Predicting the Sugar Bowl - Clemson vs. Alabama

During the build to next week's Sugar Bowl matchup between No. 1 Clemson and No. 4 Alabama, you will hear people describe these two teams as "mirror images." Those people are absolutely correct in terms of statistics.
In fact, it would be difficult to match up two teams more similar in terms of total figures both offensively and defensively. Alabama is about 20 yards better against the run, giving up 94 yards per game to Clemson's 113 on the ground, but considering Clemson gave up about 200 and 150 yards, respectively, to run-heavy Georgia Tech and Citadel, that difference hardly matters.
Offensively, neither team is among the nation's elite, but they're respectable. Alabama racks up 465 yards per game, leaning slightly toward the run, while Clemson averages 448 yards per game, leaning more toward the pass.
While the result was different, they even had similar stats against common opponent Auburn. Clemson got 281 yards - 185 through the air - and scored 14 points in a win, while Bama got 314 yards - 211 on the ground - and scored 14 points in a loss.
The two teams also had a common opponent in Florida State, of course, but with Bama facing the Seminoles mostly before Deondre Francois got hurt, that game is hard to compare. That's also why I chose not to analyze the teams' defensive performance against Auburn, since Kerryon Johnson didn't play against Clemson and played a huge role against Alabama.
Further, I think we know what these teams are going to do defensively. Both are stifling with a loaded defensive front and are known to have incredibly well-coached units on that side of the ball.
So how have these teams done against other ranked opponents, besides Auburn?
Clemson has three other wins against teams ranked in the final playoff poll - Miami, Virginia Tech and NC State. Miami was their highest ranked win of that trio, with the Tigers winning 38-3 in an impressive ACC Championship Game performance against a Miami defense that gave up less than 20 points per game this year. Virginia Tech was a similar story, with the Tigers winning 31-17 against a Hokie defense that gave up 13.5 points per game this season. NC State gave the Tigers some trouble, but Clemson still managed to win 38-31.
Alabama beat LSU - which averaged surrendering 18.8 points per game this year - by a score of 24-10. They also managed to hold off Mississippi State by a score of 31-24 in a game that the Bulldogs, who gave up 20.4 points per game this year, coughed up a chance to win with late mistakes.
The biggest key, though, might be a freshman - Clemson running back Travis Etienne. With the Tigers still figuring out their offensive identity, Etienne didn't play against Auburn. Later in the year, he emerged as the team's top rusher with 744 yards and 13 touchdowns on 103 carries and showed blistering speed.
Adding that burst into Clemson's stable of backs, particularly against a Bama defense that has been hobbled at the linebacker position, will be huge for the Tigers. If Clemson can avoid mistakes, I expect Etienne and the Tigers to run away a bit late for a 28-13 win.

Click here to find out who I expect Clemson to face in the National Championship Game in Atlanta.

Predicting the Rose Bowl - Georgia vs. Oklahoma

This year's College Football Playoffs may be the most intriguing yet, at least during the build-up. The first edition in 2014 turned out to be very unpredictable, with a No. 4 seed in Ohio State that most thought was the wrong pick eventually winning the title. But leading into the Buckeyes' semifinal game against Alabama, that game seemed destined to be a snoozefest.
This year, we have two intriguing matchups, and the first - and perhaps most intriguing - is the Rose Bowl game between No. 2 Oklahoma and No. 3 Georgia.
What makes this game interesting to me is what we really don't know. Oklahoma is known for a passing attack led by Heisman winner Baker Mayfield that has been virtually unstoppable. Even in a loss to Iowa State, Mayfield was phenomenal individually. Georgia, meanwhile, has thrived on a stifling defense and overwhelming rushing attack.
Even more interestingly, neither team has faced much competition that will test them the way their Rose Bowl opponent will, but they do have opponents that can give us a taste of what we can expect on New Year's Day.
First of all, it's no secret that Oklahoma's Big 12 opponents don't have the defensive strength that UGA possesses. However, Oklahoma did have a 31-16 non-conference win over Ohio State. The Buckeyes surrendered 183.5 passing yards per game this year, not a far cry from UGA's 158.3 per game. Mayfield completed 27 of his 35 attempts for 386 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions in that game. Similarly, Ohio State surrenders 292 total yards per game to UGA's 271, and Oklahoma put up 490 against the Buckeyes.
In points per game, TCU is surprisingly comparable to UGA, surrendering just 17.6 points to Georgia's 13.2. Oklahoma put 38 and 41 points on the board against the Horned Frogs in two meetings.
This game is also fun because Georgia's defense hasn't been regularly tested by offenses like the one they'll see next Monday. The Bulldogs did see Missouri, though, and while the Tigers aren't near as talented overall as Oklahoma, they have similar offensive figures.
Missouri averaged 308.6 yards per game through the air compared to Oklahoma's 367.4. Drew Lock managed to complete 15 of 25 passes for 253 yards, four touchdowns and one interception against Georgia in a 53-28 loss. Overall, Missouri averages 502 yards per game to Oklahoma's 583, but the Tigers were good for just 312 against Georgia. Missouri was also held below its season average of 37.5 points, while Oklahoma averages 44.9.
That game may hold another key to the Rose Bowl, with Missouri giving Georgia fits early before the Georgia offense was able to pull away by controlling the ball for almost 40 minutes. For that reason, you have to look at Oklahoma's defensive success against a running team to see if the Sooners can avoid that fate.
Ohio State averages about 249 rushing yards per game, not far off from Georgia's 267 per game. The Buckeyes were only able to muster 167 yards, and it wasn't that they abandoned the run. They still had 34 carries, but were only able to get 4.9 yards per carry. Since Ohio State actually averaged more yards per attempt than Georgia this year, that's a bit of a telling stat.
It can't be said enough that all of these results were at least a few weeks back, or further in some cases, but it's all the evidence we really have. Based on all this, it seems to me that Oklahoma has had slightly more success against teams similar to Georgia than Georgia has against teams similar to Oklahoma, but the sample sizes are small.
Still, if I'm making a prediction here, I have to lean toward the Sooners, by a score of 35-24. Let the hate begin.

