A rumor about Les Miles that started on an Alabama messageboard quickly spread to Twitter over the weekend.  But it took a few days before the LSU coach even heard about it. He was unfazed. Miles told AJC.com, “Yes, I don’t pay much attention to those kinds of things. “It’s just one of those things, I guess.”

Miles, who counts more than 100,000 Twitter followers, does occasionally find time for new technology.

“I’m an inconsistent tweeter, in general. For instance, the Super Bowl and the Miami Heat game, those were two events where I had nothing to do but watch. Know what I mean? The time before that was the College World Series when South Carolina was playing Arizona, and I tweeted a couple of innings from one of those games.

“What I do when I do it, this Twitter thing, it’s a self-entertaining piece for me. I certainly enjoy the acknowledgements, letting people know spring ball is getting start and that Johnny Jones is doing a great job in basketball. Those kinds of tweets are the real information but the fun stuff for me is pretending to call a game a live. I think Twitter for that is a little self-entertaining.”

Miles was asked about Twitter’s impact on recruiting.

“I got to be honest, I don’t know what role Twitter plays in recruiting. I really don’t. I can only tell you it’s entertaining, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of other things you’re doing. If you’re consumed by getting onto your electrical Social Media, it can be a problem.”

You can find Miles on Twitter @LSUCoachMiles.  

Former Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley has been officially named receivers coach for the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys
Dooley’s new job will not impact his $5 million buyout from Tennessee
Ex-Mississippi State WR Chad Bumphis has angered some Ole Miss fans via Twitter by telling prospects “DON’T go with the money!”
Ole Miss stands to finish with a top 10 recruiting class leading to rumors of rule-breaking
Reports out of New Orleans say Georgia defensive defensive corodinator Todd Grantham will interview for the same position with the Saints
In SEC hoops action Tuesday night, Arkansas beat Florida 80-69 and Kentucky beat South Carolina 77-55
Tennessee’s Kenny Hall will not be suspended after getting arrested for driving on a suspended driver’s license
Follow SEC football, basketball, and recruiting at twitter.com/mrsec
Follow all 14 SEC schools tomorrow on National Signing Day at MrSEC.com

SEC Football

1. How good a job has Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze done recruiting this offseason? ”You might have to go back to Michigan signing the Fab Five in basketball (in 1991) to find anything comparable.”

2. “Of course, when any school lands a huge recruiting class – much less a school like Ole Miss – the word-association test automatically pops up CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER.”

3. LSU – Texas A&M and the budding rivalry along the Gulf Coast.

4. Big sporting event, lots of celebrities.  Expect plenty of Johnny Manziel pictures to surface.

5. Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin on his star quarterback’s behavior: “Who’s to say how he’s supposed to react? It’s never been done before. How do you know how he’s supposed to react? Have you ever been in his shoes?

6. Mock draft has Texas A&M’s Luke Joeckel going first overall to the Kansas City Chiefs - five of the top 10 from the SEC.

7. Bret Bielema on why he left Wisconsin to come to Arkansas:’In my mind, the reason I made the jump was I wanted to prove something more.”

8. Kevin Scarbinsky on the circus that’s become college football recruiting:” This is what recruiting has become, adults allowing, no, encouraging teenagers to turn the most important decision in their lives into reality-TV programming…”

9. Mike Lopresti on signing day: “Prepare for a wave of 18-year-olds saying yes, while adults high-five. Happy National Signing Day.”

10. Recruiting rankings: “The evidence is overwhelming: Despite some obvious, anecdotal exceptions, on the whole recruiting rankings clearly are useful for creating a realistic baseline for expectations.”

11. Athlon’s  2013 recruiting all-name team features a Bonaparte, Lars Blix and Mike Tyson.

UPDATE: Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham set to meet with media on Wednesday.

SEC Basketball

12. Arkansas hosts the No. 2 ranked Florida Gators tonight. Razorbacks coach Mike Anderson: “I think that gets lost when people talk about Florida that they shoot the basketball, but Billy has them playing at a high level on defense, and to me that’s what wins championships.”

