It seems silly to call a win by the defending national champion an “upset”, but what else is there? When the other team has been #1 all season and entered the tournament undefeated, an upset it is. The Bulldogs upset top-ranked Virginia 4-3 on Monday evening to advance to Tuesday’s national title against Texas in Tulsa, Okla.

The “middle of the lineup” came through for Georgia in the semifinals. The Dawgs dropped the doubles point to the nation’s top-rated doubles team but then got singles wins at #3, #2 and #5 to surge ahead. Virginia soon evened things up with wins at #1 and #6, but Jamie Hunt came from a set down at #4 to give Georgia the decisive win.

Georgia now finds themselves back in the position of the favorite as they prepare to defend their national title. The Dawgs beat Texas 4-2 in an indoor match back in February, but a lot can change in three months.

The rematch presents a couple of interesting storylines. First, there’s the opportunity to win back-to back titles. Though Georgia has five team NCAA titles to its credit (four outdoor, one indoor), they have yet to defend a title. Second is the doubles point. Texas has won that key point in its last six matches, but they dropped the doubles point in the earlier meeting with Georgia. The Dawgs showed against Virginia that losing the doubles point isn’t necessarily a death sentence, but it does leave very little margin for error in singles play.

The biggest storyline for the championship is the Texas connection to the Georgia program. Georgia #1 singles Travis Helgeson played at Texas before transferring to Georgia, and there does seem to be some bad blood or at least bitterness left over. Helgeson isn’t the first high-profile UGA transfer from Texas; Antonio Ruiz made the move in 2004. Ruiz went on to win the NCAA doubles championship with John Isner. Georgia’s Jamie Hunt, who clinched the Virginia match, is a Texas native.

The Dawgs and Longhorns will play for all the marbles Tuesday night at 7:00 on ESPNU.

Spring sports are wrapping up, and as usual the Dawgs are right in the thick of things.

• “Georgia junior Justin Gaymon clocked the world’s third-fastest time to win his second straight 400-meter hurdles title during the final day of the SEC Outdoor Championships in Auburn, Ala., on Sunday.”
• The men’s golf team “made a statement” with their convincing win at the NCAA Men’s East Regional.
• The tennis Dawgs swept Ole Miss to advance to the NCAA semifinals. Top-ranked Virgina awaits in a rematch of last year’s national semifinal.
• Georgia softball won the NCAA’s Chapel Hill Regional and will advance to a Super Regional later this month.
• Last, but not least, the baseball team opens postseason play at the SEC Tournament this Wednesday as the SEC champion and #1 seed despite dropping two of three to Alabama in the final series of the regular season.

New Blue Devil football coach David Cutcliffe isn’t going to take other Duke coaches kicking sand in his program’s face:

Probably the difficult thing was just some of the culture here as to how our facilities may have been a little disrespected in my mind.

I made a lot of people mad. I closed off our practice facility and had some cars towed from some other coaches that were parking where they weren’t supposed to be parking.

I made some enemies, but they found out real quick that we’re going to have a football program here that’s not going to be disrespected.

It would be interesting to hear what sport those coaches were from. I doubt anyone’s towing Steve Wojciechowski’s car. But if we’re not talking about basketball (or even Duke’s great lacrosse program), how bad are things with Duke football that someone from, say, volleyball thinks that the football parking lot is fair game?

You almost have to pity Gamecock delusion because, well, reality isn’t a very fun thing to consider. When a moment of clarity arrives for the Gamecock fan, it isn’t pretty.

This screed is what happens when a Gamecock reaches the breaking point. If you hadn’t noticed, it hasn’t been a very successful year all-around in Columbia (even by South Carolina standards).

You f#!king suck, man.

Here’s how your sorry ass stacks up in SEC conference play: football, 3-5; men’s basketball, 5-11; baseball (prior to the UT series), 13-14; softball, 8-18; women’s basketball, 4-10; volleyball, 7-13; men’s tennis, 1-10; and women’s tennis, 5-6. The only team, in fact, at the entire school with a winning SEC record is women’s soccer, which eked out a 5-4-2 record.

