Archives for December 2007

This is either the shameful start of some serious character assassination, born of retaliatory motives – or the beginning of what could turn out to be a major story.

Yahoo! Sports is reporting that Stephan Pamon, a Big 10 referee, has some serious skeletons in his closet involving all sorts of shady activities, from child abuse to gambling problems.

Pamon refs the crew that was disciplined for the curious officiating during the Purdue/Penn State debacle. A week after that, his same crew was responsible for the officiating errors that are widely accepted to have cost Ohio State an unbeaten season.

“News of the controversial calls and the reported suspension of Pamon’s crew troubled two retired law-enforcement officers and one active law-enforcement officer who worked with Pamon in the early 1990s on the Chicago Terrorism Task Force. They suspected Pamon might have a gambling problem.

“The three former members of the task force, who spoke with Yahoo! Sports on condition of anonymity because they feared violating law enforcement protocol, said Pamon once made a phone call from Las Vegas to several task force members in the early 1990s, told them he was low on money and asked them to wire him about $400 each.”

It’s important to note that, in all fairness, there is currently no indication that Pamon gambled on any games, but the Big 10 has a strict policy against its officials gambling on sports of any kind.

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H/T: The Nittany Line

In 19 days, the Ohio State Buckeyes will take on LSU for at least one year’s worth of bragging rights.

In order to better understand OSU’s opponent on January 7th, you must first understand southern football. And what better way to edumacate yourself than by watching the best southern football documentary of all time, The Waterboy.

Only by close scrutiny of the movie will you understand the subtle nuances of the way football is played down south. For example, you will learn that when a southern team is insecure about its own abilities, it overwhelms its opponents with cockiness and overconfidence to compensate, even to the point of self-detriment.

Such is why, from this point forward, we at MotSaG will not be referring to the title game under its preferred moniker: The BCS All-State National Championship Game.

Instead, we will be referring to it henceforth as The Bourbon Bowl. Also, from now on, Les Miles will become Red Beaulieu.

Bobby Boucher is adaptable to any number of Buckeye backfielders — from the obvious Little Animal, to our favorite defensive end Gholston, or any other player that will gaze through his face mask at the cocky, taunting Southern Louisiana foolsball players on Jan 7th.

As for Dan Fouts’ character? No worries, I’m sure that Fox Sports’ Thom Brenneman can speak touchdowns with his mouth arm, too.

This also has the side benefit of appeasing both camps of BCS folks: those who love it and see the “life-imitating-art” parallels of having the title game in southern Louisiana; or those who hate the current system, wish for a playoff, and want to boycott the BCS reference.

Whatever side you fall on, we encourage you all to follow our lead (especially you OSU bloggers) in boning up on your southern football knowledge by watching The Waterboy. And feel free to join us in referring to the Bourbon Bowl from now on.

We’ve got plenty of content planned for the next couple of weeks. Naturally, we’ll give most of our attention to the big game. Lots of other things happening in CFB and the Big 10 for us to comment on, too. Watch for a post that addresses how unusual 2007 was for teams that hail from the State of Ohio. And you never know when Tressnac might stop by for a visit. Stay tuned.

With the anti-Big 10 nonsense that is currently dominating the media, many overlook one shining example of Big 10 superiority: coaching.

Of course, great coaching is not limited to a particular conference. There are examples of excellence from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Starting on the left coast, consider Carroll & Tedford. One is considered a genius by general consensus, the other a rising superstar who does scary things with average players and sub-par facilities.

Crossing the Rockies into the Big 12, one first has to scale the wall erected by Bob Stoops to keep the best players from the Plains states in-house, where 10-win seasons and national title contention is the minimum acceptable level of performance.

Continuing east across the Mississippi, men like Les Miles and Urban Meyer stand out as consistently above their peers, even during those off-years when the talent they’re coaching is not. Steve Spurrier and his dominant teams of the 90s should also be mentioned, here.

But cross north of the Ohio River Valley and you enter a land dominated by coaching excellence, tradition, skill, and competitiveness that is unequaled anywhere else in college football. Other conferences have their leaders, but none is as deep as the Big 10. Consider just a few examples:

Jim Tressel
The Sweatervest is the only active coach in Division I-A with five or more national titles in any division. Since taking over OSU’s job in 2001, he has an 83% winning percentage, which includes the aberrant 7-5 record earned his inaugural season after taking over the team from the fired John Cooper. In the seven years since joining the Big 10, his teams have earned the conference title four times and gone 4-2 in bowl games, including two BCS title games (one win, one loss in each). In 2007, despite losing a Heisman-winning quarterback and seven “skill position” starters to the NFL, he coached his team to another Big 10 championship and third BCS title game appearance. With a victory against LSU, he’ll be the only coach in history to have two BCS titles.

Ron Zook
Zook’s coaching success started at OSU in the 80s, followed shortly thereafter with a stint with that dominant 90’s Spurrier staff. In 2005, he inherited a rock-bottom Illini program and improved it from 2-10 to 9-3 by his third year. Zook recruited and trained most of the starters on Florida’s 2006 national championship squad. In 2007, his team finished tied for second-place in the Big 10, which included a road victory over #1 Ohio State, and his 2008 team will be favored by many to win the conference.