Players have value beyond the trade market

The title of this post may seem ridiculously obvious, and it should. That said, I often wonder if some baseball fans and writers truly understand this concept.
Of course, the player and potential trade that sparked this discussion was the idea of trading Ender Inciarte for the Cubs' Ian Happ, as outlined in a piece by Tyler Wilson for "Tomahawk Take." Now before I go any further, I want to say that this was a well-written piece with plenty of logical defenses for the idea, and I'm not bashing the writer in any way. If I were to be swayed to make such a deal, Tyler's arguments would have done it.
But this is where so many modern baseball fans stray so far from what I think we should be as fans.
Ender Inciarte has been one of the bright spots for the Braves in the last couple years. He's won a Gold Glove both years that he's been the starting center fielder for the Braves and made the All-Star Game in 2017. On top of that, Ender is a reliable .290-.300 hitter that started showing a little pop last year and doesn't strike out a lot.
Why would a team want to get rid of that?
Even with young stars like Ronald Acuna and Ozzie Albies ready to take their spots in the Atlanta Braves' lineup, there's still a great spot for Inciarte. Albies probably is a more appropriate leadoff hitter for the Braves as he has a little more speed than Inciarte, but Inciarte can absolutely hit second and fill that role. In fact, I'm thrilled about the prospect of having those two at the top of the lineup.
As for Acuna, there may come a day when he needs to be the center fielder for the Atlanta Braves, but why rush it? Why not allow him the opportunity to learn alongside a young guy who has established himself as one of the top defensive outfielders in the game for a couple years before you thrust a teenager into the center of things?
This notion of trading Ender is the same thought process that led to trading Andrelton Simmons and the same one that made Freddie Freeman the topic of discussion for a couple years. And I get it. Inciarte's value as a trade piece may never be higher than it is right now, but there's a reason for that. It's because his value as a baseball player may never be higher, and it's also important to note that his value to Atlanta Braves' fans is also very high.
If the Braves are going to be contenders any time soon, the team needs eight good baseball players in their lineup. They currently have a good-hitting defensive stud in center field, and he's under control for five years and less than $36 million. The same things that make him valuable to other teams should also make him valuable to his current team, and that's something that should always be kept in mind.

NOTE: Slight edit in the 3rd paragraph to clarify original intent.

How important is a great farm system?

