$9.95 worth every penny

[LTtxfan 49309]

smdh

[closetojumping 62763]

10 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

smdh

I would viciously carve out every one of your hearts on this board with a plastic spork for the chance to have Urban Meyer take a crack at fixing this program after Seven Loss Steve is kicked to the curb following the 2024 season. 

[BurntOrange&White 39934]

12 minutes ago, closetojumping said:

I would viciously carve out every one of your hearts on this board with a plastic spork for the chance to have Urban Meyer take a crack at fixing this program after Seven Loss Steve is kicked to the curb following the 2024 season. 

Same. I’d just really like to see it for all the “win the right way” crowd put on a spot by celebrating a national title or sticking to their morals. 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Social Media's gonna love this... 😋 

 

Urban Meyer news: FOX Sports' push for return faces 'internal opposition,' per report

https://247sports.com/Article/Urban-Meyer-news-FOX-Sports-push-for-return-faces-internal-opposition-per-report-187165868/ 

 

 

Edited May 5, 2022 by LTtxfan

[MonkeyDoughnut 10328]

3 minutes ago, LTtxfan said:

Social Media's gonna love this... 😋 

 

The "internal opposition at Fox":

Seems like a win-win to me.

[Hiphopopotamos 20876]

48 minutes ago, BurntOrange&White said:

Same. I’d just really like to see it for all the “win the right way” crowd put on a spot by celebrating a national title or sticking to their morals. 

I'd be curious to see how well his 'tyranny' style of coaching would work in an era of college football where stars can tell their coaches to fuck off because they can transfer and play immediately elsewhere - all while earning millions of dollars from NIL.

Edited May 5, 2022 by Hiphopopotamos

[Chooky 13317]

6 hours ago, closetojumping said:

I would viciously carve out every one of your hearts on this board with a plastic spork for the chance to have Urban Meyer take a crack at fixing this program after Seven Loss Steve is kicked to the curb following the 2024 season. 

It'd be a disaster because his next college job is where their craziness is going to spill out completely. There'll be videos of him asking students to smell his finger. Then Shelly will create a scandal for biting a monkey and shitting in Urban's bed. Then more videos of Urban asking students to smell the bed. Then we'll panic hire Houston Nutt.

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Saturday Down South

If Texas and Oklahoma join the SEC in 2023, here are 7 things that would be impacted

Connor O'Gara | 2 days ago

Quote

The cause and effect of conference realignment is back and better than ever.

Of course, last summer when Oklahoma and Texas stunned the college football world with their move to the SEC, The Alliance happened in an effort to not be bullied by the SEC with future big-picture negotiations. Instead of seeing the Playoff expand from 4 to 12 teams, The Alliance nixed that possibility for the near future.

On Tuesday, Action Network’s Brett McMurphy reported another potentially significant cause and effect. The Big 12 could be adding Cincinnati, Houston and UCF as soon as 2023 if they can reach a settlement to leave the AAC.

Remember, independent BYU is also set to join the Big 12 in 2023.

It’s possible that Oklahoma and Texas stay in the Big 12 through the 2024 season, as is currently scheduled per their agreement. The Big 12 would just have a strange, 2-year scheduling model that would need to be changed immediately after Oklahoma and Texas head to the SEC after the 2024 season. If that’s the scenario, the Big 12 would have 14 teams in 2023 and 2024.

But what’s also possible is the new Big 12 is born. Oklahoma and Texas could negotiate buyouts with the Big 12, and we could see both teams enter the SEC in 2023.

If that scenario plays out, here are 7 impacts of that.

1. The Texas-Alabama game in 2023 would be __________.

I’m guessing it would still be played, but it would be treated as a nonconference game. Canceling it doesn’t make sense because by then, Alabama will have already played against Texas; they meet in Week 2 this season. We don’t know what future divisions would look like, so there is the possibility that this matchup would be played as a conference game. But it was scheduled as a home-and-home nonconference series, so any tweak on that would go against the contract that both teams agreed on.

In all likelihood, we’ll get Nick Saban vs. Steve Sarkisian Part II. Depending on how much hype Texas has entering 2023 — my guess is top-10 buzz — it’ll be Sark’s highly anticipated return to Tuscaloosa.

2. The Oklahoma-Georgia game in 2023 would be __________.

Potentially canceled. You see, this series is different because unlike Texas-Alabama, 2023 is the beginning of the series. Alternatively, you could also treat this series as a nonconference matchup. Where it gets messy is if Oklahoma and Georgia are in the same pod/division. Geographically, that doesn’t make sense, but hey, Mizzou spent a decade in the SEC East so how much does that really matter?

The 2017 Rose Bowl rematch is scheduled to be played in Norman in 2023. But interestingly, it isn’t set to return to Georgia for the other half of the home-and-home until 2031. That might mean both matchups are treated as nonconference games if they’re played at all.

Also keep in mind that Oklahoma is set to face Tennessee in 2024. The Josh Heupel Bowl could also keep its nonconference tag and be played as scheduled. Remember that we still don’t know how many conference games the SEC would play when Oklahoma and Texas join the league. If that number stays at 8, we’d see Oklahoma and Texas have to add another nonconference matchup to their future schedules for as early as 2023 (they currently play a 9-game conference slate in the Big 12).

3. An A&M-Texas matchup would finally be on the calendar

Speaking of juicy matchups, A&M and Texas will finally be forced back into a matchup. Divisions would dictate how soon that matchup would be. We don’t know if A&M and Texas would face each other in an annual crossover. It could be Oklahoma and Texas that get the annual crossover.

Either way, A&M and Texas could end the petty war of words and actually play again at some point. Even if it isn’t an annual matchup — what a disappointment that would be — they could still face each other at least twice per decade. That’s better than going potentially 12 years between matchups like they’re currently set to do.

A 2023 matchup would be ideal, especially with the timing for both programs. We know that A&M just signed a historic recruiting class in 2022. In all likelihood, the Aggies will have a true championship window in 2023-24. Texas, on the other hand, could enter 2023 with its best preseason ranking since 2010 … when a No. 5 ranking turned into a 5-win season. But 2023, with Quinn Ewers in his pre-draft season, would have a different feel than 2010 when Texas was fresh off a national runner-up season.

Speaking of Ewers …

4. Welcome to the SEC, Quinn Ewers

I know, I know. I need to slow my roll on the Ewers hype train. I can’t keep drooling any time I watch him effortlessly sling it 60 yards. The fact that I listed Ewers as my favorite Heisman bet at 40-to-1 suggests I’m all in on the country’s highest-rated quarterback recruit since Vince Young.

