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Today in college football news, if you like pop music — well heck, everybody likes pop music — you might really like the new Lights album.
Get the Bag: How to stock your program with winners
Having spent the first decade of my working life at Publix, the Southeastern grocery chain, I of course locked on to this as my favorite detail from Scott Dochterman’s new story on dark-horse Illinois:
“On recruiting trips as an assistant at Wisconsin, Bret Bielema learned from Barry Alvarez to watch offensive linemen move while stacking groceries to see whether they could block for the Badgers.”
Valid. Wise. Mandatory. Couldn’t possibly agree more. Alvarez knows ball. Let’s go to the tape.
If I’m a recruiting staffer for a Power 4 football program, and for some reason I am sent on a grocery run with a prospective student-athlete, there are several factors to which I’m going to pay punishingly close attention. (For today, let’s just put these athletes through the grocery-bagging drill. Stocking shelves is for those who have earned helmet stripes.)
- Efficiency. Remember: Slow is clean, and clean is fast. I don’t want to see objects being hurled into plastic. I want to see whether the recruit has the patience and foresight to align objectives along the way to meeting one goal (filling one bag) at a time. Are our hands intentional?
- Strength. That stack of 20-pound dog food bags on the bottom of the cart? It needs to be hoisted so that it can be booped by the scanner. Are we lifting with our knees? Are we explosive? Are we explosively returning the bag to the bottom of the cart after it has been booped? What about the 48-packs of soda beneath the dog food? Are we returning the dog food carefully, so that the cans do not become explosive? I’m closely monitoring hip bend, as well as pad level.
- Organization. That thing about “filling one bag at a time”? Level up. Five-stars have several bags going at once. A hot bag for deli sandwiches and soups. A frozen bag. A hard bag for cans. A soft bag for breads. A pie smashed beneath a gallon of ice cream? I’m blowing the freaking whistle. If you can compartmentalize while being rushed by your hundredth $350 Christmas Eve order of the day, you can do the same while discerning which pass rusher to block. Do your damn job.
- Teamwork. Yes, you can BS your way through half a shift by laying low near the express lane. But wouldn’t you rather be great? Head on a swivel. Ashleigh is swamped on lane 9, and the parking lot is full of carts. Find work, then do it. Or else Ashleigh’s stealing your scholarship. (I realize this exercise morphed at some point from the recruit bagging their own order to the recruit clocking in for a 12-hour shift on the day before Thanksgiving. Well, we have demanding standards at this football program.)
Thank you for listening. Go read Scott’s story on Illinois.
Quick Snaps
💰 Would a billionaire booster and an eight-figure coach be the two best choices to create a fair college sports system? Skeptical! Still, there are some agreeable stances in a review of key quotes by reported presidential commission co-chairs Cody Campbell of Texas Tech and Nick Saban.
9️⃣ Everything a nine-game SEC schedule would mean, including a refresher on each team’s three potential annual rivals.
📈 The newly huge FBS schedule has paved the way for FCS to soon expand to 12 regular-season games, in addition to its own even huger playoff.
🍗 Texas A&M-Texas will be on Black Friday this year, even though Thanksgiving is their far more traditional date — 70 times! They’re now avoiding the NFL’s chokehold on the bigger holiday. (Well, the NFL’s started taking over Black Friday too, so just keep shrinking out of its way, I guess.)
🍱 “How studying sushi chefs helped Vanderbilt land a top-100 recruit.” Say no more.
🏀 “Of the thousands of college basketball players who entered the transfer portal this spring, at least 137 of them stand out because of one thing they’re all lacking: remaining college eligibility.” I love it. Married to the game. Hustle don’t quit. Make them say no. (There’s actually way more to the story than mere stubbornness or wishful thinking.)
🥎 Diamond time:
🎭 The Real World: Chapel Hill:
- ICYMI (seems unlikely), late last week, award-winning podcast journalist Pablo Torre reported — among many other things — that Jordon Hudson has been banned from UNC’s facilities.
