Let all the Bulldog faithful rally behind the men who now wear the red and black with two words, two simple words which express the sentiments of the entire Bulldog Nation: Auburn Sucks.
Dabo is officially on the hot seat, and it seems like he doesn’t much care about it. Ever since Brent Venables left the Greater Anderson Cow College, Clemson hasn’t necessarily been a feared program.
In Venables time at Clemson, roughly ten years from 2012-2021, Clemson lost a total of 17 games. In the four seasons since he took over at the helm at Oklahoma, Clemson hasn’t necessarily lost…17 games.
It’s not so bad, though…in the four years before Venables came to Clemson, Swinney lost 22 games.
It’s amazing what Swinney can’t accomplish as a head coach in his own, and people are becoming very aware of it. Smart may have had his last chance to embarrass Dabo when Georgia played Clemson a few years ago, but the better news is Kirby doesn’t have a split like that that people can point to based on a coordinator, no matter if the fan base likes the coordinator or not.
The geniuses are back. Rather than talking about their bathroom habits or what they would do to get so-and-so player and coach, they are showing their ball-knowing to the world. Week 1 this year wasn’t likely to be to be a gold mine of genius, but we got enough on our trip to get some good laughs.
Let’s start today’s trip at Smart-Richt Field at Vince Dooley Stadium as the Jacketasses’ season collapses on the season’s first real night of games.
No one cares enough about Fech football to send genius posts from StinkTalk, but I’m here for you. 2 years ago the denizens of StinkTalk thought Brent Key was the reincarnation of Booby Dudd and Booby Ross, and he was going to get Kirby Smart fired at Georgia. Today, he’s another likely failure of a head coach on North Avenue.
To get physically manhandled by Coach Amazon Prime’s Buffaloes to the tune of 183 to 51 yards rushing should embarrass Mr. Tough Guy. Let’s follow the defensive statistics of Colorado throughout the year. That should tell us something when Thanksgiving weekend rolls around. Pain.
Let’s head a little downtown to Mercedes Benz Stadium to check on the geniuses of the Greater Opelika Cow College.
If that performance did anything for male enhancement in east Alabama, Auburn is in for a long season. Auburn wins because Dave Aranda goes for the win in regulation rather than playing for overtime. Auburn’s defense made DJ Lagway look serviceable, and Byrum Brown threw 3 picks. This Baylor team is far from the best team Auburn will face this year, so it’s not going to be pretty by the time the Iron Bowl rolls around.
Dave Aranda has run out of time in Waco without a dramatic turnaround. I give him credit for going for the win with the 2 point play, but the right play probably was to play for overtime. The guy is a defensive genius, but I don’t think he’s cut out to be the leader of the program … sort of like Will Muschamp.
I don’t care about Oklahoma State football at all, but that post less than a year after “I’m a man! I’m 40!” got fired in Stillwater makes me laugh. Getting punked by double digits by Group of 5 Tulsa is not going to make the Big 12 look good to the committee. No matter what people say, the Big 12 is at best a 1 bid league given its make-up is more like a G6 league than a P4. I’m guessing the Pokes are happy that Bedlam isn’t going to be played this year, but, OTOH, on Saturday in Stillwater, they host …
Let’s head out west to check on the Handbags of the Northwest, Oregon.
Here’s the extent of ball-knowing in Eugene. The Ducks escape 34-27 over Boise, who isn’t close to the best teams Oregon will play this year. The team statistics look like Oregon should have smashed Boise like a top 5 team should do to solid G6 program, yet they needed a late touchdown to get the win. Nike is going to make sure Dante Moore gets a ton of hype for his Heismanesque performance against the Broncos.
If the pollsters do their job this weekend, I would expect that the Dawgs move past Oregon to #2 in the rankings released on Tuesday.
Let’s move on to Ann Arbor to check in on what appears to be the next scandal involving Michigan football.
Any Michigan fan who stormed the field on Saturday night after beating Western Michigan should be embarrassed. The way it happened should be an embarrassment to the B1G and its officials. That rationalization is never used at any other point in a game. A similar play would have never been reviewed for that particular issue.
Tim Brando gets something right for a change.
