All That and a Bag of Mail: BCS TItle Game Edition

I'm leaving for Miami this morning, but about a year ago I made a promise to you guys that the mailbag would always be up on Friday so you slackers could pretend to be working while you actually read about all sorts of ridiculousness from me.

So the mailbag is up and rolling even as I head down to sunny Miami to gear up for the final game of the college football season.

Our beaver pelt trader of the week is Bud Light, who has agreed to be the presenting sponsor of Outkick the Coverage for all of 2013. I'd enourage you to keep this in mind as you purchase your beers. Every time you drink a Bud Light, somewhere a man outkicks his coverage.

It's science.

You can register to win a five-day Super Bowl trip here.

Now, on to the mailbag.

Brandon B. writes:

"I received an NFL and college jersey for Christmas. I am sure that nothing but ridicule awaits me if I wear them out in public. What are the rules for grown men wearing jerseys in public? And does sport/race come into play? It seems to me a 30 year old white male wearing a LeBron jersey is a hard sale compared to same man wearing a Blackhawks jersey and vice versa if it is a 30 year old black male. I need to know the rules pertaining to wearing jerseys in public."

Here's my thoughts on jersey-wearing -- no man can do it unless you are younger than the player whose jersey you are wearing.

That's a pretty simple rule, right?

This means once you leave college, you could never wear a college team jersey again, and that once your draft class, i.e. the guys who entered school with you, is officially in the pros, you can't get any younger player jerseys.

For most guys this means that by the age of 37 or 38 your jersey wearing days are over. 

I'd feel different if the jersey actually looked good on you, but, trust me, it doesn't. No woman has ever seen a man wearing another man's jersey and thought, "Damn, Jason is sexy in that Peyton Manning Colts jersey. I'm going to screw him tonight."

This doesn't happen. Trust me, if you wear a jersey and you're a grown man you look ridiculous. It's ill-fitting and the rough equivalent of wearing an apron around everywhere you go. When you wear another man's jersey it's like tapping out of the fight before it ever starts, handing your lunch money to the bully, checking your masculinity at the door. You might as well add, "I wish I was," before the player's name on the back of your jersey.

Because you've completely given up on life.

The only exception to this age rule is if you are closely related to the player -- i.e. a dad, an uncle, a first cousin, the like -- then you can wear the jersey of your relative no matter how old you are.

Other than this there are no exceptions.

So basically this means that once you are over the age of forty there is almost no reason for you to ever wear a jersey.

That's a fair rule.

As for racial jersey disparities, the rule's the same for all races. With the caveat that it's almost impossible for a white man to wear a basketball jersey and not look like a complete tool regardless of his age.

Women can wear jerseys at any age since men actually find them attractive in the fitted jerseys.

Allan Bell writes:

"Who is a better recruiter, Nick Saban or Oregon's Cheerleading Coach?"

I'm going to go with Saban for this reason -- it's harder to project a great college football player at 17 than it is a great cheerleader. I'm pretty confident most OKTC readers could pick out the best Oregon cheerleader prospect if they watched a high school squad practice. That cheerleader would probably turn out fine when she joined the college squad the next year. But lots of football players bust. Not so much, cheerleaders. So Saban's a better recruiter. He identifies and develops the talent.   

By the way, can you imagine if Rivals and 24/7 ranked high school cheerleaders like they do football and basketball players? Would it be permissible to project a 16 year old cheerleader as a five-star at 18? Think about how much creepier this gets in a hurry. Like, about 16 year old Dwight Howard, you could write, "He has a great body-type, broad shoulders, loose hips, great wingspan, huge feet, spectacular vertical, soft touch. Dad is 6'10" so he's got good bloodlines. Lots of room to grow into his body."

And no one would even blink with this analysis of 16 year old Dwight Howard, right?

But imagine you analyze 16 year old Kaylee Smith -- this is a made up name, you perverts, don't try and Google her -- and you wrote, "She's got shapely long legs, her hips are tiny and her boobs are really well-developed for a 16 year old. Good bloodlines, her mom's a legit d-cup. Springy, has loose hips."

Her dad would probably kill you, right?