But Ewers joining the SEC ahead of his pre-draft season would be fantastic entertainment. If he looks the part in 2022, he’d get off-the-charts hype coming into the SEC in 2023. Ewers could evolve into a villain of sorts, in part because he’s Texas’ best shot at national relevance in the SEC, and also because his NIL earnings could be through the roof by then (he already reportedly earned north of a million dollars at Ohio State before he left for Texas).

Something tells me the mullet-rocking prized signal-caller could become a polarizing SEC figure in a hurry.

5. The Arch Manning factor

Where will Arch end up? That’s perhaps as intriguing of a question as any in 2023. Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Ole Miss all appear to be significantly in the mix with others like Clemson, Florida, LSU and Virginia also vying for the 2023 quarterback’s services.

If we found out in the next month that Oklahoma and Texas negotiated a buyout and they were set to join the SEC in 2023, would that impact Manning’s decision either way? It could. If there’s skepticism about joining the league that his uncles and grandpa once dominated, that could theoretically push Manning to a place like Clemson or Virginia.

Alternatively, Texas’ move to the SEC could turn it into an all-SEC battle. For all we know, Manning wants to play in the conference that he grew up watching and Texas’ current spot in the Big 12 is the only thing working against the Longhorns (another thing working against the Longhorns could be that they haven’t had an offensive player drafted in Round 1 since Vince Young in 2006). If Texas doesn’t join the SEC until 2025, Manning could play his first 2 years against Big 12 defenses.

Or, I guess, this could all be totally irrelevant and Manning won’t consider conference affiliation at all. Manning spending anywhere from 1-3 years in the SEC seems most likely.

6. Etch the NFL Draft streak in stone

I mean, 16 consecutive years of NFL Draft dominance won’t stop by adding Oklahoma and Texas even though the Longhorns somehow got skunked in 2022. Sarkisian will change that. Well, I suppose he doesn’t have to. The SEC has 8 consecutive years of 50-plus NFL Draft picks while no other conference reached that feat during that stretch.

If Oklahoma and Texas join the SEC next year, it might not be fair to even consider NFL Draft records anymore. The SEC’s total mark of 65 will inevitably be shattered, as will the SEC’s first round feat of 15 players selected in 2020.

If you’re doubting that, remember the caliber of head coach we’re talking about here. Sarkisian is the guy who had 9 offensive players picked in the first round in his 2 years at Alabama. Brent Venables is the guy who had 24 defensive players drafted at Clemson from 2015-22. Sure, that was as assistants, but both coaches had total autonomy on their respective sides of the ball, and they were both worthy of being considered top assistants in the sport. Hence, why they got their current big-time jobs.

So yeah, expect the SEC to force the college football world to stop even tracking the draft picks by conference because it won’t be a fair fight (not that it is now).

7. If the 4-team Playoff remained through 2025, we’d have 3 years in which the SEC would deserve half the field

There’s some pushback on this notion, but there shouldn’t be, and here’s why. The “SEC bias” narrative has been proven wrong in the Playoff era. The SEC’s record in Playoff games — excluding SEC vs. SEC matchups — is 12-3. On top of that, the league won 5 of the 8 titles. Twice it put 2 teams in the field, and in those years the SEC went 4-0 in semifinal matchups. There’s no debate about conference supremacy during the Playoff era.

Mind you, that was before this Oklahoma-Texas move. Those 2 teams won 6 of the last 7 Big 12 Championships and earned a Playoff berth on 4 of those occasions (I realize Texas contributed as much as you and I contributed to that total).

In other words, the SEC deserves to have 2 spots until the field expands. The irony is that The Alliance blocked Playoff expansion so that the SEC wouldn’t have the possibility of putting 4-5 teams in a 12-team field. At least in that scenario, the majority of the field is non-SEC teams. If the SEC adds Oklahoma and Texas in 2023 and the Playoff remains at 4 through the 2025 season, we could easily see the SEC have 2-team bids every year, which would essentially mean that only 2 non-SEC spots would be available.

I guess that wouldn’t be much of a change at all.

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[Junior Bonner 6272]

54 minutes ago, LTtxfan said:

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

May 9th

Why Hamilton RPMed Arch Manning to Texas/Possible Waterfall Effect

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Since some don't stray to the football board...

Edited May 11, 2022 by LTtxfan

[Viper 12109]

4 minutes ago, LTtxfan said:

Since some don't stray to the football board...

I'd buy kstate and sell tcu 

[Lou_Sassle 2884]

Def taking the under on ISU this year. They're losing a shit ton of production on both sides of the ball.

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Siap...

 

[AP101S 1480]

The Athletic article on Arch:

Spoiler

David Cutcliffe sat on the wooden stands inside the Isidore Newman School gymnasium in uptown New Orleans and told his old friends he was praying for their son. Arch Manning, he of a coiled mop and a right arm touched by the gods, was in a baggy jersey playing in a high school basketball game in January 2020, coming off a freshman football season that made most recruiters flush with intrigue. As a 15-year-old starter, the first freshman to start at Newman in 40 years, he threw for 2,438 yards, 34 touchdowns and six interceptions and had a 65 percent completion rate. The college football world knew of Arch early, as videos of the Gen Z Manning version slinging the ball around took off on the internet when he was just a middle-schooler. In the matter of months, he’d be the most talked-about, tweeted-about, rumored-about high school player in the country for the next several years. But the fall of 2019 expedited an experience destined to be his.

Cooper and Ellen Manning were in the early stages of a magnificently magnified recruiting reality. “Life was already going 900 miles an hour then,” Cutcliffe says of that visit. Nothing radically unfamiliar to this family, but still, an overwhelming experience few others will ever undergo. Cutcliffe voices prayer since he knows what it’s like to recruit a Manning – he landed two eventual Super Bowl winners from the same family, one an NFL Hall of Famer and perhaps the other one day, both uncles of Arch who, at one point, were also at the epicenter of the national football recruiting fray. As Tennessee’s offensive coordinator in the early 1990s, Cutcliffe signed Peyton, and later in the decade, as head coach at Ole Miss, he signed Eli.

“I made the decision a long time ago to not buy a lottery ticket ever,” Cutcliffe says, “because I’ve already won it coaching both Peyton and Eli. Why would I waste $5?”

Arch, however, has it exceedingly more difficult than uncles Peyton and Eli ever did coming out of Newman, says Cutcliffe. Arch is a teenage quarterback phenom in the ever-evolving social media era. A five-star recruit, who in 27 varsity games has thrown 72 career touchdowns, who also has dozens of fake Instagram pages created by random people dedicated to him and only him. As a freshman, he had Peyton breaking down his Friday night performances with him in person. In the years since, Arch opens his phone to lengthy voice memos from his uncle dissecting his outings. Interview requests for the consensus No. 1 recruit in America routinely bombard those around him and more often than not go unfulfilled.

