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Excuse the lame Carlsberg parody (hey, Liverpool demolished Marseille today, and even though this is a college football post, we had to acknowledge it), but ESPN is reporting that Bobby Petrino has resigned his position as head coach of the Atlanta Falcons and will fill the head coaching vacancy at Arkansas.

Considering the source, there’s every chance Bobby Petrino won’t be the next coach at Arkansas, but if he is, well, this is getting ridiculous.

Petrino would join a conference that has four national championship-winning coaches (Florida’s Urban Meyer, Alabama’s Nick Saban, Tennessee’s Phil Fulmer, and South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier), a coach who’s led Auburn to an SEC championship and an undefeated season (Tommy Tuberville), and eight coaches who have won championships in BCS conferences (the five mentioned above, and Georgia’s Mark Richt, Louisiana State’s Les Miles — who could join the national championship-winning coaches in January, and Kentucky’s Rich Brooks).

Petrino would give the SEC nine coaches who have won a BCS league, with seven winning SEC championships, Petrino winning the Big East, and Brooks winning the Pac 10.  The next closest leagues are the Pac 10 and ACC, both have 5. (This list only includes active coaches.  For example Carr is not included because he is resigning.)

So, we say again, this is getting ridiculous.

The good news for Kentucky is that while we’ll have to face Arkansas next year, the Razorbacks will then fall off of the schedule (to be replaced by Auburn, we think, but that could be completely wrong). And by the time Arkansas rotates back on the schedule, Petrino will probably have moved on, as is his wont.

And the great news for SEC fans in general is that Arkansas’s ‘permanent’ SEC East opponent is none other than South Carolina. So college football’s offensive mastermind of the 1990s will face college football’s offensive mastermind of the 2000s (by the way, it’s probably hard for anyone to regret going to the University of Southern California, but do you think Mitch Mustain wishes he would have stuck it out at Arkansas? He’d be the next Brian Brohm). Given each coach’s tendency to run up the score and the fact that neither seems to care at all what anyone thinks about them, that should be an entertaining series of games.

[We know you’re curious: yes, we just checked a certain Courier-Journal columnist’s blog to see if he was shocked at the Petrino news, but, disappointingly, he’s yet to comment. We’re sure it will blow his mind.  If you want to check out the complete opposite view take a look at this column.]

In other SEC coaching news, former Kentucky offensive coordinator Tony Franklin is set to become the offensive coordinator at Auburn, which is quite an opportunity for the man who penned Fourth Down and Life To Go: Lessons Learned from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Experiences of Kentucky Football.

If you’ve read that book, you know that Franklin and his former boss Hal Mumme did not part ways amicably. Score one for Franklin in that feud.

Onward and upward!

ESPN Insider has an AccuScore projector set up for all the bowl games.  On it UK is favored 56% - 43%.  (Link)

Final Score projection is 31-28

Kentucky is also a 1.5 point favorite on nearly all the online sports books. (Link)

After the UK Louisville football game, Courier Journal UofL fan blogger Tom Heiser took a few shots at UK (Link).  In his post he stated that he felt that despite the loss Louisville was better positioned for the future.  With season over, we felt now is a good time to revisit his arguments. 

Recruiting still seems to be an issue for the Cats, who don’t really have adequate replacements for key people now, let alone come next year

So let’s look at the recruiting classes for next year.
Scout ranks both Louisville and Kentucky at #56. (Link)
Rivals ranks Louisville  #53 and Kentucky at #55. (Link)

And if we take it back a year farther to the 2007 classes
Scout ranks Louisville #47 and Kentucky #58
Rivals ranks Louisville #41 and Kentucky #54
Note that this class for Louisville featured Willie Williams. Who is no longer on the team.

2006 (Next Years Juniors)
Scout Louisville 26 Kentucky 34
Rivals Louisville #34 Kentucky #36

2005 (Next years Seniors)
Scout Louisville #43 Kentucky #62
Rivals Louisville #45 Kentucky #67

While it is undoubtedly true that recruiting rankings are incredibly speculative these number show that UK has closed the gap in recruiting.

Later in his post he wrote:

The Cards are firmly placed on the national scene; Brohm’s departure is fully anticipated — has been since the final seconds ticked off the Orange Bowl clock. Hunter Cantwell is ready to take the reins. Who’s Woodson’s heir?

It is true that Cantwell looks to be a better option than anyone UK has at the moment.  However, who is he going to throw to?  Both teams are losing their top 2 wide receivers and their tight end.  Not to mention the fact that UofL loses NCAA all time leading scorer Art Carmody.

Sure its possible that Louisville might develop some of their younger players into big time contributors it’s also just as likely that UK could do the same.  After all Woodson was not the top recruit Brohm was.  Instead he was someone developed within the system.