(By the way, I still think replacing the word "slut," with saying a girl has "loose hips," needs to happen.)

Meanwhile, if you reviewed his son, he'd call and ask you to come drink a beer with him.

Anyway, I think what this illustration demonstrates is that cheerleader star rankings would be insanely popular.

And insanely creepy.

Lots of you asked me this: are you still confident that Alabama beats Notre Dame by double digits?

Yes.

The bowl season is a series of glorified exhibitions so nothing that happens in these games changes my feelings about Alabama vs. Notre Dame. The reason why I felt confident in Louisville covering the 14 point spread wasn't because Louisville is better than Florida, it's because you just knew that the Cardinals were going to play with a great deal of enthusiasm and that Florida wasn't likely to match that passion. Louisville had a chance to get the biggest win in the history of the program. The entire team from the coach to the players was made up of Florida rejects. What did Florida have to gain? The seventh biggest win of the season? Here's a list of games that mattered more to Florida than the Louisville game: Texas A&M, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, LSU, Florida State. I would also argue that Missouri, Kentucky, and Vanderbilt mattered more since at least those were SEC games.

So, at best, Louisville was the 7th biggest game on Florida's schedule and at worst they were the 10th biggest game.

Here's a list of the games that mattered more to Louisville than Florida -- zero.

I'm not saying this to belittle Louisville, I'm saying it to belittle most of our bowl games.

Other than Alabama and Notre Dame, which bowl game features two teams that really, firmly, to the absolute core of their being desperately want to win?

There isn't one.

No other game really matters.

So Alabama will beat Notre Dame by double digits. And I'd feel the same way if the SEC was 0-8 coming into th BCS title game.

Forrest Burger Tweets:

"What's your preseason top five for 2013?"

1. Alabama

2. Stanford

3. Oregon

4. Texas A&M

5. Georgia

That's predicated on Aaron Murray coming back for Georgia and on Chip Kelly leaving. If Kelly stayed I'd have Oregon at number two.

I'll have an entire top 25 out in a couple of weeks, but that's a preview of my top five.

Rance writes:

"Does the victory over LSU legitimize Clemson? Where do we stand in terms of national relevance? Does the average fan even know what state we're in? Guarantee you most fans couldn't go 5 for 5 on naming the state locations for Clemson, Xavier, Gonzaga, Baylor, and Butler."

If Larry David was a college football fan, I'm pretty sure he'd root for Clemson.

This is the most neurotic, insecure fan base in the South.

Which is saying something.

The LSU victory is a good one, but I think most people focused on Les being Les down the stretch more than they did on Clemson winning. It will help, however, with the preseason buzz. LSU will still be rated well above Clemson, but Tajh Boyd will enter the season as a legit star and Clemson will be highly ranked enough to make a run at the top of the BCS rankings if they go undefeated.

Meanwhile, UT fans are still wondering what might have been if Tajh Boyd had come to Tennessee and played for Phil Fulmer. It would be the perfect continuation of the Fulmer Curse if Boyd won the Heisman at Clemson. Tennessee's never had a player win the Heisman, it would go to figure that we fired the coach who had a Heisman winner committed.

Alan H. writes:

"This may be to heady for the usual mailbag frivolity, but, who owns the social media account if the Coach is using it as a marketing extension of the university he's working for? Does it make a difference if the university pays a person to read, monitor and "ghost write" responses ? Are AD's missing this issue in contracts ? Don't you think Cincinnati would like to have Butch Jones's Twitter lists?"

I get asked all the time by lazy law students for sports law review article ideas.

This is a great topic, does a head coach own his Twitter account or does the university?

I can give you some rough analogies -- the coach doesn't own his university cell phone, a school--issued computer on his desk, or his leased car for instance. If he leaves all of these objects would immediately revert to the school. Is a Twitter account like these objects, or is it more like university apparel, something that's given to the coach by the university that he retains after he leaves? Email is, of course, the easiest analogy. Do coaches retain their email addresses upon firing or leaving for another job? Some do, but is that a school option or a coach option? For instance, I know Phil Fulmer still has a UT email address, but I'm sure Lane Kiffin doesn't. Is that by choice? Even if you left for a new job, could you keep your old email address if you wanted to? I don't know the answer to that.

