I was going to ignore the entire “OJ Mayo Took Money From Agents In High School and College” thing. For one, OJ Mayo didn’t play football at Southern Cal. He played basketball, and we’re a college football blog. Second, I didn’t really think it would get much attention outside of enraged UCLA and Notre Dame fans because the entire scenario seemed like a giant “Duh Moment.” Honestly, who among us is actually surprised by this? It was practically assumed that OJ Mayo was receiving payouts from someone or, at the very least, getting courted by agents since his umbilical cord dried up and fell off. But the story has gotten a lot of traction nationally, it does speak to a lack of institutional control at Southern Cal, our one and only rival, and just because it was obvious doesn’t make it right.

And that seems to be the first defense of Southern Cal: They can’t be held responsible when it was so obvious that OJ would do what he did. It’s an argument that’s nearly as stupid as the “everybody does it, so who cares” defense. In fact, both defenses are so stupid that I refuse to waste many keystrokes on them. If you truly believe one and/or the other, I invite you to direct your web browser elsewhere. You’re too stupid to read this site, and literacy coupled with intellects such as yours tend to lead to very sad movies on HBO about “death marches” in various geographies.

The other defense that I keep encountering on the internet, on the radio waves, and at the lunch counter goes something like this: The world has signaled that graduating players and keeping their noses clean comes a distant second to winning, and so Southern Cal and Tim Floydd should not be held accountable. It’s too hard to monitor these players and build a winning team at the same time.

And while the argument nearly follows some semblance of logic, it shares a common trait with the previous 2 defenses in that it’s patently false. It may be very, very hard as administrators and coaches to do everything by the letter of the NCAA law (and the local, state, and federal laws), ensure that the players keep their noses clean, and win, but, frankly, what the hell else are we paying these people for?

These coaches and administrators are paid a ton of money to do all of the things I just mentioned, not most of them. It’s why we positively freaked out at Kevin White when he uttered the famous “Sunday to Friday” comment. We don’t pay coaches millions of dollars to “do all the right things” OR win. We pay them to do it all! And we pay them well! And besides, how much are we really needing to pay them to motivate them to go about trying to win? Aren’t they coaches? Isn’t it inherent within their chosen profession to want to win anyway? Isn’t the compensation entirely designed to entice the coaches to win (something they want to do) while navigating the waters of legal and NCAA codes?

Is the argument by those who would defend Southern Cal that the coaches and administrators aren’t paid enough to keep tabs on their players and make sure the players are on the up-and-up? How about Southern Cal’s NCAA Compliance Officer? Why does that person even bother having a job at all if not to be a thorn in the side of Southern Cal student athletes? Does Southern Cal even have a Compliance Officer? I’m just assuming they do, but considering this and the Reggie Bush thing, maybe they don’t.

All this ranting aside, I want to be clear that I don’t like the idea of giving Southern Cal the “death penalty” at this point. Both the OJ Mayo and Reggie Bush issues seem only to involve agents who want to represent the athletes once they turn pro rather than boosters looking to entice talent to their schools. And Southern Cal, as far as I’m aware, isn’t on probation for committing any similar NCAA violations. But I do support a real, live, actual NCAA investigation with some teeth, and some form of punishment that wont leave Southern Cal bloggers breathing a collective sigh of relief. Forfeiture of TV revenues might be a good start. A few lost scholarships could be a good step.

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• The HLS Totally Non-Homer Top 25 - Preseason Edition: #1 - Southern Cal
• WE WON!! (thank you defense)
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It must be the worst of the worst part of the off-season, because all anyone seems to be doing lately is whining.

The Roundup:

• It takes a while for the guy to make his point, but when he does, it’s a lousy one. When the guys that don’t get it start to really get uppity about sports bloggers, you know their time is coming to an end.
• Apparently there’s a doctorate in Bitch and Moan available at Michigan (sucks!)
• My turn to whine: Hey, SBNation.com, when you went and “upgraded” all of the blogs on your network, including the fine Rakes of Mallow, did you have to unleash every post ever made by one of your bloggers into my RSS reader all over again? By the way, nice job making your blogs all look like e-commerce sites with a side of blog.
• There’s so little going on in the CFB world right now, I can’t even keep this theme up, so screw it.
• John Cooper: HAHA!
• SMQ wants to know what makes someone “consistent.” If he’s talking about “consistently great,” then, speaking for myself, I dunno. I suppose it’s just a gift from God to all of you.