When Arch was an eighth-grader with so much talent that coaches across the country were booking trips to New Orleans, Cooper, the eldest son of former New Orleans Saints quarterback Archie and wife Olivia, told Newman head coach Nelson Stewart that the family wanted to try to lasso the impending recruiting tornado as early as possible.

“It’s about being your own person — nobody is going to tell him where to go,” Stewart says. “It really is his own path.”

Cooper said he wanted to keep it old-school — as out-of-the-spotlight as possible and in-person with only the necessary parties for the most sought-after recruit in decades. No rumors. No leaks.

“Normal as possible,” Cutcliffe repeats back. “Whatever that is these days.”

As the Mannings once more prepare a young quarterback for potential stardom — away from the influencers, away from the noise, away from the taxing part of this entertainment business that is now recruiting — it’s worth remembering that there was a time when the football world revolved around two other quarterbacks who donned Newman green. When the headquarters of landing the next star signal-caller meant dialing into or dropping in on the Manning household on First Street in the Garden District.

Archie and Olivia Manning let everyone in. Those they already knew, and those they had yet to meet. Reporters from New York to Atlanta to Gainesville, Fla., to Knoxville, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., and beyond asked for permission to visit the Mannings in New Orleans. Archie and Olivia had them over for dinner; they let photographers capture Archie in his study talking to coaches. All to discuss the theoretical future of a teenager in the middle of an impressive growth spurt: one Peyton Williams Manning. Starting in the summer of 1993, newspapers from across the nation booked flights for writers to descend on the Crescent City to get a sense of the next Manning, a senior quarterback at Newman, who had it all.

Archie was already a football noble of the South, having starred at Ole Miss and later becoming the face of enduring grit during some of the most unforgiving years in Saints history. Archie was, at his peak, according to those who know the family well, the best athlete in the family. He was always on the move, sprinting for his football life, playing on a team that failed time and time again to protect him from a litany of injuries that shortened his career.

So as Peyton grew from a gangly 6-foot-1 youngster into a strapping 6-foot-5 quarterback who could fling the ball 70 yards in the smothering Louisiana humidity, Archie and Olivia were well aware of what was to come. Bobby Bowden and Phillip Fulmer and Billy Brewer and Dennis Erickson knocked on the door. Steve Spurrier and Lloyd Carr and Lou Holtz called regularly. The fall season of 1993 became the season of Peyton. Recruiting really started humming his junior year, but come his last year at Newman, it was ablaze with pressure and interest. As his prospects ballooned, as the college football world yearned for any sort of time with him, he regaled his Newman teammates with stories of his visits.

He jogged out onto the field at The Big House in Ann Arbor, he slapped the banner at Notre Dame and attended Florida’s spring game with Archie and dissected Spurrier’s Run N’ Shoot from the stands. In November 1993, John Ed Bradley of Sports Illustrated wrote a cover story on the rising high school football star that Newman teammates still remember in detail to this day.

“I remember getting the issue in the mail and everybody knew it was coming out,” says Stewart, who was an offensive lineman at Newman and a year younger than Peyton. “Archie was serving us a team meal and he saw I had the Sports Illustrated with me and he actually borrowed it, read it and then just gave it back to me. They were so low-key they didn’t really care.”

Peyton invited friends and teammates over and let them listen on speakerphone as coaches made their pitches. He wanted them to share in the experience. He took wideouts with him to Bobby Bowden’s FSU camps in the summer. Peyton had a filing system at home, too, said Baldwin Montgomery, one of his best friends. He would slice open every letter from a school, read it, and put it away to later revisit. Montgomery saw Peyton quarterbacking the whole thing.

“I think as time wore on, these coaches realized that they were being interviewed maybe as much as he was,” Montgomery says.

It was assumed that because Archie was the Ole Miss legend, that because Olivia was a homecoming queen at their alma mater, the pull toward Oxford would be magnetic and inevitable for Peyton. Every coach who walked into the Manning home presumed that one day it would just dawn on Peyton that to best serve himself and his family legacy, he would pull over the navy blue and cardinal red and keep the tradition going.

“Was this going to be worth it?” Cutcliffe remembers saying to himself early on.

In a lengthy feature takeout in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in January of 1994, Peyton said, “Somebody’s going to be disappointed wherever I go.” Archie said he loved his school in Ole Miss, but he loved his son more. Coaches, along with reporters, kept on calling. Speculation spiraled.

“Even though I was good friends with Archie, I couldn’t get it out of him. I had no idea what Peyton was doing,” says Ken Trahan, who has covered sports in New Orleans for four decades and called high school football games in the area. “When people know you’re friends with someone, they think you really know. I really didn’t.”

Allen Wallace, founder and editor of one of the original college football recruiting services known as SuperPrep, which began in 1985, said his phone calls with Archie and Peyton were memorable.

“Of all the people I’ve covered that were huge athletes in the recruiting business, I would say that the one recruit that stood out above all else as the one recruit that I couldn’t crack was Peyton Manning,” he says. “I couldn’t get anything out of Archie or Peyton. It was very frustrating to me because I always prided myself on being able to go the extra mile, to talk to these guys to get some inkling of a factual basis for helping you understand where he’s going to go.”

At one point, Archie believed Michigan was the front-runner to land Peyton. Some thought Spurrier had the inside track because of his ability to develop star quarterbacks. But no relationship was fortified like the one Cutcliffe made with Peyton from the get-go. Fulmer and Cutcliffe made an in-home visit with the family in the fall of 1993. Typically head coaches do all the talking, but in this case, Fulmer spoke with Archie and Olivia while Peyton and Cutcliffe got to know each other.

“Thank goodness Phillip didn’t fire me,” Cutcliffe jokes. “I kind of knew that I was coaching him. It was a coach-player relationship that was immediately bonded and it kind of just went from there to be real honest with you.”

The days dragged on and Peyton waited to make the decision that would shape his life forever. Friends, teammates, neighbors, everyone asked him or Archie or Olivia. The weight of it all began to press down on him. The phone never stopped ringing. Peyton needed to clear his head. So much so that on Sunday, Jan. 23, 1994, Archie and Peyton left the house on First Street and checked in to the Hilton Riverside and sought out the silence. Archie’s car phone kept on ringing. Peyton slept until 1 p.m. on Monday. By 10 p.m. Monday night, Olivia still had yet to know where her son was going, said a report in The Clarion-Ledger. This was a massive inflection point for college football recruiting.

Reporters were staking out spots in the Big Easy, and the Mannings, just like the rest of the football world, were waiting.

