AUBURN | It’s been an interesting month for 5-star defensive linemen in the SEC.
It started Aug. 1 when Dylan Stewart chose South Carolina over Ohio State and Georgia.
Just this past week Williams Nwaneri chose Missouri over Georgia and Oklahoma, and Kamarion Franklin chose Ole Miss over Auburn and Tennessee.
It’s just a small sample size but I think it’s part of a trend that’s going to be good for college football and ultimately good for Auburn.
Of course, it would have been better for Auburn had Franklin chose the Tigers, but having elite talent spread out more among other SEC schools rather than just a couple is a benefit to every school not named Alabama or Georgia.
You can stretch that out nationally to Ohio State and Clemson too.
Two of those four teams have appeared in all nine of the four-team college football playoffs with three of those years including three of the teams.
Those four teams have accounted for 49 first round NFL draft picks over the last five years.
That’s a lot of talent centralized among a small number of schools, which makes for what should be an exciting end to the college football season boring and derivative to many outside of Tuscaloosa, Athens, Columbus and Clemson.
I’m not criticizing those schools for consistently achieving greatness. It’s more about a system that’s allowed it and other schools and coaches who have stood by and let it happen without putting up much of a fight.
Those schools more than others have emphasized recruiting and stacking up talent on top of talent. In several cases, such as Georgia’s Broderick Jones, those teams have been able to sign a 5-star, use him mainly as a backup for two years before starting him in year three.
Jones was the No. 14 overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft after starting just four games for the Bulldogs in his first two seasons. Had Jones gone to just about any other SEC school, he would have been a two- or three-year starter.
Is NIL helping in spreading out the talent? Absolutely, and that’s a good thing and why you should laugh in the face of anyone blustering about how NIL is ruining college football.
It’s making it better. And it’s a lot easier to accept once you understand the lie of amateurism the NCAA has shoved down your throat for more than a hundred years.
South Carolina, Missouri and Ole Miss aren’t automatically SEC championship contenders just because they landed a commitment from a 5-star defensive lineman.
It could, however, be the start of something special for one or more of those programs. We’ll see.
But what if a year or two from now, one of those 5-stars makes a game-winning play against Alabama or Georgia, or maybe even Clemson or Ohio State?
What if that loss benefits another school like Auburn in attaining a playoff spot? What if it means we don’t have to watch the same four teams compete for a national championship every single January?
As a college football consumer for most of my 55 years, I welcome the changes.
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In today’s musical journey, we go back 36 years to the release of an album that included a one-hit wonder song with a deeper meaning than many realized. On Aug. 21, 1987, Midnight Oil released their sixth studio album, Diesel and Dust, which included the breakout hit single “Beds Are Burning.” The song peaked at No. 17 on the Billboard 100 in the U.S., but rose to No. 1 in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. The album came about after the band toured the Australian outback with a couple of indigenous music groups in 1986. They played to remote Aboriginal communities where the tough living conditions and poor health care made a lasting impression. Diesel and Dust is a concept album that highlights the struggles of the indigenous Australians and “Beds Are Burning” addresses the injustice of forcible removal from indigenous lands, which is highlighted in the lyric, “It belongs to them, let’s give it back.” The chorus, “How can we dance while our earth is turning. How do we sleep while our beds are burning,” refers to a saying that the Italian partisans who fought Mussolini used. The song was ranked the third-best Australian song of all time by the Australian Performing Right Association in 2001. It was ranked by VH1 No. 95 on its list of the 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 80’s. Rolling Stone named Diesel and Dust the best album of 1988 and ranked it No. 5 on its list of Australia’s 200 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Midnight Oil was formed in Sydney in 1972 by drummer Rob Hirst, guitarist and keyboardist Jim Moginie and bassist Andrew James. Vocalist Peter Garrett joined up in 1973 and guitarist Martin Rotsey in 74. Their self-titled debut album came out in 1978 and they’ve produced 12 more albums since. They have sold over 20 million records worldwide. They had two more charting singles in the U.S. in 1988’s “The Dead Heart” and 1990’s “Blue Sky Mine.” They disbanded in 2002 before reuniting in 2016. In probably their most famous performance, Midnight Oil sang “Beds Are Burning” at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics dressed in black with the word, ‘sorry,’ written on their clothes. It was a reference to the Australian Prime Minister’s refusal to apologize for to the Aboriginal Australians for how they’ve been treated over the last 200 years. A different PM issued a formal apology eight years later. Midnight Oil have won 11 Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards and were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2006.
