Note:  This post was originally put up in a moment of breaking news and haste to get some chores done before stores closed.  The original material may be found after the jump.  Now that I have a moment to think, here is a more intelligible version.  --hooper

CELEBRATION!

Yes, the news is for real.  Gerald Williams is eligible. (Rivals here.  $$$)

Boomsday Knoxville 2007 (via naispot)

Congrats to GW, who has definitely earned the chance to play.  While most college athletes merely pass high school and sign a LOI to be eligible, this kid has taken a much more circuitous route.  But he's worked his tail off for this chance, and he's always wanted to play here.  I'm really happy for him.

MOMENT OF SOBRIETY

UT, on the other hand, really dodged a bullet on this one.  The SEC rule at the heart of the matter is this, in a nutshell:  a JUCO transfer must pass an additional math course and english course prior to enrolling at the SEC school, or they won't be eligible.  As of August First of this year, courses taught online, by correspondence, by distance, or by extension are not permissible to fulfill this requirement. 

As close as I can tell, UT advised GW to take a correspondence math course to fulfill the math requirement, even though his post-Aug. 1st enrollment would technically mean that the math class would no longer satisfy the SEC rule.  It was a grey area due to the transition between the old and new rules, but the wording probably favored a denial of eligibility.  The SEC is purported to have taken GW's hard work and academic success into account, and decided that bad advice on UT's part should not penalzie Williams and his good work.  (I would also imagine that they knew that every other conference in the country would have granted him immediate eligibility, and that he would have been playing somewhere else - most likely Oklahoma State with Trooper Taylor - is they didn't approve the request.)  So he got his eligibility, though the SEC may find some way of penalizing UT for pushing the rules like this.  Keep an ear open for future action against UT; it wouldn't be anything Alabama-esque, but the league will probably want to show that they don't like being toyed with.

BACK TO CELEBRATION!

Kool & The Gang - Celebration (via universalmusicgroup)

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Technically, this is the 4th week of the NFL preseason, according to the NFL.  But I have yet to hear anybody else call the Hall of Fame single-game weekend a legitimate preseason weekend, so we'll stick to the convention of the right-thinking world and call it the 3rd weekend.  Ok, with that little nitpicky craw out of the way, on to the Vols in their first-ever NFL experiences...

Jerod Mayo, New England Patriots

This will begin to sound like a broken record, but Jerod appears to be having a very good preseason.  Details are a little more scarce, because my normally reliable source of news on the Patriots (fellow SBNation site PatsPulpit) spent more time in the shock and awe of a miserable 3rd week of preseason than they spent evaluating individual players.

This is the week that the 1st-team units normally see the most playing time, and Jerod was one of the starting linebackers.  There is absolutely no doubt he'll be one of the 53, and will at worst be a backup LB with significant playing time.  It's quite likely that he'll be a starter this year, and maybe even in the first game.  The highlight reels don't show much, but you can see the same things we got used to:  quick play reads, hard effort on every play, solid tackling, and great teamsmanship.  (The best look of him you'll find is at 1:22 in the NFL.com video.  He's the middle linebacker on the short side of the field.  Note how fast he figures out the play and pursues the eventual receiver, even though it's too far away for him to do anything.)  Look for him to put the Vols on the map for this year's draft class.

Brad Cottam, Kansas City Chiefs

Oy.

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So here we are, three short days until the circle of life begins anew and football overtakes gardening as the #1 pasttime in the nation.  (I don't know if that's technically true, but I'm sure it's not far off.)  So what better time is there to have a discussion of the great Impressionist painters and their accomplishments?  No, stay with me on this one; I'll tie it to UT football, I promise.

The Revolution of the Impressionists

I am certainly neither an artist nor an art historian, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the work of a good artist.  One of my all-time favorites is Claude Monet.  I know he's almost cliche, what with all those Monet posters in every single wanna-be-Starbucks-coffee shop on the planet, but I absolutely love his stuff.  One of the favorite aspects of his work is how significant perspective is.  If you stand within about a foot of a Monet, you see nothing but seemingly random paint splotches piled thickly on top of a canvas.  The strokes don't connect and the shapings don't suggest anything.  But step back a few feet, and that glorified Rorschach test suddenly comes alive as a Japanese bridge, or a lily pond, or a cathedral.

That technique was one of the greatest advances in art, IMO.  Monet demonstrated that you didn't always need to search for ever-finer detail to find significance, and that some of the greatest meaning and interpretation was only available in a broad, apparently out-of-focus point of view.

