I have written mildly amusing thoughts about Ole Miss sports for four years now. I have enjoyed it, mostly, although towards the end of the Orgeron era I did not want to think about the football team any more than I had to.

You would think that with the team about to open a new season in the Top 10 that I would be eager to keep going, but for some reason I am not. At any rate, I appreciate everyone who read this site and communicated with me. It has been an eventful four years.

Maybe, just maybe, I will see you in the Georgia Dome in December.

If you’re like me, you have preseason fatigue. Non-Memphis/Mississippi media have written more about Ole Miss this summer than in the last 40 years combined, and I have read most of it. The latest example, this article from Pat Forde, graced the front of espn.com yesterday. It checks all the requisite boxes (Nutt does better when he’s not expected to, Ole Miss has never been to Atlanta, Ole Miss was the only team to beat Florida, and throw in a quote from Nutt saying “well the experts picked us towards the bottom last year.”)

But the part about changing times was a novel twist:

But Ole Miss has played an energetic game of cultural catch-up in recent years, wiping out the totems of a racist time. Thanks in large part to the efforts of freshly retired chancellor Robert Khayat, it no longer feels like 1963 at an Ole Miss home game — though they’d love to taste that level of success again.

“Ole Miss clearly had a harder time dealing with integration than anyone else because of the symbols,” Cleveland said. “Having said that, they’ve overcome it now. You used to see 30,000 people waving confederate flags. Now you may see one guy who snuck one in.”

That is good to see on espn.com, and maybe it will sink in eventually.

Since we’re all tired of reading about how many returning starters each team has and how great Team A has performed under its new strength coach (”we’re bigger and stronger and faster”), check out something a little different from Clay Travis: a dozen SEC predictions. I really hope #9 doesn’t come true but this one may very well happen:

12. Alabama and Florida’s SEC Championship game is delayed when Tebow ascends to Heaven through the Georgia Dome roof.

Urban Meyer resists all calls for the game to be postponed so the media can report on Tebow’s ascension. A grim-faced Meyer growls, “Why do you think we recruited Brantley?”

Florida wins by three touchdowns.

The weekend’s gorgeous weather was a little discombobulating, since it felt like football should be going on and it was not (except for high school.) Instead, we have two more weeks of Augustness to weather. This year, the first few days of September are just a de facto part of August because the first football weekend is not until Saturday, September 5th. If it’s hot as hell, school is in, and there’s no football, then it’s August. But since we are down to two weeks, that leaves only one more football-free weekend until the Super Bowl.

We do have the preseason AP poll to kick around now, where the Rebels bow at #8, two spots higher than the coaches’ poll. I remember being happy just to receive eight votes down at the bottom in the “Others Receiving Votes” category.

The nation’s newspaper of record (until it becomes the website of record?) is not known for college football coverage, but Paul Myerberg did a great job previewing the Rebels for the college sports blog at the New York Times. In his countdown, he has Ole Miss as lucky #13; lower than most polls and rankings, but a damn sight better than last year’s ranking way down in WAC/MAC-land at #78.

Now, onto the million dollar question: does Mississippi really have a shot at the national title, or is this another case of a flash – the hot finish to 2008 – over substance? Well, I’m not going to go so far as to say Mississippi is not clearly a Top 25 team; they are, and then some. The schedule, in this case, is smooth enough to predict the Rebels to win 10 games. But this team is not, in my mind, a viable contender for the national title. Not yet, anyway, not a year removed from the Ed Orgeron era and not in the SEC, home games or not. Alabama is a better team, perhaps lacking at quarterback but from top to bottom better coached and more talented; L.S.U. has speed and talent to burn, and has the advantage of having been here (the top 15) before.

This is all a convoluted way of making this statement: Ole Miss will be good, maybe even great on occasion, and it has the schedule to perhaps earn a place inside the top 10. But let’s not allow a tremendously impressive win over Florida and a bowl victory over a defeated Texas Tech team to blow out of proportion the current status of Mississippi football: it’s still growing as a program, and while I do think the Rebels will improve upon last season’s win total I don’t think one should be penciling it in for a B.C.S. bowl in 2009.

(emphasis added)

Dear football gods, please let us be great on October 10 and November 21. You owe us.

If you listen to podcasts while commuting or working out, check out this page from vegasinsider.com A bunch of Las Vegas wise guys got together and held a seminar about the coming football season and recorded the presentations and panel discussions. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but how can you go wrong with seminar panels called “Handicapping Theories and Techniques” and “Exotic Wagering – Futures, Propositions, Win Totals?”

And if you’re wondering, Newcastle is top of the league on 10 points, and is proving to quite a draw around the league when they play on the road. However, the club is still in ownership limbo and can’t buy players until that is resolved, which means bad luck on the injury front could cause a major swoon in form.

