Barking Carnival

Interesting topic.
CloseToJumping on Street Agents
I’ve written about the freakonomics of recruiting before,
Taylor T On Cheating in 10 Parts
…so this really caught my attention. The fascinating thing about it is how much information about the increasing role of street agents in college football is readily available via google, and how so little is reported. Look, I’m [...]

I really wanted to call this “Scattershooting”, but that just wouldn’t be right.
First item…Aggie Journalist John Lopez is working without an editor now, and it shows.
LOPEZ: Inside the Fourth Estate — UT Media Bias
He blows the lid on the BOMC.  He gives four examples of the bias in action…
A writer at a major newspaper in [...]

Evidently, there is some controversy in B/CS about the Chancellor’s annual review of the main campus’ president…

Quite a professional operation they’re running there…
However, when the story first broke, there was an interesting tidbit of information.  In the university president’s rebuttal of the poor review, she mentions that the TAMU Athletic Department had borrowed $16 million [...]

Wow, did I misread this game - Thoughts on OU Florida.
I really thought it would be a shootout.

It wasn’t.  OU went into the game averaging 54 ppg, and was talked about as the greatest offense in college football history.  Hyperbole?  No, that was the idea before the game…
Greatest Evah?
And then OU laid an egg…a big [...]

Remember literature classes where some crazy allegory was pointed out in an otherwise interesting book (i.e. “The Nautilus represents Verne’s expressions of inadequacy as a man.”), and you thought, “Man, they are really making too much out of this.”? I’m about to do that with “Solaris”, the 1972 Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky [...]

I had a post last July where I looked at the bumper crop of Texas schoolboy QBs (that UT struck out on), and tried to forecast their NFL chances (The QB Recruiting Class of 2004 - Checking Back In).  This is a good time to check back in.  I think a lot of people at [...]

I was surprised by the amount of feedback on my post about “The Bad Lieutenant”.  Anyone up for more movie talk?  I like to use Ebert’s “Great Movie” list as a DVR guide, and maybe I could post some thoughts on various films.  I feel these kind of posts are worthless without strong opinions, so [...]

Here.
First- I think Dienhart is a good college football reporter.  Second, I recognize that the coaches at the non-BCS programs are often doing amazing coaching jobs.  Still, let’s have some fun with this.  I have not copied the whole article (that would be wrong), but only excerpts and I have added  comments in italics.  Maybe [...]

“Bad Lieutenant” was a low-budget 1992 movie, starring Harvey Keitel, that made several “Best Films of the ’90s” lists.  It turns out that Werner Herzog is directing a remake of it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1095217/
The original film, directed by Abel Ferrara, was about a corrupt (in every sense) NYC cop, who somehow finds grace in the end.  Here’s Ebert’s [...]

As much as I’ve written about the Spread offense(s), I certainly don’t want to pass myself off as some kind of expert.  I’m not.  I’m just a guy who can notice when a QB gets the ball standing 5 yards behind a center, rather than under center.  I can notice when the OL has larger [...]

I have an annual hobby of taking the list of college players invited to the NFL Combine (http://www.nfl.com/combine/players), and noting what they were rated as recruits out of high school or junior college.  I think the resulting data is very revealing about talent acquisition and development.  I look at the Combine list as the best [...]

This group has definitely over-achieved. They are one of the top few teams in the nation, although by any metric the talent in the program should be less than many other programs. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the talent that came in, via recruiting. Using Rivals, here are the average ratings of the past [...]

My hatred for OU grows hotter every day. The nation seems to have bought into Stoops’ suggestion that their loss to Texas was insignificant, an example of a superior team overlooking an opponent playing over its head- kind of like Florida slipping up against Ol’ Miss in the Swamp, or USC forgetting to wake up [...]

I’ve put a lot of thought (and even more teeth gnashing and head-beating) into this post.  I’ve tried to support it with data, but by necessity a lot of it is conjecture, although well founded in my opinion.  If anybody can hack the numbers better, I would like to hear them.
The November 30 BCS, which [...]

I see a lot of people parroting Stoops’ line about  how  you can’t use Texas’ head-to-head victory over OU in voting unless you also vote Tech ahead of Texas…but yet OU beat Tech.  OMG!  There is no solution!  I am surprised by how many people seem to buy this argument.  It’s an example of specious [...]

1.  You may have seen the pushing and shoving before the Texas/TAMU game the other night.  Here’s how it happened-
Darrell Royal has always hated how the fans would boo the other team as they ran on the field. The last few years, the stadium had the visitors run from their locker to their sideline as [...]

Well, we have one weekend left, and all of the B12 south teams are playing each other.  Each game has national and conference title implications.  Let’s take a look at the matchups with an eye to conference game statistics, and see if we get any insight.  Note- I’m using the stats from the conference games [...]

It was interesting to read the national media yesterday, and discover a few things.  Namely- everybody saw the UT-TT game, everybody thought it was a terrific game (really a great promotion for the B12), and people are impressed with both teams.  I got to thinking about where it ranked in the history of big games [...]

I am convinced that the Texas/OU game is one of our program’s greatest assets. Unfortunately, I am also convinced it is one of the OU program’s greatest assets (exceeded only by booster cash and the lack of an institutional moral compass) too. Here’s why.
The two distinguishing characteristics of the Red River Shootout (RRS- I prefer [...]

Years ago, on a different board, I posted a transcript of Blair Cherry’s 1951 Saturday Evening Post article “Why I Quit Coaching Football”.  Cherry had been an extremely successful HS coach in the ’30s, was Bible’s chief assistant at Texas, and had coached Texas to a 32 - 10 - 1 record from 1947 - [...]