But the broader implication isn’t about the changing culture at Michigan as much as it is the longstanding culture at all big football schools, where the notion of “voluntary” workouts and hourly limits have been met with winks for years. A survey of Division I athletes last year revealed the reality: Time limits or not, big-time football everywhere is a full-time job that consumes vastly more hours than the NCAA officially sanctions — and has to be, if the competition is putting in the same work. That players will “voluntarily” go above and beyond the proscribed limits is taken for granted. (It hardly seems like a coincidence that at least 20 college players have collapsed and died following offseason workouts in the last decade, which was practically unheard of even under old school sadists like Bear Bryant.) Coaches follow the letter of the law at the peril of their records and their jobs.

In that sense, assuming that Carr’s staff really were the sticklers they’re widely reputed to be (an assumption backed up by the Free Press’ reports), the exuberance of their successors is just another case of Rodriguez and Barwis bringing the program into the 21st Century. The fact that they’re being singled out may only be because they’re doing it at one of the very few places that knows the difference.

In other words, there is a degree of hypocrisy in singling out Rodriguez, but it is only in the fact that this has become normal, and even expected. It is, in modern big-time football, the cost of winning. Maybe Rodriguez went too far (or maybe not), but it makes little sense to single out Rodriguez and Michigan, at least for most of the allegations. (The Sunday stuff, if true, does seem excessive.)

There is also little point in the NCAA having rules no one can be expected to comply with. The NCAA practice limits are quite stringent, and there are obvious reasons why a school would want their players to practice more than the NCAA limits would allow. Besides improving their overall conditioning and fitness, or their football skills, the large amounts of downtime for student-athletes who only practice about four hours a day and are, in many cases at least, barely even students can lead to a lot of time to get in trouble off-the-field. I’m not singling out football players as miscreants, but instead just pointing out that many 19 year-old males do stupid things, and scholarship football players are given a lot of freedom and privilege — a lot of rope to hang themselves with. Call it the Cesar Millan/Dog whisperer strategy: if you make kids work harder they are less likely to have the time (or energy) to get into trouble. (In high school, many teams schedule an early morning Saturday morning practice where the focus is on the younger guys; for the varsity players, the point is to make them get up early and thus deter them from staying out late after football games on Friday night.)

In any event, the point of the rule seems to be, among other things, to protect the image of players as “student athletes” — they don’t treat their sport as a full-time job. This is of course a classic case of image versus reality, and a conflict that will not go away. For every scholarship football player who spends extra time pursuing their degree, there are countless others for whom it is just a full-time job. And it is not like fans, if they are honest, would have it another way. I have never heard a player come off the field and say, “You know, I’m sorry I didn’t play well this week. I’m taking a lot of really interesting classes and I stayed up late to work on them and I skipped some extra film study so I could go to my professor’s office hours — man it was fascinating. I promise to refocus next week.” The NFL has no such identity crisis, but it’s just another symptom of college football’s dual role as a business that puts out a sports product where the employees are “student athletes” paid (primarily) with a free education. This tension won’t go away.

- Thanatos and football. As the Doc also noted, practicing football has become increasingly deadly. He says,  “It hardly seems like a coincidence that at least 20 college players have collapsed and died following offseason workouts in the last decade, which was practically unheard of even under old school sadists like Bear Bryant.”

Why football players are dying is a tricky question, and theories abound. Are they the same and they were just underreported previously? Are workouts tougher? Are kids less able to handle these workouts because they spend the rest of their time inside, playing video games, etc? Is it the supplement industry, with creatine-influenced cramping, reduced water retention, and sports/redbull/caffeine drink induced increased heart rates causing the injuries? It’s very hard to say.

In Kentucky, there’s a test case where a high school coach charged with “reckless homicide” and “wanton endangerment” in connection with the death of a 15-year old player who died while running wind sprints in practice. The prosecution’s theory is that Jason Stinson, coach of Pleasure Ridge Park in Louisville, “recklessly” ignored warning signs that indicated that Stinson was suffering, denied him water, that another player collapsed before Max Gilpin, the player who died, did. The prosecutor also asserts that, after Gilpin collapsed, Stinson called other players “cowards” and continued to make them run. In sum, the prosecution’s theory is that Stinson ignored all the warning signs under which a normal person would have called off the dogs.

