The Tuscaloosa County Sheriff’s Office has apparently confirmed that four Alabama football players have been arrested.  All were 4- or 5-star players coming out of high school.

Tyler Hayes (second degree robbery), Dennis Pettway (second degree robbery), Eddie Williams (second degree robbery and fraudulent use of a credit card), and Brent Calloway (fraudulent use of a credit card) have all been busted and their mugshots revealed on jailbase.com.

A second degree robbery conviction in Alabama can carry a 20-year jail sentence.

UPDATE – Williams was also arrested for carrying a pistol without a license.  That arrest was on Sunday, while his arrest for robbery and fraudulent use of a credit card came yesterday.

SIDENOTE — Last month while doing a guest bit on WJOX-FM in Birmingham I was asked about the tight ship that Nick Saban was running in Tuscaloosa.  I credited him for keeping things quiet on the legal front in recent seasons, but also pointed out that those things tend to run in cycles.  Some kids do dumb things regardless of their coach’s wishes/demands.

I was immediately hit with a few emails from Bama fans who happened to be listening to my interview.  They claimed that I didn’t understand the Alabama program and how perfectly Saban was running things (as if any coach has control over 100 college-age kids 24 hours a day).

Well, I’ll be interested to see how many of those folks email me today.

Over the past month, we’ve had a few folks ask us about our SEC Commitment Comparators.  “How do some SEC teams have more than 25 commitments when there’s a 25-man cap on signees?”  Well, since the day the SEC implemented its new cap on football signees we at MrSEC.com have referred to it as a “soft” cap.  That’s because it’s not quite the hard and fast rule the league made it out to be.

When league presidents voted in the new regulation in 2011 — ignoring a unanimous “don’t do it” vote from their own football coaches — they did not snuff out the practice of back-counting early enrollees.  And back-counting allows schools to count this year’s signees against the previous year’s class.

The NCAA allows each school to provide 85 scholarships to football players.  Each school can award 25 new scholarships per year.  There’s obviously some natural attrition built into that formula because 25 scholarships over four years would equal 100 scholarships total.

For the sake of example let’s take School X and assume their program has 85 scholarship players at the end of a season.  Now let’s say that 20 players exhaust their eligibility or leave after graduating.  School X would then have 65 players on scholarship heading into signing day.  But in January, School X loses five juniors who depart early for the NFL.  That drops the school’s number of total returning scholarship players to 60.

To max out at the NCAA-mandated 85 scholarships, School X should only be able to sign 25 new athletes on signing day, which is the supposed max anyway.  But.  If School X signed just 20 players the previous year it can still back-count five of this year’s signees against last year’s tally if those extra signees enroll early.  (On the positive side, this does reward student-athletes who have the grades to graduate high school/prep school/junior college early and enroll at School X at mid-year.)

So, let’s say School X signs 30 players this February instead of the 25 allowed by the SEC’s “soft” cap.  Five of those players — if they enroll early  — can be counted toward the 2012 number instead of the 2013 number.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m starting to get the feeling that Mark Richt has been telling his team that they have zero reason to be in awe of Alabama.  Before you say, “of course,” keep in mind that Alabama’s been so dominant in recent years that Richt may want to make sure that his guys know Nick Saban’s players put their pants on one leg at a time, too.

Why do I think Richt has been beating this particular drum?  Because players tend to repeat to the media what their coaches tell them behind closed doors.  And Georgia’s players are flapping their gums without end regarding Bama.

Bulldog safety Bacarri Rambo was the first to pop off:

“I feel like we’re more talented.  We have better players at each position, across the board, especially on defense.  It’s going to be a great challenge for us.  I know it’s going to be a battle.  It’s going to come down to who has the best defense and who makes more turnovers.  It’s going to be a battle of the defenses.”

UGA corner Sanders Commings wouldn’t bow before Alabama either:

“I think we’re the best defense in the country.  I thought we were last year and we have 10 out of 11 or 12 players back who are part of the starting rotation.  So there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be the top defense.  Everybody on this defense thinks we are…

It’s good to play with confidence.  Confidence is just another word for swagger.  We step on the field and that swagger is turned all they way up.  We feel like we can shut anybody down, shut anybody out.  In order to play good, you have to be confident, you have to have swagger.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with the expansion stuff, shall we?  (And beware… some of this stuff might be behind paywalls.)