Well, that roundup sucked. We need the season preview magazines to come out now. Phil Steele, where are you?

Here’s a fun fact from Phil to get us through this rough patch: Notre Dame plays just 6 teams in 2008 that had winning records in 2007. And those opponents combined for a winning percentage of just 51%. Wooooo!

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• Friday Roundup: The Biscuit Edition
• Friday Roundup: The “It’s All About Bob” Edition
• Friday Roundup: The Saturday, the 14th Edition

Notre Dame just announced that they’ve placed ASU on the schedule - the 2013 schedule.

NOTRE DAME, Ind. - In the second to be announced of a series of “off-site” Fighting Irish football games, Notre Dame and Arizona State will square off on Oct. 5, 2013, at the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas.

Notre Dame football will begin the series of off-site games in 2009 (versus Washington State in San Antonio) and play one game per season at locations in Texas, Florida, and in other cities.

The Irish and Sun Devils will be meeting for the first time since 1999. Notre Dame defeated Arizona State in Sun Devil Stadium in ‘98 (28-9) and again in Notre Dame Stadium in ‘99 (a 48-17 Irish victory).

The game will be played at the Cowboys’ new facility that is currently under construction and will open in the summer of 2009. With a capacity of 80,000 fans, it will be home to Super Bowl XLV following the 2011 NFL season, as well as the annual AT&T Cotton Bowl.

That’s right, in his infinite wisdom, Dr. White scheduled this game to be in Dallas, TX rather than Tempe, AZ.

First of all, flying into Phoenix is a vastly more pleasurable experience than flying into the ghetto that is DFW. The only experience worse than flying into DFW is flying into a mountain.

Secondly, it means playing a college football game without any of the college football ambiance. This will feel as much like a college football game as Pam Anderson feels real.

And thirdly, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of being in Tempe, on the campus of ASU, you know darn well why it’s a tremendous disappointment that we will not be in Tempe, on the campus of ASU. It’s just so darn… perky.

No. We’re not talking about the architecture.

Sigh.

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• HLS Picks the Michigan (sucks!) vs. Ohio State game…
• Bo Schembechler Dies. tOSU Fans Prepare Gameday Signs, Look To Raise Bar on “Shock and Awe.”
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The NCAA Released their “Academic Progress Report” today and then gushed about all their “progress.” The name alone tells you right away that the entire thing was manufactured to keep the heat off the NCAA and make it look like “progress” is being made. Note they didn’t release “A Report Entirely Devoid of Spin on Exactly How Each Institution of Higher Learning is Actually Doing Right This Very Moment With Regard To Actually Educating Their Student Athletes” This is much like those weekly progress reports you fill out every week in your thankless job to let your 7 bosses know that the “top priority” project you’ve been working on is now “83% done” versus the “79% done” of last week even though it’s really been stuck at 15% done since September. Of 2002. But hey, you put it in a spreadsheet and used TLAs, so it’s all good. Thank God for scope creep.

Ooh! Look! A graph!

What does it mean?

Absolutely nothing!

But to the NCAA, an organization that does absolutely nothing useful to any segment of humanity, it means…

The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program (APP) is creating positive behavioral change among Division I institutions, according to new four-year data released May 6.

The multi-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) data – with four years of data collection available for the first time – show upward trends in several categories, especially from 2005-06 to 2006-07. The overall APR, which measures student-athlete performance based on eligibility and retention, rose slightly, with increases in both eligibility and retention and a decrease in the number of student-athletes leaving school while academically ineligible.

Um. Okay. So how is the APR calculated?

Each Division I sports team receives an APR. An APR of 925 roughly projects to
a 60 percent graduation success rate. To calculate the APR, every student-athlete
is tracked by eligibility and retention, the two most reliable factors in predicting
graduation. Those who do well in the classroom and stay in school earn two
points. Those who pass but do not return to school earn one point. If a studentathlete
fails academically and leaves school, their team loses two points. If a
student-athlete returns to school later and graduates, the school earns one bonus
point. The team’s APR is calculated by dividing the total points earned in a year by
the total points possible.

So the “perfect score” is 1000, and yet, in an Academic Progress Report, a 60% graduation rate translates, roughly to a 925? 925 over 1000 is 92.5. Why use a 1000 point benchmark? Is there really a need for the granularity of 1000 units of whatever the heck the APR is measuring? What the heck is this thing measuring?

