In a new report out from the guys at FootballScoop.Com it appears that Everett Withers will be named the next Head Coach of the James Madison Football team…

Here are the details from their report…

James Madison: Sources tell us that Everett Withers will be the next head coach at James Madison. Withers has spent the past two years at Ohio State as the assistant head coach / co-defensive coordinator, and prior to that was the defensive coordinator at North Carolina for four seasons. Withers served as the interim head coach at UNC during the 2011 season (going 7-5) after Butch Davis was let go.

Coach Withers has been with the team since Urban Meyer took over as head coach. He has been an Asst Head Coach/Co-Defensive Coordinator/ Safeties coach his entire 2 years at OSU. He is a ver good recruiter handling the North Carolina/Maryland/Virginia areas for OSU. We should know very soon if this report is accurate but they have a great track record of getting things correct.

Bowl Season starts this Saturday, and I know you’re all psyched to pretend you might watch Louisiana-Lafayette play Tulane. But be honest, if I told you they’ve played twice already this year, you wouldn’t know for sure if that’s true or not.

Saturday
2:00p

New Mexico Bowl: Colorado State vs. Washington State. The Rams take on the Cougars for the first time ever. I don’t know if this is the cover of the game program, but it should be. Combined, these two teams give up nearly 900 yards per game. Bowls! (ESPN)

3:30p

Las Vegas Bowl: Fresno State vs. USC. Believe it or not, this game will serve as the rubber match for a series that includes a 1992 Bulldog win in the Freedom Bowl and a 2005 Trojan win. Here is a picture of a Trojan Bulldog (or, if the file name is to be believed, a Spartan Bulldog). Why? (ABC)

5:30p

Idaho Potato Bowl: Buffalo vs. San Diego State. The Bulls and the Aztecs have never played each other, but they did both play Ohio State this year. Watch our first two opponents battle it out for a trophy that I hope is shaped like this. Yum! (ESPN)

9:00p

New Orleans Bowl: Louisiana-Lafayette vs. Tulane. At least the Ragin’ Cajuns and Green Wave know how to come up with original team names. No tigers or wildcats here. But that also means no weird mashup pic from Google Image Search. I did, however, find that Cajun Wave is a defunct barbecue restaurant in Stowell, Texas, just down the street from Winnie Church of Christ, which probably doesn’t have anything to do with these folks, but I’m pretending it does. (ESPN)

Monday
2:00p

St. Petersburg Bowl: East Carolina vs. Ohio. The Pirates already have two victories over the Bobcats from the late ’90s when the school was transitioning from independence to Conference USA. If you’re going to the game, print out this handy map of Metro routes and don’t get Volkovskaya confused with Moskovskaya. (ESPN)

Tuesday
8:00p

Hawaii Bowl: Boise State vs. Oregon State. The Broncos lead this series 3-2, but all of those games happened in September in that weird northwestern part of the United States. This is in Hawaii, in what would be December if they had that in Hawaii. (ESPN)

Recruiting is big business there is no doubt about that. There are four major recruiting services out there right now. Some are really good (247sports) and some really awful (ESPN). The middle 2 services Rivals and Scout are basically the same sometimes good and sometimes bad. We here at MotSaG try to stay neutral in which site we use but I will admit I favor towards 247sports big time because they had the mindset early on to take all 4 sites rankings and avg. them out to give us a industry wide ranking system known as the composite rankings. Today I wanted to take a look at the newest rankings release this one by Scout.com. They have released their newest Top 300 players in the country and it is littered with Ohio State commits. So lets look at where each future Buckeye has been placed in the list and those on the outside looking in then we will discuss the ranking list to point out some things that stood out to me.

SCOUT 300

#33 Sam Hubbard- 5 star OLB

#39 Damon Webb- 4 star CB

#53 Raekwon McMillan- 4 star MLB

#61 Jamarco Jones- 4 star OT

#68 Kyle Berger- 4 star OLB

#76 Curtis Samuels- 4 star WR

#81 Dante Booker- 4 star OLB

#82 Parris Campbell Jr- 4 star RB

#109 Jalyn Holmes- 4 star DE

#113 Demetrius Knox- 4 star OG

#125 Noah Brown- 4 star WR

#151 Johnnie Dixon- 4 star WR

#240 Terry Mclaurin- 4 star WR

#254 Malik Hooker- 4 star WR

#281 Kyle Trout- 4 star OT

Non-Ranked commits

Dylan Thompson- 3 star DE

Marcelys Jones- 3 star OG

Sean Nuernberger- 3 star K

Stephen Collier- 3 star QB

Uncommitted OSU targets

#21 Solomon Thomas- 5 star DE

#43 Malik McDowell- 4 star DE

#45 Marshon Lattimore- 4 star CB

#67 Erick Smith- 4 star S

#83 Derek Nnadi- 4 star DT

– Of the 19 commits in the 2014 class 15 of them are ranked in the new Scout 300.

– Sam Hubbard is the only 5 star of the 19 members. This is his highest ranking of any of the 4 services by far. I am surprised they have him this high. Not that he isnt good enough just surprised he is the highest ranked OSU commit on the list.

– Based on this rankings the Linebacker, Wide Receiver, and Offensive Lineman classes are stacked for this year. Filling major needs for Coach Meyer and his team.

– The four unranked commits I still think are undervalued. Stephen Collier is a 4 star all day everyday in my opinion. Dylan Thompson and Marcelys Jones both should be 4 stars as well IMO. Not going to lie about the kicker yes he is good but he is just a kicker lol.