1.  Clemson AD Terry Don Phillips says there’s “no substance with regard to a report” from Orangebloods.com that there’s been informal contact between the Big 12, Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech and Miami.

2.  Here’s the original Orangebloods piece claiming that one Big 12 source puts the odds of expansion at “55 to 60 percent.”

3.  Today that site claims that Georgia Tech “has also put out informal feelers to the Big 12.”

SIDENOTE — “Informal feelers” could mean a single rogue booster who wants his school to move has put in a call to someone he knows at a Big 12 school.  Either way, it seems that reports of a “done deal” for FSU and Clemson to join the Big 12 were exaggerated.

4.  Texas AD DeLoss Dodds told CBSSports.com yesterday that he’s against expansion and that he thinks the new playoff system will make league’s playing championship games think twice… but he also says he’s been courting Notre Dame for a while.  (Of course he’s against expansion.  The more schools that join the Big 12, the more Texas’ power and revenue share will decrease.)

5.  ESPN’s Chris Low said on The Paul Finebaum Show yesterday that he believes more expansion is coming and “I can tell you that the SEC has their eyes on Virginia Tech.”

6.  At about the same time, the athletic directors at Virginia Tech and Virginia were saying they don’t feel there is “a serious threat of someone leaving the ACC.”

SECOND SIDENOTE — We’ll have more on the Virginia Tech talk a little later today.

7.  Here’s a graphic look – literally — at what expansion and realignment has meant for basketball.

8.  This writer says college football needs an early signing period.

9.  The season-opener between Alabama and Michigan in Arlington, Texas will — no surprise — kick off at 8pm ET on ABC.

10.  Arkansas quarterback Tyler Wilson has been pleasantly surprised by how quickly he’s developed a relationship with new offensive coordinator Paul Petrino.

11.  LSU’s football players are eager to get the “taste” of defeat out of their mouths.

12.  Transferring Texas A&M hoopster Naji Hibbert says he can be better on and off the court at Gardner-Webb.

13.  The Aggies come to the SEC with some peculiarities, says this writer.

14.  Will Muschamp believes his young Florida offense will grow up.  (Yeah, but how quickly?)

15.  Freshman Georgia placekicker Marshall Morgan will need to quickly do some growing up, too.

16.  Six Kentucky basketballers have been invited to the NBA’s draft combine.

17.  Tennessee coach Derek Dooley said of the felony theft arrest of tight end Cameron Clear: “I am aware of the situation but I can’t comment and won’t comment till I get all the details.”

18.  When Dooley was initially asked about rumors that Clear had stolen items from athletes on campus back, he said on May 7th: “I’ll classify it as messageboard journalism, like a lot of things that come through.”)

19.  Finally, here’s another writer’s look at the most important transfers in college basketball (and three are coming to an SEC arena near you).

THIRD AND FINAL SIDENOTE — If I open one more website and see Mia Hamm pop up in a video ad I’m going to punch something.

Steve Spurrier and a group of South Carolina fans have found a friend outside the Palmetto State.  LSU head coach Les Miles told a group in Birmingham today that he’s in favor of the SEC’s divisional champs being decided by division games only:

“I want the schedule to be fair and I want it to give everybody the same opportunity.  I’m for the Western Division deciding the Western Division champion and the Eastern Division deciding the Eastern Division champion.”

And there you have it — two SEC coaches are now in favor of making cross-divisional SEC games meaningless.  Totally meaningless.  Exhibitions actually.

Miles says he wants the schedules to be fair.  Well, then he should be in favor of a 13-game round-robin format in which every SEC team plays every other SEC team.  That or he should favor just going back to the six-game schedule of old with only games against division foes on the docket.  (In reality, those scenarios wouldn’t be fair either because some teams would play at home and some on the road and some would meet pre-injuries, some post-injuries, etc.)

Personally, I’m tired of writing about this subject because it’s so utterly ridiculous.

If the SEC wants to become the only major league — college or pro — in America to not count all its games, fine.  Might as well.  I’m already on record as saying the SEC is being flat-out cowardly when it comes to avoiding a ninth conference game.  What’s a little more nonsense?