13. Arkansas has won its four SEC home games by an average margin of 17. 5 points.  Billy Donovan: “They’re a very good home team.”

14. Florida center Patric Young on the Gators No. 2 ranking: “Getting more recognition means that we have to be ready for everybody bringing their best shot at us,”

15. Mike Bianchi on how the Gators would stackup against the NBA’s Orlando Magic: “I think the Gators would actually stand a chance against the Magic. Not a great chance. Not even a good chance. But a chance.”

16. Florida “is as tough defensively as any team we’ve seen in the last decade.”

17. South Carolina travels to Kentucky.  Gamecocks coach Frank Martin on matching up against Kentucky’s Nerlens Noel: “When you see a crack, you better have your eyes on that target and let it go, and know that he’s coming, because he comes every time.”

18. Kentucky a sleeper team that can make a deep tournament run? And do the Cats have an identity crisis?

19. When John Calipari talked Monday about his team playing “soft”, who was he talking about?  “(Ryan) Harrow’s ears probably should have been burning.”

20-. Mississippi State coach Rick Ray on lessons his Bulldogs team can learn from the Super Bowl: “The reason the Ravens ended up winning that game is two-fold: The turnovers, they won the turnover battle, and then their special teams, which is comparable to free throws.”

21. Auburn coach Tony Barbee on a struggling Frankie Sullivan: “It’s not so much what Frankie’s doing, but what other teams are doing to him.”

22. Declining playing time for Tennessee forwards Quinton Chievious and D’Montre Edwards.  The message from coach Cuonzo Martin? No defense, no minutes.

23. Tennessee plays Georgia Wednesday night.  The Peach State is the leading producer of SEC basketball players.

24. Georgia on pace for its lowest home attendance average since the 1977-1978 season – averaging just under 5,600 people through 13 games.

25. Missouri heads to Texas A&M Thursday night where a priority will be stopping the Aggies Elston Turner.  Coach Frank Haith: He can shoot the ball, he’s good off the deck.”

26. Missouri was 18-2 at this time a year ago under Haith, 16-5 this year. “Last season’s team, I don’t think they gave him as much heartache as we have this year.”

27. LSU forward Johnny O’Bryant has had five straight double-doubles – averaging 15.4 points and 11.7 rebounds in that span.

Basketball

1.  The SEC has named its Players of the Week.

2.  As Anthony Hickey goes, so goes LSU.

3.  Ole Miss and Mississippi State will be trying to snap losing streaks when they meet on Wednesday.

4.  Kentucky’s team is finally developing an identity.

5.  Tennessee isn’t just looking for its first road win… the Vols are looking to become mentally tough.

Football

6.  Rivals.com has ranked all the FBS recruiting classes — as of today — in a conference-by-conference breakdown.

7.  When it comes to other leagues battling the SEC long-term, this writer says: “Give up.”

8.  Nick Saban has mastered the art of getting new players on campus early.

9.  Georgia has had some comings and at least one “going” with regards to its roster this month.

10.  South Carolina is set to ink a good crop of offensive linemen… if only projecting O-linemen were easy.

Extras

11.  So what happened with that Super Bowl outage?

12.  The NFL rakes in a whole lotta cash, but Division I NCAA athletic department have some big revenue numbers, too.

13.  The Jets won’t be cutting Tim Tebow… but they do hope to trade him.

14.  There’s a massive match-fixing scandal brewing in global soccer.

15.  Muhammad Ali’s family is denying reports that the legendary boxer is near death.

With the Baltimore Ravens win over the San Francisco 49ers last night, 11 ex-SEC players will be getting Super Bowl rings in the coming months.  Congratulations to:

Josh Bynes (Auburn)

Terrence Cody (Alabama)

Emanuel Cook (South Carolina) (Is on Ravens’ IR list)

Morgan Cox (Tennessee)

Dannell Ellerbe (Georgia)

Pernell McPhee (Mississippi State)

Michael Oher (Ole Miss)

Deonte Thompson (Florida)

DeAngelo Tyson (Georgia)

Courtney Upshaw (Alabama)

