In a little over three hours, Super Bowl commercials starred squirrels, beavers, chickens, longhorn cattle, horses, dogs, cats, hippos, giraffes, whales, cheetahs, tigers, snakes, and people pretending to be dolphins. Oh, and babies and kids. Also, men were made fun of for not being manly enough. There was a time when the Super Bowl was such a cultural zeitgeist that you went to school or work the next day and discussed the latest catch phrase. Who can forget the cool teacher in sixth grade referencing, "You Got the Right One Baby"? Or the cat drive commercial during the height of the Internet boom?
Now?
Now advertising executives give us animals or children. On Sunday it was my responsibility to assiduously study the commercials and bring you a countdown of the best and the worst. So that's what you're going to get. I'm counting down to the best commercial and alternating with the worst. The worst ads are in italics. Who got the best bang for their 2.8 million?
Read on.
10. The David Letterman, Jay Leno, Oprah Commercial
David Letterman, wearing a Colts jersey, opens by saying, "This is the worst Super Bowl party ever." Then as we pan back we first see Oprah, Letterman's erstwhile nemesis, followed by a further pan out to Jay Leno.
It's a promo ad for The Late Show with David Letterman and suggests that Oprah has brought both men together to mediate their differences.
Given all the backbiting between the hosts over the Conan imbroglio, the ad was likely an attempt by Leno to still show he has a sense of humor. Even though, you know, he doesn't. Granted, it was incredibly odd to appear in a promotional spot for his late night rival. But it was also so unexpected that it worked.
The Tim Tebow commercial fizzled. From the placement, right after Betty White gets tackled in a Snickers ad, to the tepid message, to Tebow tackling his own mother. Why in the world would Tebow tackle his mother? Because he's a football player? He was a quarterback.
What was all the fuss about?
This ad didn't actually endorse anything. Which makes you wonder, did Focus on the Family foment the outrage because they wanted to get their message out via the free media as opposed to via a television commercial that appeared to stand for nothing?
I think so.
9. Jim Nantz for Flo-TV
Is Jim Nantz becoming the Alec Baldwin of television sports? So well known for his iconic and serious delivery that he's now able to send himself up to perfection by doing that iconic and serious delivery in pursuit of a ridiculous storyline?
I think so.
He's already provided some racy commentary for How I Met Your Mother. As a newly-divorced man who is now free to hang his self-portrait wherever he would like, Nantz is poised for commercial success.
This ad wasn't anything amazing, basically a man was ridiculed for not being manly enough -- which was the most popular theme of the night after animals and babies are excluded -- but because it's Jim Nantz it works to perfection.
Having said that, it's awkward to pair Nantz with the games he's broadcasting. If I was CBS I'd seriously consider not allowing Nantz ads during Jim Nantz games.
Car ad fail: The Hangover is awesome! Let's steal the gag about a wild animal on a wild bachelor party and put a whale in an SUV.
People will love it!
Or they'll see it for what it was, a lame ripoff that falls flat. Stealing a tiger was funny in The Hangover because you knew the guys who had stolen the tiger.
Here?
Random guys are in a car with a whale.
What's worse, the ad cost $2.8 million and I can't even tell you which car company was represented.
8. Brett Favre's Hyundai 2020 MVP Ad
Another icon sending himself up. The gag is that Favre has won a holographic Super Bowl MVP trophy and is once more deciding whether or not to play a new season.
As part of his postgame interview Favre mocks his age, laments the fact that he is older than all the viewers, and basically shows that he has a sense of humor about the drama that surrounds the will-he-or-won't-he coverage of his football career.
The fact that this ad made the list shows how weak the contenders were. Basically, it was better than a human bridge for a beer truck.
How has Go Daddy triumphed by putting softcore porn, at best, on the internet?
Think about this for a minute, Go Daddy's commercials are awful and don't really do anything but direct you to their Web site, which, inevitably, crashes every year when people log on to watch the video.
But, really, why do people log on? For titillation value?
Please, you can find a billion videos online that are actually pornographic.
I don't understand why this works.
7. The Simpsons Coke Ad
Was this ad spectacular?
No.
The storyline suggested that Springfield billionaire Montgomery Burns was now penniless. But it married two cultural icons, Coke and the Simpsons, in a way that rarely happens today. All of The Simpsons' cast was involved and the ad strove for a cultural cachet that used to make Super Bowl ads memorable on the day after the big game.
As is, some Simpsons fans are doubtless upset at the creators for selling out, but I liked the welding of Americana.
KISS is endorsing Dr Pepper Cherry?
As if aging rockers had any coolness left after The Who's awful performance at halftime, now once-insane rockers are endorsing low-end sodas?
It makes you think Buddy Holly got lucky.
What's next, the surviving members of the Beatles for Diet Mountain Dew?
6. The Lost Spinoff Ad for Bud Light
A plane crashes on a deserted island. A Kate-esque figure emerges from the surf with a radio, but there is a competing discovery -- a full stash of Bud Light.
An island party ensues, no one wants to be rescued.
Given the timing, five days after the debut of the newest Lost episode, I thought this came off pretty well. For fans of the television show, it was a memorable satire of the recurring theme of the first several seasons: how do we get off the island.
For my money all we needed was to see a fat Hurley-esque character remark, "I'm finally going to lose weight!" and this would have been perfect. That or have a man in a wheelchair suddenly get out of the wheelchair and make his way to the Bud Light.
Anyway, I thought this one worked given the timing and the audience. But I thought it also would have worked OK even if you'd never seen Lost.
The Dorito dog collar ad involves my least favorite and least original Super Bowl ad theme: an animal meets an idiot.
Write this down, if you work in an advertising agency immediately kill any ideas that involve idiots or animals. It's time to get original.
