Brock Berlin and Frank Gore were key players in the Florida-Miami rivalry that may be discontinued. (Bill Frakes/SI)

By Zac Ellis

Florida and Miami might have one of the more exciting in-state rivalries in college football, but that Sunshine State matchup might be coming to an end.

Miami athletic director Blake James told reporters at this week’s ACC spring meetings that no discussion has taken place with Florida regarding a continuation of the series, ESPN.com’s Andrea Adelson reports. James pointed to scheduling concerns as a potential obstacle in future meetings.

“I haven’t spoken with Jeremy or the University of Florida about future games and I don’t know how it would fit into their schedule or fit into ours right now. There hasn’t been any conversation and there isn’t anything on the schedule for the future.”

The two schools are slated to meet this season on Sept. 7 for the first time since 2008, and SI.com’s Stewart Mandel ranked the game as one of the season’s non-conference games to watch. The matchup  will wrap up just the second home-and-home series between the programs since 1987, when the schools snapped a streak of annual meetings dating back to 1938.

Florida already plays an annual non-conference matchup with Florida State, and the SEC’s proposal to move to a nine-game conference schedule could further complicate the future of the Hurricanes-Gators series.

In an official statement, Commissioner John Swofford highlighted the ACC’s solidarity and leadership. (Chuck Burton/AP)

By Zac Ellis

The ACC’s member schools have signed a 15-school Grant of Rights agreement through 2027, the league announced Monday. ACCSports.com’s David Glenn first reported the news.

“This announcement further highlights the continued solidarity and commitment by our member institutions,” said ACC commissioner John Swofford in a statement. “The Council of Presidents has shown tremendous leadership in insuring the ACC is extremely well positioned with unlimited potential.”

The move will likely halt conference realignment for the immediate future by drastically decreasing the odds of current ACC teams leaving for another conference. A Grant of Rights agreement involves teams surrendering control of TV rights to the league, meaning the ACC would retain rights to certain media revenue until the deal’s conclusion, even if a team left the conference. The ACC already has a $50 million exit fee in place — which Florida State voted against and which Maryland is currently fighting — but this would be a more definitive move toward enhancing the league’s stability. The Big 12 was the last major football conference to agree to a Grant of Rights.

MANDEL: Rejoice! ACC deal should halt conference realignment

Jeremy Fowler of CBSSports.com reports that the ACC is in talks with ESPN about establishing its own network, following the model of the Big Ten, Pac-12 and the soon-to-be-announced SEC network.

NBC and Notre Dame have extended their television deal through the year 2025. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

By Zac Ellis

NBC and Notre Dame have renewed their television partnership for 10 more years, through the 2025 season. The extension will bring the partnership to 35 years, the network announced on Thursday.

The new deal begins during the 2016 campaign and gives NBC rights to a minimum of seven Notre Dame home games per season. NBC Sports Digital will continue to live stream Irish home games, as the network has since 2009.

“While our relationship with NBC Sports is longstanding, the more recent merger between NBC and Comcast has opened up additional avenues to expand the breadth of Notre Dame-related sports programming on NBC platforms,” said Notre Dame vice president and athletics director Jack Swarbrick. “Specifically, the evolution of the NBC Sports Network has provided opportunities for special programming featuring inside looks at our football team and several other Notre Dame sports programs and in-depth profiles on the unsung heroes of Notre Dame athletics. These are examples of the growth of our partnership, and we look forward to collaborating on additional projects and distribution strategies in seasons to come.”

The school and the network first kicked off the partnership in 1991, when NBC began televising Irish home games. Revenues from the NBC contract have played a large role in Notre Dame’s scholarship fund, having provided more than 6,300 Irish undergraduate students with nearly $80 million in financial aid over the duration of the deal.

Mike Slive and the SEC are reportedly set to formally announce the league’s TV network. (Padraic Major/Icon SMI)

By Zac Ellis

The long-awaited SEC network appears to be a step closer to reality. The conference and ESPN will formally announce the league’s channel, which will launch in August 2014, at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday, according to SportsBusiness Journal.