A final factor that is often overlooked when it comes to Louisville’s football team is that over the last five years it has been built around two home grown players Michael Bush and Brian Brohm.  It’s rather unlikely that in the near future two great offensive players like these will both grow up in Louisville.

Heiser’s post closed with

Let’s have a debate on the rankings come the end of November. That is, if Kentucky still qualifies for the debate. I like our chances of still being around when the BCS Bowl bids are handed out. Can’t say as much for our Lexington kin. They should enjoy it while it lasts.

Well November has come and gone.  Kentucky is ranked 38th in the BCS, 33rd in the AP, 34th in the Harris, and unranked in the coaches. (Link)  Louisville does not make the rankings in any of the polls.

This was posted Saturday at 11:27.

From No. 1 to Number ???? That’s Louisiana State football

The SEC is supposed to be the penthouse of college football. The only place to be, live, work, tackle and point your index finger toward the sky. The gold standard of college football.

Take another look.

In eight days, Louisiana State has gone from a top-ranked team that expected to win the national title in the Superdome in early January to a school with a coaching staff that can’t wait to get off the field tonight in the SEC title game against Tennessee so its two top coaches can take other jobs.

Why would anybody leave the SEC?

ESPN is reporting that LSU head coach Les Miles is gone. He’ll be named the head coach at Michigan next week.

Yep, leaving the greatness of the SEC for the blah Big Ten.

Ouch.

And Miles might not be the first one out the door. LSU defensive coordinator Bo Pelini will be named the next head coach at Nebraska next week. Guess Pelini didn’t want to wait around to find out if he would replace Miles.

From Number One to Number ??? Some ride for one of the SEC’s sassiest programs. 

(Link)

Hal Mumme voted Hawaii number 1 in the final coaches’ poll. (Link) 

The departure of Lloyd Carr has really left me wondering.  Where is the outrage at the crazy Michigan Fan base?  Take a look at Lloyd Carr’s resume, it is incredibly similar to that of Tubby Smith.  Yet when Tubby leaves to take another job UK fans are lambasted in the media both locally and nationally for unreasonable expectations, whereas Carr resigns and not a negative word. 

Tubby Smith at UK

10 Seasons
263-83 76%
5 Regular Season Conference Titles
1 NCAA title Year 1
Biggest complaint: No final fours for 9 years

Lloyd Carr at Michigan

13 Seasons
121-40 75%
5 Conference Titles
1 NCAA Title Year 3
Biggest complaint: Only defeted Jim Tressel 1 time

Now lets look at the schools: 

UK: Most wins and highest winning percentage in Division 1-A Basketball

Michigan: Most wins and highest winning percentage in Division 1-A Football

And a quick google check show that there are 3,800 pages returned for “Fire Tubby Smith” while “Fire Lloyd Carr” returns 10,400.

After the jump we will look at the media reaction.

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I wonder if Peter King has a source on this or its just speculation.  From today’s Monday Morning QB: 

8. I think the first quarterback chosen in a good draft for quarterbacks next April will be Kentucky’s Andre’ Woodson, over Brian Brohm of Louisville and Matt Ryan of BC. All good choices, though. (Link)

We’re back in the saddle after three weeks off. After Mississippi State, Kentucky’s certainly no longer a unanimous top-15 team and Andre’ Woodson’s Heisman hopes are over. But the football Wildcats are still a top-25 team and still in the running for a New Year’s Day bowl. To the Update! (more…)

When UK moved the U of L game, one of the justifications people used to complain was that the move would kill UK’s national exposure.  For a while this looked like it might turn out to be true as UK struggled to find a TV partner for the match-up.   Ultimately, they did get the game on ESPN Classic which became the first of 6 times that the cats were broadcast as a national game.  Thus, I think its safe to say that UK was able to get their exposure this year.

After the jump a break down of UK’s televised games.  (more…)

If you’re anything like us, you were bemused by the media hoopla surrounding Kentucky’s embarrassing loss to Gardner-Webb.

One national writer wrote it was the college basketball equivalent of Michigan/Appalachian State. The Louisville Courier-Journal seemed to agree.

We found this bizarre. An upset like Michigan/App State had simply never happened in college football. Something like Kentucky/Gardner-Webb happens every November. (Note we’re not arguing the loss wasn’t embarrassing for a program of Kentucky’s stature, we just think people went overboard with this. Maybe this is just because it was a really slow news night.) Just last November, you’ll recall, No. 3 Kansas lost at home to Oral Roberts. In 2004 eventual national champion North Carolina lost to Santa Clara. Then there’s the granddaddy of them all — the literal equivalent of Michigan/App State — No. 1 Virginia’s loss to Chaminade, then of the NAIA, in 1982.

