Most recent Pundit Roundup: Feb. 22.  I have some catching up to do.

--- As always we lead off with ESPN's Bruce Feldman.

There's a Friday Mailbag from last week to sift through.  There's this note about coaches text messaging recruits:

Not sure about schools paying students to text, but I was at the coaches' convention and there are computer companies that were selling the technology that allows coaches to mass text from certain outlets. And I'm sure stuff like this already goes on. I've heard that many coaches just have their secretaries send messages from their cells.

I can just imagine the secretaries wanting to take cold showers as soon as they get home after fingering away all day with "I love u," "u r my special wittle recruit" and "daddy's got a new Rolls waiting for u come signing day wink wink" into the phone and sending them to 17 year old overgrown man-athletes.

Here's something I didn't know about Texas' ground game last year:

... the Horns have to replace three O-linemen and a fullback. Last season, Texas failed to average four yards per carry in seven of its final nine games.

Shocking, really.

There's also this gem from his Random Thoughts on the Combine entry:

I played host to FSU defensive back Myron Rolle, his older brother and their friend Georgia wideout Mohammad Massaquoi Saturday while they were in town for the Watkins Award festivities.

We ended up watching a lot of the combine. It was D-line day and the announcers were talking about Louisville's Amobi Okoye, the 19-year-old phenom who has everyone raving. They guys were amazed that someone their age could be doing all this. And then something else dawned on me: Okoye is only three months older than Notre Dame commit Jimmy Clausen.

I know Clausen's taken plenty of heat already, but he's everything us bloggers love to write about.  This is just going to end up badly for him and be great business for us.

Also: last Friday's mailbag.

Sounds like we may have a bit of a down year nationally in terms of elite quarterbacks per one of the Q&A's.

People are also killing Bruce over his new mug shot.  I think it's classic Bruce, personally.

Finally, there's Bruce's list of the best "trios" in college football.  Good to see West Virginia's slippey Darius Reynaud get some love.

There's this strange quote from new Miami coach Randy Shannon about a new gun policy with his players:

He also instituted a no guns policy.

Asked about his players' constitutional right to own firearms, Shannon said: "I'm thinking about the University of Miami and the kids. When you have a firearm, there's a 50-50 chance that you're going to get hurt. So I said, 'Let's not put ourselves in those situations.' Make it a 100 percent chance that you're not going to hurt nobody and that nobody is going to get hurt."

O RLY?  His heart's in the right place but that quote is just silly.

--- ESPN's Ivan Maisel has a small obituary for 3-2-5-e and some tales of how Bear Bryant repeatedly found loopholes in the rules and viciously used them to his advantage.

Also: an obituary for the Cotton Bowl, at least at its current location.  The much-needed move (in 2010) will be to the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium in Arlington.  It'll still be cold, but at least there's a roof and nicer facilities.

Also: Good writeup on UCLA's revolving-door of assistant coaches.  Some of it has to do with coach Karl Dorrell, and a lot of it has to do with UCLA's football apparatus.

When you stop and think about it, Dorrell said, hiring coaches is not all that different from signing players. It comes down to recruiting. UCLA scares off plenty of candidates because of the high cost of living in the Los Angeles area coupled with the state-run university's tradition of lagging behind the national market in coaching salaries. Take Dorrell. He is guaranteed $850,000 with incentives for another $505,000. Why, USC coach Pete Carroll has to work darn near till the end of May to make that kind of money.

The perception has forever been that UCLA doesn't pay its coaches.  Until they do they'll always have second-rate program in a first-rate football city.  UCLA fans are left to blast the project coaches that come through and the scandals emanating from the rival across town because for the entirety of the program's history the athletic department has never dug deep and taken that plunge towards building a consistent winner.  All that fire and vitriol is nothing but self-hate, knowing the program must forever be second rate and a clown act complete with towel wavers, jugglers and men way past middle age in goofy outfits rallying the student section.

Also: an ode to spring practice.  It's a dry time for the writers but us fans can still gather tasty scraps of information about how the various teams are coming along.

--- Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel defends Troy Smith's draft prospects.  MGoBlog got all fisky with that.

Also: Colt McCoy's bulked up as Texas looks to improve upon a disappointing 2006.

--- CBS Sportsline's Dennis Dodd checks in with a few items.

First up: a notebook of interesting tidbits.  There's reaction to the Cotton Bowl's new location and what it could mean for the Sugar Bowl's BCS viability.  Also, a little whisper about the College Football Hall of Fame moving from South Bend, Indiana.

Also: a lengthy writeup on Arkansas tailback Darren McFadden.

--- The Sporting News' Matt Hayes has a strange take on the whole Clemson Athletic Advisory Review Committee brouhaha (background).  His suggestion is that there be a universal standard for athletic admissions at various schools.  That is, if any single institution "accepts" an athlete during the vetting process, all schools should be bound by that acceptance.

