Odds and Ends
Not So Fast My Friend
ESPN college football analyst Lee Corso suffered a stroke recently. Corso is expected to make a full recovery, but feel free to send good thoughts and mojo Corso's way.
Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp will be in concert on August 8, 2009 at Texas Tech's Jones AT&T Stadium. That sounds like a helluva concert.
BHGP: Tim Brewster, speaking like a champion, and Joe Paterno, in response to Minnesota removing the Iowa ace-whipping last year from the new media guide.
Texas Tech Football
Coaches Vote Now Private
I loved ESPN Big 12 blogger Tim Griffin's stance on the the coaches decision not to make their votes public:
Even more telling was how the coaches viewed Texas Tech, which finished the poll in eighth place. Its highest votes were the second-place ballot cast by Leach and a third-place vote delivered by then-New Mexico State coach Hal Mumme, who has been considered Leach's coaching godfather after hiring him at Iowa Wesleyan in 1989.
Nobody else had the Red Raiders higher than sixth. Among the 12 coaches who had Tech at sixth place were Briles, Chizik, Pelini and Missouri's Gary Pinkel. Texas coach Mack Brown had the Red Raiders eighth.
But their lowest vote was 11th, cast by TCU's Gary Patterson. The Red Raiders delivered a 70-35 whipping to the Horned Frogs in 2004. It remains the most points ever allowed by a Patterson-coached team and the worst defeat in his head-coaching career.
With those factors, can Teaff and the other coaches really make the claim that there won't be agendas in the voting if they aren't released?
Completely agree, making the votes private would be an awful mistake and SI.com's Andy Staples notes that he'll be making public information requests of every public university to continue to hold coaches accountable:
So we're probably stuck with the current system. And come 2010, we'll have a bunch of millionaire coaches too scared to own up to their own ballots. That's OK. Remember, the vast majority of the voters work at public universities. Most states have open records or Freedom of Information Act laws that require the actions of public employees to be recorded and made available for public inspection. Come this fall, I'll be requesting the weekly ballot of every public-school coach in the poll. I imagine many of my colleagues will do the same. Come 2010, we should have the records request thing down pat.
Official Documents
I wasn't sure where to put this, so I'm putting it here. The Congressional Budget Office actually published the paper regarding tax preferences for collegiate sports. This gives me tired-head, but since I ran across it I thought I'd post it. There's a reason why I really don't get all bothered about Joe Barton and his crusade against the BCS or whether or not colleges should be given tax-exempt status or certain advantages to the federal income tax. These things could affect me in some form or fashion, eventually, but it stuff like this makes me want to go to sleep. In any event, feel free to read this to see how the government is wasting lots of time and pointing out the obvious.
Big 12 Stuff
ESPN Big 12 blogger Tim Griffin has a couple of items, first the percentage of returning tackles for each Big 12 team. I get that the correlation between returning tackles = returning starters, which is a big part of predicting the future success of a football team, but does anyone believe that this will be the case with Baylor who returns 80.8% of their returning tackles? Surprisingly, Texas Tech returns 68.9%, which is good for 47th nationally.
Next, the best position groups for each Big 12 team and Griffin chose the receiver position:
Texas Tech's wide receivers: Even after losing two-time Biletnikoff Award winner Michael Crabtree and Eric Morris, the Red Raiders developed several potential playmakers during the spring. Edward Britton appeared to have crawled out of Mike Leach's doghouse with strong late production. New quarterback Taylor Potts should have many productive targets including Detron Lewis, Tramain Swindall, Lyle Leong, walk-on flanker Adam Torres, 6-foot-7 Adrian Reese and redshirt freshmen Austin Zouzalik and Eric Ward. The Red Raiders won't have two players grab the majority of balls like Crabtree and Morris did in recent seasons. Instead, they will feature a more balanced attack featuring eight to 10 receivers capable of thriving in a tag-team approach.
I would tend to agree that this is the deepest position, although I think after this year, the secondary might be one of the deepest and best. But back to the receivers, on Thursday's second hour of Tech Talk they had on ESPN's Bruce Feldman and he too was impressed with the receiver depth and felt that the talent was much better than when he visited the Tennessee Volunteers, which I'm not sure if that's a huge compliment, but the bottom line is that I thougt Feldman came away impressed.
Texas Tech Baseball
Looking to 2010
DT's Chris Martin writes that there was improvement in the 2009 version of the Texas Tech baseball club. Martin talked with assistant coach Trent Petrie who acknowledges that the pitching has to get better:
"We have to get better at pitching," Petrie said. "The teams that win are the teams that can pitch, and we have addressed that issue for next year."The Red Raiders will lose seven seniors after this season, and Petrie said their hard work and productivity on the field will be missed. However, Petrie acknowledged that the late season push supplied the younger players with invaluable experience.
"We have so many outstanding seniors leaving us this year, but now we will have some guys who know what it takes to get to the conference tournament," Petrie said. "They will just push that much harder."