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1) SEC Media Days opens on Monday morning. If you’re interested, here’s the full schedule:
MONDAY, July 19
Florida - Dan Mullen
LSU - Ed Orgeron
South Carolina - Shane Beamer
TUESDAY, July 20
Georgia - Kirby Smart
Kentucky - Mark Stoops
Ole Miss - Lane Kiffin
Tennessee - Josh Heupel
WEDNESDAY, July 21
Alabama - Nick Saban
Mississippi State - Mike Leach
Texas A&M - Jimbo Fisher
Vanderbilt - Clark Lea
THURSDAY, July 22
Arkansas - Sam Pittman
Auburn - Bryan Harsin
Missouri - Eli Drinkwitz
The league spread the four new coaches out and put one on each day. Missouri is the last team to appear in the main room (Mitchell Forde will have more from Mizzou than the average report because he will also get some extra time with Eli Drinkwitz, Case Cook and Akial Byers along with the other local media that makes the trip).
I don’t expect Missouri to get a whole lot of attention this week. They surprised people last year and Drinkwitz does have a bit of buzz going, but Mizzou isn’t going to be picked to finish in the upper half of the league and by the time the Tigers take the stage, a lot of the people that are there to cover other teams will have left, their jobs mostly done. Being relatively anonymous on media day isn’t the worst thing, though Drinkwitz will likely manage to say something that makes some headlines on Thursday because he’s pretty good at that.
The main storylines for all coaches are going to be Year Two of COVID college football—it’s going to be easier than year one, but still a storyline that is there to some extent—and the impact of name, image and likeness. Media days tend to have a couple of overarching themes and then the local people ask some more specific questions for each team/coach. Among things I assume Drinkwitz will be asked about:
—How do you replace Nick Bolton and Larry Rountree?
—Was there anything that was different about coaching in the SEC than you expected?
—What’s been the secret to your recruiting momentum and how important is it to keep it going?
—What’s the next step for Connor Bazelak?
2) The league media will make predictions in Hoover this week. Every media member in attendance will have the opportunity to vote for the predicted standings in each division and a league champion, along with an all SEC team. Here are my predictions of the predictions (in other words, not necessarily my personal predictions, but how I think the league media will vote):
SEC East
Georgia
Florida
Kentucky
Missouri
Tennessee
South Carolina
Vanderbilt
*For the record, this is how I would vote too (I looked at the schedules and if Kentucky beats Missouri, the Cats could very well win ten games)
SEC West
Alabama
Texas A&M
LSU
Ole Miss
Auburn
Arkansas
Mississippi State
*For the record, I definitely agree with the top two and don’t really know how I’d vote the rest of the way.
I’m not going to mess with an entire all-SEC team because honestly, I’d be making it up. I think Mike Maetti, Case Cook, Trajan Jeffcoat and Kobie Whiteside will get some attention for Mizzou. I think those four are likely to make some sort of pre-season team (first, second or third). Harrison Mevis might. Other than that, I’d be surprised if Missouri has anybody. The Tigers are a good year or two away from generating much preseason buzz with media outside the state I think.
3) So another season is about to kick off and we want to tell you what we’re planning to do to help you all follow along and be the most informed Mizzou fans there are. Mitchell Forde is going to be your boots on the ground, day to day beat writer. We’ve been kind of transitioning to that over the last couple of years and this year, Mitch is fully in charge of the day to day written stuff on the team. Practice notebooks, game day written coverage, breaking news, etc, that’s going to be him. He’s the beat writer for the team news.
I’ll be doing more big picture stuff. I’ll still have the ten thoughts every Monday morning and will do a post-game ten thoughts column every Saturday along with the mailbag on Wednesday. The pandemic got me into video and streaming shows and we’re tweaking what we’re going to do with that this year. I’m going to be doing more frequent video shows (which will also be converted into daily podcasts that you can listen to if you’d prefer not to look at me). They’ll be shorter, but they’ll be more frequent. I’m shooting for 20 to 30 minute daily segments. We will stream them live through our YouTube channel as we do them, but the live part isn’t going to be the focus. If you want to watch live and participate and ask questions you’ll have the opportunity and I’ll tweet and post on the board when we’re about to go live, but we’re going to do them in the middle of the day when it makes the most sense for me to do them and then post them on the site and as podcasts after they’re completed. Here’s our general schedule:
Monday: Weekend recap with Mitchell and me
Tuesday: Recruiting show with Sean Williams
Wednesday: 573 Report with Mitchell and me
Thursday: Opponent preview, SEC talk
Friday: Picks show. This one’s still in the planning stages, but I hope to have some fun with it
Saturday: Live pre-game show including some interviews we’ve taped earlier in the week
Live post-game call in show as we did last year
We’ll also have Joel Lorenzi, who is interning with us this semester, helping Mitchell and I out with camp coverage and season coverage in addition to taking on some hoops recruiting stuff for us this semester. Joel will start with us in August.