…Oh, you started off talking all kinds of s#!t. Conference championships in football. New recruits and transfers in basketball. Best infield in the nation in baseball and the program’s best-ever slugger. And yet, man did you ever fall on your face in front of everybody, over and over again, week after week, loss after loss.

With that sad existence as the alternative, it’s understandable that a certain level of rationalization and detachment is required to keep South Carolina fans from crying themselves to sleep each night.

The NCAA membership has maintained an odd duality when it comes to the 1-A football postseason. On one hand, they disclaim any role or even influence in the process that determines the BCS champion. True enough. On the other hand, the NCAA is granted some oversight such as the requirement that a team must win at least six games in order to accept a bowl invitation.

Why?

Though bowls started out as a tourist attraction, along the way we’ve attached the implication that a bowl bid is some kind of reward for which only certain teams should be eligible. If at their core the bowls are just business arrangements between teams, conferences, television, and organizers, why put restrictions on the participant pool? This restriction might mean that there won’t be enough teams to fill all of the bowls certified by the NCAA.

In any season there are several big-name teams who sit on the postseason sidelines. Even with a depressed or angry fan base, these teams might be more attractive in terms of attendance, name recognition, television appeal, and publicity for the bowl. You think a Notre Dame team even at 3-8 wouldn’t be a bigger draw for a lower-tier bowl than, say, Florida Atlantic?

It’s not like 6-6 or even 7-5 is a season for the books. If we’re going to keep this traditional, quirky, and great postseason based around bowls (and it looks as if we are), throw off the restrictions on the marketplace and let all teams regardless of record compete for a spot in these exhibition games.

I’ve put my two cents in about the one-and-done rule before, and I know it’s easy to tell David Stern and Myles Brand that the chickens have come home to roost.

But the NCAA isn’t the only party that “would rather have the money the Mayos of the world can generate.” Mayo and the people around him have been bad news since 2005, but Tim Floyd wasn’t about to return the present that was given to him in 2006. AD Mike Garrett didn’t step in, even in the wake of the Reggie Bush mess, to question the recruiting of a very shady player. Mayo was worth quite a bit of money to the Trojans also.

Our friends at the Atlanta Sports Council are at it again. They’ve already arranged for one Alabama game to be played in Atlanta against Clemson in 2008, and they’re currently working with Duke to move their 2010 home game with the Crimson Tide to the Georgia Dome. Outgoing Duke AD Joe Alleva is hopeful that the deal will get done, and new Duke coach David Cutcliffe is no newcomer to recruiting in Georgia.

The Sports Council is just doing its job by bringing a college game to the city, but it will be Alabama’s second regular season trip to Atlanta in three seasons. Hopefully they’ll get lots of experience for the Chick-fil-A Bowl instead of the SEC Championship.

In a move that should surprise no one, the ACC has decided not to add a ninth conference game. In the end, fears of additional losses and fewer bowl bids won out. The value of a bowl bid is more than money – there’s additional practice time, television and media exposure, and recruiting credibility. Remember that the next time the "too many bowls" argument comes up. The postseason club might let nearly anyone in the door these days, but there is still a definite inside and outside. Right, South Carolina?

It’s not a scenario exclusive to football. The basketball coaches likewise do not want to expand their conference schedule because bids to the NCAA Tournament can be hard to come by these days. Replacing two or four easier nonconference games with tougher games within the league isn’t likely to add to the win totals of marginal teams.

It is interesting to note that, in both cases, the postseason is driving the decision-making.

Terry Bowden commends the ACC for considering a 9-game conference schedule, and I agree with him.

If we’re going to keep the college football postseason unchanged, the one title a team has complete control over is its conference championship. Yet as conference expansion has pushed membership in several conferences from eight to twelve members, conference schedules in most cases haven’t grown in response. The PAC 10 and Big East are the only BCS conferences in which all teams play each other.

Playing eight out of ten or eleven other schools might seem good enough, but the quirks of scheduling can mean that a conference champion hasn’t necessarily played the best competition that the conference has to offer. Last season’s SEC champion, LSU, didn’t have to play Georgia. The 2006 ACC champion, Wake Forest, didn’t play Miami. Ohio State won the Big 10 in 2006 without playing Wisconsin. Georgia avoided a 10-2 Alabama team in 2005. It doesn’t always work out that way of course, but not all schedules within a particular conference are created equal.