While Peyton and Archie were holed up in the Hilton, Peyton called Baldwin Montgomery the night before he eventually made his decision public and told his best friend he was headed for Knoxville. Peyton made him promise to tell not a single soul. He didn’t. Fulmer will never forget how he found out. Recruiting somewhere in Pennsylvania, Fulmer got the phone call of a lifetime at around 2 a.m. the morning of Jan. 25, 1994. He hollered so loud in jubilation he woke up the entire floor of his hotel.

“It was just huge for our program,” Fulmer told The Athletic. “This is going to change the face of Tennessee football. We’re going to be out there competing with anybody. We did that. Getting a guy like Peyton put the exclamation point behind it or underlined it, whatever you want to say.”

Peyton would eventually announce his intention to sign with Tennessee that Tuesday morning at school. Archie later set up a news conference at the Hilton in the sports bar. Old footage of Peyton explaining his decision can be found online. In stories across the country, a photo of a smiling Peyton and Archie seated at a table with white linens and a pitcher of water and paper cups circulated.

Fulmer said the only place he couldn’t ever stomach losing Peyton to was to Spurrier and the Gators. That morning, Spurrier heard the news from the coach on his staff in charge of recruiting the New Orleans region.

“Now Peyton, boy, we recruited the heck out of him, and I still remember the day our recruiting coach from New Orleans, Bob Sanders, came in one morning and said, ‘Coach, Peyton committed to Tennessee last night.’ I said, ‘You know what? That’s probably the best place for him to go. We have Danny Wuerffel here,’” Spurrier told The Athletic. “In the long run, Tennessee was the best place for him. Who knows, if he had come here, somebody would not have had the career they had. That’s for sure.”

Newspapers across the country picked up wire stories from New Orleans of Peyton’s commitment. And regional publications weighed in on the seismic move, too. The Charleston Sun Sentinel had its daily editorial dedicated entirely to Peyton’s decision. The Jan. 28 edition of The Clarion-Ledger reviewed the aftermath by talking to Archie, who said Ole Miss fans left several expletive-filled voice messages on their answering machine at home. People called Peyton a traitor. Two days later, the Jan. 30 edition featured an entire page of letters to the editor of Ole Miss fans voicing frustrations and congratulations to the family.

Some applauded Peyton’s move.

Others were a little more aggrieved. “Mannings’ blood apparently isn’t red and blue enough,” wrote a reader named L. Nash Allen Jr. from Tupelo. A few years later, that narrative would change slightly.

“Here comes another one,” former New Orleans sports TV anchor Lionel Bienvenu said at the conclusion of an October 1991 broadcast special on Cooper, then a receiver at Newman, during the weekly “Jim Mora Show.” He was referring to a then-10-year-old Elisha Manning, the starting quarterback of his flag football team. Six years later, Elisha was Eli to the masses, and was, in fact, the next in line.

“Peyton is extraneously outgoing, outspoken and never met a microphone he didn’t like,” Trahan says. “Eli’s nickname was ‘Easy.’ He was the opposite. Eli was very low-key. His recruitment was much like his persona. It certainly didn’t attract the attention that Peyton’s did. There’s only one first.”

The existential dread recruiters of Peyton had regarding the Ole Miss connection was much more pronounced with Eli. There was just this feeling from the outset that with the program in a better place, off probation and with a new head coach coming into the picture, Ole Miss would have an infinitely better shot at landing a Manning. At Newman, every outgoing senior football player wrote a message on a dot as a final goodbye or lasting memory. In the fall of 1993, Peyton’s was, “The best is yet to come.”

“He was referring to Eli,” Stewart says. “He really believed that.”

While Eli’s recruitment didn’t draw the same amount of attention as Peyton’s, it still was national news. He came agonizingly close (89) to Peyton’s massive school record for touchdown passes (92) but topped big brother (7,207) in passing yardage (7,389). As Wallace explained: “Eli was the crown jewel of his class, but he was not like Peyton.” The New York Daily News sent a reporter to New Orleans in September 1997 for a massive print spread with the headline: “ELI’S COMING.” The following spring, a then-17-year-old Eli recapped his recruiting visits at Miami and Boston College and said coaches from Texas, USC, Northwestern, Penn State, Michigan, Tulane and Florida State had stopped by Newman to see him. “Manning Mania,” as some papers put it, was back in full bloom.

Through it all, Eli remained his usual coy self.

“I don’t know if they’ll come after me like they did Peyton, but Peyton had it bad,” Eli said in an interview with the Daily News. “If it does (get bad), I guess I’m ready for it.”

Eli eventually trimmed his list to Ole Miss, Texas and Virginia. Texas wanted Eli, but Mack Brown signed another quarterback son of a former NFL star, Chris Simms. Sparky Woods, former Virginia offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, says Archie helped him set up the official visit. Former UVA coach George Welsh, who once recruited Cooper to play for the Cavaliers, did not want to send a private plane to New Orleans to get Eli. Woods wanted to remain in the running for Eli so badly that when he was out of options, he just had to thank Archie for considering him and the school.

Instead, Archie phoned a UVA alum he knew who was able to send a plane to New Orleans, and Archie and Eli flew east for a visit.

“He helped me recruit him. Who does that?” Woods recalls. “I know in recruiting the worst place ever to come in is second place. Maybe we were second … maybe we were 20th; I don’t know. But I always had the impression we were in a good place. But once Ole Miss hired David, it went pretty quick the other way.”

Cutcliffe was told again and again by Eli that he didn’t want to follow Peyton to Knoxville. But he recruited him nonetheless. The Vols went 13-0 in 1998 and won the national title. On Dec. 2, 1998, after Tommy Tuberville left Ole Miss for Auburn, Cutcliffe was named head coach of the Rebels.

“Well, the first phone call I make is to Eli and I said, ‘All right, Eli, all bets are off. You’re going to Ole Miss,’” Cutcliffe says.

Cutcliffe quickly set up a home visit, but Archie and Olivia were on the road, so Cooper was the man of the house during the visit. They went out and conversed over po-boys. Landing Eli was different from landing Peyton.

“I had promised Olivia when we signed Peyton at Tennessee. She told me how Archie played with some tough teams in the NFL and got sacked a lot. She said, ‘David, please help keep Peyton’s uniform clean.’ I said, ‘Olivia, you got that.’ And we delivered.”

She asked the same for Eli. Cutcliffe said he’d try to do it again. In fact, he promised.

As the calendar turned closer toward a decision day for Eli in the fall of 1998, Archie did what he’d already done before.

“Archie just kept it under wraps,” Stewart recalls.