But, as reported by the Louisville Courier-Journal, a group of legal experts think a conviction for Stinson is unlikely. Specifically:

“The classic example of reckless homicide is firing a gun into a crowded building and killing somebody,” said defense lawyer Steve Romines of Louisville. “Having kids run wind sprints doesn’t equate to that.”

It may be even harder for the prosecution to convict Stinson on the wanton endangerment count because it requires proof that he knew about the risks to Max’s health and consciously disregarded them, said University of Kentucky professor Robert Lawson.

“They must prove he saw the risk … and said, ‘To hell with it, I’m going to do it anyway,’” said Lawson, the main author of Kentucky’s laws on crime and punishment.

Even if prosecutors persuade the jury that Stinson made excessive demands on his players, Wicker said, “There is a difference between a football coach who was too tough on his players and a criminal — and I think jurors will see him as the former.”

. . .

But court pleadings show that the defense will make its case in part through the testimony of other coaches, including Butler High School football coach Scott Carmony and former St. Xavier athletic director Gerald Mayes. Both will say that running players for 40 to 45 minutes, resting half that time — as the defense says Stinson did — was “not excessive under the conditions of Aug. 20, 2008.” Dr. Daniel Danzl, chairman of the University of Louisville’s department of emergency medicine, will also testify for the defense that it was not “medically dangerous or unreasonable.”

And former medical examiner Dr. George Nichols and Dr. Bill Smock, a UofL professor of emergency medicine, will reiterate their opinions that Max’s heat stroke was not caused by lack of water. . . .

But [former federal prosecutor Scott C.] Cox said that “if the witness accounts are accurate, I think what the defendant did went beyond whatever even a so-called disciplinarian coach should do.”

Still, Cox said the prosecution faces a tough task: “The coach looks good and is well-spoken. ”“He  is popular in the community and will have lots of support in the courtroom. And he is not somebody you can say intentionally committed a crime.”

- And now for something completely different: Redskins defensive coordinator Greg Blanche gives as good as he gets. After the Redskins’ preseason loss to the Patriots, ‘Skins DC Greg Blanche fielded a question about the play of his defensive line against Tom Brady. After giving an answer (a somewhat informative one, I thought) Blanche turns the tables, and fires the question back to the questioner, Trevor Matich. Matich looked disgusted, and Chris Chase over at Shutdown Corner questions Blanche’s decision to fire back, but I actually thought it was kind of refreshing. Blanche was generally good natured about it, and had brought up a good point, that “pressure on the QB” is not the end all be all of defense. Now, the ‘Skins’ haven’t exactly been great in the pressure department, but Blanche is right that a guy like Brady is adept at checking plays and doing things to either negate pressure or figure out when there won’t be much. In any event, judge the interchange for yourselves:

- Something I wish I understood better, from the July/August issue of Discover magazine:

[Physicist Stephen] Hawking is now pushing a different strategy, which he calls top-down cosmology. It is not the case, he says, that the past uniquely determines the present. Because the universe has many possible histories and just as many possible beginnings, the present state of the universe selects the past. “This means that the histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured,” Hawking wrote in a recent paper, “contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history.”…Hawking’s idea provides a natural context for string theory. All those universes might simply represent different possible histories of our universe.

- The NY Times’s Thayer Evans with a nice Houston double-play. Evans interviews Houston alumnus David Klinger, he of run & shoot fame:

While playing in Houston’s prolific Run-n-Shoot offense in 1990, Klingler threw for then-N.C.A.A. records of 5,140 yards and 54 touchdowns in 11 games and the Cougars to a 10-1 record and No. 10 ranking in the final Associated Press poll.

“In today’s environment where you get in shootouts, who knows what that offense would have done,” the 40-year-old Klingler said in a recent telephone interview.

Houston’s 36-31 come-from-behind victory against Texas A&M that season demonstrated the Cougars’ explosiveness. When Klingler trotted on the field with 2 minutes 5 seconds remaining for what would be the game-winning drive, he had a simple message for his teammates.