And then you ask a good question, does control over the Twitter account matter? What if the coach updates it himself all the time? What if the coach never updates it himself?

I started wondering about this when Butch Jones and Bret Bielema both kept their respective Cincinnati and Arkansas Twitter accounts and just changed the school name. I scrolled through Butch Jones's followers and the vast majority were Cincinnati fans. Then Tennessee started bragging about how many followers he had and encouraging UT fans to follow him too. I can see the argument for both sides here. If I'm the coach I want to take my Twitter account with me wherever I go and if I'm the school I want to have access to the fans who are following my coach once he leaves. After all, those are fans of your school and there's probably more people who will follow an active coach on Twitter than they will the other school accounts. So why shouldn't you be able to reach them with deals, events, and the like? 

This has also become an issue in sports media. ESPN, for instance, argues that many of the accounts run by its bloggers on both the NFL and college side are actually owned by the company. So if you follow my fellow 104.5 the Zone employee Paul Kuharsky's AFC South account, it doesn't have his name. If he left, the next guy would inherit it even though he's built it up to over 50k followers. The same is true of SEC blogger Chris Low's Twitter account. This doesn't strike me as very fair since it's the sweat equity of the individual Twitter user that builds up followers, not the entity that employs him. Especially if that entity isn't actually Tweeting, replying, or maintaining the account. 

So this is really fascinating to me. 

My guess is no school would ever enter into an actual dispute over retaining a Twitter account because it seems so petty, but if I was a coach I'd care more about owning my Twitter feed than I would a lot of other details that are negotiated in a contract. With every Twitter user valued at around $1, what if a coach has a couple of million followers? Then we're talking real money. So if I was the school and we did all the posting from the coach's account and then he left and took it as his own, I'd feel like he'd been unjustly enriched. So if the coach isn't active in social media, but you know you need to be active in the arena, why not stipulate that a coach's Twitter account is university property?

Anyway, this is a great law review note.   

@lsulala Tweets:

Rank the Sprout personalities by hotness: Nina, Kelly, Denisha, Carly and Liz.

This is for the dads and moms out there.

If you haven't watched Sprout yet, it means you don't have kids.

This is Chica and the crew from the Sunny Side Up Show.

I can't tell you how many bleary early mornings I've watched this show.

Okay, from left to right is Denisha, Kelly, and Liz.

This is Carly and Chica.

And, finally, this is Nina from Sprout's Good Night Show. The lucky bastard beside her is Star.  

Okay, so here goes with my rankings:

1. Nina

She's like a combination of Andrew Luck and RGIII, you can't go wrong here.

2. Kelly

I have spent hours and hours staring at Kelly trying to decide if I think she's hot or not. Sometimes I think she's really hot and other times I think she's not that hot at all. I've even closed my eyes, thought to myself, "Okay, pretend she wasn't standing next to a puppet chicken at seven in the morning, how would she look next to a bar at one in the morning?"

And I still can't decide.

So I'm putting her at two.

3. Carly

She's got the slutty librarian look going for her with those glasses. I mean, as much as a children's morning show actress can look like a slutty librarian. Which is, clearly, slutty enough for me.  

4. Liz

She seems really perky, but I get the sense that she has really big hips.

This is all intution since a puppet chicken is generally blocking her lower body.

5. Denisha

I don't like her new haircut.

Prior to the bad haircut I had her as a solid three on my list.

Yes, I watch enough sprout to comment on haircuts. (Inevitably the new haircut will be because she has some rare disease. In which case an army of four year olds will burn down my office.)

6. Chica

I don't really like Chica's perkiness, but I think Chica is more likable than Star because at least Chica is energetic.

7. Star

It could be that I'm jealous that Star gets to sleep with Nina every night, but Star seems much more whiny than Chica. I genuinely dislike Star. (This might also be because I'm trying to get my kids to sleep and Star always makes it look so easy. "Oh, that's how you do it, you just curl up next to a hot girl on a swing and fall right to sleep. I hate you, Star, hate you."

...

Bama 24-6