Thank you Rob. An outrage, a travesty and those closest to it will all muzzle themselves for the sake of maintaining profitable relationships. It’s imperative with today’s technological advantages we get rid of Conference officials and Nationalize the Industry to that we can… https://t.co/OvRe22O0Vb
The Upstate South Carolina faithful seem to have had enough. Dabo Swinney is 121-46 without Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence. Entering Death Valley on Saturday night, Clemson is 47-20 since Lawrence took his hair and talents to Northeast Florida. I don’t think many people expected Clemson to win in Baton Rouge. I know people didn’t expect Clemson football program to spontaneously combust on Saturday night either.
The benefit of the remaining schedule is that Clemson plays all of 1 currently ranked opponent.
If you gave up 38 to Louisville and needed a punt snapped over the head of the punter to provide one of the TDs, keep rationalizing, Rebels. The Kiffin Kancer is coming, and I imagine he is planning to lay waste to Oxford given they gave up almost 500 yards and a number of explosive plays.
While this week’s game in Austin is the meteor game of the century for me, the Magnolia Bowl is setting up to be a meteor game as well. Both fan bases are being insufferable for different reasons.
We’re going to finish our trip last night under the sort-of lights of Doak Campbell.
I didn’t stay up to watch the full game. The message boards geniuses want Norvell out yesterday. I’m sure every one of them will be happy to contribute their 401k’s to his massive buyout to make it happen. The power outage is symptomatic of the problems FSU is having right now. They have a chance to make a statement on national TV, and they have this happen. They have been a joke at QB since Jordan Travis’s injury. They have been awful on the offensive line since Dumbo was there.
Kirby broke them in Miami. Danny Kanell still isn’t over it … he had us #12 in weekend rankings.
That’s what I saw this weekend. I can’t wait to see which 2 fan bases in this coming weekend’s meteor games meltdown.
If you were looking for Dabo and Company to be the hero that nobody asked for, but everybody needs, then you’ll find you’re sadly disappointed. It started well enough with a quick turnover and field goal for the Greater Anderson Cow College, but it quickly turned into reality from there.
Of course, Lane should’ve had a little more compassion for Dabo, given all the offseason tampering fun they had with Ole Miss, right?
Nope.
I caught Lane Kiffin on the field after press conferences and asked if he was surprised: "I thought it'd be like 35-7, 35-10" he said but "I didn't know they'd be that dysfunctional on offense." Noted that LSU scout team scored more on their defense than Clemson did.
It was Dabo’s worst loss of his career, and he’s now lost in 5 of his 6 last opening games. Give him credit for scheduling real opponents for Game One, but Swinney may have coached his last season opener for Clemson.
Reminder that all glory is as fleeting as a quarterback running from a massage parlor in Cleveland, Ohio. He’d probably be the only thing running for Clemson right about now.
I’ve seen some folks saying Swinney can come join Kirby’s staff once he’s booted, but I doubt Kirby wants anything to do with a guy that has so soundly rejected adjustment in the modern game in Athens.
Lane has become the face of new college football. Dabo was the face of traditional holdouts. Guess which one is going to be unemployed first, and that says all you need to know about college sports today.
Your conference champion, whether David likes it or not, was 8-5 on the year, and saw their star Quarterback opt to go to another ACC school through the portal, because the ACC champ didn’t even make the CFP, passed over for James Madison and Tulane.
Fair or not, when your biggest programs in the conference are actively considering litigation to leave the conference and join another for better national credibility, that might be all the reason you need to know why the ACC is considered just Another Crappy Conference.
If you are going to another site for your Dawgs’ content today, make it the guys at Dawg Sports. This defense of the Georgia-Clemson home and home is a magnum opus (Someone needs to send this to Josh Brooks – athdir@uga.edu). The good Senator would be smiling over this if he were with us today.
I’ll say it now. I refuse to purchase tickets to either of these games if they move to a neutral site (yes, I attended both games in 2021 and 2024). I may even decide to hell with it and not even watch the games on television on principle. I get that schools have to look for every revenue stream they can at this point, but the powers that be look at us as nothing but wallets at this point in the name of looking out for what’s best for UGA athletics as opposed to what’s popular to fans.
I carried the ticket stub from 1984 in my wallet for years after that. I wish I had kept it pristine and gotten a signed picture of Kevin Butler kicking the most famous field goal in Georgia history.