“Listen, we’re going to have to do something we’ve never done before: we’re going to have to take two minutes to score,” Klingler recalled saying in the huddle. “We’d score in two or three plays.”

Yet even when thinking about this era of the spread, Klingler said he would still rather play in the Run-n-Shoot, which employed four wide receivers and was predicated on stretching the field vertically with deep passes that often sailed 40 to 60 yards in the air.

“For my abilities, I was in the right system,” Klingler said.

That said, I don’t buy this part of the interview:

Yet the Run-n-Shoot took a toll on Klingler’s arm. A first-round pick of the Cincinnati Bengals in 1992, he never lived up to those expectations. Klingler ended up playing six years in the N.F.L., the last two with the Oakland Raiders. He threw for 3,994 yards and 16 touchdowns with 22 interceptions during his career. But when Klingler retired, he could only throw a football about 40 yards.

“My arm was so shot,” he said. “I literally couldn’t throw much at all.”

But at a Houston practice several years ago, Klingler picked up a football and started throwing. He was stunned to discover that he could once again throw like he had in college.

“Years of rest I guess did wonders,” Klingler said.

I don’t remember what Klingler’s form was like, but if you throw a football correctly and don’t grip it too hard, you don’t really get as sore. Quarterback’s have a different shelf life than, say, baseball pitchers, where the body torques every time and the arm’s motion is an athletic-but-unnatural movement. In football most passes are routine, and there have been lots of quarterbacks, from college to pro, who throw a gajillion times and experience soreness but nothing like the arm just dying out. Now, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, particularly when repeated throwing couples with injury. Famously, Tim Couch’s arm literally died about five or six years into his NFL career, resulting in his being cut from the Green Bay Packers camp after but a day or two.

Now, guys with awkward form or who gripped the ball too hard — Troy Aikman being a famous example — often experienced lots of soreness. But I don’t really buy the argument that Klinger’s arm died solely of overuse.

Evans follows this up though with a nice bit on Houston’s quarterback Case Keenum:

While Houston was second in the Football Bowl Subdivision in passing yards and total offense per game last season, the second-year coach Kevin Sumlin and Keenum said that they believed that the Cougars’ offense could be even better this season.

That is why Sumlin, who keeps Ware’s Heisman Trophy in his office, is promoting Keenum as a dark horse for the award and does not shy from talk about him potentially throwing for 6,000 yards.

“There’s a lot of things that people thought they’d never see,” Sumlin said. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

With little fanfare last season, Keenum had an F.B.S. sophomore record of 5,241 total offensive yards, which was more than Bradford, who won the Heisman. He also had more passing yards and touchdown passes (44) than McCoy, the Heisman runner-up. He topped Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, the 2007 Heisman winner, in passing yards, touchdown passes and completion percentage.

These Mike Leachian numbers are not a surprise, because Art Briles, the previous UH head coach, was Leach guy. Briles left for Baylor, and in stepped Sumlin, former co-offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, but Houston’s current OC is another former Red Raider, Dana Holgorsen, who was Leach’s offensive coordinator at Tech, coaching there from 2000 to 2007. This is not to say that UH runs the Airraid — they use more “vertical stems,” or their routes more often begin with the receiver running straight up the field, for one thing — but the production has been there. Houston is a team I will be following this season. (See here for a good Q&A with Holgorsen before he started at UH but after he took the job.)

(As a footnote, the article mentions that Keenum is chasing former Texas Tech QB B.J. Symons’s NCAA record 5,833 yards. I have to say also that I have never seen a team chew up yards the way that Tech team did in 2003. Symons, of course, benefited greatly from Leach’s offense, and also from an outstanding group of receivers, including Wes Welker. Symons had one of the best six game runs I’ve ever seen, and the competition, while not exactly a bunch of top-ten teams, was not bad, and included shootouts with Philip Rivers and Eli Manning. Over that stretch, Tech played New Mexico, NC State, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Iowa State, and Oklahoma State, winning four and losing two. Symons’s results against each, respectively: 418 yards and five TDs; 586 yards and two TDs; 661 yards and six TDs; 505 yards and seven TDs; 487 yards and three TDs; and 552 yards and five TDs. That’s a tall hill for Case Keenum to climb.)

