MWN Mailbag: Football is Back Edition!

If your life feels a little more complete  today, that’s understandable. College football makes its triumphant return today. Sure there aren’t too many great games on the schedule for this weekend, but it is still college football. And that is always good.

With the return of football season, I am bringing back the MWN Mailbag. This time of year is the only time I really get any questions, so I stopped doing it outside of football season. But it is here, and people have questions. And one person in particular, has lots of questions.

And if you have questions, I have answers. Lots of answers. I’m not going to promise any good answers, but I can certainly give you answers that I at least thought about for a couple of minutes before typing them.

So lets wipe the dust off the mailbag and see what is inside.

New rule for the mailbag. If you’re going to ask me about the way something looks, you have to include the pictures. We have a really strict image use policy, so to include the images, I have to find some way of using the image without actually downloading it. So I had to tweet the logos just to have them to show.

Are they similar? Sure. Are they exact, no. There are only so many ways you can draw an eagle, so lets not be too picky here.

I like Gabe Myles. He’s a good solid player, who filled in admirably last season when Jameon Lewis went down with an injury. Having said that, I haven’t seen anything that would make me believe he is going to be anything more than a backup to Fred Ross this season. He has potential to be a solid contributor after Ross leaves, but unless there is an injury, he won’t likely get more than a catch or two each game.

It’s a tough call, and it also depends on if you are talking about true freshmen or if you are talking about redshirt freshmen. This is tough anyway because I don’t know which freshmen are going to get a crack at a lot of playing time. Most of our two deep is filled with juniors and seniors.

If we are talking about redshirts, it’s a tough call, but I will go with Gerri Green. I think he will get more playing time than most of the other freshmen on the team, and therefore, he will have the most opportunities. Dontavian Lee and Aeris Williams will be in the mix for this as well.

I’m not sure which true freshmen will play and which will be redshirted. I’ve heard Malik Dear will get some playing time, so he might be the best bet. But running back and receiver, the positions he is most likely to play, are crowded enough as it is. So I’m going to go with Jamal Peters. Safety was the most significant weakness on the team last season, and if none of the returning players are able to fill the void, then Peters will have an opportunity to contribute.

Ashton Shumpert. I’m not convinced he is the best running back on the team, but that isn’t a knock on him. Williams and Lee are supposed to be great, but if you recall in 2013, when Perkins was struggling to get just over 4 yards per carry and Josh Robinson was making electrifying runs whenever he was in the game, Perkins was still the starter and the recipient of most of the carries. Regardless of who the best back is, I think Shumpert will be the starter the whole way out.

I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, so I’m not going to give out any names. But just in general, if you want to be annoying to bloggers and sports writers, it isn’t hard. And if that is your aim, you’ll find it easy to succeed.

Now if that is not your goal, let me just give you some tips on things to avoid. I try to respond to almost everything that comes my way on Twitter. If i don’t, it’s because I couldn’t figure out a decent way to respond, or I saw it so much after the fact, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense. But if I ever appear put off with you on Twitter, it might be because you have done some of these things

• Only responding when you disagree or don’t like something someone writes.
  • I, like most writers, know you won’t agree with me or like everything I write. But if the only time you decide to chime in is when you don’t like it, we start ignoring you.
• Use inflammatory language.
  • Coming straight at a writer with dumb, stupid, idiotic, or anything similar tells most writers you don’t want to have an actual conversation about something, you just want  to be insulting. That’s fine if you do, but once again, we’ll start ignoring you. If you’ve actually had a conversation with a writer and then call it stupid, we tend to think you weren’t just trying to troll us. At least that’s the way I view it.

This is easy. Barbecue. Or anything with the word barbecue in front of it. For example, Barbecue nachos. Barbecue Shrimp. Barbecue Pizza. Do you notice a pattern?

Biscuits And the fact this is even a debate saddens me.