- UNC quickly denied the report. Torre stands by it. I don’t know any of Bill Belichick’s friends, but I’m gonna guess “semantics” is a key word here.
- All of this leads to Steve Buckley, who long covered Belichick as a columnist, reporting on Hudson’s Miss Maine bid as if it were an NFL combine drill. (Listen, I know we’re all physically weary of this whole thing. But this link was the No. 1 clicker yesterday in The Pulse, a newsletter with over 3 million subscribers. All of us are trudging as one, forever on to Cincinnati.)
Branding: Rev. Meyer
What’s Urban Meyer been up to lately, other than wearing sunglasses on Fox’s Saturday pregame show?
This past weekend in Columbus, he was one of several major Buckeye-adjacent names — along with Kirk Herbstreit and current stars Caleb Downs and Jeremiath Smith — to appear at a Life Surge event, a kind of Give Us Money To Somehow Make Yourself Better At Real Estate thing that is also heavily infused with televangelist-style Christian theming and branding.
At one point during the event, Meyer told a story about being asked by Ohio State’s “school attorney” to stop having Bible classes and church services in some sort of Buckeye capacity. Meyer said he responded to Ohio State’s separation-of-church-and-state concerns like this:
“I said, ‘Well, we’re gonna do it.’ … ‘I’m really busy. We’re doing it.’ … ‘(Athletic director Gene Smith), we’re doing this, and if not, you gotta let me go.’ … So, the compromise: We had to call it ‘reflection.’”
Until the past couple years, I would not have guessed the hyper-competitive Meyer had ever threatened to quit the most prominent job in college football because of a dispute about a Bible study. I knew he was named after a pope, sure, and being friends with Tim Tebow surely imbues one with a buff to religiosity. But going full Bill McCartney? Surprising.
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There’s another surprise in Meyer’s statement during the event that he prefers college football over the NFL because CFB coaches can selectively recruit pious players. Not to say someone couldn’t change over time, but how would we square that claim with the non-stop chaos units that were Meyer’s late-2000s Florida Gators teams? (Along with his own evocative year in Jacksonville.)
Just interesting to watch.
Come Home: Dan Campbell, spiritually college football
I understand being in the NFL is something almost no coach would willingly give up before (or sometimes after) retirement age. It’s the peak of the profession, the highest level of competition and all that stuff.
I also know life is long and has many unforeseen avenues. So if there should come a time when Dan Campbell, the 49-year-old who has recently led the Detroit Lions’ two best seasons since 1991, is ever looking for work, college football would be a great place to look.
There are many examples that demonstrate Campbell’s erudite meatheadity is a perfect fit for CFB, and yes, the famous Biting Kneecaps speech was one of the first. The latest was Rustin Dodd’s assignment to drink Campbell’s daily caffeine treatment:
“Two 20-ounce Pike Place medium roast coffees with two shots of espresso in each one. The colloquial term for the drink is a ‘black eye.’ But I had one concern.
“‘Haha,’ I wrote back. ‘I might die.’
Did the author die? Better read to find out. (No, Rustin survived, though so did one of the coffees.)
This amount of caffeine of course reminded me of Larry “nine Red Bulls in a day” Fedora, Ed “10 Monsters in a day” Orgeron and Dana “case of Red Bull per week, every week, forever” Holgorsen, among CFB’s many other energy demons.
I hope Campbell succeeds in Detroit, partly because Lions fans never get to have anything nice for every long. All I’m saying: Sure would be fun if we could trade Belichick for the Texas A&M alum right now.
That’s a wrap. Email me at untilsaturday@theathletic.com on what you want more of in the newsletter!
Last week’s most-clicked: It was the link to the New York Times’ news story on the new pope’s identity. Guessing this means some of you learned major world news from Until Saturday. In light of that, have this story on Pope Leo XIV’s favorite sports teams all suddenly becoming very popular in Vegas.
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(Top photo: Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)
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