First Down Kentucky: ACC Loves its Non-Conference Schedule
Your conference might be in a bad spot if its best selling point is the teams it faces outside of the conference. That’s exactly what ACC commissioner Jim Phillips did when opening media days Monday in Charlotte.
“ACC football has the toughest non-conference schedule in the country,” Phillips said. “Twenty-seven games against Power Four opponents, including Notre Dame. Nine non-conference games against teams ranked in the final 2023 AP top 25 poll; 10 non-conference games against teams in the ESPN 2024 Way-Too-Early top 25. All of these are the most of any conference.”
It’s amusing to brag about a non-conference schedule when Notre Dame is required to play an average of five ACC opponents per year for its school to share the conference in all of its other sports. It’s even more amusing when you enroll your graphics department to brag about your non-conference schedule.
Despite the “toughest non-conference schedule in the country,” Georgia Tech is the only ACC program with a strength of schedule ranked in the Top 25, according to ESPN FPI. The ACC fails to realize their brag is actually a self-own.
They must play challenging opponents outside of the conference to bolster their program’s CFB Playoff resumes. This is happening a year after an undefeated ACC Champion failed to make the CFB Playoff. Phillips is desperately trying to keep this league together in the conference realignment shuffle, but he’s running out of duct tape and zip ties.
There’s a Giant Duck in Indy
While ACC schools spend time with the media in Charlotte, the new 18-team Big Ten (yes, it’s nearly double its original size) is convening at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The visuals of USC and UCLA uniforms in Big Ten country are jarring, although pale in comparison to Oregon’s introduction to the Midwest.
Commissioner Tony Petitti said the league is not currently looking to expand past 18 teams and announced the conference title game will remain at Lucas Oil Stadium through 2028. The leader of the Big Ten did not deliver the most electric quote of opening day. That title belongs to Greg Schiano, whose Rutgers team was predicted to finish ninth in the league.
“There’s two great thieves in this world: The past and the future,” Schiano said.
Kentucky Football Single Game Tickets on Sale
If you were too hesitant to pull the trigger on Kentucky football season tickets or three-game mini packs, you still have an opportunity to secure your seat at Kroger Field this fall. UK Athletics released single-game tickets for four games this fall: Southern Miss, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, and Murray State. You’ll have to wait a little longer to snatch up single-game tickets to watch Kentucky take on a few other SEC foes at home this fall.
What Paul Finebaum Does in his Free Time
You see him speaking into a microphone throughout the college football season, but what does the sports talk veteran do when he’s not in front of a camera? Paul Finebaum said he spends his weekends with his lab/pitbull rescue and he enjoys reading spy novels as his “escape.”
If there’s one thing we learned at SEC Media Days, there aren’t too many who work harder than Finebaum. He was up early every day for appearances on First Take and other ESPN shows. Then he capped off the day with four hours of television, much of which was consumed by interviews with coaches and players. In a candid conversation from his studio in Charlotte, Finebaum admitted this schedule nearly burnt him out.
“The pandemic changed my life. [The show] never left the air. But we weren’t on TV in the studio, we were in my upstairs bedroom. And that connection, during the darkest days, I felt maybe the callers really do lean on you. Maybe there’s more to it than This coach oughta be fired,” he said.
“In the 2019 football season, I was gone five nights a week. By the end of the season, I was sick, burned to a crisp. It was a blessing we got to the other side of [the pandemic] in one piece, so when someone calls into the show down on their luck, or has lost someone, I try to be a sounding board now. For the first time in my existence, here at ESPN, I was genuinely appreciative of what I was doing and where I was.”
Will the Real Joe Burrow Please Stand Up?
The internet freaked out when an image of Joe Burrow surfaced earlier this year showing the Bengals quarterback rocking an Anakin Skywalker motif. That image was faked. This image of him arriving at training camp does not look real either. Is he trolling us for falling for the other haircut? Is bleached hair back? Is this good or bad for the Bengals? There are so many questions without any answers.
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