Lloyd Carr
What can one say about Carr that hasn’t been blogged about incessantly over the past few weeks? I’ll plagiarize Brian, here:

Michigan in the Carr era: 121-40, one national championship, two BCS bowl wins, five conference titles, five bowl wins, no losing seasons.

‘Nuff said. Sure, we’ve had our fun with Carr, but we wouldn’t dare argue that he wasn’t a pillar to the college football coaching community.

Joe Paterno
Is there really a need to list JoePa’s career accomplishments here? He’s the winningest coach in history for a reason.

Joe Tiller
I list Tiller here because he is more responsible than any other coach for bringing in the modern era to the Big 10. Tiller’s “Basketball on Grass” made the rest of the Big 10 sit up and take notice of how best to combine speed and spread formations. If Tiller had ever acquired a competitive defensive coordinator, the past decade of Big 10 champions might have looked a lot different.

Bret Bielema
Since being selected by Barry Alverez as his successor two years ago, he’s gone 21-4, including a 12-1 inaugural season (which has only been done three times in NCAA history). That’s something that Tressel didn’t even accomplish at OSU, and Bielema’s done it with Alverez’s recruits. No doubt UW will become even stronger as Bielema’s initial recruiting classes get more playing time over the upcoming seasons.

Mark Dantonio
As of 2007, Dantonio is still getting settled in as new coach of MSU, but his history of success at multiple levels and for multiple teams is proof of his coaching prowess. Dantonio served as an assistant coach on all of Tressel’s dominant staffs, from YSU to OSU, including coaching the national-champion 2002 Ohio State defense. As head coach of Cincinnati, in his first year alone he led his team to its first winning season in 23 years, and directed the team into the Big East (where they beat an undefeated #7 Rutgers squad). Dantonio has the same challenge as his predecessors in East Lansing… how to woo talented players away from Ann Arbor. If he can be successful in that effort, there’s no question that MSU would transform back into an elite program.

Past Tradition
Finally, what would an article about Big 10 coaching be without mentioning men from the past such as (and in no particular order): Fielding Yost, Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, Barry Alverez, Fritz Crisler, Lovie Smith, Biggie Munn, Hayden Fry, Cam Cameron, Lou Holtz, Wes Fesler, Earl Bruce, etc., etc. There is no other conference with as deep a coaching tradition as the Big 10. All elements, motifs, and styles of modern football began as experiments and adjustments by the head coaches there. College football’s past is rooted in the Big 10, and the conference’s current group of coaches are continuing that tradition by being the most influential leaders and shapers of the sport.

So, over the next few weeks, as you hear over and over again how “OSU doesn’t have a chance to win the title,” or “Illinois doesn’t deserve to be in the Rose,” or “UM is going to lose by 900 to the Gators,” consider at least one area where the Big 10 has an advantage over everyone else, and don’t immediately discount any team that has such excellent leadership.

The ever-cogent SMQ fires a pre-emptive strike into the “SEC Speed” nonsensical argument that will no doubt reach insane proportions over the next month.

I realize it’s generally considered bad form (or just plain lazy) to past large blocks of text from someone else’s work into one’s own, but there’s simply too much wisdom here to trim down into small bites. SMQ makes no bones about his opinion of the “MNC” or the Buckeyes, so his credibility on the matter is to be respected.

The worst result of last year’s mythical championship game was the growth and perpetuation of this absurd notion of superior “SEC speed,” based not on the collective 40 times and shuttle drills of hundreds of players on a couple dozen teams that make up the SEC and Big Ten, but on a handful of plays in a single game that was decidedly outside the season-long patterns of both participants, and not demonstrably decided by “speed…” Based on everything we know from the dozen “samples” on both sides leading up to last January, that Florida team couldn’t beat that Ohio State team by 27 points again in a whole season of trying. There’s a reason the Gators were underdogs, and it’s not because they kept the fast guys under wraps when squeaking out wins against South Carolina and Vanderbilt.

Truth. He goes on with some advice for our overconfident southern brethren:

One would think the false sense of inevitability that followed Ohio State prior to last year’s championship (or USC the year before that, or that very, very fast Miami team in 2002, or, I don’t know, LSU, Ohio State, West Virginia, USC, Oregon, Michigan, Oklahoma, California, Florida or LSU again prior to stunning upsets over the last three months) would demonstrate the virtues of humility to fans everywhere.

…and offers a very realistic picture of what the title game will look like:

Based on everything we know from both teams’ performances this season, Ohio State and LSU should be a close, hard-hitting game between two of the few teams that still operate largely from traditional two-back sets on offense and do not hesitate to run old-fashioned isos, counters and traps into the line… It will be decided by the side that executes and catches the right breaks under the specific set of circumstances that unfold on Jan. 7… The athletes, the speed, all of that is a given. LSU and Ohio State have both turned in top ten recruiting classes each of the last four seasons. They’ve all got the athletes. They’ve all got the speed. The differences in raw talent on this level are nil. This championship, like all championships, will be about combining management, strategy and execution in the moment, and probably a bounce or timely flag or two. Not as catchy as “SEC Speed,” but anything more precise than wrongheaded, bumper sticker hubris rarely is.

Bravo. We’ve been complaining about the “SEC speed” myth for a long time now, but thanks to SMQ we now have a moniker for those who spout it: Bumper Sticker Hubris.

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