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Thursday, June 28, 2007

Good Job(a)!

I figured if I gave Alex Gordon some props, I better do the same for fellow former Northeast Rocket Joba Chamberlain.

This comes from an ESPN Fantasy Baseball Update:

Joba Chamberlain, RHP, NYY: A 6-foot-3, 225-pounder, Chamberlain is a 2006 draft pick who fell to the 44th overall pick last season because many teams were concerned about his physique and health. He has a pretty amazing story to tell. Putting it bluntly, Chamberlain was a chunky kid in high school, who didn't play a lick of baseball until his senior year. He got serious about conditioning, went to a junior college and went 3-6 with a 5.23 ERA. The coaches at the University of Nebraska got a look at his fastball and recruited him. He then developed into a monster, leading the Huskers to the College World Series in 2005 with teammate Alex Gordon (Royals). This season, Chamberlain has been clocked at 98 mph, and he demolished the Florida State League to get a quick promotion to Double-A. Chamberlain also has a plus slider, a solid curve, and an improving changeup. The Yankees laud his work ethic and competitiveness. Let's look at the numbers: He had a 2.03 ERA in high Class A, allowing 25 hits (no homers) in 40 innings with a 51/11 K/BB rate. Since moving to Double-A, Chamberlain has a 26/6 K/BB rate in 16.2 innings, allowing 11 hits (one homer) with a 3.24 ERA. Chamberlain could be better than Philip Hughes. I expect Hughes and Chamberlain to be battling for Yankees ace honors in a year or three.
Yankees ace? I'm only slightly impressed by that.

Nebraska and Home Field Advantage


An interesting take on the concept of home field advantage at The Straight Dope of all places. The Straight Dope is a question and answer site run by Psuedonymous columnist Cecil Adams. If you have a question about just about anything, chances are The Straight Dope have attempted an answer.

Regarding home field advantage (HFA), The Straight Dope says:
What explains HFA? Several possibilities are often cited, including familiarity with home turf, no travel stress, and what football fans call "the 12th man," the home crowd. But establishing what's most important isn't easy. Take familiarity — one study of 7 baseball, 17 basketball, and 13 hockey teams that moved to new stadiums (without changing cities) between October 1987 and April 2001 showed a significant reduction in HFA in the season following the move. However, other studies purport to show that MLB teams do better in a new stadium. One clear-cut case of HFA arising from venue familiarity is the Colorado Rockies, who consistently display the largest differential between home and away records of any MLB team. All agree that's because only the Rockies are acclimated to high-altitude Coors Field.

Crowd effects are easier to demonstrate, at least in some sports. A study of more than 5,000 English soccer matches found that teams scored an average of 1.5 goals at home vs only 1.1 on the road, with the difference growing by 0.1 goals per 10,000 spectators. The researchers attribute this to cowed refs' giving the visitors more penalties. Schwartz and Barsky thought crowd effects explained why HFA for baseball and football was lower than for hockey (in the 70s anyway) and basketball — the latter two sports are invariably played indoors, where the noise is more intense. Travel stress is probably a minor factor, since HFA persists even among teams that are geographically close.
Whatever the reason, a home field advantage certainly exists in Lincoln.

  • Nebraska was 7-1 at home in 2006 and has won at least six home games in 17 of the past 19 seasons.

  • Nebraska is 116-11 at home in the last 18 seasons (since 1989), including a pair of losses against teams that went on to win the national championship–Colorado in 1990 and Washington in 1991.

  • Since 1986, only seven different schools have left Memorial Stadium with a victory (Colorado, Kansas State, Oklahoma, Southern Miss., Texas, Texas Tech, Washington).

  • During Nebraska’s run of success at home in the past 25 years, Nebraska has had three home winning streaks of 20 or more games.

  • Nebraska had a school-record 47-game home winning streak from 1991 to 1998, a 26-game home streak from 1998 to 2002 and a 21-game win streak in the early 1980s.

  • Nebraska has not been shut out at home since a 12-0 loss to Kansas State in 1968 (245 games), and has posted 40 unbeaten and untied home seasons.

  • All-time Nebraska is 481-129-20 (.779, 630 games, 117 years) in Lincoln.

  • The Huskers are 356-106-13 (.763, 475 games, 84 years) in Memorial Stadium (since 1923).
  • Tuesday, June 26, 2007

    Quick Hits

    · Maurice Purify is officially facing a July 18th trial for all of the charges related to his infamous barroom brawl. I have no idea how the trial will play out, but I would be shocked to see Purify suit up before September 15. Does he have the mental makeup to stay in shape and out of trouble?