While some schools have used the 12th game to improve their nonconference schedules, others have used them to pad the schedule with an additional easy home game (and given what gets rewarded in college football, I can’t blame them). It might be impossible to get nationwide consensus on tougher scheduling, but it is an issue that can be tackled conference by conference. Two of them have already done so, and the ACC is considering heading down that direction (along with an 18-game conference basketball schedule!). The occasional marquee nonconference game might seem like an appealing alternative, but there is still room on the schedule for those if a team is willing to give up some of its lighter fare.

Bowden’s money quote:

Isn’t it funny how protecting the integrity of the regular season is so dadgum important when it comes to a playoff, but it doesn’t mean squat when it comes to the teams we actually play?

Perfect…right down to the classic Bowden "dadgum".

Fresh on the heels of a basketball SEC tournament title and a gymnastics national title, the Georgia baseball team wrapped up the 2008 SEC championship on Sunday in dramatic fashion at Vanderbilt. Georgia jumped out to a 12-4 lead on Sunday but had to hold on before Joshua Fields closed the door for his 15th save of the year and a 12-10 win.

If there was a single play of the weekend, it came on Saturday. Georgia’s lifeless offense roared to life in the final two frames after going scoreless all day. They scored two in the ninth to force extra innings and then added two more in the top of the tenth. Fields was brought on to close the door, but he didn’t start out in his typical dominant fashion. Fields walked the first batter on four straight pitches and then threw three more balls to the second batter of the inning. Matt Olson then made a sliding catch on a David Macias bloop into shallow right field for the first out of the inning. If that ball had dropped, Vandy would have had two runners on with no outs and a shaky Fields on the mound. Instead Fields recovered to strike out two of the next three batters to even the series and make Sunday’s championship-clinching win possible.

When you look at a list of Georgia’s conference titles in baseball, there’s no question that these are the golden years for the program:

1933
1953
1954
2001
2004 (shared with Arkansas)
2008

The regular season isn’t finished yet. We have the annual battle at Turner Field against Georgia Tech on Tuesday. Though Tech has clinched the season series, a win against the Jackets would be very important if Georgia wants a leg to stand on when it comes time for postseason seeding. The SEC title is a big trump card to hold, but a season sweep at the hands of Tech wouldn’t look very good.

The Diamond Dawgs wrap up the regular season with a home series against Alabama this weekend. Postseason seeding is also an issue in this series (a few more SEC wins could never hurt), and Bama will have a lot to play for with a logjam atop the SEC West. Bama is just 1 1/2 games behind LSU in the West, but they’re only half a game out of fourth place.

It’s a strange question given the win-or-lose nature of sports: is the team with the best record the best team? In the context of a conference or league where teams play all or most of the others, that conclusion is more than reasonable. But in a division of hundreds of teams with at most 14 games for any one team the record becomes a less reliable indicator.

I ask this question in response to a question raised by Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops (hat tip as always to Get the Picture) about undefeated teams in a plus-one scenario.

"(The ‘plus-one’ is) a good scenario when there’s an odd number of teams with no losses or one loss," Stoops said last fall. "It doesn’t make sense in years like 2000 when we won a national championship and were the only team with no losses. Why should we have to beat all the one-loss teams?"

Stoops’ meaning is obvious: the record defines the quality of the team. Your first instinct is to agree with him. Oklahoma won all of their games, so why should some one-loss team get a pass for losing? And then you remember Utah or Hawaii. Both were undefeated (in the regular season anyway), but it’s hard to imagine June Jones or Urban Meyer making the case that they were above playing any of those inferior one-loss teams.

So record, even for teams playing at the same classification, can’t be an absolute indicator of superiority. Fine. It’s still accepted in our system that in most cases record trumps any other metric. Without an improbable Pittsburgh win over West Virginia, last year’s national champion would have never had the opportunity to play for the title. Why? LSU had two losses while Ohio State and West Virginia would have had just one. It didn’t matter that both LSU losses came in overtime to bowl-bound conference opponents. 1 is less than 2 or, in this case, greater than 2.

