Fresh Men for Auburn Football

Auburn Football: I was in Auburn a couple days ago and you can smell football in the air and feel it lurking just off College Street. The campus and the whole town is alive with alumni, and with a new generation of alumni-to-be moving into fresh apartments.

My own son is one of these switching from the Copper Beech complex to a condo south of campus. I'm also glad to report that the historic oak tree at Toomer's Corner is still living, but it was sad to see the barricades around it and the lack of leaves at the tips of the branches.

This is type of mean-spirited damage is not what college sports is all about. It's about that 50-something couple I saw in Wal-Mart holding hands, with his orange polo and her white "AU" T-shirt. It's about the giggly girl shopper at the Apple Computer specialist store, Graphicom, where my son now has a part time job, in her blue and orange; and soon it's going to be about a crop of freshmen that Coach Gene Chizik said this week will NOT be sitting on the bench.

Chizik said this week that they'll play until they show that they need to be red-shirted and not the other way around. That should make for some interesting games, even if Auburn can't live up to it's pre-season #19 national ranking. Two of the most important new Tigers will try to boost the defensive side of the line, Jonathan Rose at Corner Back and Gabe Wright on the Defensive Line. With Nick Fairley and a number of other D players gone, these freshmen will be needed; and will bring an element of the unknown to the team -- should make for some fun footbal!

Gators Gall

Here's what I think should have happened. I think Florida Gators football coach Urban Meyer should have been called for unsportsmanlike conduct when he called timeout an instant before the Auburn Tigers kicked what would have been the winning field goal last Saturday. That could have done two things: nullified the timeout and given Auburn the choice to accept or decline the penalty. Obviously they would have declined, but if Wes Byrum had missed that first one, they would have had a second shot at it -- from 15 yards closer.

I'm no NCAA football official so I don't know how much latitude a referee has in assessing an unsportsmanlike penalty, but if its like other sports there is just enough. College sports don't need that crap. I know it's big business and that most of these kids are only student athletes in the broadest application of the term student but they are still more or less what I just said: kids -- and so are many of the fans.

Of course the stunt could have backfired; Byrum could easily have missed the first attempt and made the second attempt -- after all he would have just practiced it. Ask any basketball player, the second free throw is much easier than the first in a pressure spot. But Byrum banged both kicks clean through the uprights and I like what he said, "After the first kick, I really felt more relaxed. I felt like I was going to make it. It just doesn't get any better than that."

No More No-Hitters?

My father has an idea.

Dad's been around baseball a long time, he was a player and a manager in city leagues back when there were city leagues. More recently he's been a high school baseball coach, retiring from that only a few years ago. And he's been a fan forever; currently he's an Atlanta Braves fan, I think primarily because he gets all their games on television thanks to his satellite dish.

Dad's idea? A new baseball pitching role: the "opener", or maybe call it the "establisher" to avoid confusions with "Opening Day" or "Home Opener". But it's the opposite of the closing pitcher, or "Closer".

He mentioned this to me while I was visiting him over Labor Day this year. We were watching the first football game of the season for Auburn University on Saturday, September 1st. My son is a freshman there and he was at the game. We never spotted him in the sea of orange shirts in the Auburn stands, but he enjoyed his inaugural college football game. (Auburn defeated Kansas State in dramatic fashion, scoring two touchdowns in the final three minutes.)

As we watched, ESPN2 started interrupting with updates from the Red Sox / Orioles major league baseball game. A rookie, Clay Buchholz, was pacing toward throwing a no-hitter in only his second career start. This is a pretty big event, covered everywhere including the blogosphere. A no-hitter has always been a rare event, but in this age of protecting pitchers' arms and maximizing winning percentages even "complete games" are pretty rare and getting more so. Managers are quick to pull starting pitchers who stumble, early or late in a game and even pitchers enjoying a shut-out are often pulled for as little reason as that their pitch count is climbing beyond their normal range. No more are pitchers heroes-on-the-mound, giving up their bodies for their team and because its their game.

Depending on when a "starting pitcher" is pulled determines which role will come on in relief. There's middle-relievers, short-relievers and closers. It's not uncommon to see all four types in one game, and sometimes more than one of the relievers if the situation calls for a left-hander when a right-hander is in the game. But through the years of the rise of the relievers, the Starter has still been something of a sacrosanct role. A prime statistic for a starter was his number of complete games, but as the shame of leaving a game before all nine innings were in the book diminished, the new statistic of "quality starts" gained prominence.

Well my dad would shove quality starts into the dust bin of history as well by beginning each game, or important ones at least, with a team's ace opener, a pitcher that can come out hot and establish dominance at the dawn of the game the way a closer can vanquish the last hopes of the opposing team in the twilight innings.

Dad's thought was that the Opener might only face 2 or 3 batters, just like a Closer. I wondered if the Opener might run all the way through the line-up once, getting 7 or 8 outs before any batter gets a second look at his stuff. Of course once the taboo of starting with Starters is lifted, managers will find what works best with the rest of their style -- maybe the Opener would just pitch until he faces a strong opposite-handed batter. Starters might not even be called Starters anymore, they could be called "Gamers" or something.

The key is to break that taboo of starting pitchers and sticking with them deep into the game. Establish dominance early with a system that includes Openers and works with the bullpen you've built. A pioneering manager could earn a spot in Cooperstown with success and have a lot of fun watching the other clubs try to catch up.

I know my father would like to see an Opening Pitcher in practice. He didn't get the chance to try this idea with his own teams, but ask him sometime about "two platooning" his pitchers one year in city league -- he'd do a mid-inning triple swap among his catcher, pitcher and short-stop to keep an opposite-handed pitcher facing key batters. You bet the umpires loved it. Who'd love Opening Pitchers? Fans would, if their winners. Remember you saw it here first.

Micky D's for WiFi

We were on vacation in beautiful upstate New York in late July when it was time to get connected to a fast internet pipe so that my son, an impending Auburn University freshman, could have a chance at getting season tickets for Tigers football. The flood gates on the Auburn website were due to open at 9:00 am central time, 10:00 am our local NY time, so we located a nearby McDonald's restaurant and ordered some breakfast and asked for wireless access. The young lady behind the counter handed us our cinnamon rolls, OJ, and an instruction card and we went to work.

Thirty minutes later we still weren't on line, but we were getting closer after the store supervisor rebooted their system (the extent of her technical expertise, but she was very nice about it) and we realized that we were trying to get in via the local carrier's public portal rather than their McDonald's pathway. By twenty 'til all we had to do was wait. My son pounced on the tickets link as soon as it went live: $95 for 6 home games, not bad. And Auburn is the football team in Alabama with a tested coach in place, Tommy Tuberville. I guess I'll have to learn more about the players, and quick, since the season is about to kickoff in a couple weeks, it looks like with four home games in a row!

So when you need some internet in the middle of nowhere, for tickets or just sports scores, most McDonald's can hook you up, if you don't need much tech support.