    · The Huskers had a big recruiting weekend corralling linebackers Doug Rippy, and Shaun Mohler. Both of these guys seem like players on paper and fill a huge need for the ’08 class. Nebraska also added a much needed tight end in Tyson Hetzer a 6-foot-7 project from Redding, CA. I’m happy to see a TE, but I have to admit I’m not 100% in love with his high school coach’s tone:
    “He's a big boy with a body a coach would love," Hare said, "but when Tyson was here, he was unbelievably stiff. If you could get his motor running, he would run some people over. It didn't always happen. But when he did get open, he would catch the ball.”
    · Neil Barduson of The Football Experts believes that the entire Big 12 is overrated.
    “The only team in the Big 12 that has the chance to make the national title game is Texas, which they are in the back of the pack of national title contenders. Other than Texas, the Big Twelve consists of average football teams. Oklahoma had Adrian Peterson and a supposedly great defense last year, yet lost to Boise State. Texas A&M will be as good as they have been in a while and could even pull out the Big 12 championship. As far as the North goes, all of the teams are not good as they once were. Colorado does not have players or coaches they once had. Kansas State is improving, under coach Prince, but need more time. Nebraska is getting better and has potential to win the Big 12 this year. However, I think the 8th best team in the S.E.C (Alabama), the sixth best team in the Big Ten (Iowa), sixth best team in the Pac – 10 (Arizona), heck even the fourth best team in the Big East (South Florida) could all beat every team in the Big 12 besides Texas.”
    I’m not even going to bother with a response. Except for that Neil Barduson is totally overrated.

    · The Big Red Network is continuing their never-ending quest to persuade us that all 22 positions on the field are the key to Nebraska’s success. The most recent version focused on the WRs. I’m eagerly awaiting a flashback to the work of David Seizys and a treatise on the importance of the holder on FG attempts. Just kidding guys.

    Thursday, June 21, 2007

    Ranking the Coaches Based on...Um, Coaching

    I'm sure many of you remember Tom Dienhart's attempt at ranking all of the BCS coaches. Like most of Dienhart's columns the piece seemed to be based on little other than personal opinion. That's fine as he gets paid to have an opinion, but there had to be a more scientific approach to the endeavor.

    Well, it turns out there was a better approach, like the one taken by LD at the The Corporate Headquarters of the San Antonio Gunslingers.

    LD based his rankings on several key factors:

    Longevity
    National Titles
    Conference Titles
    Winning Percentage
    Winning Percentage As Against School's Historic Winning Percentage

    I've said it before, but this is another example of how the mainstream media gets outdone by bloggers. Anyway, you can see the spreadsheet of LD's rankings here.

    Here are some of LD's comments related to Nebraska and Bill Callahan
    Winning Percentage As Against School's Historic Winning Percentage:

    Biggest upgrade by Dienhart from where a coach would be rated by this objective category: Bill Callahan (from 50th up to 21st).

    Coaches upgraded by Dienhart by more than 10 spots (my guess at a reason, and here I don't consider a bad program as a good reason since it's already accounted for): Hawkins (small sample), Bobby Johnson (???), Bill Callahan (???), Mark Mangino (???), Greg Schiano (???), Jim Leavitt (Shouldn't be listed here - he's the only coach at the program, so his comparison to history is neutral), Houston Nutt (???), Lloyd Carr (title), Kirk Ferentz (???), Tom O'Brien (???), Tommy Tuberville (???, near-title?), Frank Beamer (longevity), Nick Saban (title), Mack Brown (title), Rich Rodriguez (???), Jim Tressel (title).

    Looking at the various objective criteria, I think Dienhart overrates and underrates a few coaches, based upon their accomplishments.

    OVERRATED: Mark Mangino, Bill Callahan, Bobby Johnson, Rich Rodriguez, Kirk Ferentz, Tom O'Brien.

    UNDERRATED: Phil Fulmer, Ralph Friedgen, Mark Richt, Charlie Weis, Jeff Tedford, Les Miles, Tommy Bowden, Bret Bielema, Tyrone Willingham, Karl Dorrell, Bill Doba.