5. Google's Ad
It was understated, classy and uncluttered, like the search engine. I don't think any commercial fit any product better than Google's ad. The Google search process is simple yet it leads us to all sorts of complicated information.
Put simply, life = difficult.
Google = making life less difficult.
McDonald's blew it with a take-off on their famous ad. The McDonald's credo: Let's go back to what was once an iconic commercial and make it worse by infusing it with new stars.
Remember when Larry Bird and Michael Jordan enthralled us with their game of H.O.R.S.E.? Well, this time new stars are playing a game of H.O.R.S.E.
Meet LeBron James and Dwight Howard.
Only, here's the deal, these guys are already superstars capable of amazing basketball moves, why use CGI to make them do even more impossible dunks? Wouldn't it have been better to let the cameras roll and see what dunk or shot attempts they actually came up with?
As is, they managed to take two stars and put them into a completely fake situation. What made the old commercial work was its veneer of originality in combination with a shootout contest.
McDonald's made an attempt to fuse the two generations by utilizing Larry Bird at the end, but it didn't work.
4. The Bud Light Book Club
The only three lines I remember from any commercial are both from this spot.
First, "I'd like to hear you read words."
Second, this sequence:
"So then do you like Little Women?"
"Yeah, I'm not too picky."
Somewhere Will Ferrell is kicking himself for not coming up with, "I'd like to hear you read words," in one of his movies. On a relatively weak night for beer commercials, this bit stood out.
The Clydesdale Horse ads are officially dead. This year's Super Bowl featured a baby Texas Longhorn racing alongside a horse. Then the Texas Longhorn grew up and burst through a fence so he could run alongside a Clydesdale.
For this, Budweiser paid in excess of $2.5 million.
This commercial was the equivalent of Phil Simms' haircut -- unoriginal and uninspiring. By the way, am I the only person that gets Boomer Esiason and Phil Simms confused? Are we sure they aren't the same person?
3. Megan Fox in Her Bathtub for Motorola
I loved this. A winking portrayal of the rapid-fire communication that ensues whenever a celebrity is caught in a compromising position. As quickly as Fox takes the picture -- "I wonder what would happen if I were to send this out?" -- it spreads across the country like wildfire.
Sparks literally fly in the next sequence. A man fails to hold on to the ladder of a friend, a wife slaps her husband, a gay man slaps his partner, and, in the raciest bit of any commercial, a woman bangs on a locked door -- "Jimmy, what are you doing?" -- in a veiled reference to masturbation.
Lane Kiffin is the Paris Hilton of college football. He's famous for nothing, essentially, except being famous. While at Tennessee, fresh off a firing from the Oakland Raiders, Kiffin claimed all the negative media publicity that surrounded his 13-month tenure in Knoxville was a deft manipulation of the media. Right. In reality, Kiffin was out of his league when it came to understanding how a major SEC team was covered. Kiffin claimed that the spate of attention, 95 percent of which was negative, was needed to revive a program he characterized as moribund.
A moribund program that was, you know, less than a year removed from playing in the SEC championship game when Kiffin was hired. But, no matter, college football's Paris Hilton had to make a scene. And he did, turning the Tennessee job into an extended version of the The Simple Life. When he bolted for USC, Kiffin claimed he no longer needed to capture media attention because the status of the program was so much better. Then, barely one month into the job, Lane Kiffin went all Paris Hilton on us once more: He offered and accepted the commitment of a 13-year-old quarterback David Sills.
For the first time, Kiffin's erratic decision-making has truly crossed over into the mainstream of American culture. Prior to this moment your grandmother might not have known who Kiffin was. Plainly, that wouldn't do. Everyone in all of American life must know who Lane Kiffin is. Prediction, within two years, he's released a sex tape entitled, "In the Fast Lane."
The quarterback in question, David Sills, is a seventh-grader. He is 5-foot-11 and, wait for it, 136 pounds. But, and this is key, doctors have projected that he will be 6-5 when he is fully grown.
I'm not making this up.
Middle school basketball players have previously committed to play for coaches with a screw loose. Such as Kentucky's Billy Gillispie. But offering a seventh-grader you've never seen play in person is a new low. Or, at least it would be if this was not the second time in eight months that Kiffin has been associated with offering and accepting the commitment of a 13-year-old boy. Back in the summer, before he even coached a game at Tennessee, Evan Berry, younger brother of Vols safety Eric Berry, purportedly committed to Kiffin and Tennessee before everyone backtracked.
What's more, the early backlash that arose over the idea that Kiffin would give a scholarship to a 13-year-old also eliminates any thought that Lane Kiffin didn't know how the public would react when he did the same thing with another kid. He knew exactly what the reaction would be. And he did it anyway.
Let's just say that Lane Kiffin was so blown away by a 13-year-old quarterback that he wanted to offer him a scholarship. Wouldn't it stand to reason that he should tell the boy and the boy's family to keep that commitment quiet?
Of course it would.
But poor Lane, he simply can't help himself. He needs the headlines even if those headlines are all negative.
Channeling Jessie Spano in the 1990 caffeine-pill addiction episode of Saved by the Bell that aired a full decade before Stills was born, the buoyant first-year teenager had this to say to Delaware Online:
"I'm very excited, but I was very, very nervous. It was very cool [to talk to Kiffin] but my heart was beating so fast, and I was scared. But after it was over, I was so excited and pumped."
Doubtless, Kiffin was so excited and pumped as well. Why wouldn't he be? The long offseason of college football wasn't made for the Paris Hilton of college football. Lane had to make a move to keep the headlines rolling.
Now!
Pete Carroll was never the type of man not to watch his highlights. Lane Kiffin? He's going to demand that all USC games feature a Kiffin-cam. Get used to this USC fans. I call it the Kiffin factor. Where once you could turn on your iPhones or BlackBerrys in the morning fairly comfortable that nothing extraordinary had happened in the national news associated with your head coach, now you have to wake up every morning with the entire spectrum of football possibilities before you.
