5-at-10: SEC Media Daze -- again, ready for Saban, baseball awards, Rushmore of Alexander


              Vanderbilt NCAA college football coach Derek Mason speaks during the Southeastern Conference's annual media gathering, Tuesday, July 11, 2017, in Hoover, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Vanderbilt NCAA college football coach Derek Mason speaks during the Southeastern Conference's annual media gathering, Tuesday, July 11, 2017, in Hoover, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

SEC Media Daze

We're hitting the halfway point.

Thankfully.

Side note: Press Row has been slammin' down here in Hoover. Tuesday we had Kirby Smart, Derek Mason, Nick Chubb, Laura Rutledge, Greg McIlroy and Paul Finebaum. In one day.

The podcasts of those can be found at espnchattanooga.com if you are interested. The takeaway from Day 2 is as follows:

Derek Mason is way more comfortable this time around than he was this time last year. Wins over Tennessee and bowl trips can do that for Vandy coaches. More over, Mason's belief in his program and its direction was overwhelmingly clear. Here's today's sports column on how Mason's message and connection is so much better than Butch Jones' with his fan base.

Entering year two at his alma mater, Georgia coach Kirby Smart also had the quiet comfort of having been through this circus.

Florida players routinely win the trash talk award, and they did not disappoint on Tuesday, highlighted by one of the three Gators representatives saying they are used to another team being picked to win the East and then Gators finding their way to the A-T-L.

So it goes.

Daze 3 primer

We have bounced around what will be said and discussed in advance of each day of this circus.

And we have been pretty close on most of these, whether we were being serious or not, which is a testament to the amount crazy that happens here. (Seriously, while the coaches are condition to craft sentences that become paragraphs without truly saying anything, the swirling buzz here is different. Maybe, as Finebaum told us, fans are truly starved for college football stuff this time of year. (Yes, the folks who spend all day in the lobby waiting to catch a glimpse or snag a signature from their coach or a player are committed. Or possibly they should be.)

Alabama's Nick Saban will take to the podium this morning, and there's little doubt he will a) mention how bad the media is at picking who will win the league, even though the media correctly picked the Tide to do it last year, and b) will have a soap box issue that he wants to discuss. This one may be the early signing period, but it could be any other macro issue in college football or college sports.

Missouri coach Barry Odom will speak. Allegedly. If it was Barry Williams, would anyone really know the difference.

Kentucky coach Mark Stoops will answer questions about his Wildcats team, which may be better than a lot of people know. We also expect him to discuss his brother Bob's stunning offseason decision to step down at Oklahoma.

And Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin will take his turn and we feel relatively certain the term :"hot seat" will be used more than once.

Baseball

The All-Star game was played Tuesday. At least that's what we were told.

The AL won 2-1 and thankfully that will have nothing to do with who has home-field advantage in the World Series.

(Sadly, we to a place in our short-attention-span theater that the Home Run Derby was way more entertaining than the All-Star game. And that's not a good thing. In fact there were almost than 8.7 million people tuned into the HR Derby, a rise of almost 55 percent from last year. In an age of dwindling TV numbers across almost all sporting events, a 55 percent jump is huge.)

We head into the second half of the baseball season knowing that there are a few elite teams and roughly half the league wondering if they are a piece or three away from contending for the postseason. That could make for an explosive trading deadline later this month. With that in mind, let's look back at how we got here.

NL MVP: Clayton Kershaw, Dodgers. He's a dunk for the Cy Young, but the fact that the Dodgers are 17-2 in his starts screams to his value. Yes, the monster trio in Washington of Zimmerman, Harper and Murphy are crushing it, but all three of their stat lines are pretty similar. No one is doing what Kershaw is right now.

AL MVP: Yes, we are in on the Aaron Judge take over, and he will get as lot of support. But the Yankees are fading and the Astros are so money. We'll go with Houston's best player - and arguably the best pound-for-pound player in the game - and that's Jose Altuve.

NL Cy Young. Kershaw.

AL Cy Young: Chris Sale, Red Sox. Dude has been an ace for a team that looks the part of frontrunner in the East.

Manager of the Year: Here's where it gets kind of sticky. On coach of the year awards, more times than not preseason expectations are factored in, and more times than not those predictions were made by the court of public opinion. Is Colorado manager Bud Black doing a great job because Charlie Blackmon is killing the baseball to start the season? Sure. Or maybe not.Let's just skip this one shall we.

Rookie of the year. This one could be unanimous. In each league. Judge has been an absolute stud. In the NL, Cody Bellinger is third in the NL in homers, but the staggering stat that can't be ignored is the Dodgers are 52-18 since calling him up in late April and putting his power in the middle of their lineup. They were 9-11 before Bellinger showed up.

This and that

- Nice coverage from Mean Gene Henley and Weeds in today's TFP on the CFC. OMG that's some alphabet soup right there.

- Speaking of SEC media days, there was some chatter that the location of this event could go to Atlanta or Nashville or even Dallas. We think that's mostly talk to try to get the Birmingham folks to offer up a better deal, but there was talk from the commissioner, so there's that.

- Peyton Manning hosts the ESPYs tonight. More on that in a moment.

- Looks like the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor circus has started in earnest. - Mark Schelerth became the latest ESPN personality to head to Fox Sports, ending his 16-year career in Bristol.

- The Freeze - the Atlanta Braves groundskeeper turned in-game racing sensation - got an All-Star invite and got owned in his race in Miami.

- Kentavious Caldwell-Pope got a one-year, $18 million deal form the Lakers. Yes, read that again. My goodness.

Today's question

Will you watch the ESPYs because Peyton is hosting?

As for this day in history, well, Henry David Thoreau would have been 200 today. Milton Berle would have been 109.

Bill Cosby is 80 today. Brock Lesnar is 40 today.

Alexander Hamilton died on this day in 1804 after being shot by Aaron Burr in a duel. Also, Alexander Cartwright, the man viewed as the inventor of modern baseball, died on this day in 1892.

With that, who makes the Rushmore of Alexander?

Go - and remember the mailbag.

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