Bobbie Williams (Arkansas)

Internet reports indicate Missouri basketball coach Frank Haith is expected to be charged with unethical conduct and failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance
Three SEC teams in AP Top 25 – Florida 8, Missouri 22, Ole Miss 23
Ole Miss guard Marshall Henderson SEC Player of the Week
Kentucky center Nerlens Noel SEC Freshman of the Week
23 SEC players are on the South squad roster for this weekend’s Senior Bowl
23 players from SEC teams dot the rosters of the two Super Bowl teams
Follow SEC news year-round at MrSEC.com and at Twitter.com/MrSEC

 The Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers will meet in the Super Bowl a week from Sunday.  On the rosters of those teams are nearly two dozen players from teams represented in the conference – 12 from the 49ers and 11 from the Ravens.Even after backing out three players from Missouri and Texas A&M (who played their college ball in the Big 12) – that still leaves 20 guys with SEC roots.

Here’s the entire breakdown:

San Francisco

Carlos Rogers – Auburn

Ray McDonald – Florida

Demarcus Dobbs – Georgia (reserve/injured)

Ricky Jean-Francois – LSU

Curtis Tayler – LSU (practice squad)

Anthony Dixon – Mississippi State

Aldon Smith – Missouri

Justin Smith – Missouri

Patrick Willis – Ole Miss

Chris Culver-South Carolina

Parys Haralson – Tennessee

Tony Jerod-Eddie – Texas A&M

Baltimore Ravens

Terrance Cody – Alabama

Courtney Upshaw – Alabama

Bobbie Williams – Arkansas

Josh Bynes – Auburn

Deonte Thompson – Florida

Dannell Ellerbe – Georgia

DeAngelo Tyson – Georgia

Pernell McPhee – Mississippi State

Michael Oher – Ole Miss

Emanuel Cook – South Carolina (reserve/injured)

Morgan Cox – Tennessee

The two Mississippi State players represented here – Anthony Dixon of the 49ers and Pernell McPhee of the Ravens – are featured in a new billboard campaign across Mississippi.  MSU announced the billboards (click the icon up top for a larger version)are launching in Tupelo, Jackson and Columbus.

One year ago, Ole Miss did a billboard campaign before the Super Bowl featuring Eli Manning of the Giants and BenJarvis Green-Ellis of the Patriots. This year, Ole Miss has Michael Oher of  the Ravens battling Patrick Willis of the Niners. The lineman and linebacker will no doubt be staring each other down at some point during the game - maybe a little like this.

With two former Auburn players headed to the Super Bowl - San Francisco cornerback Carlos Rogers and  Baltimore linebacker Josh Bynes – this makes the 29th time out of 47 Super Bowls a former Tiger has made it to the championship game.

Former Georgia Bulldog and current Baltimore Raven Dannell Ellerbe got a shoutout on Twitter last night from Mark Richt after intercepting a Tom Brady pass in the fourth quarter.

When you talk about The Greatest anything in sports, you’re setting yourself up for trouble.  Everyone has an opinion on who or what The Greatest is.  That’s because everyone uses different criteria to determine what The Greatest even means.

Example: Who’s the NFL’s best quarterback?  The guy with the most Super Bowl trophies?  The guy with the most MVP awards?  The guy with the most passing yards on the back of his trading card?

As for college football, we can use the Heisman Trophy as another example.  Some people believe “most outstanding player” means the best offensive player on the best team.  Some people believe it means the most valuable player on a team, regardless of highlights and hype.  Still others cast their votes based on hard and fast stats.

So when we ask who should go on an imaginary Mt. Rushmore of SEC football coaches, we know we’re opening the door and inviting debate to come on in and sit a spell.

Fair enough.

As usual, we wanted to inject a little data, a bit of math into our study of the SEC’s greatest all-time coaches.  We also wanted to weed the competition for those four slots — we said Mt. Rushmore after all — down to a manageable number.

Our first step was to figure out who should be left out.  We set our start date at 1935.  The SEC was founded in 1932 and ’35 made for a nice round number.  If a man didn’t coach the majority of his career after that year he was excluded from our exercise.  So if you’re wondering why someone like Vanderbilt’s Dan McGugin isn’t on the list, now you know.