    A few more specific nits to pick considering all the categories discussed:

    Houston Nutt at #20 isn't defensible. Guys behind him that best or equal him in every category: Tedford, Richt, Leach, Friedgen, Fulmer, Tiller, Bielema, Miles. Nutt's objective rankings put him right in line with Tommy Bowden, whom Dienhart ranks 47th (though, arguably he shouldn't be that low).
    Matt at Statistically Speaking also introduced another variable into attempts at rating coaches. He created a formula that looks like this:
    Win % Last Season (50%) + Win % 2 Yrs Ago (20%) + Win % 3 Yrs Ago (10%) + .500 (20%)

    The four components are winning percentage for the previous three seasons; with each season decreasing in importance as the distance from the current season increases and the final component is a winning percentage of .500 as teams tend to trend towards .500. Including this component ensures we don’t penalize coaches coming off undefeated seasons because improving upon a 100% winning percentage is impossible. Additionally, we don’t reward coaches who go winless because we assume they will improve at least marginally. Next we just subtract the team’s expected winning percentage from their actual winning percentage. This number is the coach’s rating.
    Here are the best and worst coaches in each conference according to Matt's formula:

    Best

    ACC
    Jim Grobe (Wake Forest) +.389

    Big East
    Greg Schiano (Rutgers) +.340

    Big 10
    Bret Bielema (Wisconsin) +.235

    Big 12
    Dennis Franchione (Texas A&M) +.215

    Pac 10
    Mike Riley (Oregon State) +.208

    SEC
    Rich Brooks (Kentucky) +.309

    Conference USA
    Todd Graham (Rice) +.296

    MAC
    Frank Solich (Ohio) +.271

    Mountain West
    Bronco Mendenhall (BYU) +.372

    Sun Belt
    Larry Blakeney (Troy) +.166

    WAC
    Dick Tomey (San Jose State) +.392

    Worst

    ACC
    Chuck Amato (NC State) -.294

    Big East
    Randy Edsall (Connecticut) -.203

    Big 10
    Pat Fitzgerald (Northwestern) -.205

    Big 12
    Dan Hawkins (Colorado) -.367

    Pac 10
    Walt Harris (Stanford) -.354

    SEC
    Mike Shula (Alabama) -.185

    Conference USA
    Tommy West (Memphis) -.427

    MAC
    Shane Montgomery (Miami, Ohio) -.467

    Mountain West
    Chuck Long (San Diego State) -.181

    Sun Belt
    Darrell Dickey (North Texas) -.127

    WAC
    Jack Bicknell (Louisiana Tech) -.329

    Obviously neither of these systems is perfect, but they have to be better attempts than what Dienhart and most pundits provide.

    Tuesday, June 19, 2007

    Alex Gordon is Good

    Not football related, but...

    Check out this amazing play by former Lincolnite (and Southeast Knight)Alex Gordon in KC. MLB hates on the YouTubes, so you'll have to follow the link to see it.

    Pound the Rock - 2006 Rushing Highlights

    SportsCenter Just Seems Irrelevant

    I don't know what brought this about, but I was thinking today that I just don't pay attention to SportsCenter anymore. I have no idea when that happened.

    It reminds me of an anecdote about the Manning family that I once read in GQ. The story focused on the family's crazed sports fandom. At one point it noted that Cooper, who was forced to leave football and get a "real job" was able to pinpoint the first day that passed in which he failed to catch SportsCenter.

    In my case, I don't think I can point to the last time I actually watched SportsCenter from start to finish. I guess at some point I decided I didn't need somebody in Bristol to tell me what the day's most important sports story was. When I'm looking for information now, I'll always turn first to the blogosphere.

    Or it might be because the last few times I watched SportsCenter it looked exactly like what is depicted below (Not entirely safe for work).



    HT for the video - Texas Tech Blog Disco Tech!

    Thursday, June 14, 2007

    Go Read This...

    SMQ's Reasonably Anticipatory Assessment of Nebraska is up. It is spot on as usual. Go there now.

    More on Mo P. - From the Comments

    I heard on the 1480 A M talk show from a caller "Mo had 34 rec's and 29 first downs". Can this be right??

    That will be tough to replace!!
    oldtennisbum | 06.14.07 - 1:27 pm | #

    According to my data:

    Of Purify's 34 catches...

    30 went for either a first down or a touchdown.
    23 gained 10+ yards
    14 gained 20+ yards
    6 gained 30+ yards
    2 gained 40+ yards
    1 resulted in a defensive pass interference penalty of 2 yards (half the distance to the goal).

    Of his four catches that did not result in a first down or TD...

    All 4 resulted in 8 yard gains.

    They set up down and distance situations of:

    2nd & 2
    3rd & 5
    3rd & 1
    3rd & 1

    Some Thoughts on Maurice Purify

    I wasn’t really planning on touching on the Maurice Purify situation, but someone asked my thoughts, so I’ll oblige.