Kiffin could have spent the night depositing lit bags of poop on Rick Neuheisel's porch or moved in with Brody Jenner, where he is now negotiating an end to the Cuban embargo with his close personal friend Raul Castro.
Truly, nothing is unexpected.
When you've built your entire career on recruiting and haven't accomplished a single other thing other than winning the genetics lottery of being a famous coach's son, it doesn't matter how old the kids are, you just can't say goodbye to national signing day.
That's why I'm privy to exactly what Kiffin promised 13-year-old David Sills to entice him to join the USC class of 2015.
1. Monte Kiffin gave him his Purple Heart from World War I.
2. Lane connected with Sills thanks to his knowledge of classic cinema. Sills was wowed by Kiffin's expansive knowledge of such films as, "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Old School," released when Stills was a wee pocket passer of 6.
3. Lil Wayne will rap at Sills's senior prom ... in 2015.
4. When Sills hits puberty, Kiffin has already promised him his own pellet gun to rob neighborhood gas stations.
5. The USC song girls got on the phone and performed the newest Trojan cheer, "Dela-Where, Dela-Where, Dela-Where, it will be legal for us to sleep with you in five years."
6. Coach Ed Orgeron promised him a mustache. Told that he could not control the growth of a young boy's facial hair, Coach O. covered the phone and scowled.
"WhennaCoachOsayin' hairdegrow, hairdegrowin'."
7. Was I the only person that immediately thought, this kid must be the illegitimate child of Urban Meyer and Lane Kiffin is just trying to draw attention to him?
No.
Good.
8. Kiffin telephoned former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie to ask for tips. Gillispie, reached at his 1 a.m. tee time, had this to say, "By goshhhh, you're the Erwin Rommels of footballs."
National signing day is close to a regional holiday in the South. Nowhere else in the country is recruiting followed so obsessively. Maybe that's the reason the SEC continues to crush other conferences when it comes to signing the top football classes in the country, fans simply demand it. As Wednesday wound down, the top of the recruiting boards looked awfully similar to the top of the recruiting boards for the past six years: the SEC dominated.
How much so? Tennessee's class finished ninth in the country.
That sounds pretty good, right?
Unfortunately for the Vols, that only put them at fifth in the SEC.
Fifth!
That's because Florida clocked in at No. 1, with a class that some are already calling the greatest in college football history. Auburn pulled in a No. 4 class, Alabama fifth and LSU took seventh. Rounding out the list, per Rivals, Georgia and Ole Miss were 16 and 17, giving the SEC seven of the top 17 classes in America. South Carolina clocked in at 25, Arkansas and Kentucky were 48 and 49, and Vanderbilt was 60.
If Rivals isn't your speed, ESPN had similar class rankings, with five of the top nine classes in the country in the SEC and seven of the top 18.
What does all this mean for the balance of power in the country?
Since 2003, when the SEC began a run that would see five of the eight championships reside in the conference, here is how the conference has ranked in Rivals' recruiting databases:
In 2003, five of the top 11 classes in America were from the SEC.
2004? Five of the top 15.
2005? Four of the top 15
2006? Six of the top 16.
2007? Seven of the top 10.
2008? Four of the top 11.
2009? Six of the top 12.
2010? Five of the top nine.
2011? More to come.
Is the on-field dominance a coincidence?
I think not.
In fact, it's just evidence that the era of ManifeSECt Destiny remains upon us.
Perception is now fueling reality. The best players in the country want to play in the SEC because the best players in the country play in the SEC.
Good luck beating that.
But what do the SEC classes in 2010 tell us about the path of SEC football as we enter a new generation?
First, the usual disclaimers. Recruiting, like drafting, is an inexact science. You need a large sample size for to recruits to translate into on-field results. Even then, in terms of individual classes and individual schools in the SEC, recruiting well does not guarantee BCS bowls are coming. But recruiting poorly does guarantee that you won't win an SEC title. In other words, every school's class won't pan out, but all of them won't collapse either. Chances are, as has happened in the past few years, one or more of the top 10 classes in the SEC will be a national champion three years from now ... if not sooner.
1. Florida's class is dominant and the Gators are now going national for top talent.
Urban Meyer claimed he was overstressed. Then he went out and put together the greatest collection of defensive recruits in SEC history. I don't know about Meyer, but that would lower my stress level an awful lot.
How dominant are the Gators becoming in recruiting? They got three five-star defensive players from areas that are hardly SEC hotbeds: Philadelphia's Sharrif Floyd, Staten Island's Dominque Easley, and Moreno Valley, Calif.'s, Ronald Powell.
What's this teach us? The SEC's national footprint is growing. Gone are the days when Steve Spurrier told a top California recruit, Donte Stallworth, "We don't recruit California."
Now the Gators nabbed three of their four five-star players from thousands of miles away. This doesn't mean Florida abandoned their usual turf of Georgia and Florida -- they signed 19 players from those two states -- but it does mean that, if you're a top program, the SEC brand is opening doors that were previously closed.
The entire country is a fertile recruiting market. Gene Chizik 2. If you're at the right school, you can become a recruiting juggernaut because the school sells itself. See Chizik, Gene.
Corey Lemonier, a top defensive end recruit from Hialeah, Fla., committed to the "University of Auburn." Of course it's Auburn University, but that was about the only downside to this year's haul for the Tigers.
In fact, Gene Chizik was so pumped, in a moment of premature celebration, he traveled down to the Senior Bowl and clapped Terrence Cody's breasts together while making a squealing seal-like sound. As if that weren't enough, he also found three Nestle Crunch bars hidden in Cody's breast folds.
On a more serious note, Chizik had three classes at Iowa State.
All were awful.
