Sylvester Croom says minority hires in college football have to get better, mostly because they can’t get any worse.

“But we do know this,” said Sylvester Croom, the head football coach at Mississippi State and one of eight minority head coaches among the 120 schools that play Division I-A football. “It has to help. It has to get better because it can’t get worse.”


Croom, telling the truth.

The article recapitulates a lot of what you may already know about the disparities between the number of black players and the number of black coaches in division one football, but it’s always fun to drive the knife home one more time.

The bottom line, said several officials, is this: In a sport where 54 percent of participants are African-American, having only 6.6 percent of its head coaching positions filled by minorities should be unacceptable to everybody.

The question again posed by the article is “why aren’t there more black hires?” And the answer is, depending on your degree of cynicism, is some form or side effect of racism.

Fulmer’s Belly institutes the John Adams Hate-O-Meter, because suddenly now everyone in the Tennessee blogosphere is running to Phil’s defense, save for this commenter so eloquent his comment on OuterMonvolia made Deadspin:

John Adams is your alls daddy and you all know it. So why hate?

If even Will Leitch is writing something about a college football story, it’s a bonafide kerfuffle, since Deadspin tends to regard college football as the sport of Cletussian heels too provincial to appreciate the pro game. Which, to some degree or another, we are.

SMQ’s counting and shit, and comes to somewhat similar conclusions about the new clock rules that Russell’s indomitable reason forced us into the other day:

The opportunity is there for a team that wants to exploit those extra seconds – a team with a lead, for example, or an outmanned team that wants to play keep-away with the opposing offense would have an incentive to milk it – but it probably won’t cost as many plays as the new out-of-bounds rule unless certain offenses really make a point of slowing it down on a regular basis.

The rules likely won’t pass anyway–at least that’s what we’re hearing–but a small, dorky, torch-bearing idealist with tinfoil haberdashery fully in place hopes the immediate nastiness greeting this rule on the internets helped doom them from the start if that’s really what happens. While we’re at it, that internet petition to save Firefly is going to take hold any day now!

Talla-classy. That’s how you say it. The urinals at Doak Campbell Stadium are, yes, Orange and Blue.

The line that draws Wetherell to athletics is obvious, given his past. Inside his box at Doak Campbell Stadium hangs a picture of the infamous Lane Fenner catch that was disallowed — a play that should have given FSU a victory against Florida in 1966. And inside the men’s room in the president’s box, the urinals are Gator blue and orange.

And that’s all well and good. For instance, whenever we eat Mexican food involving corn, our shit comes out a stunning garnet and gold color whether we like it or not, a natural metaphor both ironic and fitting. If anyone on the planet ever somehow manages to defecate blue and orange btw, they’ve either been doing some heinous Jelly Belly consumption, or they need to be quarantined and isolated in a medical facility immediately.