    First off, I don’t know Maurice Purify. My outside perception of him is colored by glimpses of incredible talent and news reports of legal transgressions. He’s lived a lot of his life outside of my view and there is always danger in lending too much credence to too few data points.

    Rather than a vast narrative that bores us all, I thought I’d instead take a look at some of the key arguments involved.

    One arrest was bad enough, but two is surely a sign that Mo is a “bad seed,” and Nebraska needs to cut its losses.

    The stance you take on this particular issue could tell you a lot about your view of human nature. Were the personal fouls Purify collected last season an early warning sign? Or are the penalties, the first arrest and the second arrest all isolated, random occurrences?

    This is reminiscent of the fable of The Scorpion and the Frog. In this story a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid to be stung, but the scorpion reassures him that they would both die if that happened. The frog then agrees. Nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings the frog and tells him that it is his nature to do so.

    How much can person suppress his or her true self? How confident should any of us be in making that kind of judgment about someone else? Ultimately, Purify’s fate appears to lie in Callahan’s hands. But in some ways, all of us with a vested interest in Nebraska football wind up playing the role of the frog. We’ve been stung before.

    Purify drinks too much and/or has a problem with alcohol

    This one definitely involves taking a thin slice of Mo’s behavior and its associated consequences. And in the interest of full-disclosure…I drink. I drink heavily at times. I’ve driven when I shouldn’t have driven. I’ve never been cited, detained or arrested for anything (knocking on wood as I type this).

    It’s easy to defend drinking in college as just drinking in college. A 1999 Harvard study indicated that 44% of college students engage in binge drinking. We also know that most binge drinkers change their habits after graduation. As a result, most college students are not and do not become alcoholics. But realistically some do or will have problems associated with alcohol. How can we tell which ones? Well, we could all sit around and count the number of drinks they consume and if they drink “a lot” we can place them in the “alcoholic” category. Or we could take a more behavioral approach and base the decision not on how much they drink, but instead on the consequences of their drinking. From this perspective we can conclude a person has a drinking problem if their consumption of alcohol has led to significant personal, social or legal repercussions. I think you can probably see where I’m going with this.

    Thus, if we conclude that Mo has problems with alcohol does this change your decision about his status with the team? If he enters, completes and sustains treatment a common denominator associated with his offenses has been removed. How does this affect his “true self?”

    Purify is just another criminal athlete

    Athletes do commit crimes, this much is unmistakable. Some findings even indicate they do so at higher rates than the regular college student body.

    ABC News:
    "The Benedict-Crosset Study of sexual assaults at 30 major Division I universities over a three-year period in the 1990s concludes that "male college student athletes, compared to the rest of the male population, are responsible for a significantly higher percentage of sexual assaults reported to judicial affairs on the campuses of Division I institutions."
    There are several hypotheses that attempt to explain this.

    ABC News:
    "There is a mentality among athletes that 'we can get away with this, that no one is going to challenge us because we are student athletes,'" said Richard Lapchick, professor at the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

    "They are given star status at 17, 18 and 19 years old," said UC Berkeley sociology professor Harry Edwards. "That is unprecedented."

    "They feel like they are gods, they can do anything," Pollack said. "They lose touch and sometimes they get lubricated with alcohol and women become a prize."
    Or maybe their crimes would be better placed in a larger context.

    Lapchick:
    According to an extensive Los Angeles Times survey of athletes and crime committed in 1995, a total of 22 athletes and three coaches were accused of a drug-related crime in 1995. That means that, on average, we read about a new sports figure with a drug problem every two weeks! Anecdotally, those numbers have seemed continue in succeeding years. Each new story reinforces the image from the last one.

    Their stories are and surely should be disturbing. But those stories are rarely, if ever, put in the context of the 1.9 million Americans who use cocaine each month or the 2.1 million who use heroin throughout their lives. A total of 13 million or a staggering 6 percent of the American population use some illicit drug each month! When you look at the 18-25 male age group in general, the percentage leaps to 17 percent. Twenty-two athletes represent a small fraction of a single percent of the more than 400,000 who play college and pro sport in America.

    In the same Los Angeles Times survey, 28 athletes and 4 coaches had charges related to alcohol. None of these 32 cases were put in the context of the 13 million Americans who engage in binge drinking at least 5 times per month. Yet we read about a new athlete with an alcohol problem every 11 days. Such images can surely create a building sense of problems in athletics if they are not viewed in the context of society.
    Athletes can’t separate the violence of the playing field from their everyday life.