In short, Monet showed us the forest when we were too busy trying to look at the trees.  I hope to bring a faint imitation of that concept to our attempts to predict the Clawson offense.  What follows is a very broad view of Clawson, something I must admit I never thought of doing until recently.  Instead of sifting for hidden meaning or small points of significance, I'm going to give a very broad, loose view of what we can expect.  Like the Japanese bridge, the planks won't seem to connect when we're looking closely at this.  But it will have some sense from afar.  And I think it gives us something more tangible and concrete than we've been floundering around with for a while.

Clawson - the Big Picture

As we're all aware, the biggest stumbling block in predicting Clawson is that there is no Youtubery of Richmond or Fordham to give us a peek under the hood of his offense.  Instead, we've been trying to sift through the news accounts and the numbers to find those little nuggets that, when assembled, would somehow give us a picture and a reason to hope.  What I am posting here is an admission that we won't be able to get a clear picture with that approach.  Instead of trying to find all the details, I took a look at the broadest statistics I could find on his offenses: the run/pass distribution and the distribution of runs according to ball carriers.

Rather than looking at game-by-game information, I looked at the seasonal data for both Clawson and UT for the last 8 years.  Remember, there's nothing of fine detail here; catch the big picture and leave the rest to Monday Night.

Run/Pass Distribution

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I watched back through some of the Broncos-Packers 1st half, andI think I noticed some things that I'd like confirmation/rebuttal on:

The Packers, as was noted by the commentators (and by MHR commentors), appeared to have scripted and rehearsed the opening drive.  Additionally, they really seemed to play the 1st half like a real game rather than an opportunity to get reps in live scrimmage situations.  For example, note the repeated exploitation of the Jennings/Bly mismatch; there were occasions where nearly half the playcalls went to Jennings (as I'm sure you well remember).  They already knew from past experience that Jennings could beat Bly in short yardage passing routes due to the size difference, so that was really not something they needed to run over and over again.  Yet they did, indicating that the goal wasn't to discover "what worked" so much as to generate successful drives.

At first, that seemed a little odd that they'd place so much value in drive success that they'd sacrifice as much experimental time as they did.  Granted, it was the 3rd preseason game, but it was still a real-game effort.  But then I remembered three things:  1) they got drubbed by San Francisco last week; 2) Rodgers is the full-time starter for his first year; 3) the F-vr- madness caused a lot of distraction and undoubtedly set the team back.  Given those three, I think the Packers felt they needed a morale boost more than they needed to iron out some plays and formations.  They knew some plays that would work (<i>especially</i> the exploitation of Bly) so they played to the sure bet.  When they review the game with the team, they now have a lot of positives they can discuss; that should help them convince the team they're on the right track.

I think that sounds like a fair assessment, and it was probably the right move for the Packers to make.  Given that the Broncos were doing a lot more experimentation in the 1st half, I think it also speaks well of our team that they played at least as equals.  I'd be interested to find out (if anybody happens to watch GB in preseason next week; I won't be able to) if the Packers continue the same trend or if they work on prep for the regular season.

If you didn't pick up on it before, I am getting tired of seeing 17 new polls every day.  I don't blame anybody for it; that's the business side of college football: the MSM has to make their money; the pollsters have to advertise themselves; the rest of us have nothing better to do while waiting for football to begin.  Our choices are to a) bicker about the polls, or b) this -

(via magumbo)

So we bicker.  And since we're on the subject of bickering, let's slide things over - just a jump to the left - to whining.  And I'll ask you this question:

Which fan base is the whiniest?

(Much more after the jump...)

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A few of you are like me -- sick to death of all the preseason polls and prognostications.  All of us are getting tired of waiting for that Vandy @ Miami(OH) kickoff at 7 PM Eastern next Thursday, when SEC football finally gets underway.  (For those who have stopped by who aren't primarily ESS-EEE-SEE SPEEEEEEEEEEED types, replace "SEC" with "NCAA" and roll with it.  Keep the game the same though; it's the only one that appears worthwhile for non-alums.)