Whatifsports.com is a great place to kill time while waiting for real football to start. They are crunching numbers to create week-by-week college football game projections. They’re only up to week 3, and since the Rebels have an early open date they only have two projections for Ole Miss so far. I will be very interested to see what they come up with for the Alabama and South Carolina games.

Similar to Accuscore, What If Sports has their computers simulate each game 10,000 times and records each outcome.

The inputs to the simulations are based on a rigorous analysis of each team that considers strength-of-schedule-adjusted team and player ratings from 2008. Once this step is complete, we make our modifications for 2009 based on returning starters (who, where and how many), expected progression of returning players in new roles, depth at each position and incoming recruits and transfers.

According to their simulation, Ole Miss beats Memphis 95% of the time or more by an average score of 48-10. The Rebels also beat SELA 95% of the time or more at a 55-6 clip. Nothing surprising there at all. (All 1-AA teams are treated equally by the computers.)

State beats Jackson St. 89% of the time by an average score of only 24-7. (Surely State will score a lot more than that on a SWAC defense, but since all 1-AA teams are treated equally the scores aren’t necessarily going to be accurate.) But here’s where the numbers start to get interesting: in the week 2 matchup against State and Auburn, Auburn only wins 53% of the time with an average three point margin of victory. That makes the game a virtual coin toss. Even with Auburn’s travails, winning on the Plains in his second game would be a huge program-building win for Dan Mullen that Orgeron could never secure. It would also make Gene Chizik press conferences much more entertaining.

In the big game of week 2, What If has Southern Cal beating Ohio St. in the Horseshoe 90% of the time. I’m not sure what their computers make of the muddled USC QB picture.

Having an off-week so early is pretty lame, but at least we will be able to enjoy all of the TV games that weekend. In addition to USC-Ohio St. and State-Auburn, you can also choose from Notre Dame @ Michigan, UCLA @ Tennessee, Vandy @ LSU, and South Carolina @ Georgia.

Our sister sports organization Newcastle United is actually doing okay on the field in their new home in the minor leagues of English football. Off the field, everything is still a grease fire. But they got a draw in their first away game, and when they came back home they won 3-0 thanks to a hat trick from the impeccably named Shola Ameobi.

Appearances can be hugely deceptive. Superficially all certainly seemed well on Tyneside, with a healthy crowd cheering Newcastle United to the rafters as Shola Ameobi’s hat-trick consigned Reading to a comprehensive 3-0 Championship defeat.

Scrape a fraction beneath the surface, though, and you will find a club in such turmoil that local dramatists are pinching their increasingly far-fetched, ultra soapy, plotlines. Earlier this summer You Really Couldn’t Make it Up – a play detailing Newcastle’s recent travails – drew full houses at the city’s Live Theatre.

Since its run ended, the tragi-comic farce at St James’ Park has taken a few more bizarre twists, but, at long last, a denouement appears in sight.

Perhaps an aspiring writer in a creative writing class at Ole Miss this semester will pen a play about the Orgeron years called You Really Couldn’t Make it Up.

Act 1, Scene 1

Orgeron, clad in a coach’s headset, paces the sideline.

State’s PA Announcer: “4th & 1 for the Rebels.”

Orgeron then delivers a monologue to the audience about who he is, where he comes from, how important it is to ALWAYS COMPETE, and why he just has to go for the 1st down here even though plenty of (expletive deleted) would punt the ball.

The play would then go on with flashbacks to his first meeting with the team and the shirt-tearing, the infamous mid-game practice during the Wake Forest lightning delay, and various scenes with him recrootin’. At the end, we watch his face as Benjarvus gets stuffed and State drives down to win the game as the PA announcer describes the action. The final scene is of a somber Khayat calling him into his office.

But anyway, back to Newcastle. This is a shirt (not official, of course) that you can buy from whoareyadesigns.com. It is a nice companion piece for your Larry Wamble prints.

Reading about football tactics over the weekend (the other football), I came across something about a Soviet coach named Valeriy Vasylyovych Lobanovskyi who was way ahead of his time. He was the first coach to really apply scientific methods to training and coaching. (He may have been the guy who designed the training regimen for Ivan Drago.) He knew that a team could reach its peak only a few times each season, and so each year he examined the schedule to pick out the most critical fixtures and plan accordingly. For example, in some away games his teams would simply play for a draw and preserve energy. If you know beforehand that the intensity and effort will vary, it makes sense to plan ahead and have the team peak at the right time.