By the way, that 925 is the “benchmark” score. Any program falling under that score is subject to “contemporaneous penalties.”

For fun, I took the APR numbers of teams on this year’s ND Football schedule and compared them to the latest published GSR (graduation success rates) of each school respectively. Now, maybe the most recently published GSR numbers aren’t the GSR numbers the NCAA used to calculate APR, but if they aren’t, then why not?

As you can see, Michigan State fell dangerously close to falling below the benchmark. SDSU was the only team not to get a score in the lofty 900s on ND’s schedule (again, why are we playing SDSU?). Purdue scored a 920, but aren’t listed under the NCAA’s list of programs that will be receiving penalties. I’m sure there’s an explanation. It’s probably got to do with “momentum” or something, which will probably play a role in the fact that MSU got a “passing” grade even though they’re sporting a GSR of 43. Maybe it’s because, if these programs fall below the benchmark, they can, essentially, promise to do better next year, and get a reprieve. I used to promise I’d do better next year all the time, but did that ever stop me from getting fired? Never mind. Didn’t the NCAA just say a GSR of 60 roughly translated to a 925? So confusing. But like I said, maybe the GSR numbers are old, and MSU made an improvement of 17 points in the GSR this past year. Maybe.

Ultimately, the APR is a freaking joke. There’s more smoothing out of blemishes here than at your average junior high. So tomorrow, when you hear on the radio about how things are getting better, and programs you’d expect to get penalized aren’t, just remember that MSU is sporting a freaking 43 GSR and not getting penalized either.

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• Southern Cal Releases “Inspirational Video” for Notre Dame Week
• Clearly, the NCAA is in Cahoots with the Irish
• HLS Expert Picks Week 7 Results: The “domer.mq Can Hardly Score Either” Edition

HLS Expert Picks Expert and Once Upon a Time HLS contributor ChisND shared a rather humorous web page titled “5 Cats that Look Like Wilford Brimley.” I have no idea where he found that site. Maybe he’s a cat person, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Theoretically.

But it got me thinking, are there any college football head coaches that have 5 cats that look just like them? I decided to find out, and programmed the robots to search the internets until they found some matches between cats and college football head coaches. See the results after the jump.
More…

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• Crybaby Coaches, Media Cry Like Babies
• NCAA: no mor teh txtng. Charlie Weis: :-(
• Mommy, Where Do College Head Coaches Come From?

The internets seem quite concerned with the “likelihood” that a team that went 3-9 in 2007 (specifically, Notre Dame) would “rebound” to a “respectable record” in 2008 (say, 8-4). One such discussion is happening here. And in that discussion, a question came up that I actually find more interesting: Sure, it’s rare to “rebound” from such a record, but how common is it to “collapse” from being a 10+ win team to a 3-9 team? Answer: Exceedingly rare.

I figured that had to be the case, but you know me and my unnatural affection for spreadsheets (Yeah, ND Business School!):

As you can see, between the 2004 and 2007 seasons, 34 different teams experienced at least 1 season with a record including 10 or more wins. But only 1 team in that time, Notre Dame, managed to follow such a season with a collapse the next year into “Epic Fail” territory of 3 or fewer wins. The only other comparable collapse would be Tennessee’s own “Epic Fail” of 2005 where they went 5 and 6 after a 10-3 record in 2004.

In fact, the collapse of ND in 2007 was so bad that it was more than 4 games worse than the average “letdown” for a team that just experienced a 10+ win season. On average, any team that had a 10+ win season in our sample experienced an increase of about 1.7 more losses in the following season. ND experienced a 6 game letdown.

I wont get into causation. That’s been hammered on around these parts and everywhere else a football fan can access the internet for long enough, and lord knows we’ll probably do it again ourselves in another post before the 2008 season gets kicked off. But know this: Anytime someone tries to tell you it’s statistically unlikely that ND will have a “good year” this year, you can point out that our disaster of a 2007 season was even more unlikely. Maybe it’s all just dumb luck.

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• Goodbye and Good Luck
• OSU/UM Most Watched Game Ever…
• Friday Round-up: The “MQ is in Delaware” Edition

First, let me express my apologies to the millions of HLS readers out there who depend exclusively on HLS to deliver the latest, most timely Notre Dame Football news. There have been some really significant (huge!) verbal commitments by extraordinarily talented football players to the University of Notre Dame, and “we” failed to mention anything about any of those commitments. As Executive Founding Benevolent Lead Managerial Omnipotent Editor of HLS, I take full responsibility for this gaffe, and I swear to you on the souls of the little blue fish that the big, ugly, black fish ate when I was 7, this will never happen again. The buck stops here. I’m going to make this right.