Anyway, the point is this: the "official" pollsters have had their fun.  They've come up with their schmancy preseason polls that have only one meaning in life: to give them a reason to keep Auburn out of a MNC game so they don't feel so bad about ranking them too low to start the season.  As a counterpoint, everybody else (RTT included) is busy releasing polls to explain exactly why the "official" polls are screwed up and need to be demolished.  Somewhere around week 6, we'll begin taking these things seriously and all will be well.  But until then (actually, until the first game), we're stuck in the land of no-event newschasing where all the journalists keep their little typing muscles in shape by bringing us all the predictions they'll never mention at the end of the season.  (Gee, wouldn't you love to trust these guys to pick your Powerball numbers?  Or better yet, your Fantasy Football team?)

Soooo . . .

Let's have a little fun.  Rather than creating yet another boring old top 25 ranking, I've created a new poll.  This is one for anybody to answer.  You can only pick one, unfortunately.  The poll question is:

What potential upset would be as shocking as the Appalachian State - Michigan fiasco awesomeness?

Michigan vs Appalachian State 2007 (via code05)

(But don't forget about this!)

Dream away, impatient one.  Which game(s) from this list would give you the greatest joy (or grief) and would cause bloggers for the respective teams to post things like this?  Or this, or this, or this, or this?  (Thanks to Brian Cook of MGOBlog for such a wonderful display of angst, may I never understand the feeling.  Shame on Brian, though, for conveniently losing the live game comment thread after upgrading his website.  That was perhaps the most brilliant display of the Michigander command of the monosyllabic English language ever assembled.  The Psychology department at Stanford would have loved to study it, by the way.)

Moderated by some guy from Ohio, naturally

And while you're at it, have you noticed how many creampuffs that Ohio State has on its schedule?  Southerners may love their sweet tea, but Buckeye fans' appetite for chocolaty sweet breads surpasses all.

Keeping up with the NFL preseason, there are 3 Vols who were drafted and are battling for roster spots.  In draft order, let's take a look at their progress:

Jerod Mayo, New England Patriots

If you happened to keep up with NFL draft day, you'll remember that most prognosticators thought that the Patriots reached with their pick when they selected Mayo at 10th overall.  (Never mind that their next pick was in the second round, nobody would trade them down, and LB was their position of greatest anticipated need in the next few years.)  Give the completeness of the Pats, the Mayo pick was intended to give them a smart, aggressive, hard-hitting linebacker that they could train for a year or two before replacing one of their vets.  Well, that was the intent.

Somebody should have given Mayo the memo on that on.  Or perhaps they did.  Either way, Mayo has been a force on the field so far.  Mayo led the team with 7 tackles - 5 of which were solo.  Most of those tackles came in the first half, when the Tampa Bay 1st team offense was on the field.  Nothing but good news has come from the practice sessions either. 

He's keeping his head screwed on straight, too.  When asked about that helmet-ejecting hit, he downplayed its significance in favor of looking at the things he needed to work on.

In short, if he keeps this up, he may surpass that "ease into the system" approach and earn a starting spot this year.  I dont know if he'll make it by the first game, but it's not out of the question, either.

Brad Cottam, Kansas City Chiefs

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This isn't directly UT-related, but it is an SEC story.

For those of you who didn't know, I'm becoming an enormous fan of the "blog" that Chris Low runs on ESPN.com.  (I refer to MSM blogs as "blogs" for two reasons: 1) they're professional writers using a blog-ish format to write a journalism piece; 2) they often involve actual beat reporting - like Chris Low - which is something most bloggers can't do.)  Chris Low doesn't fall into that 1-sentence-per-paragraph writing that most MSM "bloggers" try to pass off as a "blog".  He actually tells a story when he writes.

Back to the point: his latest entries were transcripts of an interview he conducted with Houston Nutt regarding the Arkansas firing /  Ole Miss hiring around the turn of the year.  For "bloggish" convenience, Low broke up the transcript into two pieces:

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 2

The Arkansas/Nutt fiasco has highlighted some of the worst of college fandom.  How many of us would appreciate having every waking moment of our lives scrutinized for mistakes - including FOIA requests - with the sole intent of finding reasons to get us fired?  Or have airplane banners requesting our firing?  At another teams' stadium?  As someone with enough skeletons in the closet, it's a process that has really been disturbing for me to watch.  But when I read the interview, I got a sense that Nutt and his family have been able to move past the whole mess and pick up with their lives.  I hope the best for Nutt, and I think Ole Miss will be a good place for him.

If you skipped the interview pieces, go back and read them.  It's not like you're watching a college football game right now, after all.

And Chris Low, if you happen to grace this blog with your reading, keep up the wonderful work.