Careful what you wish for coach 🤬

I have been downright gleeful in listening to the criticism that Kalen DeBoer has taken in the four days since his top-ranked Alabama team lost to Vanderbilt.

I do not believe this is very mature on my part.

It’s not particularly productive, either.

It is gratifying, though. And REALLY funny to hear Alabama fans absolutely losing their minds over a loss to Vanderbilt.

This was from “Legend” who is apparently a regular caller to the Paul Finebaum Show, which functions like a nerve center for the passions and vitriol of SEC fans.

One week after being toasted for Alabama’s victory over Georgia, DeBoer is being roasted over a loss to Alabama, and while I’m sure DeBoer thought he knew what he was getting himself into when he agreed to succeed Nick Saban, I don’t think he really knew.

Not until this week, but we’ll get back to him when we go deep.

• Jerry Dipoto will be returning for his 10th season as Mariners GM. The team has made the playoffs once in that time, and is currently high-centered on the cusp of mattering. Meanwhile, the Twin moved on from GM Thad Levine after the team won three division titles and made the playoffs four times in his eight seasons. Huh. I guess some people have standards.

• I thoroughly enjoyed the raucous College Gameday atmosphere at Berkeley over the weekend. My father graduated from Cal in 1972, and he was of the belief that as powerful as the Free Speech Movement was, that it was not particularly conducive to a successful football team. He would have absolutely loved the Calgorithm, though, and the big fuss Cal fans made over the biggest show in college football coming to town. At a time when TV networks seem intent on training the focus on an increasingly narrow band of teams, the beauty of college football is the quirks and nuances of the various fan bases.

• Getting increased attention may be a good business strategy for the WNBA. It may not be entirely good for the players, however, when you consider how they’re increasingly (and in many cases unfairly) being pitted against each other in the current discussion of the sport. This piece from The Defector is one of the most insightful pieces I’ve read on not just the way the league is being discussed, but why that discussion is coming at the expense of a huge swath of the players.

Ryan Grubb said it was his fault Seattle didn’t run more in Sunday’s game against the Giants.

He said this a few times, actually, using different words as he answered questions following Tuesday’s practice.

“We leaned on the wrong things,” he said.

Geno Smith threw 40 passes in the game compared to 11 rushes. Even that doesn’t provide a full view of the disparity because of those 11 runs, four were quarterback scrambles.

There were seven handoffs in the game.

“I’ll own that,” Grubb said. “Got to get the ball to Ken more.”

That would be Ken Walker, who had two carries for 2 yards in the first half and rushed three times for 17 yards in the second. Seattle handed the ball off just seven times — total — in the game with Smith scrambling four times.

“My job is to make sure we get all our guys in the best position possible to win the game, and I didn’t do that.”

In terms of public relations, Grubb was absolutely flawless. There are no follow-up questions when you accept responsibility without excuse or equivocation.

However, mea culpas such as this one don’t provide much in the way of insight about why the game unfolded the way it did. Football coaches can be stubborn. They can certainly make mistakes, but when they abandon a component of their game plan as Seattle’s offense did on Sunday, there’s usually a reason for it.

In this case, I think it was a recognition that Seattle was getting dominated by New York’s defensive line.

I do not think DeBoer was wrong in any sort of moral or ethical sense when he left Washington after two seasons to become Alabama’s coach.

I don’t think it was a wise choice, however.

That is a job that has chewed up anyone who wasn’t named Bear Bryant or Nick Saban.

And replacing Saban in that job?

I thought that DeBoer didn’t know what he was getting himself into or he was overly confident of his ability to handle it. Now, I think that both things may be true and one week after beating top-ranked Georgia, he’s now dealing with a full-blown freakout for having lost to Vanderbilt.

Exhibit A:

Now it might seem silly to focus on a caller to a radio show as being particularly meaningful. Every fan base has its lunatic fringe.

However, in the SEC, this perspective is considered to be a significant part of the show that is college football. Those attitudes are shared by some of the folks who sign fairly large checks, too, and when Legend compares losing to Vanderbilt to coming home and finding your spouse in bed with the neighbor, well, I’m going to contend that there are some Alabama fans who would say the loss to Vanderbilt is worse.

Alabama is a lucrative job. It is a prestigious job.

I’m not sure, however, that it is a good job because of the pressure and scrutiny that comes with it. I’ll stand by my prediction that DeBoer doesn’t make it to a fourth year at Alabama.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Who Killed College Football?” What I like is the breadth of history it considers and the different dynamics at play.

The first episode looks at television, going all the way back to the 1980s to explain how the way TV rights were bought and sold in college football not only changed based on Supreme Court rulings, but that the changes turned out (initially) to be much less lucrative than schools expected.

The second episode is about the conferences, and you begin to see how college football operates like a society in which rival warlords vie for power and seek to undercut one another as opposed to a league like the NFL, which has a centralized authority.

It’s great! I heartily recommend it.