Reporters pressed for a deadline after Eli took his Ole Miss official visit: Archie said it could be 48 hours. Or maybe six hours. Maybe six days. Former LSU head coach Gerry DiNardo remembers when Archie and Eli came to Baton Rouge on an unofficial visit. There will always be some lingering resentment from the locals who never felt like the Mannings gave the Tigers a chance. DiNardo doesn’t see it that way. At least for Eli, he gave them a shot.

“Did I ever think he’d come to LSU? All I could do was keep my fingers crossed,” DiNardo says. “I knew the history and all that and yet they spent the entire day. No one ever looked at their watch. We looked at the facilities. I’ll always remember that day.”

Sixteen days after Cutcliffe was hired at Ole Miss, Eli made his decision on Dec. 18, 1998. He called the other coaches in the mix to inform them he was going to Oxford. Woods remembers the call. He’s been told thanks-but-no-thanks an infinite amount of times in his coaching career. This one he remembers because he felt so close.

“I’ve had several get away. But he certainly was a good one. I can’t imagine anyone any more talented. I was coaching quarterbacks and running the offense, so I wanted him,” Woods says. “You weren’t going to win him over by putting his name on something or hanging a jersey somewhere. None of those things meant much to him.”

Eli wore a long-sleeve flannel shirt and a blue Rebels cap at a podium and explained his decision in front of a sea of microphones. The photo of him smiling having finally made his choice was in papers and on TVs around the country. Eli later said he would not take the No. 18 like his father and older brother. He chose No. 10.

“It was different than Peyton. It really was. Eli looked for a lot of different things. What his life was going to be like, who his friends were going to be. I will say this: People misread Eli’s intensity,” Cutcliffe said. “He just has a brother who is the best player in the Southeastern Conference and he’s willing to follow a dad who’s the speed limit on campus. His jersey number is the miles-per-hour on campus. Arguably the best player in Ole Miss history. You’re willing to follow that? It was important we could both travel that road together.”

Almost 25 years later, it’s Arch’s turn to experience the madness of it all. Like Eli, Arch opted for his own number even at Newman: No. 16.

Cooper Manning doesn’t have to man the phone lines like Archie did in the 1990s. Everyone in the recruiting realm is obsessed with finding little crumbs of truth regarding a visit of Arch’s, or even a potential lean one way or another. Stating the obvious, Nelson Stewart said the social media fanfare does a teen like Arch no good. Cooper called it from the outset. He saw the insanity of what his little brothers dealt with three decades ago. Now? It’s an impossibility to exist without the constant commotion as a five-star QB recruit whose last name happens to be Manning.

“That’s how we’re navigating this circus, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Stewart says. “We have had more coaches than ever on campus, the media, the coverage, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. But just like Peyton and Eli before Arch, he doesn’t get caught up in it. Sometimes he doesn’t even know. I think that’s the beauty of him.

“He’s never ‘blessed’ and ‘humbled to announce’ anything on Twitter. He’s just that curly-haired kid that drives his pickup to school, has his hat on, works his tail off in the weight room, endears himself to his teammates, and plays multiple sports. That’s Arch Manning.”

Cutcliffe, who recently retired after being head coach at Duke for the last 14 seasons to take a job in the SEC office, said college football recruiting is a new spectator sport in this country. It’s what drives intrigue for fans.

This could be the year of No. 16, Archibald Charles Manning. Or he could just let it play out until February. It’ll be done his way. Where might he end up? Whispers, however accurate they may be, have Alabama, Texas, Ole Miss and Georgia atop the list. Inevitably, like Peyton said nearly 30 years ago, his decision will disappoint a bunch of people. That’s the game, though.

At the Hilton dais the night he committed to Tennessee, Peyton said he didn’t want to go to Ole Miss because “I’d be an instant celebrity without doing anything.” Arch, for no fault of his own, is already there in this breakneck-speed era of information and internet trumpeting. Cutcliffe, a man who has won the lotto twice, offered his vision of what’s to come for coaches still in the fight to land the nation’s most-prized recruit.

“If I’m recruiting Arch Manning — and I am not — I want boots on the ground. I want it to be all about real relationships. Knowing Cooper and Ellen and Arch as well as I do, that’s where they’re looking. You look for trust in any relationship, right? I think that’s going to be the pivotal part of that one,” Cutcliffe says.

“In recruiting a Manning, the truth is the most important aspect. Don’t act. They do their checks and balances, pros and cons, and if they’ve got the truth, then you’ve got a real shot at maybe them playing for you. If you don’t speak honestly and speak the truth, you’re not going to sign Arch Manning.”

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

?????? 🤔

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Monday May 9th in San Antonio...   6mins

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Of course Roach tweets this...

[LTtxfan 49309]

FBD 

 

[Hornlover 8830]

3 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

?????? 🤔

 

[Hornius Emeritus 12477]

22 minutes ago, LTtxfan said:

FBD 

 

I dunno. Like Tito's but just vaguely feel that that's somehow tacky. Not sure why.

[AP101S 1480]

11 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

 

I like the 3-6 format where each school has 3 permanent opponents each year and rotates through the other 6 teams home/away every 4 years. In the comments someone posted an example of how this would look. I think Andy Staples of The Athletic did something similar many months ago.

"My stab at permanent opponents. I tried to balance historical rivalries, regionality, competitiveness, and more recent rivalry. No one is going to be completely happy, but the beauty is you still play everyone else twice over a four year span.

Alabama - Auburn, Tennessee, LSU
Arkansas - Texas, Missouri, Texas A&M
Auburn - Alabama, Georgia, Miss State
Florida - Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky
Georgia - Florida, Auburn, South Carolina
Kentucky - Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Florida
LSU - Texas A&M, Miss State, Alabama
Ole Miss - Miss State, Oklahoma, Vanderbilt
Miss State - Ole Miss, LSU, Auburn
Missouri - Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina
Oklahoma - Texas, Missouri, Ole Miss
South Carolina - Missouri, Georgia, Florida
Tennessee - Alabama, Vanderbilt, Kentucky
Texas - Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas A&M
Texas A&M - Texas, LSU, Arkansas
Vanderbilt - Tennessee, Kentucky, Ole Miss"

The Athletic article:

Spoiler

What will SEC’s new schedule look like? Officials hope to settle on new model next month

By Aaron Suttles and Seth Emerson

May 11, 2022

The SEC holds its spring meetings early next month, and the hope is to come out of those sessions with a makeover of the league’s football scheduling model, timed for the expected arrival of Oklahoma and Texas in 2025.

That could mean a nine-game conference schedule. It could also mean the elimination of divisions. And it would mean a concerted effort to make sure teams in the new 16-team superconference are not strangers to each other.

That was a goal even before expansion, and why eliminating divisions was already on the table. But now it’s an emphasis, with a goal of every school visiting each of the other 15 schools at least once every four years.