– There are somewhere between 4-6 spots left available in this class depending how things shake out with the NFL and transfers. The 6 guys I listed under uncommitted targets will fill most of those spots improving this class even more.

– Also should be noted that TTUN has only 8 members of their class in the Scout 300. OSU has nearly doubel that amount at 15. The 15 total Future Buckeyes on the Scout 300 nearly matches the entire class for TTUN who has 16 members of their class.

– This is of course just one of the four recruiting services opinions but it is very telling just how good this 2014 OSU class really is. Coach Meyer and his staff is putting together another stellar class and is building depth at positions where we are lacking it right now. This class has the potential to be one of the best ever in OSU history and we will look back on it in 5 years to see how they panned out.

As you know, I like to predict things–often with little to no substantiation. I get away with this baseless speculation because I do it for free. If I were some professional working for, say, ESPN, I would be held accountable for my prog–what? No one holds them to any sort of standard either? Huh.

But I’m not one to sweep my failures under the rug, so let’s take a look at some things I predicted this year, and how they turned out (so far):

B1G Newbies:

Back in February, I took a shot at guessing how the two new conference head coaches would fare in their opening season. I thought Wisconsin would take a small step back under Gary Andersen and go 6-6. Instead, they went 9-3 and one of those was the Arizona State loss where what should have been a last-second Badger field goal attempt disintegrated into mass confusion thanks to probably the worst performance by officials ever. That was one of the losses I picked, though, so there’s that. I also correctly picked the Ohio State and Penn State losses.

On the other side of that coin is Purdue’s Darrell Hazell, who I thought would go 4-8. Instead, the Boilermakers won a single game, against Indiana State. Obviously, I had them winning that game too, but also thought they’d handle Northern Illinois, Regular Illinois and Indiana–games they lost by a combined 55 points.

Fraud Teams:

Faring much better was my annual Fraud list of teams that were undefeated after five weeks only to lose at least five games the rest of the season. Missouri and Houston managed to get themselves off the list by the Week 11 update, and of the six remaining teams, four have already lost their fifth game and Washington needs to beat BYU next Friday to avoid going full Fraud this year. The only team that won’t hit five losses is UCLA, who was almost left off the update. All in all, a pretty successful year for the Fraud List.

Before I get too far into the primary theme of this post, congratulations to Florida State, Auburn, Michigan State, Stanford, Baylor, Rice, UCF, Fresno State, and Bowling Green on winning their respective conference championship games. Congratulations to each of these teams for achieving conference champion status.

**
Anyone who knows or is familiar with my passion for college football is also accustomed to my passionate belief that college football needs a playoff system. Yes, I know – a four team playoff is starting for the 2014 season. Yes, I believe it will be an improvement over the present BCS system.

I refer to this time of year as my “Airing Of Grievances”, as my all-time favorite Seinfeld episode is “The Strike”, which features the themes of Festivus. Among the concepts of Festivus are The Airing Of Grievances, as well as The Feats Of Strength.

Yes, college football will have a four team playoff, and I will concede it will be an improvement. But…college football needs, and deserves, more.

A 16 team playoff is the answer. Why 16 teams, you ask?

Every conference champion (see up above) should be represented. From the mighty SEC champion, to the lowly Sun Belt champion (congratulations to Louisiana-Lafayette, by the way; Louisiana-Lafayette did not win the Sun Belt via a conference championship game, which is why I did not list them up above.).

College football fans are told repeatedly how every game matters, yet a four team playoff will exclude teams that are not considered “power conferences”. Why not give a MAC champion or Conference USA champion a shot at the title?

And how would I get to sixteen teams, when there are only ten conferences? Six at-large berths, based upon computer rankings. Below, all rankings based upon computer rankings from ESPN and Jeff Sagarin.

Here is how this could work ~

· American Athletic Conference (UCF) Seeded 12th

· Atlantic Coast Conference (Florida State) Seeded 1st

· Big 12 (Baylor) Seeded 9th

· B1G (Michigan State) Seeded 5th

· Conference USA (Rice) Seeded 15th

· MAC (Bowling Green) Seeded 14th

· Mountain West (Fresno State) Seeded 13th

· Pac 12 (Stanford) Seeded 4th

· SEC (Auburn) Seeded 2nd

· Sun Belt (Louisiana-Lafayette) Seeded 16th

· At-Large # 1 (Alabama) Seeded 3rd

· At-Large # 2 (Ohio State) Seeded 6th

· At-Large # 3 (Missouri) Seeded 7th

· At-Large # 4 (South Carolina) Seeded 8th

· At-Large # 5 (Oregon) Seeded 10th

· At-Large # 6 (Oklahoma) Seeded 12th

All games played at home team stadiums, with the higher seeded team being the host. (For those of you wondering why I would rank Alabama over Stanford, it is due to Alabama having only lost one game, while Stanford lost two.)

Can you imagine how insane your December weekends would be if there truly was a playoff system like below? Every conference champion gets a shot at the title. And every deserving at-large team is rewarded for playing well throughout the season too.

Somewhat surprisingly to me, Dan Wetzel, author of “Death To The BCS”, has switched from his previous position of including all conference champions, whittling down to an eight team playoff proposal. Below is a brief Twitter exchange on the ideas of an eight or sixteen playoff system…

https://twitter.com/DanWetzel/status/410865955506360320
https://twitter.com/DanWetzel/status/410870984137138177

Until the day arrives where every conference champion is given a chance to win the national championship, I will be skeptical of any college football playoff system, with this serving as my Airing Of Grievances. And until we have a system like mine, you can count on me to be ready for The Feats Of Strength…