The brilliant end of the Southeast’s stranglehold

The Ohio State vs. Oregon college football championship Jan. 12 in Jerry Jones’s basement game room is causing more heartache in football’s America than Papa John’s Fritos Chili pizza.

Because, well, it SHOULD’VE been Bama and FSU. The BCS WOULD’VE given us Bama and FSU. And two weeks ago nobody COULD’VE believed it wouldn’t be Bama and FSU.

Yet, the semi-final games were played and it’s very decidedly never going to be Bama and FSU.

That Nor’easter nipping at your neck is everyone west of the place that decided a president by the margin of a piece of confetti in 2000 breathing a collective sigh of relief.

And the crosswind is a pair of decisive victories by Oregon and Ohio State breathing life into the notion that a four-team playoff—at once incomplete in its infancy while adding heft to the notion college football is about as close to an amateur enterprise as amateur porn sites—is thus far working.

The decisive semi-final outcomes resulting in this unlikely pairing is such a disturbingly better match up than the prospect of a traditional Southeast-themed championship that it can only be the result a couple decades of gears turning toward college’s fringe, rather than sheer luck or fate intervening on Jan. 1.

Oregon, a program on the rise since Rich Brooks roamed the sideline and title sponsor Nike’s best-selling sneak was coined for a man named Penny, is still routinely maligned by the blubbery pundits as gimmicky; versus Ohio State, resurrected and spit-shined from the 2011 rubble of Jerseygate by one Urban Meyer—known from his Utah days to now as a little flavorful and gimmicky himself.

But these gimmicky West Coast-based blend (not bland) spread offenses and other erstwhile ignorable programs which color outside the margins and the hashmarks (think: Marshall, Boise State, Utah State, Baylor and TCU) will grow in number and remain venerable for the following reasons:

• The SEC’s patsy out-of-conference regular season schedule does come back to bite it (or at least took a chunk out of Vegas) during bowl season: Mississippi State, which was one game away from being named the second SEC team in the final four, was trounced by ACC also-ran Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl joining other top SEC programs Auburn (34-31 loss to Wisconsin in the Outback Bowl) and LSU (31-28 loss to Notre Dame in the Music City Bowl) in this year’s SEC bowl bust…a parade of futility whose grand marshal was Ole Miss. The school with a secession-era mascot less than two months ago stood tall with Bama and Mississippi State as three of the top five programs in the nation. Then they got waxed like Andy Stitzer by, who else? Final-four odd-team-out TCU. The 42-3 final score doesn’t take into account TCU suited up the band for the fourth-quarter SEC mercy rule and the Rebs still barely avoided a shut-out with a late field goal. On the bright side, new-to-conference Missouri does run a very fresh-looking offense under second-year coordinator Josh Henson. Though the Tigers lost to Bama in the SEC title game it was more at the behest of head coach Gene Mauk’s conservative play calling which loosened up ever-so-quietly as Mizzou took down the Golden Gophers of Minnesota at the Citrus Bowl.
• College football’s parity is just beginning to show not only because Oregon and Ohio State represent teams with progressive coaches who run progressive schemes, but because the regions slowest to embrace football as a track meet or ballet not a heads-down Smashmouth scrum are going to continue to lose. And by lose we don’t mean just 42-3, we mean lose athletes, lose alumni support, lose programs. The spread is quickly becoming the offense of choice of high school football because it plays faster, smoother and more athletic/watchable than the rendered fat amorphous blob of your grandfather’s single-wing attack. Well-publicized head injuries and the expense of equipment has dropped Pop Warner participation numbers almost 15 percent since 2012. Nutrition, conditioning, speed and sportsmanship are the new pillars of youth sports which doesn’t leave much room for molasses asses and barking coaches. Prep football programs will still cherry pick some of the school’s best athletes, but gone is the propensity to want to hit and be hit. Scrambling brains and sacrificing joints truncating careers in track, soccer and swimming—sports student athletes can more likely excel at at the next level—no thanks.
• Recruiting and appeal is no longer regional. The rest of the country, specifically the West, has quietly caught up with and surpassed the Southeast on defensive size and speed, offensive schemes, coaching prowess and practice facilities. Oregon’s current top two commits are from Missouri and Georgia and another five of their top 10 hail from Southern California including guard Zach Okun, skill position player Malik Lovette, defensive tackle Rasheem Green, defensive end Keisean Lucier-South and inside linebacker John Houston Jr. Stanford, USC, Washington, UCLA, Arizona and even Utah are ever closer to tipping the scales of in-state/out-of-state recruits to even, each taking big chunks from yesterday’s stay-home football states Texas, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana.

Still, it is a transition moment. And this year, to much of sports nation, the Buckeyes/Ducks sounds like an aberration, a great Holiday Bowl match up and not much else. But that’s the same “Oh, it’s just one comet” mentality that did in the first set of dinosaurs.

Recruits will continue to migrate to the West and regardless of tradition and a TV contract, the ONLY thing the Southeast has in store for the rest of the country henceforth is Sperry topsiders and blotchy frat guys screaming in the Gameday broadcast backdrop with crooked hats and half-empty Solo cups to house their beery tears.

