Link-o-rama

Sports Guy's intern has a reasonably interesting take on Andruw Jones. The parallel at the end between Jones and the Braves - a very good team that never quite won as much as we thought it should - is interesting and if the analogy holds true, then this October should be a real treat...if we get there.

Jeff Francoeur has caught the eye of Sports Illustrated's John Donovan, who writes that Francoeur has a lot of power, swings at everything, and brings a football mentality to the diamond. Nothing too earth-shattering there for anyone who's watched the Braves over the past month, but it's nice to see Frenchy get some recognition. By the way, can you imagine the parallels between Francoeur and Vlad Guerrero if Jeff was from the Dominican?

If you've been looking for a completely incoherent take on the Hawks' disaster, Scoop Jackson is on the scene. This joke will only resonate with people who grew up on the Macon Telegraph & News, but Jackson's paragraph-to-sentence ratio must be the lowest since Harley Bowers. (My favorite Harley memory is the year that he decided that the Heisman shouldn't be given because none of the players that year deserved it. It was some time in the late 80s and for the life of me, I can't remember the exact year.) For those of you who didn't read Harley every morning, imagine Furman Bisher writing a front-page of the Sports section piece every morning, only with even less coherence.

Stewart Mandel's SEC Preview is up. Not much interesting here, other than Mandel taking Florida over Tennessee in the East. He also predicts Arkansas to have a winning record, which is a bit of a stretch, but the Reggie Herring hire might be the reason. I didn't see anything out of Robert Johnson last year to make me think that the Hogs will be able to move the ball, but he should be much better now that he's the starter and getting most of the reps in practice. Getting thrown into a tight game against Georgia's defense wasn't exactly a situation that had success written all over it.

Speaking of Sports Illustrated, I was reading the college football preview at the gym today and caught two factual errors in the space of about 15 pages. First, they say that Marshall and West Virginia haven't played since 1915, when a simple trip to jhowell.net would have revealed an August 30, 1997 42-31 WVU win over Marshall. Second, they printed a stat that Ohio State gained around 400 yards per game in the first half of last season and then 500 yards per game in their final five games. Those are some pretty impressive numbers for a team that finished 98th in the country in total offense at a whopping 320.8 yards per game. It's possible that SI is including return yardage in their 400/500 figures, but that's incredibly misleading because any football fan will read the stat and think that SI means total offense. And so, we ask the question again: don't these people have fact-checkers? I thought that SI had, you know, editors?