“I look at it as an opportunity, and have from the beginning of the conversation last August,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said this week on what impact adding Oklahoma and Texas would have on scheduling. “Let’s look at everything. So I had two anchor points. One, let’s engage in blue-sky thinking. And what is meant to be conveyed by that is kind of, (let’s) detach from reality for a bit and look at all of the possibilities. And the second is how do we rotate teams through our (league’s) campuses more frequently?”

In the current format — an eight-game SEC schedule and two divisions — there are too many examples of cross-division matchups happening rarely: Georgia and Texas A&M have only played once since the Aggies joined the league, and Georgia has yet to visit College Station.

“So this once-every-12-year approach, we would have turned the page on that whether we expanded or not,” Sankey said. “What probably is not understood as we were in the beginning of a scheduling review in 2019. We actually we’re bringing a report to our presidents in March of 2020… we were bringing in analysis to that meeting to think about what a future 14-team schedule looks like. And then, you know, the pandemic was so full-time plus, just trying to sustain competition, that we had just put that aside. And then we came back to 16. So this is almost a natural conversation. The impact of new rivalries on existing rivalries, those things are real. What I’m really encouraged about is the opportunity in different models to see everybody with some level of frequency. And we’ll move towards a decision-making point sooner rather than later.”

A nine-game conference schedule is much more likely than it was pre-expansion. The SEC for years resisted expanding beyond eight conference games, instead encouraging teams to schedule marquee nonconference matchups. But with Texas and Oklahoma joining the league, it makes more sense to go to nine games, especially since those two schools already had series scheduled with SEC teams. (Georgia and Alabama had series planned with both and Tennessee with Oklahoma.)

Two of the league’s most prominent coaches — Nick Saban and Kirby Smart — have long called for a nine-game SEC schedule, but other programs have resisted with hesitancy about what effect nine conference games would have on their ability to reach bowl eligibility. Currently, a team must win six games (including no more than one against an FCS opponent) to be bowl eligible, although there have been exceptions made. But the time may have finally come to expand from eight to nine games with the addition of the Sooners and Longhorns.

The SEC has not settled on doing away with divisions, but it still seems the most likely scenario. When Texas and Oklahoma join, something would have to give, with the most discussed option being putting those two schools in the West, moving Alabama and Auburn to the East, then shifting Missouri to the West, the more geographical fit anyway.

But that would not solve the main problem in scheduling, which is schools seeing each other enough.

They’ve discussed a scenario where they do four divisions of four each, but one source didn’t think that had enough traction. The attraction there would be that lack of stigma for finishing 16th in a 16-team league, but their basketball counterparts could tell them they’ve been dealing with that since 2012.

Pods have also long been discussed, which essentially would be unofficial divisions of four each for scheduling purposes, but the standings would be determined 1-through-16.

“We still have some time based on a July 1, 2025 entry date, but it’s really been a healthy opportunity to look at how do we keep things fresh and new by moving teams through? Whether it’s divisions, single division, we’ll keep pods alive for conversation purposes today, but it’s really been an interesting conversation,” Sankey said.

That leaves a “3-6” scheduling arrangement, where each school has three permanent opponents, then rotates the other six. It could also become “4-5”, with one source not believing it would go beyond four permanent opponents. How many permanent opponents, three or four, evidently remains a big part of the discussion. Multiple sources told The Athletic that multiple options are on the table. Regardless of what option emerges, the SEC Championship Game isn’t going to go away with broadcast partners seeing such value from a game that annually yields high ratings, including 17.9 million viewers for last year’s game between Alabama and Georgia, the highest-rated non-bowl game of the 2021 season.

The goal is to come out of SEC meetings next month with a plan. That’s not a hard deadline, but at some point, schools need to know what the plan will be as they schedule for 2025 and beyond: Do they definitely only have three nonconference games? Will there be divisions or not? And everything else that is impacted by major scheduling changes. There are logistics that need to be ironed out between now and the start of the 2025 season.

Part of the scheduling debate will certainly be how it affects entry to the College Football Playoff. The SEC is the only conference to have at least one team in each CFP, which began in 2014. Twice, in 2017 and 2021, the conference had both participants in the national championship game. With no agreement on CFP expansion, Sankey is content to remain at four teams.

“I’ll say it clearly today: We can stay at four,” Sankey said. “This conference will thrive at four. Period.”

However, if the conference goes to nine league games and with adding two blueblood programs, accounting for a rise in degree of difficulty also means protecting the SEC in CFP expansion talks. The number of automatic qualifiers against at-large bids will be major sticking point for the conference.

Regardless, change appears on the horizon for SEC teams and their scheduling, and fans who’ve been clamoring for better schedules are primed to be the big winners.

 

[Mikey4 2476]

7 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

FBD 

 

The University names things after people all the time, though (for example, McCombs). Maybe the University justifies this as naming the facility after the person, Tito, rather than the company/brand by the same name.

Edit: And would it really be that big a break to name something after a company? I recall back when I was in school, we had the "Enron Trading Center" or something like that in the business school. Not sure how common that is.

Edited May 12, 2022 by Mikey4

[MonkeyDoughnut 10328]

8 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

FBD 

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

You know Farrell hopes his destination's not Texas...

 

[closetojumping 62763]

7 hours ago, AP101S said:

I like the 3-6 format where each school has 3 permanent opponents each year and rotates through the other 6 teams home/away every 4 years. In the comments someone posted an example of how this would look. I think Andy Staples of The Athletic did something similar many months ago.

"My stab at permanent opponents. I tried to balance historical rivalries, regionality, competitiveness, and more recent rivalry. No one is going to be completely happy, but the beauty is you still play everyone else twice over a four year span.

Alabama - Auburn, Tennessee, LSU
Arkansas - Texas, Missouri, Texas A&M
Auburn - Alabama, Georgia, Miss State
Florida - Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky
Georgia - Florida, Auburn, South Carolina
Kentucky - Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Florida
LSU - Texas A&M, Miss State, Alabama
Ole Miss - Miss State, Oklahoma, Vanderbilt
Miss State - Ole Miss, LSU, Auburn
Missouri - Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina
Oklahoma - Texas, Missouri, Ole Miss
South Carolina - Missouri, Georgia, Florida
Tennessee - Alabama, Vanderbilt, Kentucky
Texas - Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas A&M
Texas A&M - Texas, LSU, Arkansas
Vanderbilt - Tennessee, Kentucky, Ole Miss"

The Athletic article:

  Reveal hidden contents

What will SEC’s new schedule look like? Officials hope to settle on new model next month

By Aaron Suttles and Seth Emerson

May 11, 2022

The SEC holds its spring meetings early next month, and the hope is to come out of those sessions with a makeover of the league’s football scheduling model, timed for the expected arrival of Oklahoma and Texas in 2025.