And for further proof that something like Kentucky/Gardner-Webb happens every year, look no further than Mercer 96, Southern Cal 81. Mercer, like Gardner-Webb, plays in the much-maligned Atlantic Sun. Mercer, like Gardner-Webb, had a poor season last year. Mercer had an 8-10 conference record (Gardner-Webb was 7-11) and finished 13-17 overall (Gardner-Webb 9-21). The two schools split their games last season, each winning at home.

Southern Cal, although lacking Kentucky’s tradition, was ranked higher than Kentucky, expected to have a better season than Kentucky, and coming off a more successful season than Kentucky.

All of which begs the question: If we’re supposed to believe Kentucky/Gardner-Webb really is the basketball equivalent of Michigan/App State (and everyone not wearing Blue Goggles seems to think so), what is the football equivalent of Southern Cal/Mercer? For now we’re going with the NFL’s New England Patriots losing at home to Notre Dame, but we’ll need more time to think about it.

Onward and upward!

UK is off Saturday but could still end up as losers if Navy upsets Notre Dame.  Currently Notre Dame holds a 43 game winning streak over Navy.  This is the longest winning streak by one team over another in NCAA history.  More importantly however this streak is all that separates UK from having the top two active loss streaks.  Currently the Cats streak of 22 strait losses to Tennessee ranks as 2nd while our streak of 21 against Florida ranks 3rd.

From Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback. (Link)

I wonder what Wayne Weaver, the Jags owner, thinks when he sees the Super Bowl champs come into town on a Monday night and the game draws 67,164, with tarped sections of seats that go unsold, and six days later Florida-Georgia draws 84,481. And I know those seats are tarped for all games, and the Jags could have sold more tickets for that game than they did, but the contrast is striking. It’s the one market in the league that takes a back seat, with an exclamation point, to the college game.

In what may become a regular feature (if work rears its ugly head it’ll probably disappear), Allenby For Heisman! hopes to take a weekly look at the University of Kentucky’s place in the world of college football.

After Kentucky’s loss to Florida, nobody is projecting the Cats for a Bowl Championship Series bowl berth. But most everyone still sees the Cats as a top-15 team who will play in a non-BCS New Year’s Day bowl. We’re guessing the win against LSU has much to do with that.

On the Heisman front, Andre’ Woodson didn’t do anything to hurt his Heisman chances. In fact, we’d be so bold to say he enhanced his chances in spite of the loss if not for the fact that Kentucky’s opponent Saturday featured a Heisman candidate of its own, Tim Tebow. Most people have Woodson pegged as a finalist, but we’d think if it comes down to he or Tebow, Tebow would have the advantage for besting Woodson head-to-head. (Plus, Tebow gets another national CBS game this weekend versus Georgia, and his Gators have the inside track to play in the Southeastern Conference championship game, which would put him the national spotlight the week before the vote.)

And with that unusually lengthy prologue out of the way, let’s get to the Update.

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Following Thursday’s Rutgers vs. South Florida Big East matchup, at least two national writers lamented that the Bulls were out of the national title race while one-loss teams from more established Bowl Championship Series conferences lived to fight another day.

We’ve no problem with this sentiment, generally. Perhaps it is unfair that Oklahoma, Louisiana State, and Southern California, to name a few, can still dream of a national title while the best West Virginia and South Florida can hope for is a BCS bowl berth. Perhaps it’s also unfair the Big East champion only plays seven conference games while the champions from the SEC, Big 12, ACC, and Pac 10 play nine and the Big 10 champion plays eight.

The point, of course, is the BCS isn’t fair. This is no newsflash. Each team and each conference faces unique difficulties. In such a flawed system, the only time a team can really complain about not getting a title shot is to go undefeated. We can understand Boise State’s frustrations with its glass ceiling, sympathize with our SEC brethren Auburn’s plight in 2004-5, and wonder what else that Kerry Collins-led Penn State team could have done to get a piece of the national title. But we don’t feel sorry for South Florida or West Virgina.

But ESPN’s Mark Schlabach and Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel certainly do. As noted, we’ve no beef with this sentiment. But we do have a beef with inconsistency.

Schlabach writes that an upstart program in a rebuilt league won’t get the second chance an SEC member gets:

The Tigers were given the benefit of the doubt a week ago, after the country’s No. 1-ranked team lost at No. 17 Kentucky 43-37 in triple overtime. LSU fell to only No. 5 in the human polls and was fourth in the BCS standings.