Were those classes awful because Chizik was a bad recruiter or because the job makes a head coach as a recruiter?
I think it's the latter.
3. Nick Saban will never fail when it comes to recruiting, but other schools can slowly catch up.
After running roughshod over the SEC for the past two seasons, Saban and crew slipped back to earth this season. I know, I know, the Crimson Tide still finished with a top-five class, but they also took more risks than they have in the past two seasons.
'Bama fans will say that their team was so stocked after two top classes that many recruits were scared off. They'll be wrong.
In 2009, Alabama had four five-stars and 14 four stars.
In 2008, Alabama had three five-stars and 19 four stars.
These two classes, the top two in the country both years per Rivals, were the foundation for Alabama's national title.
This year?
The Crimson Tide had just one-five star and 15 four stars.
It might not sound like much, but three or four stud players end up making a class, and 'Bama lost several kids they thought they had a chance for on signing day.
4. Les Miles continues to illustrate that a blind monkey with dropsy could recruit well to LSU.
Here's a fun fact, the entire Big Ten conference managed the same number of five star players, one, as LSU. That means that Florida by itself had three more five star players than the entire Big Ten.
Uh oh.
Another fun fact, at Oklahoma State the last two classes Les Miles recruited finished 37 and 42. Here is what LSU's classes have ranked under Les Miles: 7, 4, 11, 2 and 6.
I ask you, how much of it is Les Miles and how much is being able to recruit players to LSU.
It's mostly LSU.
By the way, is anyone else certain that Les Miles still calls a fax the facsimile machine?
5. Derek Dooley saved the Vols' recruiting class and added a couple of flourishes on his own. But he also demonstrated that programs still recruit themselves as much as coaches do.
Fun fact before we get rolling here, Derek Dooley's nickname, given to him by his mother, Barbara, is Precious.
I'm not making that up. She told us on the radio. You can hear it yourself here.
Tennessee's finish in the top-ten is the recruiting triple crown that proves top SEC programs recruit themselves.
If you've ever doubted whether there is a clear divide between the big six programs in the SEC and everyone else, looking at the success of Gene Chizik, Les Miles and Derek Dooley this season offers some evidence of the pecking order in the conference.
These three men had never signed a top twenty-five class as head coaches, and all three managed top 10 classes this fall at Auburn, LSU and Tennessee.
Dooley's Louisiana Tech program finished 93rd in the nation. Is that because Dooley is a bad recruiter or because recruiting is a lot like sales everywhere? The better the product you have to sell, more people are interested in buying it.
That's one of the things that most astounded me about the Lane Kiffin era. Vols fans acted like Tennessee had never been a good recruiting program before. Lane Kiffin is a great recruiter, but four years ago the Vols had the number two class in the country. Send Kiffin out to Wyoming and let him put together a top-10 class. As is, all Kiffin has done is take over top recruiting programs and continue to be successful.
6. Mark Richt is going to have to take Georgia recruiting national ... or else.
The Bulldogs were the biggest signing day loser in the SEC, falling out of the top 10 and losing their top players to raids from out-of-state. Losing players to other programs happens in every state, particularly when, like Georgia, the state is stocked with so many top recruits. But generally those programs snag top players from other states as well.
Not the Bulldogs.
Georgia only signed 19 prospects. 14 players were from Georgia, four from Florida, and one player from South Carolina.
I'm not saying Georgia needs to get tons of national prospects, but it does need to supplement its recruiting base with national players at positions of need. The Bulldogs can't be lazy.
They've brought in top rated national players before with Matthew Stafford from Texas and Knowshon Moreno from New Jersey.
This time they rested on their local laurels.
And got burned.
This class, which breaks a multi-year string of top 10 finishes for Mark Richt, will do little to stave off the impression that Georgia's program is declining.
7. Ole Miss followed the rules this year ... and proved that national television can have a quick impact on a program.
Last year, the Rebels signed 37 prospects, necessitating a change in rules in the SEC, limiting signing classes to 28 players.
This year the Rebels only signed 25 players.
And, in an interesting test case for how success in the new era of national television can help a program, Ole Miss only signed 10 players from in-state.
What was the second biggest recruited state for Ole Miss?
Florida, with eight commits.
The Rebels took players from eight different states. This suggests that it only takes a couple of years of success to put your team on the radar.
8. South Carolina's best player, five star Marcus Lattimore, announced in a church.
Which makes sense, because every Gamecock fan spends the month of November praying for their season not to collapse.
Spurrier's classes at South Carolina have been better than his on-field results. He's had a top-10 class and four other classes in the top 25. But for whatever reason no positive results have developed.
Unless you count a Liberty Bowl win as a truly positive result.
The time for grumbling about a talent gap is over. Either the Gamecocks make the step up this year and make a run for the SEC East title or they never will under the Ole Ball Coach.
For the past several years Dan Mullen has thought he was a great recruiter, that players loved him, that every joke he told was worthy of Chris Rock's stand-up routine, that his recruiting touch was pure gold.
This year?
This year he probably felt like he was lobbying for same-sex couples.
In Mississippi.
State finished with 20 of their 26 players from inside the Magnolia state environs. No recruits were from states that didn't border Mississippi.
Some programs don't go outside their state because they don't need to, others don't have the option to bring in national players.
(Also, FYI, there will be a 2k word signing day column up on FanHouse in the next hour or so.)
This much is clear about SEC basketball as a decade dawns: Never has the disparity between the SEC East and the SEC West been greater in terms of basketball coaches, team talent, and the respective status of the programs in both divisions. Why has this happened? Because football is king in the SEC, and the divisions were designed to successfully calibrate the traditional football powers. Football behemoths Auburn, Alabama, and LSU were assigned to the SEC West and the SEC East picked up Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia.