This might be viewed as a continuation of my last post explaining why I never got on board with John Coppolella as a general manager, but it's also more than that.
With Coppy and among the Atlanta Braves' fan base, there seems to be an obsession with farm system rankings. For fans of such a franchise, I can see the appeal to this focus. Since the organization is rebuilding, the major league team stinks, so why not focus on the minor league talent?
And while this post isn't a criticism of that focus, it does seek to address how much value farm rankings actually have.
So I used Baseball America's annual Organization Talent Rankings to see how often high-ranking farm systems linked with future championships. The results were interesting.
From 2005 to 2015, 25 total teams had farm systems that ranked in the "top 5" farm systems at some point. From that group of 25, just four teams managed to win a World Series at any point after reaching that point of the rankings - the Red Sox, Cubs, Giants and Royals. Of those, only two - the Cubs and the Royals - won a World Series after having the best farm system in baseball, a distinction the Braves reached last season.
Now you may have noticed the same thing I noticed, though. While that ratio of World Series success to farm system ranking is pretty low, those four teams have accounted for seven of the 12 World Series titles in that time. That would suggest that if you can really master the farm system building, you can have consistent success.
As true as that could be, let's look at the other end of the spectrum. In all, 23 teams have found themselves in the "bottom 5" of the list in that same time period. Of those, three teams - the Cardinals, Giants (again) and Cubs (again) have won World Series rings after hitting the basement region to account for six of the 12 rings. The Cardinals managed to win a World Series both after hitting the "bottom 5" AND after having the worst farm system in baseball in 2005.
In fact, let's take a minute to look at the Cardinals. Now, I know a lot of Braves fans have a particular distaste for this franchise, but few could question their success at the major league level.
In fact, St. Louis has been perhaps the modern prototype for consistent success. From 2000 through 2017, the Cardinals have had just one losing season. They've won two World Series titles in that time, been to the World Series two more times and won their division 10 times.
Yet, when you look at the farm system rankings from 2001 through the Cardinals' most recent World Series championship in 2011, their best ranking was eighth. Beyond that, their farm system was ranked in the "bottom 5" a total of five times over that stretch.
The Cardinals did manage to make it to the top of the ranking in 2013 and made the World Series that year, for full disclosure.
But what does all that mean? For me, it means that it is absolutely possible to turn a great farm system into a great MLB team. But it's also absolutely possible to build a great MLB team without having a high-ranking farm system, and there's also success to be found in between.
It's how that talent is developed, identified and utilized that matters, and it should mean that if the Braves need to make moves that bring greater balance to the system but perhaps hurt talent rankings, they should pull the trigger.

A message from the "other" Braves fans

It occurred to me that some Braves fans might not realize that there was another group of fans out there.
You see, while some of you seemingly celebrated every move that John Coppolella made, there were those of us who never fully bought in. For us, the last week or two have been a different - and perhaps even more frustrating - experience that what you've had.
For me, it wasn't always that I necessarily distrusted Coppy specifically. It was the nature of what trust means to me as a sports fan and former sports writer. I need to see proof.
In that vein, Coppy had never been part of a rebuild and had never been a general manager before. There were no "receipts" to show that he knew how to tear down an experienced but unsuccessful franchise and turn it into a championship organization. While he quickly showed that he knew how to tear down, we had not seen that he knew how to build up. In that regard, my decision not to simply "trust the process" wasn't one to distrust Coppy, but I simply needed to see proof that he could finish the job.
We, of course, never got that proof.
That's not to say that I didn't have specific reasons not to trust Coppolella. In my mind, he always displayed a desire to be seen as the "smartest guy in the room," capable of making moves others couldn't make. Sometimes that worked out great, like when he turned a year of Shelby Miller into Dansby Swanson, Ender Inciarte and Aaron Blair. Those are the deals that made us tweet irrational things about Coppy being some sort of deity or horned farm animal.
But there were other deals that some fans just trusted would pan out, that people like me never liked. Sending away Andrelton Simmons was always stupid because he was always trending to be better in every facet of the game than Ozzie Smith. Yes, even defensively. If you say no one saw Simba's improvement at the plate coming, that's false. Some of us knew from the moment that trade happened that it was a bad idea, and even if Sean Newcomb is the second coming of Kershaw, he'll only pitch every fifth day.
That wasn't the only deal, of course. There were plenty others, like the one that sent Alex Wood to Los Angeles for Hector Olivera. Others are really too small to mention, but they felt like "trading for trading's sake" and did very little to make the team better. Again, not all of his trades were bad, but I always wondered if Coppy just liked making trades and moving players around like a fantasy GM.
Of course, we'll never know what the next steps would've looked like, and that's the real point of this rambling.
John Coppolella is out of the Braves' organization because he got caught flaunting the rules that others worked around. By accounts we've read, he was a miserable person to work with, and other GMs and even agents had perhaps decided they wouldn't deal with him anymore. Maybe this is why, even as veterans like Brandon Phillips, Matt Adams and Jaime Garcia played better than could've been expected, Coppy was unable to move them for anything substantial.
At the time, fans like me were told to trust that Coppy got the best deals that were available, but do we know that now? Or were other teams simply tired of dealing with him, and he was left to take what little he could get?
So now, fans like me are left in a different position.
We sat through all those deals we hated, all the necessary losing that felt worse than it really needed to be due to guys like Simba not being on the roster. We put up with deals we didn't understand because other fans said "trust the process" and talked down to us if we disagreed.
And what did we get in the end?
Another rebuild.
Because that's where we are, folks. The odds of a new GM wanting to continue what Coppy started, or even being able to continue what Coppy started without incurring further violations, are pretty low. Sure, the pieces are there, but so is a manager that probably would've been let go if not for the front office turmoil.
So excuse fans like me if we're a little saltier than usual and aren't willing to just "trust the process" as the same front office that botched reining in Coppy finds a new GM. At least for me, I need to see it play out first.