Cal’s surprising defeat to Oregon State last week was the 10th time a top-10 ranked team had lost to an unranked team during this unpredictable college football season. The Bulls became the 11th such victim on Thursday night.

But South Florida will be penalized more than LSU. And more than Oklahoma, which lost at Colorado 27-24 on Sept. 29. The Sooners are back to No. 5 in the BCS standings after beating Texas and Missouri in consecutive games.

[Link]

Mandel makes similar points:

When you’re an LSU or Oklahoma, you can lose a tough conference road game, brush it off and return to the top five within a couple weeks as if it never happened. When you’re USF, and you lose a tough conference road game just four days after an already skeptical set of voters tabbed you the No. 2 team in the country almost as an obligation, you can expect the court of public opinion to be somewhat less merciful.

…

Such is the still fragile state of the rebuilt Big East. When Kentucky beats LSU, it’s written off as a near-inevitability in the rough-and-tumble SEC. When Rutgers beats USF — just a couple weeks after losing to then-undefeated Cincinnati, which itself turned around and lost to Louisville — it’s an indictment against both program and conference.

…

Those polls and computers can be awfully harsh about losses to Rutgers.

If only you’d lost instead to Kentucky.

[Link]

Leaving aside the fact LSU’s resume is more impressive than South Florida’s — wins versus then-No. 9* and current No. 11 Virginia Tech, then-No. 12 and current No. 6 South Carolina, and then-No. 9 and current No. 14 Florida with a loss at then-No. 17 and current No. 8 Kentucky versus wins at then-No. 17 and current No. 18 Auburn and then-No. 5 and current No. 9 West Virginia with a loss at unranked Rutgers (Sagarin Rating: 38) — we’d just like to see consistency.

For his part, Schlabach left the Cats for dead after their Thursday night road loss to then-No. 11 South Carolina two weeks ago. He certainly wasn’t concerned the Cats would plummet from the top ten just because they lost to a good team on the road — indeed, he suggested they deserved to by stating they weren’t ready to compete for the SEC East. And when Kentucky did just that and dropped from No. 8 to No. 17, we certainly don’t recall Mandel writing that Kentucky — a program with little noteworthy football history, kind of like South Florida — was being unfairly penalized because it lost a road game after a short week to non-traditional power South Carolina — a program whose rise over the last few seasons is not unlike that of Rutgers.

We also doubt either writer will protest when upstarts Arizona State of the Pac 10 and Kansas of the Big 12 suffer their first losses and plummet in the polls, either.

Oh well. Poor out a little liquor for the Big East’s title chances.

*For simplicity’s sake, we used Associated Press rankings here.

How sweet. I don’t expect the Red Sox to make another 2004-esque comeback, but Thursday’s performance by Beckett was vintage and gave a ray of hope. You have to expect Curt Schilling to pitch like his old self, the John Wayne character before Beckett, if only because he’s always pitched best with his team’s back against the wall. But with Daisuke Matsuzaka slated for Game 7 I don’t like the odds of winning three in a row.

Some thoughts with the Sox finally cruising for once:

Who would I rather start Game 7 (if we get that far)? Well, other than Beckett, who obviously can’t start on 2 days rest but might be available for the 6th and 7th innings when Dice-K predictably bows out after 4 2/3 innings, why not Jonathan Papelbon. Well, it might have been a more realistic pipedream had Tito Francona not used him for the 9th inning on Thursday, but who better? Sure, they might need him on Sautrday, but why not leave open the possibility by pitching anbody else with a 6-run lead on Thursday? I’d still rather see Dice-K than Tim wkefield or Jon Lester, but not by much, but I hope everybody but Schilling is available in relief beginning as early as the 4th inning.

On to Joe Torre, the poor sap. Seriously, nobody feels less sorry for the old man than Moxie, but this was as predictable as a Coco Crisp GIDP. The MFY didn’t want him back, but they do want the Joe Torre loyalists (most importantly, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Alex Rodriguez) to return and needed to show the MFY skipper respect to at least have a shot at signing each.

So, they made a half-hearted offer so they could claim to those free agents that they wanted him back and tried to keep him. I’d love to call them each dumb, but even Grady Little could read between these lines. It’s going to take one of two guys. Joe Girardi, who played with Pettitte, Rivera, Posada and Derek Jeter, will be able to keep some semblence of sanity. Don Mattingly might be able to keep a couple of the guys in stable.

Any other manager and you’re going to see a major overhaul. The MFY are already in store for a transition period — Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes will take over for Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte — but having to replace Rivera, Clemens, Posada, A-Rod and Pettitte this year and Mussina, Giambi, Abreu and Damon in 2009 will be a major transition even if more money is freed up in that span than any other team spends.

Oh, and before I forget … Go Cats!!!