Basketball was an afterthought, a way to pass the time between football seasons. Indeed, basketball had long been a second-class sports citizen everywhere in the SEC except for Kentucky. Since that time, as dollars have poured into athletic department coffers, many programs have stepped up their competitiveness in the sport. As a result, the unequal divisional alignment has become more glaring. This season? This season has erased any semblance of equality between the divisions. In fact, the SEC has developed a talent and coaching gap between the divisions so pronounced that it threatens the competitive balance of the league.
So much so, that I've got this idea: Why not scrap the divisions when it comes to college basketball?
Consider the proven coaches in the SEC East who have all led their programs to multiple Sweet 16s in the six preceding seasons: Florida's Billy Donovan (two Sweet 16s on the way to two national titles), Kentucky's John Calipari (four Sweet 16, including twice advancing to the Elite Eight, and a championship game loss, all at Memphis), Tennessee's Bruce Pearl (three Sweet 16s, including one at UW-Milwaukee), and Vandy's Kevin Stallings (two Sweet 16s). In fact, you can argue, and I would, that the four best coaches in the SEC are all in the East.
That doesn't even consider South Carolina's Darrin Horn, who has begun 3-0 against Kentucky and already advanced to a Sweet 16 with a mid-major, or Georgia's Mark Fox, who has drastically improved Georgia in his first season at the helm.
Match those six East coaches against these names: John Pelphrey, Anthony Grant, Trent Johnson, Jeff Lebo, Rick Stansbury, and Andy Kennedy. If I gave you one of those old-fashioned match-up tests, where you had to draw a line to connect each coach to the school, how many people could correctly match these coaches to their respective teams? Anthony Grant is in his his first season at Alabama, has a Billy Donovan pedigree and may be a future coaching star, while Trent Johnson, who has taken two teams to the Sweet 16, is in his second at LSU. Every other coach listed above has been at his respective school long enough to escape the deep shadow of mediocrity.
Only Stansbury has.
And even Stansbury at Mississippi State hasn't been that successful. In fact, in the midst of his 12 seasons in Starkville, he's never taken the Bulldogs to the Sweet 16 and has only advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament four times.
His career record in the SEC? Try 100-82.
Hardly the stuff of legends.
Yet compared to the rest of the SEC West, Stansbury is legendary.
Why?
The other five coaches in the SEC West have combined for seven total NCAA wins in a combined, wait for it, 35 seasons of head coaching.
Take away Trent Johnson's five NCAA wins and we're talking about four other coaches with 25 years in head coaching and just two NCAA tournament wins. And only one of those, Pelphrey's 2008 first-round win with Arkansas, was achieved while in the SEC.
Total it all up and the entirety of the SEC West coaches, in 46 seasons of combined head coaching experience, have 11 NCAA Tournament wins.
The SEC East?
John Calipari has 25 NCAA Tournament wins ... by himself. (Granted, UMass and Memphis have been forced to vacate both Final Fours he's made, but, still.) Still, Cal has won over twice as many games as the SEC West combined.
Toss in Billy Donovan's 22, Bruce Pearl's seven, Kevin Stallings' five, Mark Fox's two, and Darrin Horn's two, and you're talking about a grand total of 63 NCAA tourney wins for the coaches in the SEC East.
Ultimately, in 67 seasons of head coaching, the SEC East coaches have 63 NCAA tourney wins.
That's 63 to 11.
Does that strike anyone as surprising?
Maybe it does.
Does it strike anyone as surprising when you really sit and think about the disparity in coaching and talent that now exists in the two unequal divisions?
What does it tell us?
The SEC East schools take pride in their on-court performance. The SEC West?
Put simply, they don't.
In fact, do you need even more tangible evidence of how the divisions value their head coaches?
Well, I'll show you the money.
John Calipari's $3.96 million salary is more than SEC West foes Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Auburn, and Arkansas pay their head coaches combined.
Those four coaches total $3.55 million in salary.
And while basketball is Kentucky's primary sport so you might expect that the Wildcats would be an outlier on the salary front, fellow SEC East coach Billy Donovan also makes about the same that those four SEC West coaches are paid. ($3.5 million for Donovan vs. $3.55 million for the other four coaches.)
The top three coaches are all from the SEC East and six of the top nine are from the East. All told the SEC East coaches average $2.2 million a year in compensation, while the SEC West schools average barely over a million a year.
Given the production of the SEC West coaches, you might even argue those coaches are overpaid. Regardless, quite simply, you get what you pay for.
Is it a coincidence that six of the top eight SEC teams in the RPI are in the East?
Is it a coincidence that the top four teams in the East are 9-0 against the SEC West?
Quite simply, no, it isn't.
The SEC East is as good of a collection of teams as exists in college basketball this season. The SEC West? It's as bad as any.
Here's the link to several of the first week's interviews. Click here. The interviews linked are Gregg Williams--the one that led SportsCenter yesterday--, Barbara Dooley, Carl Pickens, and former Saints wide-receiver Joe Horn.
If you're not listening, we had an awesome time in studio the first week. We stream online every day from 12-3 central.
For those of you who are listening thanks for the calls and emails.
GREECE, N.Y. -- It's a winter morning in Rochester, N.Y. Dirty, ice-caked snow rests up against the side of cracked concrete sidewalks. Old buildings, once bustling, are silent, as dim sunlight spills over the windy roads that lead from downtown, 15 miles west, to the suburban town of Greece. It was here, almost four years ago, that a young, autistic basketball player named Jason McElwain, then a senior manager, stepped off the bench and into celebrity.
Then, as so often happens, the attention faded.
Now, it's morning in Greece and outside his home an old basketball hoop where Jason learned to shoot, chipped black paint on the pole revealing the rust underneath, rises into the clear blue sky. The hoop is weathered, the lower left part of the backboard chipped away, and there is no longer any color at all on the backboard, it's faded white, the paint rubbed off from overuse.
