Bulldogs4

If they cut out one regular season game and cut out the bye week, the championship games can still be the first weekend in December.

MT6 I just don’t get it. Playing football games in August is beyond dumb. At least by Labor Day weekend, we are generally getting a bit of less hot weather. Plus the natural start of the season works out nicely with the start of college football season.

They need to cut the schedule down to 10 games. And start season on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. No need play eleven regular season games if you only have 5 or six division games.

The conference record looks bad but I like the direction we are going. Coach Jans is a good coach. We have three losses that could have easily been wins. Close but no cigar to this point. TN is probably another loss especially since they lost to KY at home. I was hoping they would win that game. Just need to keep playing strong D and eventually the offense will line up the stars and we will shoot well from the 3 point line, inside the arc and at the FT line.

The Collective was beyond stupid to pay a HS player $13 million to begin with. Second, old school finance says don’t write a check unless you have funds in the bank to cover it. I suspect we are going to see more and more of these absurdities in the future. As you all have noted with news being communicated 15 minutes before it even happens, nothing escapes the limelight today.

Coach Leach’s idea on this actually made great sense. Have two sets of rules. Players coming out of high school have two choices. Choice A - sign a traditional scholarship and then receive a stipend of say $150,000 (the amount could be different) upon graduation. Choice B - free agency - players negotiate their deals, they can sign year to year contracts or multiple year deals. They still have to maintain their academic standing to receive their compensation. It may be a bit different than how I described it but most people scoffed when he proposed it. Upon further review it might make more sen$e than the current chaos we are in. I am certainly still a fan but my enthusiasm has been diminished by what has happened over the last couple of years.

And to the point of freedom of choice. By having one district per county , students could select the schools of their choice. No need to restrict students to a certain school because of geography. If you are worried about schools being overcrowded, then students could select their choices 1/2/3. Once they start at a school they would be grandfathered in unless they chose to move to another school.

Once Ole Miss made the tournament and seeing the bracket they were in, I felt they had a great shot to go to Omaha. After they beat USM, I knew they were going to win it all. And I told several friends just that. You could just sense it was going to happen. I am so glad for Coach Bianco who has always been one of my favorite coaches. He earned that Championship. As die this year, I have no idea what is going to happen. Feels pretty wide open in the SEC though I agree that LSU/TN are the favorites now. There are no weak SEC teams. USM in the Sunbelt should be really good during the baseball season. Generally speaking the Sunbelt has a good baseball and the addition of USM is going to make it even better.,

One district office with one superintendent per county. No need to have duplicate offices with multiples of people doing the same job. It is a very inefficient way to operate schools. That will put more money in the classroom. The amount of waste in the central district office is abysmal. How many times have you seen a principal/coach/teacher promoted/reassigned to a newly created post in the central office? Oftentimes it is to handle this Federal grant program or this other new initiative that they have come up with specifically designed to protect a person’s employment status. Law enforcement is another parallel. Have one County wide police force per county. Have all the LE’s under one umbrella. One dispatch center. One sheriff/chief or whatever you want to call the person. They would no longer be elected. They would be appointed by the county board of supervisors. So much duplication in counties with multiple police forces. Very inefficient.

Free throws have been costly for State. Poor FT shooting have cost us two SEC wins. 18-35 against Bama and 7-22 tonight at Georgia. I listened to Coach Jans post game and I think he is at his wits end and I know the players have to be frustrated. He said they have tried multiple strategies and nothing over these last four games has worked. Disappointing because we are doing a lot of other things well. Hopefully just need to keep plugging away. At some point I feel like we will be better offensively overall with the obvious weakness being at the FT line. Certainly not going to laugh at Ole Miss. Just a tough situation there but they will get some wins and will probably beat State in Oxford. That is generally a given.

This is something that should have happened years ago. One school district per county. The schools can still operate as they are. Just to give you one example. In Lauderdale County you have two school districts. Lauderdale County and the City of Meridian. It is beyond stupid the waste that goes on in those two central offices. First there is duplication. What need is there to have two central offices about a mile or two apart doing the same work. Second they have created so many new positions in the central offices to protect employees/teachers/principals who should be fired that it is beyond ridiculous. Combine the districts are under one superintendent and one office and more money could be freed up for the classroom. What a concept. Spend more money where the students are. That seems to be a foreign concept with schools today. I could write more but you all get the picture.

With Chris Parson coming in and hopefully the future at QB State needs to at least to find a suitable back up QB to bridge Rogers to Parsons over the year or two.

Well he is going to Illinois who under Bielema is going to be a run first type offense. He may fit well into that kind scheme where they are not completely depending on him to win a game. I wish him well. Seems like a good young man. His dad is an excellent orthopedic doctor. My wife saw him in Columbus some years back and he is one of State’s team doctors as well. Good family.

