For the second straight week, it was a short weekend for me, as I attended the annual estate planning institute continuing legal education seminar in Athens last weekend and I spent Saturday in McDonough serving as an evaluator for the regional high school mock trial competition. If your weekends have been as busy as mine have been lately, you may have fallen a bit behind, but don't worry, 'cause I'm here to help get you up to date, so hang on tight as I take you through it:

• Can you tell it's been a while since I updated the ol' blogroll? It turns out that Tommy Perkins accompanied his geographic move from California back to Texas with a blogospheric shift from Bottled Blues and Other Roadside Attractions to Apropos de Nada. Tommy is now Bulldog Nation's man in Austin, where he can keep an eye on Peter Bean and his buddies for us.
• Speaking of Peter, he has done an admirable job---maybe too admirable a job, in fact---of hyping what has come to be known as "The Great Debate" between Sunday Morning Quarterback and me over the issue of a Division I-A college football playoff. SMQ and I will be conducting a back-and-forth exchange sometime in the coming week, but I suspect it will be more of a Slate-style conversation than a rhetorical smackdown.

Permit me to state from the outset that Sunday Morning Quarterback is not ignorant and I haven't the faintest notion about his promiscuity.

• As a Georgia alumnus and fan, I have always shared Dawgnoxious's distaste for Don Leebern, about whom the best that could be said is that he isn't Bobby Lowder. Well, maybe now there's something good that can be said about Lowder, too . . . he isn't Phil Knight. Clearly, Dawgnoxious is correct that these three boosters are the unholy trinity of smarm.
• This Big Ten thing is getting out of hand. The Southeastern Conference seems to be everyone's favorite scapegoat; just as Pac-10 fans sometimes direct at the S.E.C. bile that more properly ought to be spewed at the Big 12, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany has chosen to respond to a column in The Chicago Sun-Times by bashing the S.E.C.

Rutgers alumna Kristin Davis, a devoted Big East football fan, revels gleefully in the internecine cross-sectional conference warfare brewing between the Big Ten and the S.E.C. as untalented dufus Conan O'Brien ineffectually looks on from nearby. (Photograph from Yahoo! GeoCities.)

Some of the blogosphere's heaviest hitters have been dragged into the fray, as MGoBlog and Every Day Should Be Saturday have thrown down upon this issue. Senator Blutarsky detected a hint of racism in Delany's ill-considered remarks, which garnered mentions from College Football Resource and (as noted by Paul Westerdawg) the mainstream news media. For his part, Sunday Morning Quarterback wonders why we can't all just get along.

Here at Dawg Sports, I have addressed some of these recruiting and scheduling issues. In addition, I have another explanation for the disparity in size between Big Ten and S.E.C. recruiting classes.

Maybe Big Ten teams are signing recruiting classes as large as those landed by S.E.C. teams, but the player head count is being lowballed. This is, after all, an 11-member conference that calls itself the Big Ten, so there's a pretty good chance they're signing 23- and 24-member signing classes and just miscounting them as 20- or 21-member classes.

Exactly the same problem caused Macaulay Culkin to be left behind in "Home Alone."

In the meantime, as noted by A.C. Evans, anyone who believes Georgia isn't taking the academic attainments of its student-athletes seriously hasn't been paying adequate attention.

• I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating that today is Mark Richt's 47th birthday.
• As noted by Jason Pye, the newspaper industry is scaling back. At the same time, SportsBlogs Nation continues to expand, having recently added weblogs covering mixed martial arts and ultimate fighting, the Indiana Pacers, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

It's debatable how good a football team they are, but, logo-wise, the Bucs have made great strides since the days of that Day-Glo pirate of questionable orientation, haven't they?

That ought to give you all the information you need to get your work week started off right. I hope you all have a good week and I'll be back with you before you know it.

Go 'Dawgs!