The Wednesday following the Major League Baseball All-Star Game may be the worst day in all of sports. The majors are idle; there's not even another thrilling home run derby, celebrity All-Star softball game or something for ESPN broadcast for hours and take our minds off the summer doldrums.
The pro football and basketball drafts have come and gone. The NBA beat the NHL in getting its season over with before the end of June. Wimbledon is past and the British Open is still a day away. We've got the Golf Channel and ESPN providing run-up coverage to The Open Championship, though, telling viewers how hard it is for even the best professional golfers to drive a 243-yard par-3 into the gale coming off the English Channel.
The NFL players and owners keep going back and forth on whether a season will even be staged this fall. Speaking of stages, somebody probably took over the yellow whatever-it-is in the Tour de France. Whoopee.
ESPN can spend all night talking about the USA Women's 3-1 World Cup semifinal win over France. Again, Whoopee.
As for college football news, we're just hoping we don't hear of another DUI arrest during this time of year.
Beyond that, nothing, and I mean nothing, seems to be happening in the sports world on hump day in the middle of July.
However, that's soon about to change.
Next week, more than 800 writers, radio talking heads and TV sportscasters and their cameramen will converge on Hoover, Ala., for the annual mid-summer event that tells us the start of football is just a few scant weeks away. ArkansasSports360.com's Chris Bahn and myself will be there among the media throng.
Arkansas is part of the first-day kickoff of four teams -- head coach and selected star players -- discussing how great the 2011 football season will be.
Many in the media outside Florida, Georgia or those who covered Auburn will be meeting Will Muschamp for the first time. He made a big impression with the Arkansas media and some fans, though, when he was in town as a Broyles Award finalist in December 2007. For a few hours, it appeared he had made such an impression that he was soaring up the candidate list for the opening at Arkansas that both Tommy Bowden and Jim Grobe supposedly turned down.
Then, of course, Bobby Petrino rode in from Atlanta.
Muschamp waited for his time for three years at Texas as defensive coordinator and "coach in waiting" at UT before Florida called, needing a new coach to replace the worn-out Urban Meyer.
That's the Southeastern Conference for you: A former Georgia player ends up the head coach of one of the Bulldogs' fiercest rivals. Pat Dye went the same route, ending up a former Dawg coaching Auburn and turning the Tigers program around in the early 1980s. Dye had also coached at Auburn's other hated rival, Alabama. Vince Dooley, for that matter, was an Auburn assistant coach who was surprisingly hired by Georgia as head coach in 1964, and the rest is history in Athens.
Muschamp is certain to be the most excited coach at Hoover, next to James Franklin, who takes over Vanderbilt, which has nowhere to go but up after a disastrous 2010. Vanderbilt has 21 of 22 starters back from a team that only beat Ole Miss in SEC play.
We've found in the past four years visiting Hoover, the new coaches with the most pizazz with the media turn out to be disappointments on the field. Nobody was duller than Auburn's Gene Chizik two years ago, unless it was Mississippi State's Dan Mullen. Both guided their teams last year to heights unimagined. Here's hoping Cam Newton enters the discussion when either is up on the main table in front of the writers next week.
Bobby Petrino wasn't Mr. Excitement at his first SEC media days, either. It took him three seasons to guide Arkansas to its first-ever BCS bowl.
On the other hand, Vanderbilt ushered up longtime assistant Robbie Caldwell as the new head coach just days after Bobby Johnson had surprised everyone outside of his inner circle by resigning, and Caldwell wowed the crowd with his impromptu stand-up routine. Before the 2010 season was done, it was obvious Caldwell would be a better comedian than a head football coach.
Every year at Hoover, the media horde has tried to figure out which Mark Richt we'd see at Georgia for the coming year. This time, the media may approach it as Richt's last hurrah.
With the meetings based within an hour of Tuscaloosa and just outside Birmingham, naturally Alabama crazies will pour into the Winfrey Hotel to get a glimpse of the Crimson Tide's most recent football saviour, Nick Saban.
Arkansas sends quarterback Tyler Wilson, running back Knile Davis and end Jake Bequette to Hoover to rehash all the same things they've told the state media about the coming season.
They plan to have a great season. They all do. At least they'll all be talking about it, and we can start the countdown to the first official practice, then the first practice in pads, the end of two-a-days, the last scimmage and then the first kickoff to the 2011 season.
It can't come fast enough.
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