If we don’t reject this kind of thinking while still getting OOC games with the likes of Tenn State and WKU in our season ticket packages, we’ll get more of this.
It’s time for these people to feel the economic impact of the decisions they make rather than to tell us they know what’s best for us.
For years, if college coaches and staffers wanted to pursue a player at another school, they would find a way to get to them. They would call their high school coach or reach out to a trainer or family member to express interest and try to persuade them to transfer. Coaches knew they risked NCAA sanctions for impermissible contact, so they had to be cautious about making these overtures.
But now that players have agents, impermissible contact has dramatically escalated.
“The tampering got much more brash and blatant,” one agent said.
The current transfer rules now make it seem impossible to navigate the chaotic portal process without the help of an agent and their rolodex of contacts. This year, the portal window began on Jan. 2 and was open for only two weeks. To meet enrollment deadlines, players on the move had to get official visits booked and deals negotiated as fast as possible.
For all parties, tampering has become imperative. Teams need to find out who will be available. Players need assurances they’ll have somewhere to go. Agents play the role of matchmaker throughout December, if not sooner.
Agents say they started getting calls from general managers as early as September last season, and many agencies will distribute their client lists to front offices to initiate discussions. Purdue coach Barry Odom said his staff received a list of impending transfers from an agency who mistakenly included Purdue players. By now, these general managers know they can’t be naive. While they’re doing early shopping, their players are being shopped around as well.
In other words, it’s hard to call it tampering and impermissible if everyone is doing it. Wasn’t this supposed to be the era of above-the-table deals and negotiations? While the relaxing of the transfer portal and NIL deals would suggest that it should, it seems there’s going to be a shady side to college football, regardless.
An ACC GM told ESPN he received a call in late October and learned his top receiver already had million-dollar offers on the table from SEC and Big Ten programs. It didn’t stun or even bother him. If you have good players, it’s inevitable. There’s no sense, he said, in phoning the GMs at those schools and calling them out. All you can do is put in the work to try to retain them.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever going to call a press conference and be like, ‘I lost a player because he went to his agent and said he wants more money in the portal, shopped his name around and got three offers,'” the GM said. “That’s called recruiting nowadays.”
From the agents’ perspective, it’s not really tampering or tortious interference when you’re talking about players on expiring one-year deals. The way they see it, their clients are well within their right to explore their options.
“I don’t even see why schools get mad about it,” one agent said. “If you don’t want your kid to be tampered with, sign them to an agreement that’s fair and the kid won’t be looking to go elsewhere.”
In other words, don’t sign the star athletes to one-year deals, hedge your bets on their development and sign them to a long-term contract? Am I reading that right? And how well does that work when the athlete decides to head somewhere else, anyway? It seems like buyouts from other programs are being tossed around in some of these stories, like Damon Wilson, but given that it seemed like no litigation actually started to move until a year later, I’m of the assumption that Georgia never got their money back. And who is supposed to regulate that if they can’t regulate tampering?
Pete Golding may have gotten one over on Kirby in the Sugar Bowl, but Kirby can confidently say Dabo never got one over on him quite like Swinney did here.
8 minutes of Dabo Swinney flaming Ole Miss for tampering with Clemson’s Luke Ferrelli
If you don’t have 8 minutes, the summary is essentially that Ole Miss was tampering and didn’t do it in a very discreet way. To make matters slimier, the agents involved tried to convince Clemson that if they doubled the athletes NIL deal, they’d give Clemson more information to burn Ole Miss with.
Clemson declined.
Never thought I’d say it, but I got some mad respect for Dabo Swinney doing what he can to save us from this bullshit era of college football.
Whatever you do, Dabo, don’t hold that Tiger. Let the hate flow through you.
Basically the transfers coming in to Georgia and even leaving rarely go down to a G5 school. This seems to suggest that Smart only takes in quality, impact transfers, but also speaks to the quality of guys he recruits who eventually opt to leave and head elsewhere. Most seem to head to other Power 4 programs, instead of heading down a level to get more playing time (or, presumably, money).
Not surprised to see Alabama and Ohio State there…but this warrants the question: what the hell is wrong with Clemson, I mean, aside from being Clemson?