    ABC News:
    "We have to be careful about sending a message to young boys in particular about toughness and how important it is," Roby says, "because it's going to lead them to make decisions that are going to result in them doing some things that society is going to say, 'How the heck could that ever happen?'"
    Lapchick:
    "We are getting athletes who have fights during games, in bars and on campus. Is there a link between the violence of a sport and one's actions away from that sport? There is certainly a growing body of public opinion that assumes that; media reports regularly imply that the violence of sport makes its participants more violent in society.

    Are sports any more violent today than 20 years ago when no one would have made such an assertion? Or is it the fact that our streets and our schools surely are more violent. According to the National Education Association, there are 2,000 assaults in our schools every hour of every day! It is an ugly phenomenon that is neither bound by race, class, geography, nor by athlete vs. non-athlete."
    Overall, I don’t really know which side I come down on the issue of crime and athletes. Clearly it looks like a problem. But the bottom line remains, most athletes don’t engage in criminal activities. When they do, however, you can bet that you will hear about it.

    Our attitudes are influenced by the athlete’s race

    I hate to even mention race, but there is far too much evidence from social psychology to ignore the influence of race on our perceptions.

    Lapchick:
    “According to the National Opinion Research Center Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation for the University of Chicago, whites share the following attitudes:

    56 percent of whites think African-Americans are more violent
    62 percent think African-Americans are not as hard working as whites
    77 percent of whites think most African-Americans live off welfare
    53 percent think African-Americans are less intelligent

    Sport as it is currently being interpreted, now provides whites with the chance to talk about athletes in a way that reinforces those stereotypes about African-Americans. With African-Americans dominating the sports we watch most often (77 percent of the players in the NBA, 65 percent in the NFL, 15 percent in Major League Baseball (another 25 percent are Latino) 57 percent in NCAA Division I basketball and 47 percent in NCAA Division IA football are African-American), whites tend to "think black" when they think about the major sports.

    I spoke at an elite university four years ago to 25 career diplomats. I asked them to write down five words they would use to describe American athletes.

    Not one missed including one of these words:

    dumb
    violent
    rapist
    drug-user

    That was a distinguished group of international leaders who had such assumptions impressed on them by reading the American sports pages for just one year.”
    New York Times:
    Experiments conducted by Elizabeth Phelps who teaches psychology at New York University, combine brain scans with a behavioral test known as the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., as well as physiological tests of the startle reflex. The I.A.T. flashes pictures of black and white faces at you and asks you to associate various adjectives with the faces. Repeated tests have shown that white subjects take longer to respond when they’re asked to associate black faces with positive adjectives and white faces with
    negative adjectives than vice versa, and this is said to be an implicit measure of unconscious racism.

    Phelps and her colleagues added neurological evidence to this insight by scanning the brains and testing the startle reflexes of white undergraduates at Yale before they took the I.A.T. She found that the subjects who showed the most unconscious bias on the I.A.T. also had the highest activation in their amygdalas — a center of threat perception — when unfamiliar black faces were flashed at them in the scanner. By contrast, when subjects were shown pictures of familiar black and white figures — like Denzel Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and Conan O’Brien — there was no jump in amygdala activity.
    Scary stuff that puts an interesting persepctive on things. Overall, I’m just glad that I’m not saddled with the decision of what happens to Maurice Purify. There are a lot of variables tangled in his recent offenses. It’s okay to have an opinion about how Purify should be treated. I hope that it will be an informed one. And remember whatever standards you set for others, you must be willing to live up to yourself.

    Work in Progress...

    Someone asked me to write something about the Purify situation. Apparently trying to determine whether Nebraska could live without his production doesn't count as a legitimate stance on the issue. Anyway, I'm working on it and should have it up by sometime Thursday.

    Monday, June 11, 2007

    1983 Nebraska - Oklahoma Highlights

    Part I



    Part II



    Another classic Nebraska YouTube find. What a great way to catch some highlights of our amazing football past. You'll really want to notice the diversity of Osborne's offense. Its complexity is almost always overlooked.

    Friday, June 08, 2007

    SDPI - Another Interesting Statistical Variable

    In my continuing quest to continue to help bring college football into the Moneyball era I've run across another interesting football statistic. This one comes to you from the fine work of Statistically Speaking.

    This variable is the Standard Deviation Power Index. This index originates from Eddie Epstein’s book Dominance. It focuses solely on conference play and looks at a team's points scored and allowed relative to the league average and standard deviation.