Pass the hoop and a two-car garage rises alongside a brick house with a blue-paneled second story. Inside the house a sock-footed Jason McElwain, who as a senior hit six 3-pointers in a little over four minutes, stands with a cantaloupe in hand. "Hi," he says, "I'm eating breakfast."
It has been four years since Jason, "My friends call me J-Mac," won an ESPY and was transported in an instant from a sleepy suburban town to the center of the sports universe. From anonymity to hanging alongside Kobe, LeBron, Shaq and Derek Jeter and back. Now J-Mac is a volunteer assistant coach for the Greece-Athena Junior Varsity sitting in his parents' quiet living room.
"We're 9-2," he says, "but last year we only lost one game."
The team has won two overtime games, "In both of them we were down four with 12 seconds to go," J-Mac says. He's taller than you expect, over six feet, rail thin, with a buzzed haircut. He's sitting in a brown recliner surrounded by the wood-paneled living room walls.
His feet, antsy on the cream carpet, bounce up and down. He's ready to ride to the gym with his father, David, who will drive since J-Mac can't, for morning practice.
"I think he could probably drive," his mom says, "but he gets distracted. He's always on his phone. People call me and say, 'J-Mac wasn't paying attention while he was riding his bike.'"
J-Mac is the second of David and Debbie's two children. Josh, J-Mac's older brother, is 16 months older. Despite their close age, J-Mac was different than his older brother -- for five years he didn't speak.
Share Then came sports. J-Mac followed his older brother everywhere. Eventually, he started to play basketball too. And he fell in love with the sport.
The old basketball hoop outside had an adjustable height. "We started at six feet," says David, standing over 6-foot-4 and also thin. "As soon as they were tall enough they would dunk on it all the time, hang on the rim."
"He moved it higher with a broom stick," says J-Mac.
"Every boy in the neighborhood came over and played. We were lucky then, all the boys were the same age. Now it's different, but then ..."
Debbie, a short-haired woman who works as a dental hygienist, nods, "So much mud in the spring," she says, "the tracking."
Slowly, as sports suffused his life, J-Mac emerged from his shell.
"Do you know about autism?" Debbie asks.
"No," I say.
"He won't look at you when you talk to him, that's one of the signs," she says.
"I look," says J-Mac.
"You're better," she says. "Jason is a high-functioning autistic."
J-Mac works at Wegman's, a grocery store chain, a little over a mile from his home. He works in the produce department and specializes in making sure that the breads are stocked adequately.
"You've got to watch them," he says, "some days sourdough is popular."
He's been working at Wegman's for 3 1/2 years.
"How often do you work there?" I ask.
"Not enough," says Debbie, "he needs to work 20 hours to get benefits."
Currently, J-Mac works 14-16 hours. But his dream is to be a high-school basketball coach.
He's proud of the job. "Wegman's is a great place," he says. Occasionally, says his manager Peggy Allan, Jason sings the only song he knows ... "Sweet Caroline."
"He's an awful singer," Peggy Allen will say later.
Slowly, the talk turns to the February night when J-Mac, student manager for the basketball team, suited up and entered the final home game of the season.
"We had a huge snowstorm the night before, it was a Wednesday," David says.
The parents watched their son's performance from the crowd, jaws agape, as J-Mac rained in basket after basket. Entering the game with just over four minutes remaining, J-Mac, channeling his inner Pete Maravich, would take 13 shots, hitting six 3s and one two-point basket, en route to a team-high 20 points.
Greece-Athena head basketball coach Jim Johnson says the most remarkable thing of all was this fact, "No one told the kids to get J the ball or told them not to shoot. They did it all on their own."
Coach Johnson pauses for a moment, grins. "I tell J-Mac we're still looking for his first assist."
On Friday after the game, the local CBS affiliate ran J-Mac's story, featuring game footage shot from inside the gym. By Sunday, the national CBS reporters were in Greece-Athena and when the story ran on CBS' national news, the onslaught was officially on.
So many calls arrived for Debbie at the dentist's office that eventually Dr. Spinelli, seeing how overwhelmed his hygienist was, instituted a rule. "Unless it's the president or Oprah," he said, "she doesn't talk to them."
Shortly thereafter Oprah and the president called.
******
Downstairs in the family basement are J-Mac's treasures. His silver ESPY trophy, and a wallboard filled with pictures. There's J-Mac with Peyton Manning. The Colts quarterback invited him to preseason camp, and for the past four seasons J-Mac has worked the event, living in the dorms alongside the team at Rose-Hulman college.
"Peyton's really serious," says J-Mac in his husky voice.
"Every year in fantasy football he has to have Peyton and Adam Vinatieri," David says. "Every year."
Last year as soon as he drafted Vinatieri, J-Mac texted the Colts kicker to let him know about the draft. Vinatieri texted J-Mac back immediately and the other drafters swooned.
"He said, 'Good,'" says J-Mac.
As part of his duties with the Colts, J-Mac is not supposed to travel, but that doesn't mean he's not willing to pull a fast one on his parents.
As David and Debbie sat down to watch the Hall of Fame game to look for Jason on the sideline, Debbie suddenly sprang from her seat. "This game's from Ohio," she said, "he didn't tell me he was traveling outside the state."
"No big deal," deadpans J-Mac.
J-Mac and his dad travel to one Colts game every season, and a couple of weeks ago they went to Buffalo and stood on the sideline in the snow. The Colts, resting their starters for much of the game, lost.
"It was freezing," says David.
"It wasn't that cold," says J-Mac.
Back in the basement a collage of photos of J-Mac with athletes of every shape and size cover the wallboard in front of him. But also, J-Mac with President George W. Bush and Oprah, J-Mac with Jessica Simpson and the Olsen twins. Now, four years later, he's unimpressed as a visitor looks over his pictures.
