…you’ll love how the Boise State stadium will look on Thursday night. As if the blue turf wasn’t enough. Kudos to them if they pull off anything closely resembling this.

All 12 SEC teams will be in action this weekend, and all 12 games will be televised in some form.  This is mostly a note-to-self, but someone else might find it useful.  Or we could all just bookmark this page.

Thursday:

 7:00:  South Carolina at N.C. State (ESPN-HD)

That’s right – the SEC and ACC are the opening acts for the west coast headliners.  South Carolina has enjoyed this opening Thursday slot several times lately, but it’s usually been some ugly football.  No matter…hook up the IV and let the football drip…drip…drip…

 10:15 PM:  Oregon @ Boise State (ESPN-HD)

Few teams have as much on the line this weekend as the Broncos.  The national title game is out of the picture regardless, but a win here could still be their gateway to another BCS bowl.

Saturday:

10:00 AM:  College Gameday (ESPN-HD)

Everything about the show is beyond parody now, but you’ll still watch it.  The crappy intro, cartoonish hosts, predictable storylines, crowd trying too hard, and of course the obligatory Tebow human interest story – it’ll all be there, but we’ll all be tuned in.  I can’t think of another major sport that has a single  this kind of hold on the sport’s collective conscious.   The Gameday intro, whether performed by Bubba Sparxxx, Kenny Chesney, or the Wiggles, is the shrill factory whistle letting us all know that it’s business time.  You’ll be too busy watching for milliseconds of your team’s highlights in the opening montage anyway. 

Noon:  Kentucky vs. Miami of Ohio (ESPNU-HD)

Not much reason to watch other than it’s the first SEC game of the day.

 12:21 PM:  Western Kentucky @ Tennessee (ESPN Regional / SEC Network – HD)

Two debuts here:  Kiffin’s debut against WKU is all well and good, but it’s also the first broadcast on the new ESPN Regional network that will be taking the place of the weekly Jefferson Pilot game.  Tune in to see how the broadcast survives with only one Dave.

 3:30 PM:  Georgia @ Oklahoma State (ABC-HD)

3:30 PM:  Jackson State @ Mississippi State (ESPNU-HD)

Um…OK.  If you’re at a bar with 700 TVs, you might ask to turn one to Dan Mullen’s debut in Starkville and peek at it between commercials.

 7:00 PM:  BYU vs. Oklahoma (ESPN-HD)

You can tune in to see if college punters can get as much elevation as their NFL counterparts, but the game itself features two teams looking for a bit of legitimacy.  An Oklahoma loss would do a lot of damage to their chances of producing consecutive BCS and Heisman finalists.  BYU has an outside shot at playing for the national title if they run the table, but none of that happens without a win here.

7:00 PM:  Charleston Southern @ Florida (FSS / Sun – HD)

If this game loses your interest after, say, the first minute, you can always stay on the lookout for the elusive I-formation.

7:00 PM:  Louisiana Tech @ Auburn (ESPNU-HD)

Two more debuts:  the Chizik experiment and ESPNU’s Saturday evening SEC game.  Make it a game:  will there be more Florida touchdowns or Auburn completed passes?

7:00 PM:  Missouri State @ Arkansas (PPV/Gameplan)

Realize that this is Arkansas’ only game until Georgia visits in a few weeks.

7:30 PM:  Western Carolina at Vanderbilt (CSS)

Don’t mistake this for a repeat of the high school game CSS shows on Friday evenings.

 8:00 PM:  Alabama vs. Virginia Tech (ABC-HD)

Bama launched their 2008 season with a win over an ACC team in Atlanta.  Their most recent trip to the Dome wasn’t as pleasant.

 10:30 PM:  LSU @ Washington (ESPN-HD)

Lookit!  SEC!  Travel!  West coast!  Distance!  Will they finally love us?  I know…I’ll probably be asleep by then too.

Sunday:

 3:30 PM:  Ole Miss @ Memphis (ESPN-HD)

The Snead Stampede gets going with a rivalry game.  It’s Sunday, the NFL won’t start for another week, so you’ll watch.

Monday:

4:00 PM:  Cincinnati @ Rutgers (ESPN-HD)

Rutgers seems to be as good of a choice to win the Big East as anyone.  Fortunately we’re past the point where that comes with national title hopes.  Still, they’re at a critical stage of building a program:  the first wave of program-changing talent has moved through.  Now do they regress back to historical results or can the next wave of players sustain and improve on what they have?

 8:00 PM:  Miami @ FSU (ESPN-HD)

I think “pity” is now the default frame of mind in which to watch this game.

As if this week’s off-the-field distractions weren’t enough for Oklahoma State, we learn this afternoon that starting MLB Orie Lemon, a senior, will miss the season with a torn ACL. Lemon was the team’s third-leading tackler in 2008, but it sounds as if he brought everything from pass breakups to blocked field goals to the table.

Georgia fans know too well how much of a kick in the stomach this can be to a player and his teammates, so we wish him all the best and the strength to make a complete recovery.