That could mean a nine-game conference schedule. It could also mean the elimination of divisions. And it would mean a concerted effort to make sure teams in the new 16-team superconference are not strangers to each other.

That was a goal even before expansion, and why eliminating divisions was already on the table. But now it’s an emphasis, with a goal of every school visiting each of the other 15 schools at least once every four years.

“I look at it as an opportunity, and have from the beginning of the conversation last August,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said this week on what impact adding Oklahoma and Texas would have on scheduling. “Let’s look at everything. So I had two anchor points. One, let’s engage in blue-sky thinking. And what is meant to be conveyed by that is kind of, (let’s) detach from reality for a bit and look at all of the possibilities. And the second is how do we rotate teams through our (league’s) campuses more frequently?”

In the current format — an eight-game SEC schedule and two divisions — there are too many examples of cross-division matchups happening rarely: Georgia and Texas A&M have only played once since the Aggies joined the league, and Georgia has yet to visit College Station.

“So this once-every-12-year approach, we would have turned the page on that whether we expanded or not,” Sankey said. “What probably is not understood as we were in the beginning of a scheduling review in 2019. We actually we’re bringing a report to our presidents in March of 2020… we were bringing in analysis to that meeting to think about what a future 14-team schedule looks like. And then, you know, the pandemic was so full-time plus, just trying to sustain competition, that we had just put that aside. And then we came back to 16. So this is almost a natural conversation. The impact of new rivalries on existing rivalries, those things are real. What I’m really encouraged about is the opportunity in different models to see everybody with some level of frequency. And we’ll move towards a decision-making point sooner rather than later.”

A nine-game conference schedule is much more likely than it was pre-expansion. The SEC for years resisted expanding beyond eight conference games, instead encouraging teams to schedule marquee nonconference matchups. But with Texas and Oklahoma joining the league, it makes more sense to go to nine games, especially since those two schools already had series scheduled with SEC teams. (Georgia and Alabama had series planned with both and Tennessee with Oklahoma.)

Two of the league’s most prominent coaches — Nick Saban and Kirby Smart — have long called for a nine-game SEC schedule, but other programs have resisted with hesitancy about what effect nine conference games would have on their ability to reach bowl eligibility. Currently, a team must win six games (including no more than one against an FCS opponent) to be bowl eligible, although there have been exceptions made. But the time may have finally come to expand from eight to nine games with the addition of the Sooners and Longhorns.

The SEC has not settled on doing away with divisions, but it still seems the most likely scenario. When Texas and Oklahoma join, something would have to give, with the most discussed option being putting those two schools in the West, moving Alabama and Auburn to the East, then shifting Missouri to the West, the more geographical fit anyway.

But that would not solve the main problem in scheduling, which is schools seeing each other enough.

They’ve discussed a scenario where they do four divisions of four each, but one source didn’t think that had enough traction. The attraction there would be that lack of stigma for finishing 16th in a 16-team league, but their basketball counterparts could tell them they’ve been dealing with that since 2012.

Pods have also long been discussed, which essentially would be unofficial divisions of four each for scheduling purposes, but the standings would be determined 1-through-16.

“We still have some time based on a July 1, 2025 entry date, but it’s really been a healthy opportunity to look at how do we keep things fresh and new by moving teams through? Whether it’s divisions, single division, we’ll keep pods alive for conversation purposes today, but it’s really been an interesting conversation,” Sankey said.

That leaves a “3-6” scheduling arrangement, where each school has three permanent opponents, then rotates the other six. It could also become “4-5”, with one source not believing it would go beyond four permanent opponents. How many permanent opponents, three or four, evidently remains a big part of the discussion. Multiple sources told The Athletic that multiple options are on the table. Regardless of what option emerges, the SEC Championship Game isn’t going to go away with broadcast partners seeing such value from a game that annually yields high ratings, including 17.9 million viewers for last year’s game between Alabama and Georgia, the highest-rated non-bowl game of the 2021 season.

The goal is to come out of SEC meetings next month with a plan. That’s not a hard deadline, but at some point, schools need to know what the plan will be as they schedule for 2025 and beyond: Do they definitely only have three nonconference games? Will there be divisions or not? And everything else that is impacted by major scheduling changes. There are logistics that need to be ironed out between now and the start of the 2025 season.

Part of the scheduling debate will certainly be how it affects entry to the College Football Playoff. The SEC is the only conference to have at least one team in each CFP, which began in 2014. Twice, in 2017 and 2021, the conference had both participants in the national championship game. With no agreement on CFP expansion, Sankey is content to remain at four teams.

“I’ll say it clearly today: We can stay at four,” Sankey said. “This conference will thrive at four. Period.”

However, if the conference goes to nine league games and with adding two blueblood programs, accounting for a rise in degree of difficulty also means protecting the SEC in CFP expansion talks. The number of automatic qualifiers against at-large bids will be major sticking point for the conference.

Regardless, change appears on the horizon for SEC teams and their scheduling, and fans who’ve been clamoring for better schedules are primed to be the big winners.

 

One of the rumors that keeps popping up is that ATM is throwing a temper tantrum about having to play Texas every year. They want to "treat Texas like any other non-rivalry" and have South Carolina as the 3rd team in their permanent setup, because that "rivalry is now established" or some shit. Note that Oklahoma is also not someone they're interested in playing every year, shockingly. 

The problem for everyone else is that they know the Texas/ATM game inside the setting of the SEC and today's focus and interest in college football would be a much bigger moneymaker for the conference and sport. Texas has emphasized an interest in playing ATM and has 14 other teams supporting the premise. 

Allegedly, ATM is emphatic in keeping FCS scheduling and South Carolina on their schedule, and emphatic in having Texas on there as rarely as possible. They're also supposedly one of the only schools pushing for an 8 team only SEC schedule, whereas everyone else sees the obvious value and math in playing 9. 

[Scholz 11946]

Shocker.  aggys are fucking timid pussies.

[AP101S 1480]

2 minutes ago, closetojumping said:

One of the rumors that keeps popping up is that ATM is throwing a temper tantrum about having to play Texas every year. They want to "treat Texas like any other non-rivalry" and have South Carolina as the 3rd team in their permanent setup, because that "rivalry is now established" or some shit. Note that Oklahoma is also not someone they're interested in playing every year, shockingly. 

The problem for everyone else is that they know the Texas/ATM game inside the setting of the SEC and today's focus and interest in college football would be a much bigger moneymaker for the conference and sport. Texas has emphasized an interest in playing ATM and has 14 other teams supporting the premise. 