I think it is great news. I honestly did not think there was any chance that this could happen. However , Cheyenne Trussell is an excellent AD and he was probably the only person that was capable of getting Coach Boyles to Meridian. Meridian has been one of the standard bearers for high school football in Mississippi for over one hundred years. I do believe he can lead us back to that standard again. It will be a challenge but I think the community will respond in kind. So I hope for good days on the horizon.

That beat down was shades of the State women losing to uconn in the sweet sixteen 98-38. At least State came back the next year and beat connecticut in the Final Four. Doubt TCU gets a chance to exorcise this demon anytime in the near future. Georgia left no doubt that they are king of the hill right now. I went to bed in the second quarter LOL. We lost 45-19 to Georgia and I thought we played well. And had a couple of things gone our way, it could been a closer game in the fourth quarter. Georgia just has no weaknesses. Even if they don’t play too well in a given game, they are still solid across the board.

CC You are absolutely correct. As I mentioned previously we have many problems in the city and with high school and many of those cross over to the other. The football team has been a source of great pride for generations white and black (we were and still are all Wildcats). This hire has the potential to generate that again. I don’t pretend it will be easy or happen overnight. And like I said nobody expects an immediate State Championship but I hope to see us become relevant again. That is very possible.

Nobody has any illusions about us being back to where Meridian was in the 1920’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s , 70’s , 80’s, 90’s, 00’s and even up until the last 7-8 years. But IMO Coach Boyles can energize the community again. Cheyenne is an excellent AD. Together I think they will make a good partnership. I hope that the program can be restored again to being good and competitive. Douglass did help stabilize the program over the last couple of years. We were six points away from the playoffs this year. Now having said that, Meridian High has a lot of problems and this is not going to fix that overnight. But a strong football team can be a force for good at the school and in the community. Obviously the city as a whole has issues with crime, neighborhood blight, struggling schools, gangs etc. No easy antidote for all that but this hire certainly gives me (and others as well) some hope for the future. We will see how it goes going forward.

If this is true, then it is great news. I figured he was going to not come back to coaching and retire or stay retired for good. The program definitely needs a shot in the arm and I think he would be up to the task. Count me as excited!!!

The Clarion Ledger of the 1970’-1980’s was a good sports rag though they were always historically an Ole Miss paper (no surprise there as the Journalism school was at Ole Miss, Ole Miss was the stronger football program from the late 40’s into the 1970’s-80’s and the Hederman family were Ole Miss people). They did have some excellent sports writers through the years like 83 mentioned above. But like all newspapers, their influence and viability have gone to just about zero over the last 15-20 years. I cannot remember the last time I read an article that they published online or in print.

Yep, if we are 4-4 after 8 games in the conference, that will be tremendous. Doubtful that happens like you said. Georgia is much improved so that will be a great win if we can pull it off.

Certainly some truth there. State’s FT woes and shooting percentage are masking a lot of good things that the team is doing. 18-35 FT’s killed any chance to win against Bama. 13-26 against Ole Miss is horrible. Offensively we have no scorers (from the sense of a guy creating his own shot or making a difficult three pointer at the end of the shot clock). We have a collection of good players who play hard but in basketball you have to make shots to be a great team. I continue to be puzzled by Ole Miss. Coach Davis is a very good coach and Ole Miss seems to have good talent but the level of play has been disappointing to this point. Unless Ole Miss gets on a roll this year, this will probably be Kermit’s last year. Which is unfortunate because his coaching is very good and he is a tremendous person. But we all know at the end of the day, wins are all that matters. All that said and we are still only three games in to an eighteen game conference schedule. Both teams have played the two best teams in conference along with yesterday. So we will see how this develops going forward.

We had a game against Georgia in the early 80’s that was pre shot clock days. Georgia led 14-10 at the half and won something like 24-20. At least todays game was better than that. Good must win for State. We absolutely had beat Ole Miss at home. I have no illusions about winning in Oxford this year but today’s win was much needed. Good to get that monkey off our back. Now let’s see if we can win some games going forward.

I think the first college game my wife ever saw was back in the 1980’s, a State-Ole Miss game that was uglier than ugly. State won but it was like 42-40. The loser was the team that missed the most shots. The kind of game that you go “well we won but there were only lowlights and the final score was hardly a highlight.” The game tomorrow has that kind of feel to it though these two teams are more talented than those teams were 35 years ago. But maybe they will surprise us. We will see.

I am not familiar with him. Intriguing to say the least. Obviously you would have to look deeper than just the record of the schools he has coached at.

Briles is an okay Coach but I am not really distressed about him not coming. Arkansas folks seem to be hoping he was going to leave. That was kind of a red flag to me. Matt Brock has been promoted to DC which I think is a good move. The OC hire is important. We certainly need to leverage the strengths of the air raid offense going forward along with some other elements to see if we can improve offensively. I think that would probably be the consensus of Arnett and the coaches he has on the o side of the line. Will be interesting to see how it unfolds in the coming days.