Trucks And Trends

Anybody notice that Saturday's Geico Gator Postgame show on Sun Sports was upside down?

No? Good.

Here's today's lesson in Television Production 101: It's Not Too Late To Choose Law School (4 credits).

Sun Sports has been producing Florida and Florida State football games for Sunday replay for many years now, going back to the days of "Sunshine Network" (and on that note -- it's been almost four years now, people. Can we please retire the phrase "Sunshine Network" forever?). The FSU games, titled "Prime Time Noles," with the original broadcast team of Paul Kennedy and Keith Jones, go back 20 years; the Florida replays, branded as "Breakfast With The Gators," started in 1996.

In order to produce these games for replay, Sun Sports rolls out a full-sized 18-wheel TV production truck to every FSU and UF football game, home and away. These are the very same behemoths that bring you every sporting event you've ever seen on television. Each truck contains all of the computers, monitors, cables, cameras, and various and sundry other pieces of hardware necessary to produce an event for live (or, in our case, taped) television.

However, most of these production trucks do not contain the hardware necessary to uplink the game to a satellite, which is how it gets beamed down to your local cable company and thereby into your home. For that, we have to bring in a second, smaller satellite truck, which parks close enough to the production truck so that cables can be run from one to the other. If those two trucks cannot get close enough to each other to hook up, the game can be produced, but it cannot be transmitted live.

Thus, truck parking is a very big deal. If the "cable run" is too long between the two trucks -- or between the stadium itself and any of the trucks -- we've got issues. Which was the case in Columbia, South Carolina this weekend.

It seems that our friends at The Four Letters had bogarted all the prime parking spots around Williams-Brice Stadium, so much so that Sun Sports was struggling to find room for our satellite truck to get close enough to our production truck. In the days leading up to the Florida-South Carolina game, a flurry of phone calls and urgent messages failed to resolve the situation (and from what I hear, we were actively seeking help from UF and/or the Southeastern Conference itself to get ourselves some space). Once it became apparent that the Worldwide Leader wasn't budging, literally or figuratively, we had to get creative.

So we parked our satellite truck across the street from the stadium. While this was too far to run cables to our production truck, it was not too far to run, literally -- which is what some poor kid had to do all day on Saturday.

We actually hired a "runner" -- new meaning to that term, no? -- whose job it was to sprint tapes across the street to the satellite truck to be fed to us in the studio. Hence, every shot you saw during the pregame and postgame coverage from South Carolina on Saturday, from the tailgating shots to Urban Meyer's press conference to the player interviews, was taped, not live. Which is why the postgame show appeared "upside down," with said press conference and player interviews coming in the second half-hour of our postgame show, instead of coming closer to the top of the show, as we usually do it. Simply put, it took a few minutes for the kid to run each tape across the street.

Ah, the magic of television. As we like to say, "America will never know." Unless I choose to blog about it.

Speaking of which, I received an e-mail from an avid viewer/reader named Seth who disagreed with Brady's contention that Florida State and Miami have killed the Big Five. Felt bad about this, a little, only because Brady made the comment off-air, and I used it for blog fodder (note to my co-workers: EVERYTHING is blog fodder. If you don't mean it, don't let me hear it).

Anyway, Seth points out that Florida State's stumble at Virginia Tech can be directly traced to a rookie QB with 70 percent of the playbook replacing the concussed Drew Weatherford (true), a rash of injuries to key guys like Antone Smith, Tony Carter, and Toddrick Verdell (also true), and some bad calls by the refs (umm, okay).

Seth also defends Miami as a team in transition with a new coaching staff and a "culture shock" of newly-installed disciplinary requirements. He also goes after Florida as not exactly helping the "Big Five" with three conference losses on the heels of a national championship. I'm pretty much cool with all that.

However, one weekend, or one season, does not define a program. Instead, you have to look at the long-term trend, and in that light, I consider Brady's offhand comment to be rather profound, actually (don't tell him I said that).

Florida State, as I have written before, has been in steady decline since 2000, when the Seminoles finished the season with the top-ranked offense in Division I football at 549 yards per game. Offensive coordinator Mark Richt left Tallahassee after that season to take over as the head coach at Georgia; the FSU offense has dropped in NCAA ranking ever since, settling in at 78th in the country as of this writing. I single out offensive ranking because it's the most linear example of Florida State's fortunes -- if you prefer to go by wins, the Seminoles won only 7 games last year (their first 7-win season since 1986) and have recorded exactly one 10-win season since Richt left, which is stunning for a team that reached double digits in victories every year from 1987 through 2000.

Of course, there's a new staff in Tallahassee this year, and a new system, so an adjustment period is to be expected -- but the fact remains nonetheless that Florida State, with a 6-4 record and road games coming up at Maryland and Florida, is merely continuing a 7-year trend.

Similarly, Miami's 2007 season is not a one-time thing, either. Starting with the 2003 season (the year after the Hurricanes were robbed of a second straight national championship by an atrociously timed pass interference call in the 4th quarter of the Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State), the Hurricanes have slowly slipped into mediocrity. They won 11 games in '03, nine games in '04 and '05, seven games in '06, and just five games this year -- and with road games coming up against Virginia Tech and Boston College, it will take a mighty effort to get to six.

Point being, if the Big Five is really dead, it didn't happen overnight. I'm even willing to grant the point that Florida is at least partially culpable for this demise, as the Gators, who recorded nine 10-win seasons from 1991 through 2001, retreated to 8-5, 8-5, 7-5, and 9-3 before last year's national championship.

However, if we agree with Seth and declare the Big Five (or the Big Three, which is really his point) to be alive and kicking, we're doing so based on perception, tradition, and history, and not so much on "right now." Over the six seasons from 2001 through 2006, Miami was 6th in the country in winning percentage at 80.0%. Florida was 14th at 72.3%, and Florida State was 22nd at 66.2%.

But what if you shorten that range to four seasons, from 2003 through 2006? Florida drops to 16th in winning percentage at 72.5%. Miami goes down to 17th, at 72.0%. And Florida State drops to 23rd, at 66.6%.

Interesting to note that the winning percentages themselves don't change that much for the Big Three, but their ranking compared to other D-I programs drops -- which means that even though the Big Three aren't exactly going into the tank, other programs around the country are winning at higher clips over the last four seasons. Everyone else is getting better at a faster rate, which is one of the principal tenets of "parity" in college football.

Of course, South Florida, with its historic three-game Big East losing streak, dropped itself from BCS contention into conference also-ran, rendering my invite into a "Big Four" rather tenuous, and pretty much throwing a wrench into any Big Five, for now. Luckily, we still have UCF, which controls its own destiny as a division leader in Conference USA, and has a running back in Kevin Smith who is unquestionably the best at his position in the state, and one of the best in the nation. Should the Knights hang on to win their conference, the conversation can begin again.

By the way, Florida Atlantic is one game out of first in the Sun Belt right now, with a non-conference game at Florida this week followed by road games at winless Florida International and a season finale showdown with league leader Troy. Raise your hand if you thought at the beginning of this season that UCF and FAU would have the best chances of winning their respective conferences by the time we got to mid-November. Of note, those two teams were a combined 9-15 last season.

Welcome to the Bizarro World of college football in which we now live.