Bevo's Daily Roundup - December 10, 2009

"It was close, you've got to admit that," McCoy said. "It was
probably closer than you wanted it to be, but understanding everything
that goes on I was not worried about it. 

"I walked off to the side and told Coach (Mack) Brown, I said, 
'I bet we have 2 seconds left.' He said, 'Yeah, you're probably right.' 
But he was real nervous at the time."

Mack Brown got a raise.

University of Texas football coach Mack Brown will be paid $5 million a year, plus annual increases of $100,000, through 2016, when his contract ends, the school’s governing board decided today.

The compensation, recommended by UT President William Powers Jr. and men’s athletic director DeLoss Dodds, amounts to a $2 million raise for Brown. He already was set to earn $3 million this season and then collect a one-time $2 million "service payment" next February. Today, the regents decided to make that $2 million payment a part of Brown’s annual compensation package.

For this season, Brown is also set to earn $250,000 for advancing to the national championship. Winning the national championship would add $450,000 to his bank account.

UT football is a cash cow.

If the BCS awarded a championship for making money from football, the University of Texas would win in a walk.

"We used to be No. 2 behind Ohio State. Now we've jumped out to a pretty good lead," said Ed Goble, UT's associate athletic director for business.

According to data the schools filed with the federal government, the top five money makers in college football also included Southeastern Conference powers Florida, Georgia and Alabama, which will face Texas on Jan. 7 in the BCS national title game.

Colt McCoy is still being followed.

In Texas quarterback Colt McCoy's nightmares, Nebraska defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh is surely running him down. The two will meet again on Saturday, but McCoy is relieved that this time Suh will be wearing a suit.

"Funny story: I graduated on Saturday but I didn't get to walk. Somebody asked me if I graduated and I said 'yes.' And they said, 'But you played, you didn't get to walk.' And I said, 'You're right, I ran. I ran all over the place.'"

McCoy is having fun playing and we can all thank Roger Staubach.

Roger Staubach was a guy who helped me through that. He was one of the first people to call me and say, "Hey, look, you have to have some fun. You have to enjoy what you're doing. You have a huge passion for playing the game." He was right. I enjoy it. I love it. And that part of the game wasn't there for me. I just wasn't seeing through that. But to have a guy like him step in and encourage me, it really hit home and allowed me to dig myself out of the hole that I was in and really have the best season I've ever had.

From The Heisman Pundit:

1. M. Ingram--46 (4)
2. T. Gerhart--43 (2)
3. C. McCoy--36 (1)
N. Suh--36 (4)
5. K. Moore--11 (1)

Kirk Bohls did not vote for Colt McCoy.

Thank you, Barry.

The rationale of Husker fans and Texas haters is that the replay review rules don’t specifically allow officials to check the clock in game-ending situations. That’s true. But that’s not the rule that allowed the second to be placed back on the scoreboard.

A college football official who knows the game and knows the rules and follows officiating very closely, but who was not involved in Nebraska-Texas, told me that everything was above board. And you can find the support in the NCAA football rulebook. Rule 12, Section 3, Article 6.

It’s a relatively new rule, added just a year or two ago. Egregious timing errors can be corrected by officials, even without replay help or even with replay help in which there is no other reason to go to replay.

Fan House writer Clay Travis ripped Mack Brown for his handling of the last few seconds of the Nebraska game. He also thinks the Horns will get run down by Alabama.

 Let's begin with a clear thesis: Running a play with a running clock as the game nears the end is a recipe for disaster. No team worth it's salt should ever do this when they've got a timeout left. At the end of this game, Texas could have called a timeout with 29 seconds left and set up a final offensive play. Get a first down, and you spike the football. Fail to get a first down and you still have plenty of time to run your field goal team onto the field after gathering them near you during the preceding timeout. There would have been plenty of time to make this happen.

It's what an intelligent coach who manages his team well would have done.

This is the talented writer that asked Tim Tebow if he was a virgin. Yes, he is a credible journalist.

Mike Leach has some thoughts on clock management. And they make sense.