Allegedly, ATM is emphatic in keeping FCS scheduling and South Carolina on their schedule, and emphatic in having Texas on there as rarely as possible. They're also supposedly one of the only schools pushing for an 8 team only SEC schedule, whereas everyone else sees the obvious value and math in playing 9. 

I think DeLoss said "Texas will decide when Texas and ATM will play again." Wait till they find out that the first time we meet in the SEC it will be in Austin.

[NoName 16364]

52 minutes ago, closetojumping said:

One of the rumors that keeps popping up is that ATM is throwing a temper tantrum about having to play Texas every year. They want to "treat Texas like any other non-rivalry" and have South Carolina as the 3rd team in their permanent setup, because that "rivalry is now established" or some shit. Note that Oklahoma is also not someone they're interested in playing every year, shockingly. 

The problem for everyone else is that they know the Texas/ATM game inside the setting of the SEC and today's focus and interest in college football would be a much bigger moneymaker for the conference and sport. Texas has emphasized an interest in playing ATM and has 14 other teams supporting the premise. 

Allegedly, ATM is emphatic in keeping FCS scheduling and South Carolina on their schedule, and emphatic in having Texas on there as rarely as possible. They're also supposedly one of the only schools pushing for an 8 team only SEC schedule, whereas everyone else sees the obvious value and math in playing 9. 

also, of course they want FCS scheduling to stay. i would guess more than just about anyone else in the SEC...how many wins have they had vs FCS teams in the last decade?

[Sandbagging Steve 982]

2 hours ago, closetojumping said:

One of the rumors that keeps popping up is that ATM is throwing a temper tantrum about having to play Texas every year. They want to "treat Texas like any other non-rivalry" and have South Carolina as the 3rd team in their permanent setup, because that "rivalry is now established" or some shit. Note that Oklahoma is also not someone they're interested in playing every year, shockingly. 

The problem for everyone else is that they know the Texas/ATM game inside the setting of the SEC and today's focus and interest in college football would be a much bigger moneymaker for the conference and sport. Texas has emphasized an interest in playing ATM and has 14 other teams supporting the premise. 

Allegedly, ATM is emphatic in keeping FCS scheduling and South Carolina on their schedule, and emphatic in having Texas on there as rarely as possible. They're also supposedly one of the only schools pushing for an 8 team only SEC schedule, whereas everyone else sees the obvious value and math in playing 9. 

[Hookem2147 21345]

Chip reads Surly and CTJ

Quote

 

I’ve heard when Texas and Oklahoma join the SEC, it’s likely the SEC will break into four, four-team pods. 

In football, you’d play the three other teams in your pod every year and then likely play two teams from each of the three other pods, giving the league nine conference games. Currently, the SEC plays eight conference games.

That would also allow for every team in the SEC to never go longer than two years without playing the other conference members outside of their own pod. It would also mean you’d host every school in the SEC at least once every four years.

That would solve a weird quirk in the SEC’s current scheduling created after the league expanded to 14 when Texas A&M and Missouri joined the conference in 2012. Teams such as Alabama and Georgia had only one scheduled meeting (in Athens in 2015) during an 11-year span from 2009-19 and the Crimson Tide and Bulldogs have had only two scheduled meetings (2015 and 2020) in the last 13 years.

Here's the kicker: I’ve also heard Texas A&M does NOT want to be in the same pod with Texas.

A&M sources will deny that publicly. But A&M obviously didn’t want Texas in the SEC and might’ve tried to make a deal with the rest of the SEC: in exchange for A&M’s vote in favor of admitting Texas, the Aggies and Longhorns wouldn’t be in the same pod.

I’ve heard one proposal that had Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri in the same pod while A&M, LSU, Ole Miss and Mississippi State would be in the same pod. Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee and Vanderbilt would be in the same pod, while Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and South Carolina would be in the same pod.

Again, things could change. But if all that plays out, Texas and A&M, who talk about each other in their respective fight songs, would play twice (home and away) every four years instead of every year. Definitely, something to keep an eye on.

As far as when Texas and Oklahoma would join the SEC, I'm still hearing their first football season in the SEC would likely be 2024, when ESPN takes over the broadcast rights for SEC football.

 

 

[Elmer_Fudd 22304]

I'd love to see aggy in the same pod as those three teams seeing as they went 0-3 against them last year.  Leach continuing to own aggy will make for great TV.

[SL Xpress 7516]

2024/ESPN taking over SEC rights makes sense. But I really didn’t want to play UH in football. 

Also, I’ve got scar tissue from the three BYU beatdowns since that miserable game in 1988. Not to mention I think Taysom Hill is still hurtling Texas defenders 8 years later. 

I’ll hold out a forlorn hope for 2023. 

[LTtxfan 49309]

14 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

2024/ESPN taking over SEC rights makes sense. But I really didn’t want to play UH in football.  Also, I’ve got scar tissue from the three BYU beatdowns since that miserable game in 1988. Not to mention I think Taysom Hill is still hurtling Texas defenders 8 years later. 

I’ll hold out a forlorn hope for 2023. 

Who gives a shit about the fuckin' past...

Just kick their fuckin' asses now if we play them!!!  🤘

 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by LTtxfan

[UDontKnow 10447]

4 hours ago, Hookem2147 said:

Chip reads Surly and CTJ

 

As if the SEC is going to pass up on the annual cash cow matchup that is Texas-aggy. Chip you dumb, ignorant slut!

The only four team pod that makes sense is: Texas, aggy, OU sucks, and pig. SEC wants Texas for brand recognition and the best way to achieve that is to ensure Texas plays its historic rivalry games. That's what it's about.

[LTtxfan 49309]

HaHaHaHa 😂😂😂😂😂😂

Texas Softball getting more fun !!!

 

[LTtxfan 49309]

Siap...

 

Edited May 15, 2022 by LTtxfan

[pacman 7363]

The program that keeps creating excuses to dodge playing teams (Wake Forest, Incarnate Word) is really trying to convince everyone they aren't dodging Texas.

[bar 396]

Aggy is probably demanding that the pod be Texas, A&M, Vanderbilt, and Prairie View.

[The Beast 585]

On 5/12/2022 at 10:01 PM, UDontKnow said:

As if the SEC is going to pass up on the annual cash cow matchup that is Texas-aggy. Chip you dumb, ignorant slut!

The only four team pod that makes sense is: Texas, aggy, OU sucks, and pig. SEC wants Texas for brand recognition and the best way to achieve that is to ensure Texas plays its historic rivalry games. That's what it's about.

This. Money rules it all. If I remember correctly there was talk years back that the renewal of Texas vs Aggy game could be at the Texas Motorspeedway. 

[LTtxfan 49309]