"Dad," he says, "can we get to the practice?"
"Look at this," says David, handing me a binder from a Gatorade commercial shoot. J-Mac and his father traveled to Orlando to film the "What's G?" ad. Just before they arrived, Tiger Woods filmed his commercial.
"Nice guy," says David, "but he didn't have a lot to say."
"Dad, can we go now?" asks J-Mac, clutching his red basketball shoes, with the inscription "RIP Tom Bazold" on the right sneaker. Bezold is the sports editor for the Rochester Gazette who died suddenly last season.
"He was a really good guy," J-Mac says later.
J-Mac climbs the basement stairs, ready to leave for practice.
David continues to speak, "Gilbert Arenas called and asked for one of J-Mac's jerseys. But we only had one. I guess Gilbert collects jerseys. So I had them make a new one and we sent it to him."
Arenas returned the favor and signed a jersey for J-Mac.
David is silent as we climb the stairs. Finally, he speaks. "That story was better before the guns," he says.
******
The Greece-Athena junior varsity practice is in full flow by the time we arrive. Immediately J-Mac (above), wearing a white T-shirt, black basketball shorts, and a long, dangling whistle around his neck begins to stalk the sideline.
Mike Setzer, chemistry teacher, and Greece-Athena junior varsity coach, welcomes him.
"What's up J?" he asks. "Ready to coach?"
J-Mac blows his hands, the gym is cold because the heat is turned off on weekends. Gold and black pads, alternating colored stripes, ring the small gym. A large divider is down to close off one side of the court, the other sideline runs into a red line, and then, almost immediately, the folded-up bleachers.
By now you're all still kicking yourselves because you don't have $64,000 in the bank from betting on the SEC in the past six BCS title games. (By the way, the most hardcore gamblers among you keep e-mailing about the vig. I've simplified the numbers, but the fact remains that the SEC has not been favored in three of these games. So betting on the SEC to win, as opposed to just taking the line, would actually have netted you more than 64K. Please stop with the gambling e-mails now.) Another year, another SEC champ in college football. Ho hum. Some things never change. And, like it or not, I'll probably be able to write the same column in 2011, after the SEC wins a fifth in a row.
Notwithstanding the SEC's continued dominance, some things did change this year. And that's why we're bringing you a very special end of the year Starting 11 focusing on the season that was in the SEC. But before we do that, it's time to bring to a close the picks challenge with my family's former French exchange student, Audrey. You'll recall that we picked games against the spread all season, and as a grand finale we both picked all 10 bowl games featuring SEC teams.
Ultimately, Audrey and I both went 6-4 in those games.
Meaning, drum roll, after picking 70 games against the spread this season, Audrey, who has never watched a college football game in her life, went 32-34-4.
Meanwhile, in a triumphant turn, I routed her with a record of 36-31-3.
That's a prodigious 3.5 game victory.
I take my bow.
And now with my bona fides as a football picks genius validated by my victory over a French girl, here is the Starting 11 (plus one) wrap-up and look ahead on the SEC.
1. With a wobbly 2009, Les Miles confirmed that 2010 will be his final year at LSU.
I know, I know, LSU fans will point to close losses to Alabama, Ole Miss and Penn State as evidence that the Bayou Bengals are on the comeback trail.
That the Tigers were almost 12-1, 11-2 at worst.
I feel differently. And in your heart so do you, LSU fans.
Why?
Because change a single play in the Arkansas, Mississippi State, and Georgia games and the Tigers lose three more SEC contests.
So, lucky for them, LSU split their close games this season.
Miles is now 8-8 in the past two SEC seasons. 2010 will be the season that breaks him. Especially with Nick Saban and Alabama running roughshod over LSU in the SEC West.
2. Nick Saban proved that he's the best coach in college football.
There are conferences where you can have a life off the field and still win. The SEC is not among them.
If I give him five years, a BCS level conference, and a top 50 team from those conferences, does anyone believe that Nick Saban wouldn't have that team in the BCS title game in the next five years?
I'm convinced he would.
3. Georgia's continuing decline will be the story of the SEC east in 2010.
Like 2009, the Bulldogs will go 7-5. Only this upcoming season the schedule is much easier. No matter. The Bulldogs are taking on water and they can't bail out fast enough.
Both the offense and defense will be weaker. And even in a weakened SEC east, the Bulldogs will be in trouble.
At some point this offseason, I'm going to chart the top six programs in the SEC by wins, and measure the relative strength of those six. I've got a theory that the total number of wins among those six stays pretty constant and that what we see is a fluctuation among which teams in the SEC are in the top of the mix.
Basically everyone makes their run, and then returns to the average.
Right now Florida and Alabama are ascendant.
LSU and Georgia are in decline.
Tennessee and Auburn are in holding patterns under new coaches. One of these will rise and become dominant. The other will remain left behind. Given that no one has any idea what to expect from Derek Dooley, the early money is on Auburn reclaiming some past glory. At least assuming that offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn returns.
4. Ole Miss is still Ole Miss and consequently, the bottom half of the SEC is still the bottom half of the SEC.
This was going to be Ole Miss' year to return to SEC prominence, right? How quickly did those dreams die? I'll tell you, they were dashed before September ended.
Quick, which programs in the SEC have not won an SEC title since before the Civil Rights movement?
Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, South Carolina and Arkansas.
Quick, which three programs have never won an SEC title?
South Carolina, Arkansas, and Vanderbilt.
Granted two of those teams are the new additions, but we're moving up on two decades since the SEC split into two divisions. That's plenty of time for a football program to demonstrate it belongs among the championship contenders.
Which of these six teams have never even been to the SEC title game?
Ole Miss, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, and Kentucky.
What's my point in asking all of these questions?