And no, one disastrous bowl season combined with emergence of a four-team playoff does not spell the end for the biggest conference in all of amateur sport. What it does show is SEC has much more to prove in coming seasons than they’d like to admit. Without change, the very distinct, very recent memory of relevance could be the only salve as the search continues for a schedule replacement for University of Alabama-Birmingham 

A timezone stranglehold on an arcane cable highlight show no longer matters and neither does the old guard in a burgeoning meritocracy spawned by manifest destiny and the possibility of more than 700 really ugly uniform combinations per game.

Though it may already be too late for some storied programs because change—a college football first in the first year of a playoff—has already taken place.

 

When the Heisman winner is too good for the NFL

The emergence and prevalence of the system quarterback has taken hold in the NFL, albeit with some resistance.

By Andrew Pridgen

Alex Smith, a quick study by all accounts, took eight seasons of fine-tuning to switch from Urban Meyer’s spread option at Utah to the 49ers’ once-signature West Coast offense. Smith never really found his groove until Andy Reid implemented a sort of hybrid West Coast/zone-read playbook featuring familiar receiver sets and screen options for Smith in Kansas City.

Having learned from almost a decade of blown courtship, the 49ers’ current playcaller Colin Kaepernick was given a truncated pro style read-option playbook which is a spruced-up version of the rifle offense he ran at Nevada. Though questions linger around the system’s long-term efficacy, Kaepernick’s stumbles in his third full year as starter are more congruous with an aging and broken offensive line, a concussed running attack and an old, slow and agitative receiving corps.

Heisman winner Marcus Mariota’s effort at Oregon breaks with the prevalent wisdom that eighteen months is about all a college quarterback has to learn and lead ergo, playbooks should be distilled to the size of Tecmo Super Bowl’s. Recent collegiate standouts whose dearth of decision-making abilities under center were exposed as professionals include Christian Ponder, Blaine Gabbert, Mark Sanchez, Vince Young, Brandon Weeden, Brady Quinn and the irrepressible Jamarcus Russell.

Mariota’s weekly showcase of brain power seems all but guaranteed to steer him clear of the purple drank-coated path of self-destruction at the next level. He’s got a legendary drunk’s ability operate on autopilot while effortlessly making crucial decisions. He is able to manipulate Oregon offensive coordinator Scott Frost’s zone-read version of the spread from the line of scrimmage as he uncovers plot holes in defenses like a Grisham novel.

Having attained a gamer’s abstraction with the ability to toggle capable skill position set pieces, Mariota runs the Oregon offense more like half-court sets on the hardwood. His play is based on fabricating space from a cluster. It is a seemingly different game to watch Oregon flow on neon green compared to an SEC scrum where touchdowns seem more an accidental byproduct of a gelatinous moving mass. It is football as verse versus football to merely be tolerated.

At Oregon, Mariota’s recruiter Chip Kelly barnstormed his way through the Pac 12 with Popeye’s crooked smile and terse quips to the sideline girls during cutaways. Oregon faithful were wise to the joke, but the rest of the nation rejoiced when Cam Newton’s Auburn put the Ducks in check to take ownership of the giant BCS crystal ashtray in 2011. Kelly was able to thaw the hearts of Philly fans and their East Coast media apologists taking the Eagles from 4-12 to 10-6 his rookie NFL campaign and at 9-5 certainly hopes the division-rival Cowboys don’t stand in his way of another berth.

Cryptological imitators of Kelly’s giant placard play calls have spread throughout the West and into the professional ranks creating a new vernacular of gamesmanship and deception through images. Though this may be at times mere sideline spectacle, the preferred form on field is achieved. Running through four fast-break downs in under a minute is now de rigueur from the region that invented the drive through, the Showtime Lakers and the web browser.

But it has taken a soft-spoken, demure and sincere ambassador like Mariota to get the rest of the country to embrace this speedy ballet over the gridlocked dogpile. His work is beautiful and it was showcased beautifully in a town known for Pinot and track and trail and spring gardens and winter dark brews.

There’s a gray duvet of cloud cover that blankets Eugene eight school months a year, shielding its students and faculty from the rigors of the outside world and at once providing a world-class showcase for their own industriousness. The nearest metro, nesting ground of the horn-rimmed and hapless, is not so much a temptation as it is a living cliché two hours away. Phil and Penny Knight watch over their charges like stubborn helicopter parents providing them with ample resource and creating a pictorial narrative of life.

Mariota is the personification of this lifestyle. Sped up on the field and slow and droll and proud of his roots off it. There is a good chance he’ll end up in New York. Rumors of a brutal media there have shrunk in time to the city’s expectations of a winner (see: Carmelo Anthony). The outsized shadow of Derek Jeter is a crumpled wrapper skipping toward a sewer grate on 5th Avenue and a new aesthetic of what a sportsman can be is needed.

It is unfortunate, Mariota’s choice of football as his sport. It is also too late to revise. Professional football players are now built to more closely resemble last year’s Heisman winner Jameis L. Winston, troubled and talented and plagued by alleged this and thats. It’s a sport you no longer want to raise your child on. Its imminent demise aptly compared to the ubiquity, ruthlessness, hubris and eventual collapse of the tobacco industry.

A true system quarterback who was developed outside the system, perhaps Mariota’s masterful brush can help establish a new tradition of grace over junk in the professional ranks.

My guess is it won’t.