- Fall of the House of Bowden. More from the NYT, this time on the Bowdens.

. . . All that seems to remain is the gong to be wheeled out to get the Bowdens off the stage. Except, they refuse to go quietly.

“This game ain’t over yet,” said Terry Bowden, who starts his first season as the head coach of Division II North Alabama on Saturday at Southern Arkansas. “There is nothing less important in life than the score at halftime. Well, it’s halftime with the Bowden family. I’m ready for the second half, and Dad has a finish on his career that has yet to be written.”

He added: “Who else has three family members that coached teams that were undefeated in Division I? Who else had a father-son coach at the same time, or coach against each other? Nobody, and they never will. Who has 70 years of head coaching in one family and 500-and-something wins? Darn it, heck with y’all.”

…

The Bowden coaching tree seems to have new blooms this fall, a revival that began July 14, which was Bowden Day at North Alabama. All four Bowdens served up their best stories and one-liners, and the brand still showed it had some cachet by raising $25,000 for the program in just a few hours.

They still have their sense of humor, too. On the practice field this week, Jeff teased Tommy about standing on the sideline in casual clothes and not helping out with the coaching. Tommy said it was fun to see Terry sweat, especially after his brother had written a column last fall arguing why he deserved to lose his job at Clemson.

“He dropped me out the third-floor window, instead of just showing me the stairs,” Tommy Bowden said with a laugh. “My wife and sisters were really mad at him, but you have to know Terry.”

The Bowdens, it seems, can be just as tough on one another, so the scorn directed at them in recent years is only an annoyance — not a reason to exit.

“We’ll go up against anybody right now, and we’re going coaching,” Terry Bowden said. “We’re not apologizing for nothing.”

Rank	Team
1	Florida
2	Texas
3	Oklahoma
4	Southern Cal
5	Penn State
6	Ohio State
7	Alabama
8	Virginia Tech
9	LSU
10	Oregon
11	Mississippi
12	Oklahoma State
13	Georgia Tech
14	California
15	TCU
16	Boise State
17	Georgia
18	Utah
19	Nebraska
20	South Florida
21	Pittsburgh
22	Notre Dame
23	West Virginia
24	Texas Tech
25	Nevada

Now, some words on methodology:

This will be my thought process through most of the season.The BlogPoll makers (i.e. Brian Cook of mgoblog), tells us:

The poll’s goals are clearly stated. The AP poll is full of voters who vote team X super high in the preseason because of its schedule; this is strongly discouraged by the BlogPoll. Preseason polls are supposed to be exclusively about how good a team is thought to be, and postseason polls are supposed to be exclusively about how much a team has accomplished on the field.Â

Now… it is impossible to separate the former from the latter in late-season polls because college football provides such a sparse data set, but at the very least BlogPoll voters know they shouldn’t vote a 9-2 USC team #1 even if they think they’re the best team unless that 9-2 includes three killer nonconference matchups.

I agree for the most part, but I don’t know if it is that cut and dried. College football polls suffers from the intractable problem of ranking over a hundred teams that do not all play each other. Everyone has done the elementary problem where, for example, you ask how we might rank the 2008 football teams. Florida was the number one team, but wait: they lost to Ol’ Miss. Ol’ Miss in turn lost to South Carolina, which itself lost to Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt lost to Duke, and, well, let’s just stop. It gets even crazier when you start adding up scores: Florida beat Kentucky by X, which beat so-and-so by ten so Florida would beat them by 70 or whatever.

Compounding this problem is the fact that college football ends its season in a rather ambiguous manner, with a series of bowl games and then re-rankings. In the NFL, you can pretty easily do “power rankings,” because you know there will be a playoff at the end. This is not to say that the playoff will ultimately crown the “best” team, but if a team has three losses and another two, but you think the first is better, it’s fair to rank the first higher because you are sure they are more likely to win the rematch.

In college, however, it is, as I said, ambiguous. Texas beats Oklahoma; you happen to think Oklahoma is the better team; you rank Oklahoma higher. Or, alternatively, you say it was decided on the field and rank Texas higher. The Oklahoma guy says that Texas Tech beat Texas and OU beat TTech by about a thousand, and so on, and around we go.