Pointing out that none of these six programs in the SEC are ever going to be relevant for more than a one season spurt. Ole Miss had their chance this season.
The Rebels failed.
Arkansas, who admittedly has been to the title game more than the other teams listed here, will have their chance in 2010.
But odds are they'll fail too. Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook
5. After a 2-10 season will Bobby Johnson spend all his free time wondering why he stayed at Vanderbilt after a bowl win?
Yes, sigh, yes, he will.
We all agree that Bobby Johnson is a good coach, right? I mean, Johnson is probably questioned less than any coach in the entire SEC.
Yet what is Bobby Johnson's record at Vanderbilt after seven complete seasons?
29-66!
He's 37 games under .500!
And his record in the SEC? 12-52!
Yet everyone assumes he's a great coach.
Just how poorly does Vandy have to perform for someone to be a bad coach?
Anyway, things were bad in 2009, 2-10, but they're about to get worse. In fact, what's the most brutal thing about Vandy's upcoming schedule? For some reason the Commodores continue to schedule like madmen.
Take a look.
The Commodore non-conference?
How about: Northwestern, at UConn, at Wake Forest, and Eastern Michigan
Yep, Eastern is the only guaranteed win on that schedule.
Fact is, the Commodores are going 3-9 at best next year even if they are massively improved. Thank the schedule. No matter the circumstances, Vandy is never going to get to more than four wins in the SEC.
The Commodore schedule should reflect that fact so the team can have a realistic chance at getting to 6-6 and advancing to a bowl game.
Unfortunately it doesn't.
There is a zero percent chance the Commodores are in a bowl game in 2010. And after eight years Bobby Johnson is likely to be 31-77 or thereabouts.
Good Lord.
6. Kentucky was relevant for the fourth consecutive season under Rich Brooks, will that change under new coach Joker Phillips?
Wildcat fans are nervous that Charlie Strong will make inroads at Louisville. After all, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that the state of Kentucky can't support two bowl-winning programs. Meanwhile, Joker Phillips has brought out the scythe and fired two coaches for not being committed enough to recruiting.
With the weakest SEC East in recent memory coming in 2010, this would normally be Kentucky's year to sneak toward the top and make a run at 5-3 or better in conference. Even with the bowl wins, Kentucky still has not done better than 4-4 in conference in over two decades.
If they don't do it now, when?
7. South Carolina finished its fifth consecutive disappointing season under Steve Spurrier.
It's time to pronounce Spurrier's tenure at South Carolina what it is: a failure.
Spurrier is now 35-28 overall in five seasons in Columbia. In that time he's lost three bowls and won a single bowl game, the Liberty Bowl. That season, Spurrier's second in 2006, is also the only time the Gamecocks have managed to finish with eight wins under the Ole Ball Coach.
As if that wasn't enough, Spurrier is now 18-22 in the SEC and, wait for it, he's lost more games at South Carolina in just five seasons than he lost at Florida in 12 seasons.
Maybe it's finally time to go ahead and bury the Gamecock football program. No matter who is the coach, they aren't winning.
Period.
Not unless the Gamecocks join the ACC, anyway.
8. Florida will win the SEC East again with a much weaker team than it fielded in 2009.
In fact, given his success in the NFL this season, does anyone think Florida would have gone 14-0 with Percy Harvin back last year?
I do.
I think he would have made the Gators offense explosive, and provided necessary playmaking both in the backfield and at wide receiver.
But that was last season.
With five early entrants, and a questionable head coaching commitment during the offseason, the Gators will take some lumps early in the season. But Urban Meyer will be on the sideline for all of those games. After an early loss at Alabama spells doom, the rest of the SEC East will be so down no one can take advantage of Florida's returning to the middle of the pack. In fact, it's hard to imagine anyone in the East knocking off the Gators head-to-head and managing to get to six wins in the SEC.
The Gators will go 6-2 in the SEC east and no one else will get to 5-3.
Travis has become enamored of several objects, phrases or events which he frequenly references in the column. Among the most frequent:
'Bama Bangs - a term coined by Travis to refer to southern men's hairstyles that feature prominent bangs for no apparent reason. Brodie Croyle and John Parker Wilson are oft-cited violators of 'Bama Bangs rules.
Read More...
When Clay Travis, acclaimed author of Dixieland Delight, decided to spend the 2008 season up close and personal with UT football, he—and every other college football aficionado—thought he was in for a rollicking ride with one of the leading contenders for the national title. After all, when the Vols kicked off the season on September 1, the defending SEC East champions were ranked 18th in the country. As head coach Phillip Fulmer prepared for the game, he reflected upon a coaching career that included an astounding 147 victories, two SEC championships, and a national title. With 34 years at UT under his belt as both a player and coach, the Tennessee native had just signed a contract extension that projected to keep him at the university long enough to become the winningest coach in program history.
Read More...
There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory.
Read More...
The newly favored man is not really a man at all, but a hairless, effeminate, germ-fearing, non-meat-eating, exfoliating, wristband-wearing woman of the worst order. We as men are told that we must embrace the sacred feminine in ourselves, even if it doesn't actually exist, and become the very quintessence of woman, plus penises. This situation is untenable. This trend must stop.
Read More...
Clay Travis is the only former student manager in the history of college athletics to marry an NFL cheerleader. He managed to pull this off despite an irrational affinity for the television shows Dawson's Creek and My Super Sweet 16. While being raised in Nashville, Tenn., Travis developed a healthy obsession with college sports and Alyssa Milano. As a teenager his greatest accomplishment was taking a doo-rag wearing Luke Duke (balling as Tom Wopat) to the hole at the Nashville YMCA.
In the midst of a stellar legal career during which he specialized in rewarding the unjust and punishing the oppressed, Travis began writing for CBS Sports's SPiN section in September 2005...
Read More...