Jackie Sherrill spoke about this in an interview once, saying that you can only motivate a college football team for a supreme effort 3-4 times per season. You have to pick your spots and hope that a lackluster effort on an off day doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass with a loss, as it did last September 27 for Florida. But you can’t pull out all of the motivational stops and trickeration against every team you are a double digit favorite over, or the team will quit responding. Remember all of those close losses from the Orgeron Era? Georgia, Alabama, et. al. just showed up and played, and it was always enough to eke out a victory despite the fact we were playing with everything we had. They saved the juice for big games, as they should have.

So what games should Houston Nutt save his Patton speeches for in 2009? Alabama and LSU are 1 and 1a. If we win those games, we are in very good shape. After that, you can argue about it. Nutt will probably want to save something extra for the Arkansas game, and who could blame him? South Carolina is not a divisional opponent, but it is the first conference game and everybody in the country will be watching. That should give it the nod. That leaves State off the list, but after the ‘08 game what are you going to do?

And, via the recommendation of RCR, check out this ranking of the SEC coaches by an Arkansas blog. It’s not based on ability or results, but rather who you would want to accompany you on a road trip where you can’t talk about SEC football. Nutt checks in at #2: “The trip would undoubtedly be a roller coaster of exhilarating highs and crushing lows, but it’d certainly never be dull. HDN’s hyper-enthusiastic personality and giggety giggety approach to life pretty much guarantee that something crazy would happen.” I can’t argue with that. How many multiple OT games did Arkansas play in?

As you can imagine, Lane Kiffin does not do so well in this competition:

10. Lane Kiffin - In both appearance and attitude, Kiffin strongly resembles the archetypal preppie/jock villain from an 80’s teen movie. And since most of our outlook on the world was forged by watching 80’s teen movies, that’s good enough reason to put him towards the bottom of this list.

It’s funny because it’s true. Kiffin would have fit in well with the Cobra Kai where, on orders from Johnny Lawrence, he would have no problem coming in hard on Daniel LaRusso with a horror tackle during P.E. in order to humiliate him in front of Ali and the cheerleaders.

I’m a big fan of ‘fun facts.’ For example, did you know that Walt Whitman ate four raw eggs for breakfast every day for the last 20 years of his life? But I’m not sure the one I have in mind qualifies as fun exactly. Last season, Memphis rushed for 188 yards against Ole Miss, the most the Rebel defense gave up all season. Obviously, we can attribute that to it being the first game under the new coaches. Things tightened up considerably after that first game. Six weeks later against one of the best rushing teams in the nation, Ole Miss held Alabama to their season-low total of 107 yards. Rushing defense was the strong point on defense last season, as the Rebels finished fourth in the nation in yards allowed at only 86.5 yards per game. A more typical performance against Memphis would have improved those numbers even further.

I heard that stat about Memphis’s rushing yards mentioned on the radio yesterday, and it triggered something in my subconscious. I have had a couple of dreams nightmares where we are losing to Memphis. Several other people have mentioned they have suffered similar dreams about the Memphis game. It must be because the possibility, however remote, is so terrible that it floats around in our subconscious. In the full light of day, it is hard to imagine how catastrophic that would be; the mind boggles and shuts down before you can fully contemplate it.

With that in mind, I have started to peruse the Commercial Appeal for articles about Memphis.

The offensive line

Developing depth here will be a key to the UofM offense. Dominik Riley is the lone returning starter, but moves from left guard to center. To create depth, West moved Tommy Walker, a redshirt in 2008 and a defensive lineman in 2007, over. Left guard Joel McCleod opens camp atop the depth chart after playing 11 games on the defensive line a year ago. JC transfers Brad Paul and Kindly Jacques enter camp listed as backups at right tackle and right guard.

Before reading up a bit, all I knew is that they have tall receivers. Four of the OL that were able to grind out those 188 yards graduated, and they are thin at the position. Lots of guys were moved from defense in order to play on the offensive line. It will be a challenge for their first starts as offensive linemen to come against a superior SEC defensive line, so I don’t foresee another 188 yard day for the Tigers.

But I had totally forgotten about that rushing performance by the Memphis offense. After years wandering in the post-Eli desert, everybody was so ecstatic to see an exciting offense and a good quarterback that everything else became irrelevant after we won by double digits and covered. We all remember pulverizing LSU in Tiger Stadium and then obliterating State at the end of the season, but the Memphis game did happen too.

The big college football story is the injury to Southern Cal’s heir apparent at quarterback, Aaron Corp, who is out for “one-two weeks.” This opens the door for Matt Barkley. Who? Matt Hinton explains:

..the chosen one, the top quarterback recruit in the country, blessed already with an NFL body, an eye-opening spring and possibly a narrow mandate from the fans, who’d rather see the potential savior right away than spend the next three years pinning their hopes to a skinny gamer whose most prized talent is “takes care of the ball” while wondering what potential riches wait on the bench.