Compounding this is the fact that the BCS, although I don’t think it is as bad as some of its detractors say, is not entirely fair. Or at least it doesn’t provide the same opportunity for a championship to all teams, based on money but also the not completely farcical fact that the non-BCS schools can pad their records against inferior teams, and a matchup between SEC #2 or #3 is still one they would be overmatched for (i.e. Georgia vs. Hawai’i, but then again there’s Utah vs. Alabama and Boise St. vs. OU). (Incidentally, didn’t LSU win a title with two losses recently? Including one to Kentucky?)

So what to do? This is the long way of saying that my poll will be a kind of “gestalt” approach, and therefore I will try to reflect the following “mix” of considerations:

• What teams do I think are the best? Who is playing the best? Generally, do I think team A would beat team B if they played.
• Who has the best chance of converting their season into a championship? The point of a poll is, in some respects, meant to reflect my perceived odds of a team winning it all. This will hurt non-BCS schools and will benefit teams with favorable schedules (contra possibly to Brian’s diktat above), but that is counterbalanced by …
• What teams have had the best “season,” and should be rewarded for winning the games they need to win and playing well? I may think a one or two loss USC is “better” than, say, an undefeated Utah, in the sense that if they played I’d be pretty sure USC would win, but maybe Utah deserves to be “rewarded” for its better season.

I take it that the BlogPoll seems aimed primarily at the last factor, but I can’t get around the fact that I think it is relevant that I think a team is flat better than another, or for that reason or another that team A is more likely to take home the BCS title than team B.

Thus, for this preseason poll I focused primarily on the first two factors, since the third is not yet relevant. (I was not interested in “rewarding” anyone for how they finished last year except insofar as it portends positive things for 2009.) It might be considered cheating, but I consulted Vegas’s odds of winning the BCS, because I do believe in the wisdom of crowds, though with limits. From there I applied my own gut feelings on teams. Some very basic specifics:

• Florida ought to win the title again unless something happens. That said, if you offered me Florida vs. The Field at even money, I’d obviously take it.
• The next two most likely contenders are Texas and OU, who of course will play each other and (theoretically, didn’t happen last year) settle who is the Big 12 delegate. I think OU loses more than people think, though McCoy still needs some runningbacks, secondary receivers to help Jordan Shipley and replace Quan Cosby, and for the D-Line to step up.
• Southern Cal I’m sure will be great, but they did lose a lot, and they are replacing their quarterback without any of the three offensive guys present throughout their big run (Chow, Sarkisian, Kiffin). Corp is hurt, so there’s Barkley? And yet, I still couldn’t rank USC behind a Big 10 team, hence their lead over Penn State (who I like more than the Pryor show from OSU).
• 11-13, Ol’ Miss, Oklahoma State, and Georgia Tech wound up being my “upstart” part of the poll. I actually think Georgia Tech is the most likely to fall back down. I’m a huge Paul Johnson fan, obviously, but in 2008 the Jackets were hit or miss and it would still be a solid move for Coach Johnson to finish in only the Top 25, and not this high. Ol’ Miss is harder to read. I like them and all, but the SEC is a buzzsaw from which I’m unsure they will escape.
• I could have had some of the non-BCS schools like TCU, Utah, and Boise ranked higher, but their stock was hurt by the fact that it is unrealistic for them to get to the BCS game. This is also why BYU didn’t get ranked: if they win their games, including one against Oklahoma, they could go to the highest heights, but I anticipate them taking some big losses. (Incidentally the same goes for Miami, who I think could be both improved this year and start 0-4 with a really tough schedule.)
• No Big East school was ranked in the USA Today Coaches poll, but that conference does get a spot in the BCS and I think they should be alright. People have Pittsburgh highly ranked, but that team has never put up much offense and they lost LeSean McCoy. As a result I think South Florida could finally burst through. Tough to call though. (Rutgers is the dark horse in that conference.) As a side note, Notre Dame benefited from the easy schedule/road-to-BCS position they are in. But seriously: who knows about that team? They could finish top 10 or out of the top 25; I wouldn’t be shocked either way.