Here we are on the eve of the 2009 season and we just can’t let go of 2008 yet. We’ve looked at the hard numbers. We’ve looked at the hidden numbers. At this point it takes something out of the ordinary to take our focus off of the game just five days away and go back over the tired corpse of 2008, but Year2 over at Team Speed Kills has one last post about 2008 worth reading.

He takes on the statistic of scoring defense which blindly counts any opponent points against the defense, and he “corrects” the numbers by removing things like opponents’ defensive and special teams scores. (It’s like an ERA for football defense.) You can argue whether or not it’s appropriate to discount drives that start on the defense’s side of the field, but he does it. It’s stats-heavy stuff for sure, but taking apart a stat like scoring defense has implications for the entire team.

Read the whole post for context and how the adjustment applies to the rest of the SEC. The relevant bit for Georgia:

The Bulldogs gave up an average of 24.83 points per game as a team. However, their adjusted points per game allowed was 15.58, a full 9.25 points lower than its team average. That to me suggests that there is a grain of truth in the claim that Georgia might be better off without Matthew Stafford if Joe Cox throws a lot fewer picks. I’m not saying that’s 100% true, just that there’s at least one piece of evidence to back it up. In total, UGA’s defense gave up 20+ adjusted points five times. Against the top six SEC defenses, Georgia scored 21.40 a game and an adjusted 19.60 a game for a difference of 1.8 points per. That shows that for all that the Bulldogs gave up in the way of non-standard points, they were almost completely unable to get some back via big special teams and defensive plays themselves.

No one is excusing the defense from some pretty rancid play at times last year. They still “gave up 20+ adjusted points five times.” It’s also the defense’s job, as Coach Martinez has admitted several times, to respond when placed in a tough situation like having the opponent start a drive on your half of the field. That said, those numbers put a point value on what PWD likes to call “team meltdowns”. You see it all there – turnover margin, kickoff problems, the short field, and, yes, the defense…it all added up to nearly a 10 PPG swing, and it truly took a team effort.

There’s another side to the numbers. As Year2 notes, “(Georgia was) almost completely unable to get some (points) back via big special teams and defensive plays.” Aside from Prince Miller’s punt return against Alabama or the glorious interception returns at LSU, the Georgia defense and special teams were typically not able to create points or set up the offense. We went much of the season with the defensive line recording more interceptions than the secondary. It’s not enough for the offense to avoid turnovers or hope Joe Cox throws fewer interceptions. Generating points is a team effort also.

If you had to point to the defining moment of Florida’s 2008 championship season, I’d bet that most would say Tim Tebow’s promise. They have the monument to prove it after all. But Florida’s offensive stats weren’t a great deal better in 2008 than they were the year before. There was a slight shift in balance from passing to rushing, but that’s about it. Giveaways dropped from 15 to 13. To be sure, it was a high level of performance in both years. But what turned Florida from a 4-loss team to a national champion?

The defense improved across the board. 35 takeaways fueled a +22 turnover margin. Opponent trips into the red zone decreased by over 60%! Opponent points per game were cut nearly in half, and that’s before Year2’s adjustments. Back over to Year2 to put a point value on those defensive improvements. Combine Florida’s insane number of takeaways with great special teams play, and you get this:

Everyone knew that Florida’s opportunistic defense and special teams were good, but against the best defensive teams in the conference, they were worth an entire extra two touchdowns per game.

That’s right: last year Florida’s defense and special teams spotted Florida’s already-potent offense an additional 13 points against the SEC’s top defenses. Not to take away from the accomplishments and contributions of Tebow and his teammates on offense or the potency of the spread option, but what Florida’s defense and special teams were able to accomplish takes hidden yardage and points to the extreme.

Think life would be easier for Cox and company with anything approaching that level of contribution from the defense and special teams?

(The quote in the title comes from a Warren Buffet letter to shareholders.)

So within the past few days Oklahoma State has had to deal with a couple of personnel issues.

Senior starting defensive back Perrish Cox was arrested last week for driving with a suspended license. He won’t miss the opener (“We handle all of those things internally,” said coach Mike Gundy), but that’s not unusual for a simple moving violation. It’s not like he was caught with drugs or anything.

Now starting tight end Jamal Mosley has left the team. Mosely is the same player who was arrested for marijuana possession over the summer and also wasn’t suspended. Now Gundy doesn’t have a choice – it’s on to plan B at tight end.

Does Mosely’s departure really matter? He only tallied five receptions last year, but he was expected to step in for NFL-bound Brandon Pettigrew. It’s worth noting that in Oklahoma State’s 2007 game in Athens, the most productive OSU receiver was the tight end. Does it matter that the position now turns to a player who recorded a single reception (for four yards) to replace an NFL-quality tight end? Much (or nearly all) of the buildup to this game talks about Georgia’s challenge in defending Dez Bryant, but as good of a receiver as Bryant is, he’s still not going to be the target on every pass attempt. Chris Brown, in his overview of the OSU offense, cautioned that “with Big 12 defenses focused on Bryant, it will be up to the run game — and the other receivers, and the playcallers — to find ways to succeed without lobbing it up to No. 1.” Just five days before the opener those OSU playcallers are dealing with a shakeup at a position that they’ve leaned on for a good bit of production over the past couple of years.