    Statistically Speaking later provides an example of how SDPI is calculated:
    The mean points scored and allowed for all ACC teams in conference play (championship game not included) was 162 points. The standard deviation for points scored was 35.97. The standard deviation for points allowed was 51.18. Coastal Division champ Georgia Tech scored 213 and allowed 155 points. Georgia Tech’s offensive SDPI was 1.42 = ([213-162]/35.97). Their defensive SDPI was .14 = ([162-155]/51.18). Their total SDPI was 1.55 (not 1.56 because the other two were rounded). In the 2006 ACC, that was good for third best.
    As part of his SDPI project, Statistically Speaking broke down the conferences in a historical manner. He examined the Big 12 from 1998-2006. This is what Nebraska's SDPI looks like in graphical form for those particular years.



    This is what he had to say about Nebraska's historical SDPI in the Big 12.
    Frank Solich kept the Huskers near the top of the college football world (though not quite the heights reached under Tom Osborne) for four seasons. The wheels came off in 2002, but Solich seemed to reverse the teams trajectory in 2003 before being fired despite a 10-3 record. Bill Callahan took over in 2005 and promptly guided the Huskers to their first losing season since 1961. The Huskers improved and were an average team in 2005. They improved yet again in 2006 and may be on their way to recovering their place in the Big 12 pecking order.

    First Place SDPI Finishes: 2000
    You'll first want to keep in mind, the SDPI does not adjust for schedule strength for conferences such as the Big 12 where each team does not play each other and it ignores special teams which can play a significant role in both points scored and points allowed. However, this seems again like an interesting statistic that appears to correlate with performance at least to some degree.

    I just wanted to introduce it to you today. I plan on getting into at a deeper level in the future.

    Erin Andrews Picture of the Week


    Have I mentioned that teaching summer courses blows? The pace is ridiculous and I actually feel sorry for my students. Anyway, does anyone find the Google Reader links useful? I spend a ton of time on mine so I figured I would just start sharing interesting finds with Nebraska fans.

    Wednesday, June 06, 2007

    Sick Bobby Newcombe Punt Return



    Anyone else notice how he caught that ball? When was our last punt return for a TD? Groce vs. Texas 2002?

    Monday, June 04, 2007

    Most Hated Coach?

    The Shreveport Times ran an article Sunday discussing some of the most hated coaches in the SEC. The piece includes the normal cast of SEC characters like Steve Spurrier and Nick Saban, who are seemingly hated by fans of every team but their own. In a side-box accompanying the article, however, the writer included his Top 5 most hated coaches in all of CFB. Here was his list:

    1. Charlie Weis, Notre Dame. Coaching the Irish usually gets you on the list, Weis' NFL smugness assures his spot.

    2. Steve Spurrier, South Carolina. The job may have changed but ask Tennessee folks how they feel about Spurrier.

    3. Nick Saban, Alabama. Auburn and LSU fans are united on this front and his salary makes him a target for the rest of the college football world.

    4. Bob Stoops, Oklahoma. A former Spurrier assistant, the Sooners coach has some smugness of his own.

    5. Bill Callahan, Nebraska. Until he has big-time college success, Callahan's NFL attitude comes off as arrogance.

    I don’t really know what to make of the list, and I’m honestly a little surprised to see Cally included. But I’ll come back to that. First things first, I can’t possibly rank anyone any higher than Spurrier. I do, however, believe Weis deserves a spot, simply for failing to wipe his nose during games. I don’t care how deep in thought he might be, how can he ignore the drainage that is pooling on above his upper lip?

    Saban is a given as well. He screams used car salesman, no matter how hard the book The Blind Slide tries to depict him as a charming gentleman.

    Stoops is no surprise either. Early on his sideline demeanor seemed as though he OU would never lose under his command. He also wears a visor. See Spurrier, Steve.

    Then we come to our own head guy, Callahan. I honestly figured most of the hatred directed at him came from Nebraska, Oakland, or the Big 12. I didn’t realize his arrogance had gone nationwide. Although I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean I did spend a good part of my Friday night at a blues bar defending Callahan to an OU fan who is convinced we have the wrong guy running our team. I tried to remind him that we already had our Gary Gibbs in Solich, and that Callahan was certainly better than Howard Schnellenberger, but he wasn’t buying it.

    But honestly am I just to close to see this. Is our coach really as hated as the rest of that list? Does it bother us? Should it bother us? Is this what it is like to have J.J. Redick on your team?