will always be a special place to me and my family, but I am right where I’m supposed to be.

The privilege of coaching at Ole Miss in the ultra-competitive SEC is something that I will never take for granted, and we will continue in our efforts to move this program forward.  There have been numerous milestones met over the last six seasons, and we have many more goals to reach.”


The takeaway?  Kennedy will be getting a contract extension that was already in the works when Bjork was hired.  We at MrSEC.com believe he deserves that as he’s led a program with league-worst hoops facilities to five 20-win seasons in six years at Oxford.

However, he’s also never reached an NCAA Tournament and he’s about to start working for a hotshot, young AD that he knows little about.  And new athletic directors often like to hire their own guys.

If Kennedy fails at Ole Miss or if Bjork gets froggy and someday nukes him, the coach could come to regret not re-starting his coaching clock at another school — even a school like UAB that would pay him considerably less than Mississippi.  Remember, Rick Stansbury had a chance to move to Clemson just a couple of years before he “retired” at Mississippi State.  Think he’d take that one back at this point?

Also, with much of a young team back next year, expectations of an NCAA berth will be on the rise at Ole Miss.  But if Kennedy is eventually ousted from the school, it’s likely that his soon-to-be extended contract will at least put some nice parting cash in his wallet.

Western Kentucky has confirmed that Ross Bjork — the nation’s youngest athletic director — will be leaving the Hilltoppers after just two years to take over at Ole Miss.  The school’s statement includes this quote from Bjork:

“I have decided to accept the director of athletics position at the University of Mississippi and depart WKU.  While I was not seeking to leave WKU, the opportunity to oversee and manage the athletics department at a historic and prestigious university in the Southeastern Conference was one that we had to examine and ultimately accept.”

Interestingly, Bjork’s WKU contract contains a clause that could force Ole Miss to schedule the Hilltoppers in football and basketball.  And not just in Oxford.

In the past year, we’ve seen more and more small schools build “if you leave for another school you’ll have to schedule us” clauses into the contracts of ADs and even basketball coaches.  But what makes this deal unique is that it calls for Bjork to “use his best efforts at the hiring institution to schedule two-year home/home game series between the men’s and women’s basketball teams and one home/home series for the football team.”

“Best efforts” is awfully vague and it would seem that Bjork and Ole Miss would have some serious wiggle room thanks to that phrase.  Basketball probably wouldn’t likely be a problem anyway, but football might cause a hold-up.  No Southeastern Conference team is going to want to visit a lower rung FBS program like WKU (although Mississippi State did play at UAB this past season).  Whether it happens or not, it was a sharp idea by the folks at WKU.  Not only would they get national exposure, they’d get national exposure for their own campus, stadium and fans.

We’ll see if Bjork indeed makes his “best efforts” to line up the Rebels and Hilltoppers in football in Bowling Green anytime soon.

UPDATE — Ole Miss has now made the hiring of Bjork official on its end, too.