Bevo's Roundup - November 18, 2010

We should be 7-3 probably sitting here now, and that’s the
disappointing thing for me, for the players and the fans, that we could
have done a better job.- Mack Brown

The Horns are just playing for pride.

Texas vs. Florida.

"You know they'll come in here with all those Florida athletes," said Longhorn safety Blake Gideon.

"There's definitely pride on the line," said Texas receiver Malcolm Williams.

It must be a coaching problem.

Mind you, Texas' recruiting classes have earned top five rankings nearly every year for a decade, and Mack Brown's team has produced 10-win seasons nearly every year during that span. So was Rivals.com suddenly completely off the mark with the '07 class, or have an inordinate number of those recruits simply fail to develop as expected? I'm inclined to go with the latter. Ultimately, that falls on the coaching staff. Meanwhile, that same year, Boise State signed nearly 15 players who are starters or key contributors on its current top five team, most notably Kellen Moore and Austin Pettis, both of whom were three-star recruits. Give the Boise coaching staff ample credit for evaluating and developing those players -- and perhaps give Rivals a little flack for not seeing the same thing.

Well, thanks for the mention...I think.

The Big 12 has landed a team in the title game in each of the past two seasons. Despite being on the outside looking in on this year's chase, the league still has five teams in the top 20, and earlier this year, nine teams were in the poll or receiving votes. All that should be even more impressive considering the league's glamour program, Texas, at 4-6, is having a "down year" that is insulting to down years. Nine consecutive seasons of at least 10 wins for the Longhorns has come to a rather spectacularly bad end.

Tre Newton did the honorable thing.

The University of Texas’ Tre Newton announced Monday he would stop playing. The redshirt sophomore cited a series of concussions for his departure.

Now, that takes guts. To leave your hobby, your love, your passion for reasons beyond your control is difficult.

The Aggies are dredging up the Wrecking Crew once again.

Bulletin board material. Bo Pelini is not impressed by the 12th Man.

"Our fans are better than the Aggie fans," Pelini said. "They have a good culture around their program. They support it well. They're into it. It's a unique environment. I don't know what they call that, I know they have some type of thing on Friday night, like cheer practice or whatever, so there are certain unique traditions with every program, and I think they have their own. They do a good job with it."

Oops. Bob Stoops was not pleased with his receiver.

After celebrating his 59-yard touchdown catch on Saturday by jumping and spiking the ball, Kenny Stills might not have known what was coming next.

But a few yards behind him, fellow Oklahoma receiver Ryan Broyles sure did — well before the official even reached for his flag.

After all, it was only a year ago Broyles felt the wrath of a Bob Stoops tsunami for similar transgressions.

The Land Thieves are keeping a low profile.

After beating Texas Tech on Saturday, Oklahoma linebacker Travis Lewis was asked about the prospects of needing two road victories to win the Big 12 South.

Replied Lewis: "It's time to man up or shut up."

This week, all but five OU players will be shutting up.

Monday afternoon, coach Bob Stoops revealed that only five of his players would be available to speak with the media this week, as the Sooners prepare to go back on the road where they've lost two straight.

You can teach an old dog new tricks in mid-season.

Last week, head coach Gary Pinkel and offensive coordinator Dave Yost spiced up Missouri’s playbook with some new looks. It wasn’t necessarily the innovation that led to the Tigers’ success, but players said the new plays had them excited.

"I think we showed some innovation, some willingness to try new things," sophomore wide receiver T.J. Moe said.  "I don’t think we’ve ever been afraid of that, I just think a lot of times we had been successful doing what we were doing, so there’s no reason to just throw a whole bunch of stuff in that might not work."

Keeping Dana Holgorsen around is Mike Gundy's top priority.

"If we lose him to be a head coach, we lose him to be a head coach," Gundy said. "Or if somebody in the NFL pays him $2 million to be a coordinator, there's nothing we can do about that.

"(But) we don't want to lose coordinators to go to other schools."

T. Boone Pickns has arrived.

"Go back and look, I'm always the underdog," Pickens said. "I kind of like the role when you're the underdog, when they underestimate you."

Which is maybe why Pickens has given almost half a billion dollars and counting to OSU football. To one day see the Cowboys riding high on the gridiron.

One day is here.

It is the year of the running back in Texas.

The interweb is just trouble. Six degrees of separation from Pelini to Cam Newton.

A playoff would fair and legal, unlike the BCS.

Their basic point seems to be: because college football requires "coordination and cooperation among the competing conferences and teams" in order to arrange postseason play, anti-trust laws "are applied much more loosely in this context." While the authors point out -- repeatedly, and in plain language that must have caused Hancock at least some discomfiture -- the numerous shortcomings of the BCS system, their claim is that, because it represents an improvement on the system it replaced, it cannot be illegal. "If it has allowed for a higher-quality product, the anti-trust laws do not kick in."

I ran that by Alan Fishel, a partner with the Washington, D.C.-based firm, Arent Fox. He and his colleagues described Schnell and Scupp's analysis as "extremely superficial and one that ignores every argument for why it is actually an anti-trust violation." Says Fishel, "The problem is that most attorneys have no idea of the facts behind this system. Once you fully know the facts, the conclusion that it is an anti-trust violation is an easy one to make.

"It seems to me their argument is, 'It's better than the old system and therefore it can't be illegal.' First of all, that's false, legally. Secondly, in many ways, the current system is worse than the old system."

The NCAA doesn't have a policy for this.

The most startling revelation in this all is that the NCAA does not have a policy to address this topic, even after the countless acts and accusations of domestic violence, rape and other sexual assaults over the decades involving college athletes, especially in the major revenue sports like football and men's basketball. Individual athletic departments, in fact, rarely have a policy in place -- at best, many only have guidelines and talking points included in the annual student-athlete handbook. At most schools, athletic programs adapted the university's code to their own situations, rarely to the benefit of the victim or accuser, Redmond said she found.

"You look at the fact that the NCAA has policies against tobacco,'' she said, "it has policies that say a person can't buy a Big Mac for an athlete, but a person can beat up someone or rape them and be on the field the next week.''

Is high school football too dangerous?

All of a sudden it seems, America has discovered that our football is a very dangerous game. The talk of concussions and the reports of how the sport permanently damages its gladiators has mostly centered around professionals. But what has happened recently at two high schools suggests, perhaps, that the risks of football will now be more seriously evaluated with regard to ordinary schoolboys.

The NCAA basketball tournament could get more complicated.

"I still believe there's going to be that 38th and 39th team that feel they should have been the 36th or 37th (at-large) team," the selection committee chairman said Wednesday on a conference call. "I do believe, though, in the room we'll kind of have one of those moments of, 'OK, here we are with trying to solidify who 35, 36 and 37 is.' But it won't change our process.

"I think it will be more of a psychological or emotional experience in the first year of going to 68."

Forty years ago a football program was decimated after a plane crash.

Forty years ago from this Sunday, Marshall assistant coach Red Dawson and graduate assistant Gail Parker hit the road to head back to Huntington, WV. They had already visited a recruit on the way to East Carolina and planned to visit him again on the way back. As the two left, the Marshall football team along with some school administrators and fans boarded a Southern Airways DC-9 to fly back home. It was the last time Dawson would ever see them.

And finally...

Thoughts and prayers go out to Southern Miss football player Martez Smith.

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