Next, we decided to include only coaches who have toiled in the Southeastern Conference for at least a decade.  Regardless of a coach’s success, if he hasn’t spent at least 10 years in the SEC how much historical impact could he really have?  Florida’s Urban Meyer — despite two BCS titles in six years — failed to pass this portion of our test.

One-year wonders were out, too.  Only coaches with multiple SEC championships were considered deserving of placement on our monument.  That eliminated coaches like Auburn’s Shug Jordan.

We decided that a coach also had to have won at least one consensus — that’s consensus — national championship during his tenure as an SEC head coach.  That eliminated Tennessee’s Johnny Majors, for example.  Majors won a national title at Pittsburgh, but he didn’t win one in the SEC.  So he’s out.

Finally, we eliminated any coaches who had their success at a program no longer in the SEC.  There are three ex-SEC schools out there: Sewanee, Tulane, and Georgia Tech.  One of them had a coach who fit all of the above criteria.  But it felt a little silly to consider Bobby Dodd for a spot on the SEC’s Mt. Rushmore when it was Dodd who famously yanked Tech from the Southeastern Conference.  So coaches like Dodd are out.

Those criteria — post-1935 career, 10 seasons in the SEC, multiple SEC titles, one consensus national title, and employment at a current SEC institution — helped narrow our choices down to just seven men.

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Barry Switzer is best known as the former national championship-winning coach of Oklahoma and the Super Bowl-winning coach of Dallas.  (How ’bout them Cowboys!)  But he’s also an Arkansas grad and he’s just fine with his alma mater’s hire of Bret Bielema.  For a number of reasons:

“The first thing I heard today was that he grew up on a pig farm.  That’s quite a start in my book.  And my last memory was watching him hang 70 on Nebraska.  Just those two facts are enough.  Then, I hear that he’s out of the Hayden Fry-Bill Snyder-Barry Alvarez coaching tree.  Oh, that’s enough for me to like a lot.  Then, I hear he’s got a 27-year-old wife.  Okay, we can stop. I like him.”

Now, that quote comes from a messageboard, so it could be bogus.  But it sure sounds like something Switzer would say.  And even if he didn’t, it’s funny.

Each and every day this website gets ‘em.  Emails from folks who want so badly to believe that a big name NFL coach is coming in as their football program’s savior that they fall hook, line and sinker for every rumor they read on a messageboard.  And, heck, one day one of these “out there” stories might just come to fruition.  But when we see one of the following nuggets in an email, we immediately raise a cynical eyebrow:

* Coach X was seen in town eating with a prominent booster.  (Meetings with candidates are done outside of college towns to avoid both the media and every Tom, Dick and Harry with a cell phone camera.)

* Coach X was seen in town playing golf with a prominent booster.  (See explanation above.)

* Coach X’s wife was in town to look at houses.  (Any coach’s wife interested in a house can have a surrogate go to said town and scout out houses if necessary, but they do have these newfangled virtual tours of houses, too, you know?)

* Coach X has a clause in his TV contract that states he can’t coach in the NFL next year.  (Ex-coaches leave the broadcast booth every year to return to the sidelines despite having spent the previous season holding production meetings with coaches and players from other teams.  If ex-NFL coaches had binding deals with networks, you’d think NFL insiders like Chris Mortensen, Adam Schefter, etc, would know about them.)

All that said, the rumors are swirling in the Bluegrass State that Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Cowher is considering the Kentucky job.  First, there’s the obvious question that must be thrown out regarding any NFL coach: “Why would he take less money in the college game and have to recruit when he could take more money in the pro game and not have to recruit?”  Second, if Cowher did decide to coach in the college ranks for the first time ever, do you think he’d pick Kentucky of the Southeastern Conference over — potentially — NC State of the ACC?  You see, Cowher played football at NC State.  Seems the Wolfpack would have a bit of leg up on the Wildcats if NCSU drops the hammer on Tom O’Brien.

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