That said, it was all Biscuit’s fault! Oh sure, I suppose I could have done it, but I was exhausted from my Blue and Gold Game tome earlier this week, and then I was very busy with work, and then there was just so much beer to be consumed. How can you expect one man to consume that much beer and blog? What’s Biscuit’s excuse? Let’s hear it, Biscuit. Let’s hear about what on earth made your widdle wife so vewy vewy hawd that you couldn’t step up and do what we pay you to do!

The Roundup:

• Looks like Demetrius Jones makes a habit of not showing up.
• Charlie Weis, since you’re reading this, please take note.
• Kids, Mario Manningham is your brains of drugs.
• Didn’t Bear Bryant once say something about teams having a “few good seasons” thinking they were the Alabamas, Oklahomas, Michigans, Southern Cals, and Notre Dames of the world? Hey, if I were Rutgers, I’d want to sell tickets to our new stadium too, but if I were Rutgers I wouldn’t actually expect my current coach to around in 3 years.
• Making the most highly unanticipated NFL draft in memory even more highly unanticipated.
• One of the few times I think the NCAA shouldn’t spank SoCal.
• Good luck, Trevor.
• They needed some enormous balls to make this happen.

Finally, here’s a picture simply for the sake of having a picture, as we haven’t had many pictures on HLS lately.

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• Friday Roundup: The Biscuit Edition
• Thanksgiving Play by Play
• Friday Roundup: The “It’s All About Bob” Edition

Holy Flaming Batsuits, Robin, I’ve found the dumbest writer in the history of communication. Illiterates probably berate this woman. Her ancestors, thousands of years ago, probably drew cave paintings of buffalo with which everyone else on the planet confused toucans. Her name is “Lisa H,” and she “writes” a blog on FoxSports.com’s community blogs. You know how they say a million monkeys with a million keyboards, given enough time, could write the works of Shakespeare? Well it would take one monkey to write the equivalent of Lisa H. in an afternoon. And I’m not talking one of those fancy zoo monkeys that knows how to signal for food. I’m talking the monkey still in the forest that eats rotten bananas, can’t figure out that whole “use stick to fish ants out of hole” thing, and even Jane Goodall wouldn’t want to save. (Yeah. I know. Moneky /= Gorilla. I don’t care.)

In “Lisa H’s” “20 burning questions going into football season,” Lisa writes:

14- Will Weis finally get Notre Dame on track?

No. The problem with Notre Dame is not the players. It’s their coach. How desperate is Charlie Weis? He turned over the offense to his OC. Considering that Weis is known as an offensive genius, this is concerning. There is nothing good to come out of this- if the offensive output gets better-and when you are ranked dead last in offense, is there anywhere else but to go up?- then it makes him look overrated as an offensive guru. If the offense still remains the same, then Weis made a poor coaching decision.

Either way, Weis is in a giant hole. Their sked is difficult, and there are only two guaranteed wins, with a third possible one against Pitt. Couple that all in with mumblings about some discontent in South Bend during Spring practice, and you can count on Weis updating his resume. Unless he beats USC, of course.

It’s like she takes courses at the Dan Rather School of Journalism and Making Shit Up. The only mumbling that occurred this spring were in her head while she tried to sound out the Dollar Menu at Wendy’s.

And did she actually use “sked” in place of “schedule?” I think I just heard the sound of a 1000 English teachers blow their brains out.

Way to go, Lisa. You just set the world of the written word so far back that they’re considering works by Pat Forde from his probable 3 years in the 5th grade for a Pulitzer. You have to be less intelligent than the beer I just drank. If you’d lived in the 17th century, villagers would have burned you as a witch, knowing full well you weren’t actually a witch, but unable to help themselves since they just couldn’t take all that stupid any longer. If you don’t eventually die by accidentally suffocating yourself with a plastic shopping bag from the grocery store, millions of dollars will be lost in Vegas.

I’m big on the internet, but I have to admit, the internet, and the enabling of people like terrorists, religious zealots, white supremacists, and Lisa H to share their so-called thoughts make me wonder if we should just unplug the entire damn thing. Giving Brian Cook a voice is bad enough, but this? I need another drink.

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