"It's not an exact science," Mike Leach said by telephone Tuesday. "And it's not easy.

"You've got split seconds to make monumental decisions."

Kansas AD Lew Perkins did it his way.

Enough on how Perkins has done what he has done. Now look at what he has done. He has maneuvered himself into a position where he has a $2.3 million annual salary, probably more, and vastly improved facilities with which to shop for a new football coach. Perkins does his best work in the shadows, and that’s where football coaches are hired. His two football hires at UConn, Skip Holtz (now at East Carolina) and Randy Edsall, are highly regarded coaches who could be on the verge of upward moves.

Bottom line, ask yourself this question: If you had an annual salary of greater than $2 million and a new facility to offer a coach, would Mangino be on your short list? If the answer is no and you don’t mind the athletic department paying two football coaches, you have to like what Perkins has done, even if you don’t care for how he has done it.

Convenient. Turner Gill's daughter recently started working for the KU athletic department.

Jordan Gill, the daughter of Kansas University football coaching candidate Turner Gill, recently began working for the KU athletics department's Williams Fund, the Journal-World learned Tuesday.

Gill, a sophomore at KU, began the job — the duties of which include handling ticket sales for KU Athletics — this semester.

Bring On The Cats doesn't have any sympathy for Nebraska and Bo Pelini.

Nebraska wants you to believe it's the victim in all of this.  They want you to believe they got jobbed by the monied elite in Austin, who have pretty much gotten their way with everything since 1995.  They want you to believe that, but they leave out the most important fact: they themselves are also the monied elite.  While they will complain to no end about Texas' humongous budget and ridiculous facilities and air of entitlement, they'll hope everyone overlooks the fact that they have a budget nearly as obscene, facilities nearly as sparkling, and a fanbase that feels at least as entitled to success as Texas does.  This isn't the Yankees and the Royals.  This is the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Nebraska, including Osborne and Harvey Perlman, will play the role of the downtrodden for the unexamining eye of the national punditry, but we know better.  We know that if Nebraska ever really wanted to do something about "the system," it would add its vote to the other eight schools who want equal revenue sharing in the conference to take money away from those greedy bastards in Austin.  But Nebraska won't do so, and in fact has publicly declared that it won't do so, because it benefits from the same system it now deplores.

The Aggies really need a win in Shreveport.

Texas A&M has already had a successful second season under coach Mike Sherman by making a bowl game.

A bowl victory, however, would offer some icing that's been missing for some time around these parts. A&M (6-6) hasn't won a bowl game in eight years, or since the Aggies got together with TCU in Houston in a now defunct furniture bowl in a now defunct stadium -- and before TCU was TCU.

A&M's draw since has been fairly formidable: Tennessee, California and Penn State, leading to 0-3 since the '01 TCU victory, and the Aggies skipped the postseason all together following the 2002, '03, '05 and '08 seasons.

That's why a victory over Georgia on Dec. 28 in the Independence Bowl would do wonders for a program that could use a few good tidings in the offseason.

A House panel considers breaking up the BCS monopoly a college football playoff.

A top official of the Bowl Championship Series says there are more important things for Congress to worry about than pressing for a playoff system for college football.

But lawmakers were taking a crack at it anyway Wednesday. A House panel was to consider a proposal to ban the promotion of a postseason NCAA Division I football game as a national championship unless it's the outcome of a playoff.

"With everything going on in the country, I can't believe that Congress is wasting time and spending taxpayers' money on football," Bill Hancock, the BCS executive director, said in a phone interview. "We feel strongly that managing of college sports is best left to the people in higher education."

The Waldorf-Astoria is place to be in New York City.

For college football fans, coaches, players and former players, the lobby of the Waldorf is the nexus of their universe this week. They will attend awards banquets, clandestine meetings and alumni functions in the lead-up to Saturday night’s announcement of the Heisman Trophy winner at the Nokia Theater.

"This is one of my two favorite days of the year," said Gene DeFilippo, the Boston College athletic director. "It’s a who’s who of college football, both past and present."