I give that a big fat meh.  Each school should by all means be allowed to vet athletes at their own discretion.  If some want to raise their standards, so be it.  They know what's best for their institutions.

Did the Clemson group go to far?  It kind of sounds like it given where some of their football rejects ended up (Notre Dame, North Carolina).  It's a shame Clemson's coaches lost a few recruits to what appears to be overbearing academics pressing the no button too often.  There's ways to remedy that, however without affecting all other universities.  The football coaches (and all other athletic coaches) need to sit down with the review panel and gain some greater understanding and if either side cannot act in good faith their universities can intercede as Clemson has done with a review of this process.

Ultimately there is a universal standard: the NCAA minimum based on SAT scores, GPA and I believe core units.  If an athlete cannot get past the NCAA standard, they're not going anywhere.  What transpires after that is each university's discretion based on character, recommendations, further academic data and so on.

Let's not get stupid here and start telling the schools who they can and cannot admit based on what other schools have done.  That is their right to pick and choose who bets fits their desired profile of a student at Clemson or North Carolina or Oklahoma or wherever.  That is not for us or the NCAA to decide and may it forever be that way.  Sometimes these academic review groups go too far but that's their right and other institutions should not be punished because of that.

Also: more reaction to the Cotton Bowl's smart move from Dallas to the Cowboys' new facility.  Hayes suggests that not only the Sugar Bowl but the Orange Bowl are at risk for exclusion from the BCS down the road.  I'd love to see the Holiday Bowl and Cotton Bowl join the BCS.

Also: a look at the spread at three schools - LSU, Texas and Virginia Tech.

Also: some national notes.  Markus Manson has moved from tailback to cornerback for Florida.  Joe Dailey's moved from quarterback to receiver at North Carolina.  Clemson's looking for more ways to get C.J. Spiller the ball.  Quarterback Willie Tuitama has a new OC at Arizona: former Texas Tech OC Sonny Dykes.

--- The Sporting News' Tom Dienhart updates his "65 Reasons to Love College Football" list.

--- We've seen the headline before, but I'd never have imagined that Rivals.com's Mike Farrell would have penned it: "College Recruiting is Speeding Out of Control".

Farrell laments the practice of increasingly early commitments by recruits to big name schools (namely Texas and Texas A&M and now USC).  Farrell says the process has sped up by almost nine months in the last few years.  Brian Cook touched upon this a little bit in the FanHouse.

I had a conversation just the other night with a friend in the recruiting business about this.  He also was surprised to hear that Farrell was "jaded" (his words not mine) by the process.  We talked for a while about Texas and the strengths and flaws in their approach to stunningly early evaluations, offers and the completion of their recruiting class.

Although Texas coach Mack Brown is credited for the practice, he first learned it while at North Carolina in response to the less-publicized early-offer mania spreading through east coast schools (notably Penn State).  Brown then took it to Texas, especially in reaction to what he felt was a terribly chaotic recruiting situation there in his early years.  So although Texas takes some of the scorn for the barrage of early commitments, they weren't the first but instead merely the best at it.

My friend actually queried a member of the USC staff about their barrage of early commitments this year (six so far and several others expected quite soon) and he was told they're not very happy about the change.  They prefer to stretch out their evaluations, be more judicious about offers and not get caught with commitments to academic and injury cases as well as kids who start taking it easy once they have an offer and lightly binding oral commitment.  But the game's changing and so we see formerly slow-moving USC jumping the gun a bit here.

--- The Mobile Register's Paul Finebaum is head over heels for new Alabama coach Nick Saban.  His latest: a review of a reprint of Saban's 2003 book titled "How Good Do You Want To Be? A Champion's Tips On How To Lead and Succeed at Work and in Life".

Notable: Saban heavily quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was awed by a dinner meeting with Jesse Jackson.  He also turned down a congressional appointment to the Naval Academy (!!!).

At least Finebaum hints at Saban's hypocrisy in the following:

Saban, who was lambasted by some in the national media and called a "liar" and a "fraud" for saying he would not take the Alabama job, then leaving Miami, has a long passage on honesty.

Under the heading "Honesty is the best policy" the Alabama coach writes: "Lying will get me nowhere. I am not perfect and I'm sure I have fibbed in the past or pushed the rules to the boundaries, but stepping over the line is something I try to avoid."

Saban says it is wrong to lie to your wife and family, and ends the chapter by writing: "Do not lie at work, because somehow, some way, the truth always comes out."

Hmm ...

Alright, that's all she wrote (well ... in my case he).  I'll pencil in next Tuesday for another Pundit Roundup.

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