You have to feel for Corp. Here in the late aughts, the most high-profile position in college football is quarterback at USC. You are guaranteed to have your exploits covered in loving detail on the highlight shows, such as effortlessly tossing off 50 yard bombs against Washington State while your offensive line–which has an aggregate 437 Rivals recruiting stars–gives you enough time to check your phone to see which Hollywood starlet wants to meet you at the Viper Room after the game. It is actually conceivable that Aaron Corp’s injury has taken him from serious Heisman consideration on the country’s biggest college football stage to a footnote on the bench as the career understudy to the next Palmer/Leinart/Sanchez first round pick type.

This happened despite QBs being afforded the special protection of different colored-jerseys and strict hands-off warnings from coaches. You might remember that Deuce got hurt in preseason practice in 1999, which opened the door for Joe Gunn to actually become the SEC’s leading rusher that season and was the first warning sign that led to Deuce getting drafted much lower than expected because of injury concerns.

Now that they have put on pads up in Oxford, I am too nervous to bring up the name of a certain quarterback in this context, although when clicking on the links to read practice reports I do so with some trepidation.

Some casino put out some very early lines back in June for select big games, but the limits were pretty low and it was just the one place. It worked though because that place got a lot of publicity. But now we are close enough to the season that real lines for every game are out:

South Carolina @ NC State (-3)–This is the first game of the season on Thursday night. Too bad it is a boring NFLesque line with the home team getting the customary three points. These teams opened the season last year as well, and there’s no way this game can be as boring as it was last year. Unless you spent 10 quality minutes on the NC State page of your copy of Phil Steele, I’ll bet you didn’t know that NC State’s QB is pre-season first team All-ACC. I forget his name.

Georgia @ Oklahoma State (-5.5)–UGA’s bizarrely challeging non-conference schedule is bad for them, but good for TV viewers. This could be the best opening-weekend game in a long time. Lots of people are saying Okie St. is overrated in the preseason, but they are getting some respect from oddsmakers as solid favorites over a traditional SEC power.

Kentucky (-14) vs Miami (Ohio) in ClevelandYeah.

La Tech @ Auburn (-13)–Auburn’s new coaches debut as two TD favorites against what I assume is a competent La Tech team. Those points look very tempting right now.

Va Tech vs. Alabama (-5) in Atlanta–The total on this one is only 37, by far the lowest of week 1.

LSU (-16) @ Washington–I am surprised this one is under 20. I bet it will be higher by kickoff.

Western Kentucky @ Tennessee (-30.5)–Something is off when Tennessee is favored by 30 points. The best explanation is that Western Kentucky is playing as a full member of 1-A for the first time this season and virtually everyone rates them as the worst team in the country. But still. Last year, Tennessee was favored by 25 over Wyoming and then Phat Phil was phired.

Ole Miss (-17) @ Memphis17 is pretty much what I expected. Maybe a little higher. Last season, the line on this game in Oxford was only 7.5. If the offense scores as expected, this should be a cover.

With the players reporting to Oxford over the weekend, we now will be blessed with daily practice reports and don’t have to try so hard to invent things to talk about when it comes to the upcoming season. Now actual things will be happening.

Coaches take different approaches to first day addresses. As usual, Coach Nutt sounds very upbeat about what a great summer everyone had and how their “antennae were up” on overconfidence or loafing. I’m pretty sure Kent Austin didn’t take his shirt off and challenge the incoming freshmen to fight him. Not every leader makes a good first impression, as this story about Winston Churchill assuming command of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in Flanders in 1917:

The usual low-profile arrival of a new commanding officer did not suit Winston Churchill. His appearance shortly before noon was arguably the most bizarre of any in World War I. He rode in on a black charger, accompanied by Archie Sinclair and two grooms, also riding black chargers. Behind them was a cart piled high with his luggage, which far exceeded what was permitted under regulations. “In the rear half,” recalled Hakewell Smith, “we saw a curious contraption: a long bath and a boiler for heating the bath water.”

Churchill had sent word ahead that he desired to meet his officers at lunch before inspecting his new command. Hakewell Smith relates: “It was quite the most uncomfortable lunch I had ever been at. Churchill didn’t say a word: he went right round the table starting each officer out of countenance. We had disliked the idea of Churchill being in command; now, having seen him, we disliked the idea even more. At the end of the lunch, he made a short speech: ‘Gentlemen, I am now your commanding Officer. Those who support me I will look after. Those who go against me I will break. Good afternoon gentlemen.’ We all agreed we were in for a pretty rotten time.”

Carlo D’Este, “Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945″