I don’t necessarily consider this reality a flaw in college football; after all, the point is to win games. Record is as close as we have to an objective measure for so many teams with relatively few points of comparison between them, but it isn’t a perfect indicator. We’ve tried to take that reality into account in the BCS whether it was the overt strength of schedule adjustment early on or the current built-in adjustments of the computer polls. Even human pollsters (consciously or otherwise) sometimes consider schedule in some rough form.

That brings us to Dennis Dodd who unfortunately captures a meme we’re going to hear a lot this preseason. One, Ohio State is good enough and has a favorable enough schedule to skate through a weak Big 10 and remain in the national title picture even with a loss to Southern Cal. Two, Georgia might be a great team, but their schedule is just too tough to expect them to come through unscathed. Agree or disagree with his analysis, but his conclusion makes sense when you look at things in the context of the pursuit of the unblemished record.

Ohio State could lose three games and be irrelevant in the title discussion, but that hasn’t been the way to bet lately. And if they do beat Southern Cal and run the table, I’ll be the first to welcome them to the BCS championship. The thing of it is that Dodd seems to be setting up his apology in advance for having to rank Ohio State near the top if they sweep the Big 10 schedule but lose to the Trojans. Given the way we decide things in college football, it’s an entirely reasonable approach.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Les Miles stuck his neck out last summer and made some pretty bold comments about LSU’s schedule relative to Southern Cal’s. But you know what? It worked. LSU was just one of a number of two-loss teams, but there they were at the end. Mark Richt hasn’t had to say a word about Georgia’s schedule; pundits like Dodd are doing the work for him. If Georgia survives its gauntlet, how can anyone using Dodd’s logic deny them a shot at the national title?

In a regular season of 162, 82, or even 30 games, the difference of one loss between two teams is insignificant. In a 12-game season, it’s a chasm. Not to turn everything into the scheduling debate (here we go again…), I’m left with this question: is it rational for a contender from a major conference to schedule challenging non-conference games? Why is Ohio State playing Southern Cal when a diet of mid-major schools from the state of Ohio would get the job done with less risk?

First, let’s get the good news out of the way. Georgia came out just fine in the APR numbers released on Tuesday. In fact, it was better than good: Georgia was among the SEC’s top three in football and men’s and women’s basketball. The football team led the SEC. Bottom line is that none of Georgia’s programs face sanctions, and it looks as if all programs have student-athletes making satisfactory progress towards graduation. Cool.

Now on to the SEC. All SEC football programs met the minimum APR requirements. Tennessee and South Carolina however did not meet requirements in men’s basketball, and it cost each a single scholarship for one season.

Nationwide, 17 Division I-A football programs will be penalized. Only two of those schools – Kansas and Washington State – were from BCS conferences. It makes sense when you think about it. Schools in conferences outside the BCS:

• Are often lower-quality colleges to begin with. Directional State is typically not going to be your state’s flagship of higher learning.
• Have to take risks in order to compete. A weaker program can get better in a hurry by taking a chance on an academic or character risk that the big boys can afford to pass over. If you’re taking more risks on marginal students, chances are it will come back to bite your APR score. I wonder if this point affected Kansas’ place among the penalized. Historically a weak program, Coach Mangino might have had to take some academic risks in order to raise the competitiveness of his team.
• Have less money to throw at academic resources. The $2.2 million Georgia spent at the Sugar Bowl could just about fund some smaller football programs. The large, typically public, schools that make up the BCS conferences invest quite a bit in keeping student-athletes eligible, and they would have the flexibility to do what it takes to raise dangerously low APRs. Huge well-organized tutoring programs, computers, dedicated facilities…these are all luxuries when most athletic departments struggle to break even.

Given those built-in disadvantages, it’s no shock that though the BCS conferences have over half of the Football Bowl Subdivision membership, they get a disproportionately low share of the APR penalties. The news isn’t much better on the basketball side of things. There are an awful lot of HBCUs on the list of penalized schools.

If further study determines that the APR does in fact make things much tougher for the little guy than for State U., don’t expect those schools to stay quiet about it for very long. And, just damn, hasn’t Temple suffered enough already?

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. San Jose State coach Dick Tomey was one of the first to beat the drum:

“There’s such a difference between the B.C.S. schools and those who are not,” Tomey said. “I don’t think it’s an intended difference, but it highlights financial things like not being able to throw money at the problem and solve it very quickly.”

