Books, Beaches, & Blather

College Football Relativity

September is the busiest month for me, so I've not had much time to think about or digest the Tennessee Vols' woes (two shellackings on the road to obviously better teams).  Living three time zones away makes it easier to have a more nonchalant attitude towards their misery.  But I feel like I do need to add my two cents worth, so here goes.

The easy swipe is to knock Phil Fulmer.  And while I'm not a Fulmer apologist, I must point out that the guy has been very successful over his tenure.  He's the most senior coach in what is the toughest conference in America...not only is the conference the best top-to-bottom in college football, its fans have expectations, hopes, dreams, and unhealthy identity projections most other conferences' fans don't have.  So to hold on to his job this long while winning a few conference championships and a national title says a lot about the guy and his staff.  Maybe he is lazy.  Who knows?  That's speculation.

For Tennessee, however, I think the bigger issue is how the college football recruiting landscape has changed in the past 10 years.  Put simply, the state of Tennessee is not the football player producing powerhouse that Texas, Florida, and California are...or, for that matter, are Georgia, Alabama, or Ohio.  During Tennessee's best years in recent memory (1995-2001), almost all of their star players were not from Tennessee.  In fact, Fulmer used this as a selling point, touting Tennessee's "national" reach.  Most of UT's best players during that era were recruited from the Carolinas, Georgia, Louisiana, and California.  They would even get the occasional blue-chipper from Alabama or Florida.  I'd suggest that UT was able to do this because the flagship programs in each of those states had football programs that were underachieving or on the downslide.

I think that's changed.  Whether it be Pete Carroll or Jeff Tedford in California, Mark Richt in Georgia, Spurrier in SC, Saban/Miles in Louisiana, etc. - each of those coaches has more or less drawn fences around their local territories and are retaining much (if not most) of their best, local talent.  Tennessee still has had decent recruiting classes, of course, but I don't know how reliable those prognosticators' assessments of recruiting classes can truly be.  Moreover, everyone knows Nick Saban is going to do this in Alabama, cutting off another potential pipeline (and adding another L in the loss column each year).  The recruiting competition has gotten much tougher, and you can almost track the inverse ascendancy of these programs against the descendency of "national" programs without natural recruiting bases like Tennessee, Michigan, Nebraska, and perhaps Notre Dame.  Two coaches in those four programs who won national titles (Carr and Fulmer) bought themselves a nice lacquer of grace with those titles, but I think that grace is running out quickly. And frankly speaking, I don't know that coaching changes at either place will automatically make that much of a difference.  College football has become increasingly local in its recruiting, it seems to me, and until the state of Tennessee begins producing a similar number of blue-chippers as Georgia, Florida, or even Alabama, UT's future may not be much brighter than it is with Phat Phil at the helm.

IMHO

Right Direction.  Wrong Direction.

Law School Politics Behind the Orange Curtain

Public universities, especially the UC's, are very liberal, right?  (FWIW, I thought this editorial was well-done.)

I think the most surprising aspect of this story is that this is an out-of-character misstep for UC-Irvine.   Though UCI is an incredibly young university (founded in 1965), it has quickly become one of the country's top-flight research universities.  The financial resources offered to it as a UC campus have been augmented by its leadership's ability to woo and recruit many world-renowned scholars (for example, I didn't realize until recently that Irvine was the home of J.D.)  In my little corner of academia, for quite some time we were the only nationally-respected business school with a program in the OC; again, in the past few years UCI's ascending business school has anecdotally cut into our numbers.  And who knows about fundraising - for a long time my little corner's political leanings made it a the natural for the big money donations most often seen from the OC; UCI has given OC residents quite a bit of pride for their dollars, and it would seem in this case that that money is talking (though in all fairness there's a lot down there to go around).  It would seem that until now everything UCI has attempted to do it has done exceedingly well, though the bruise this incident leaves will undoubtedly harm its attempt to create a top-tier law school.

Zona

Well, that was a fun weekend.  Though the Cardinals were swept, it was nice to spend some time exploring a city neither of had spent much time in before.  Phoenix is a nice, clean city that's in a lovely setting, but I think it's a tad bit on the hot side for my tastes.  The misters help things considerably - in that sense Phoenix is a lot like LA.  In LA, nearly every restaurant or coffee shop has heat lamps on its patio so folks can sit outside year-round and eat even when the temps are in the lower 60's; in Phoenix, it seemed every place had a mist machine (like the ones you see on football sidelines) so people could sit outside and eat in the 106-degree desert climate.  (I don't know, does it strike anyone that maybe, just maybe, people don't have to sit outside to eat?)  And, contrary to what the promotional magazines in our hotel room said, I don't think Phoenix has an "ideal" climate.  Ideally it would rarely get above 80 degrees or below 60 degrees, but call me picky.  Or a Southern Californian.

(I also don't care much for Chase Field.  With swimming pools and batting cages and playgrounds, it seems designed for crowds who know or care little about the actual game of baseball.  People around us didn't know what was going on; I had to listen to an obnoxious fan behind us lecture his fellow party members what was going on when a walk was issued by a pitcher.  That never happens in St. Louis, or, for that matter, Dodger Stadium.  I feel like the Diamondbacks are baseball's equivalent of a big-box suburban strip mall.  End of rant.)

Down the Stretch

We're off to Phoenix this weekend for some baseball between the Cardinals and Diamondbacks.  After last season, a year when all three of my favorite teams made the playoffs (with two of them facing each other in the World Series), I suspected that cosmic justice would disallow any of them from making the playoffs this year.   Or any year in the near future, for that matter.

And I'm not letting myself get emotionally duped - the Tigers have a fork stuck in them, and even though the Cardinals are but one game back and the Dodgers 3.5 games back in their respective divisions, I don't think either of them can muster the consistency needed to put away the teams they need to put away down the stretch.  At this point I feel like I do in most third quarters of college football games between Tennessee and Florida: yeah, things are looking good for now, but I know in my gut things are going to go downhill quickly, awfully, and terribly.  So it's better for me to enjoy these last few games for their own sakes.

That said, it sure would be nice for both the Dodgers and Cardinals if the Redbirds can win this weekend series.

Week #1 Recap On This Year's Drive to the Peach Bowl

As much as I hate to agree with John Adams (from the Knoxville News-Sentinel), he nailed it on the head:

BERKELEY, Calif. - Maybe Tennessee went west a day too soon. The Vols arrived on Thursday, giving themselves a couple of days to acclimate to California and Pacific Daylight Time.

They acclimated just fine. In fact, by Saturday evening, this proud, card-carrying member of the SEC found itself playing Pac-10 football.

As usual, Tennessee didn't play a powerhouse like Western Carolina in their opener, but maybe it's best to get a warm-up game in before playing a top 15 team.  Next year is no different - their first game is against UCLA in Pasadena.  Maybe they'll find a defense and running attack between now and then.