Just answer the question...

By now, everyone knows Marshawn Lynch doesn't like talking to the media.
He's made that perfectly clear.
And if it weren't for the fact that talking to reporters is part of being a professional athlete, that would be OK. But it is part of being a professional athlete.
Now a lot of fans who have never been a member of the media will say, "Aw, it doesn't matter. Just let him play the game."
They might even say, "Look, we don't care what he has to say. I just want to see him run the ball."
As a generality, that's false.
I get a report every day in my email listing the top stories on the Telegraph's website, meaning the stories that were visited the most times from various platforms. Some Georgia football story is almost always in the top 15, regardless of the fact that it's been a month since the Dawgs' last game and two months since the last game with real significance that even approaches the same ZIP code of Super Bowl magnitude. It'll be seven months until UGA takes the field again.
So that's an awful lot of people reading stories full of people answering reporters' questions. No game coverage, no previews for actual events.
All that aside, even if Lynch just really doesn't like talking to the media, we all have parts of our jobs we don't like. Nobody sits in high school dreaming of the day they can sit in staff meetings, listening to reports about ad revenue.
(Can't take credit for that thought. I heard it from a caller on the Rich Eisen Show.)
And the same is true of the reporters asking questions at events like Media Day. Sports reporting was something that I really loved doing, but it wasn't because of news conferences. There isn't a whole lot to enjoy about rushing to find a spot among a host of other reporters just to get the same quotes from the same people that every other reporter has.
No, people become sports reporters so they can cover exciting games, get interesting personal interviews and write interesting features. Covering press conferences is just part of the job.
The difference is, the rest of us don't get paid seven-figure salaries in the process, and we can't tell our bosses, "You know why I'm here," and skip the afternoon meeting.
So for our sake, just answer the questions.

College Playoffs Already Teaching Lessons

I think we all knew we'd learn something from the first year of the college football playoff.

And we have already.

- After the semifinals, we learned that, as many people conjectured, this Florida State team had remained undefeated without being the best team in the country. Oregon showed us that.

- We also learned that the SEC West wasn't, in fact, a league of juggernauts waiting to unleash punishment on foes from other conferences. That lesson came from five matchups pitting the top five teams from the SEC West against members of the B1G, ACC, Big 12 and a mediocre Notre Dame team.

- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we learned just how flawed the old system was and just how necessary a playoff really is. And that we learned from Ohio State.

When I say "old system," I'm lumping the BCS in with earlier eras. If we really wanted a true national champion, how many times did we miss that because of an inexplicable loss earlier in the season like Ohio State's home defeat against Virginia Tech?

In fact, in any previous system, few people would have cared that Ohio State was left out of the title game. Oregon would've been regarded as a snub. TCU would've had a complaint, as would Baylor. But the Buckeyes? They lost to a mediocre to bad ACC team at home; they wouldn't get any sympathy.

Yet in this new age, Ohio State won the B1G and then went into Bama's playground and beat the SEC champions.

So now we, myself included, have realized that we must think about teams differently now that we have the chance. If the top four teams in the country, and hopefully eight someday soon, are going to play for the championship, we need to stop pretending we know how to pick those four teams with our eyes and our logic.

The takeaway from this is that there needs to be that eight-team bracket some of us are clamoring for. There need to be automatic spots for the power five champions, because TCU also showed us that Ohio State might not be the only team from outside the SEC that could've taken down the Crimson Tide. The Horned Frogs thrashed the very Ole Miss team that handed Bama its only regular season loss.

My pick out of the Big 12 would've been Baylor, but for an eight-team bracket, both would've made it, and that would be OK, even though the Bears couldn't hold of Michigan State.

If we must have a committee or a poll get involved, have it select three at-larges to go with the power five champions. But there's a reason that every other major team sport has guaranteed spots for regular-season accomplishments. 

Because it works, and Ohio State gave us a glimpse of that.