WAC commissioner Karl Benson also spoke up for the non-BCS conferences.

“When the A.P.R. first was introduced, I think all of our schools took it to heart and put in plans to face it and to fight it,” said Karl Benson, the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference. “But I know that we may not have had the same resources that others have had.”

Consider the news that has come out of Georgia Tech in the past two days:

• First, the cause of the tragic death of baseball pitcher Michael Hutts was determined to be “accidental morphine toxicity.” In other words he overdosed, though the exact drug is not known yet.
• Former star quarterback Joe Hamilton was hired by the football program less than two weeks ago as assistant director of player personnel. Monday night he was arrested for “marijuana possession, driving under the influence of alcohol and hit-and-run” near the Tech campus.
• The AJC contrasts Tech’s drug testing policy with Georgia’s. Though there is no reason to doubt the integrity of Tech’s testing program, it looks weak next to Georgia’s.
  

  Punishment is quick and sure for athletes who fail a drug test at the University of Georgia. They’re suspended from competition. They’re ordered to perform 20 hours of community service. They’re required to pass two more drug screens before playing again.

  A third failed test? Permanent banishment.

  At Georgia Tech, a failed drug test sends an athlete to counseling. Three failures warrant a one-year suspension, but with the chance of returning — even, conceivably, for an athlete who fails more drug tests in the meantime.

Add three stories of such magnitude in such a short time frame, and Dan Radakovich has a certified headache on his hands. Whether any of the incidents were isolated won’t matter much. There will be editorials and increased scrutiny on Tech’s testing and hiring policies. That’s just the way the media works. Trust us. Some high-profile student deaths and arrests in Athens led to a campus-wide crackdown on student drinking and institutionalized penalties for student-athletes arrested for alcohol-related incidents.

Radakovich will likely feel some pressure to take action as the athletic program is hit with its biggest black eye since the academic scandal of 2005. Georgia’s president spearheaded its reaction, but Tech’s outstanding president Wayne Clough will be stepping down at the end of June. I expect Tech’s athletic director to be in the spotlight during this ongoing story.

Every time a new bowl game is introduced, someone feels the need to weep for the state of the college football bowl game and shout, "ENOUGH!"

In 1901, the young Tournament of Roses thought that a football game might enhance interest in its mid-winter festival. So Michigan came out west on New Year’s Day 1902, ran it up on Stanford, and football was dropped in favor of "Roman-style chariot races" until our great game got another shot in 1916.

There was no ESPN or BCS involved with the first Rose Bowl, but from the very beginning bowl games have been business relationships between local entities or sponsors and a pair of college football teams. They were not created to reward teams for a great season. Stanford was 3-1-2 heading into the first Rose Bowl. They were not created with deciding a national championship in mind.

Complexities have been added. Television, corporate sponsors, and conferences now all conspire to shoehorn a championship process into this loose network of exhibition games. But at their cores the nature of bowl games hasn’t changed in 106 years. We have bowl games because they work as business and civic deals. Some didn’t, and so we no longer have the Bluebonnet Bowl (among others).

Now that air travel is relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous and television networks seem to have no shortage of programming slots, the barriers to entry are getting lower and lower to the point where $350,000 might get you the title sponsorship of a new bowl. Someone’s going watch, and it beats Roman-style chariot races, poker, or whatever alternative programming they’d show otherwise. I even question the qualification that you must have a winning record. If Auburn wnt 3-8, they’d probably still draw enough interest and fans to a small market bowl game.

I’ve said it before…bring on more bowls.

Back I December I mentioned ESPNU’s Campus Connections program where students at various schools would help to produce coverage of sporting events at those schools. It’s Georgia turn, and Saturday’s 3:00 baseball game against Ole Miss will be on ESPNU with the involvement of 13 University of Georgia students.

A crew of 13 Georgia journalism students will serve in a variety of production roles for this game. Three of the school’s students will appear on air – one as an announcer (joining ESPNU’s Dave Ryan, Kyle Peterson and Melissa Knowles) and two as reporters. The others will serve in a number of other technical job functions, including game producer, stage manager and camera operator.