If Mike Slive and his presidents are content to let the league’s athletic directors do what’s best for themselves rather than what’s best for the league as a whole, then why not add more cupcakes to the nonconference portion of the schedule and stop counting or even playing cross-divisional league games?  Hell, perhaps they can get the folks with the BCS computers and the poll voters not to count those games, either.

“Loss?  What loss?  That exhibition with Alabama didn’t count in the SEC standings so it shouldn’t count in the BCS rankings!”

Jon Solomon of The Birmingham News was on hand for Miles’ engagement today and he has more on the ongoing soap opera that is the SEC’s struggle to put together a new schedule format.  An SEC vote at the end of the month can’t get here soon enough for this writer.  Time for this story to be put to bed.  Regardless of the final decisions.

SIDENOTE — Miles also managed to chuck a little warning in the direction of SEC newcomers Missouri and Texas A&M, today: “I would say strap it up.  They’re going to really not enjoy their welcoming to this conference.”

Yesterday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier told a group of Gamecock boosters that his school and the SEC’s newest school — Missouri — are going to create a trophy for their new annual football game:

“We’re going to have a trophy for that game like we do for the Clemson game.  We already have the state championship trophy.  Since Missouri is also in Columbia, we’re going to have The Battle of the Columbias with a big trophy.  It should be fun.”

That according to the good folks at GamecockCentral.com — the Rivals site covering USC (and, yes, that means the quote’s behind a paywall).

Carolina and Missouri will battle for the first time as league mates this September.  In Columbia.  Columbia, South Carolina, that is.

Whether a trophy will kickstart the schools’ new rivalry is anyone’s guess.  Arkansas and LSU are border rivals and they’ve played for the Golden Boot trophy every year since 1996.  Even so, none other than ex-Razorback coach and AD Frank Broyles — who helped lead the Hogs to the SEC — recently said, “We don’t have a rivalry” in the SEC.  Trophy or no trophy, Arkansas-LSU hasn’t created the blood feud that once existed between UA and Texas, which is one reason Hog fans are happy to see old SWC rival Texas A&M join the SEC.

It takes at least one of three things to create a rivalry:

1.  Time — Schools that have played just 20 times won’t have the build up bad feelings that schools that’ve played 80 times will have.  The longer the history, the better the rivalry.

2.  Championship Races —  A recent example inside the SEC is the Florida-Tennessee rivalry.  Those schools had rarely played one another when the league went to divisions in 1992.  But just as they were launching an annual matchup, both schools found themselves in the Top 10 for much of the decade, battling back and forth for the East Division crown.  A heated rivalry was born.

3.  Odd Circumstances — A coach badmouthing another school or another coach.  A school turning in another for NCAA violations.  Crazed fan behavior.  Recruiting wars.  Pick your poison, but a rivalry can quickly be created if one side feels slighted by the other in any way, shape or form.  Especially in the Deep South where dueling’s only gone out of style because it was outlawed.

This isn’t to say Missouri and South Carolina won’t make for good — albeit distant — rivals in the long run.  And we at MrSEC.com are all in favor of trophy games.  We think creating The Battle of the Columbias trophy is sharp.  A natural move would be to somehow incorporate a personified Columbia into the prize itself, a la the Columbia Pictures logo at left.  We just believe it’ll take more than a trophy to ratchet up the hate between two schools that have rarely battled one another.

SIDENOTE — This news might pop the balloon of those few folks who’ve been holding out hope/belief that the SEC was secretly planning a raid of the ACC to reach 16 schools and push Missouri back to the SEC West.  We’ve told you that the SEC isn’t planning such a raid for months, but talk of NC State and Virginia Tech never seems to die.  Well, if the administrations at Carolina and Mizzou felt their rivalry would be short-lived, it’s doubtful they’d be adding any trophy.  If the league expands again and stays with an eight-game league schedule, USC and MU would face each other about twice a generation as non-division foes.

Things can change quickly when it comes to realignment and expansion, but for now, this seems to be a bit more proof — small as it is — that the presidents in Mike Slive’s conference aren’t eyeballing any further moves at the moment.  At least not to the east.