The yet-to-be-named SEC network is slated to be a national channel, much like the Big Ten and Pac-12 networks before it. According to SBJ, the league cleared its biggest hurdle by re-aquiring part of its TV rights from IMG College, Learfield Sports and CBS Collegiate Sports Properties, which include one football game, eight men’s basketball games, baseball, women’s basketball and other sports not claimed by ESPN or another partner.

The SEC will now spend the month until the launch building the network, including hiring staff. More details to come next week.

TO THE BARRICADES! Red, the schmear of angry men/Black, the poppy seeds on top! RT @nuhighlights: LET OUR STUDENT ATHLETES HAVE CREAM CHEESE

— Tom McGrath (@TCMcG) January 18, 2013

Everybody’s favorite bit of NCAA micromanagement, The Bagel Rule, appears to be crumbling into, um, crumbs, in the wake of some very serious discussion at the annual NCAA convention. If you’re unfamiliar with this rulebook gem, the Bylaw Blog did a great writeup of what the actual rule is and how it came to be back in October. It’s actually got a pretty complicated backstory, beginning with a shift on college campuses away from dining hall meal plans and toward food courts, and ends with the specter of secret peanut butter machines. We highly recommend you read the whole thing, but here are some pertinent highlights:

[In] 2000 the NCAA members voted to allow schools to provide unlimited amounts of “nutritional supplements” to student-athletes. [...] In 2008, to add some real food into the equation, the Atlantic Coast Conference put forward Proposal 2008–43, which sought to allow schools to provide “fruits, nuts and bagels to student-athletes at any time.” [...] [Spreads] and toppings on bagels were prohibited. The reasoning was to prevent something intended as a snack or supplement from becoming a meal (because then you could eat pizza anytime, right?). Second, only “whole foods” were permitted. You could not get around the prohibition on bagel spreads by providing jelly (technically a fruit product) or peanut butter (technically a nut or legume product). [...] So the real story is that the NCAA did not set out to make sure bagels went unschmeared. [...] The result though is that a proposal in the spirit of deregulation makes the rule book larger and more complicated.

And then, Friday morning, word began trickling out from the Gaylord Texan via social media channels …
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College football fans shall be deprived of Duck pushups for months at a time, but we shall prevail. (AP)

Good morning, dear readers, and welcome: You Are Looking Live at between seven and eight months without proper football.

[a moment's pause to allow for the removal of handkerchiefs from pockets]

For those of you who weren’t with us last offseason, a few notes on what to expect:

• Not a whole lot in the way of recruiting coverage. There are several fine folks who track the movements of 17- and 18-year-olds as though they were endangered species of sharks. We don’t really get invested in these kids until they take the field in August. The SI.com mothership will be the best place to look between now and signing day for information of this kind.
  
• Not a whole lot in the way of NFL draft coverage. Same principle: College football players are ours while they are college football players, and no longer. (One of these days we’ll write a Schrödinger’s Quarterback story about this principle.) You’ll be able to find plenty of draft coverage out front.
• Lots and lots of coverage of any scooter-related arrests that might crop up this spring and summer. Oversized elite athletes riding scooters they are frankly too large for and attempting to evade police: If it’s funny once, it’s funny every time.
• An update to the coaching carousel tracker, sometime today. Several arrivals and departures were lost in the run-up to the title game, and we cannot let this moment pass without marveling that Syracuse may be the only college team to end up losing its head coach to the NFL.
• An endless string of diversions. From now until the final depth charts out of fall camp are released, we’ll have to make our own fun, and there are only so many prop bets one can make regarding whether or not Texas will have named a starting quarterback by the Longhorns’ season opener. (That’s still a thing, right?) If you have a mascot story, blurry Instagram photo, amateur rap video, epic poem featuring Nick Saban’s pompadour, or any other piece of content with a tenuous relationship to college football that you think might help pass the time on the endless march of the offseason, send it this way and we will do our best to share it. The easiest way to contact us is in a comment thread (below) or via Twitter (over there in the right-hand sidebar).

If this all sounds sort of hopeless, just look at the punny joys that originated from a Monday night liveblog typo from an anonymous commenter, with Bama up approximately nineteen touchdowns on Notre Dame and a roomful of bored readers: Read More…