It's Friday which means it's time for the Mailbag. 

Congrats, you can pretend to work while reading in advance of the Memorial Day weekend.  

Our beaver pelt trader of the week is Kevin Durant. He's included in a mailbag question as well, but his decision to donate a million dollars to the tornado victims is worthy of the award. 

And much more. 

Okay, let's dive into the mailbag.

While Derek Dooley has been focused on growing nonexistent bamboo in Knoxville, James Franklin has been winning football games at Vanderbilt. In just his first season at Vandy, Franklin has notched the two biggest margins of SEC victory for the Commodores since 1971, come within a single play of beating both Arkansas and Georgia, and seen his team win more football games in his first season than it won in the previous two seasons combined. Along the way Franklin has refashioned the Commodore football program, grabbed the city of Nashville's sports attention with his insistent sales job, and beaten out Tennessee for at least two prime recruits in the state. Indeed, Franklin's most recent commit, Andrew Jelks, grew up a Tennessee fan and his parents are Vol season ticket holders. Franklin's recruiting class currently sits at #21 in the country. That's poised to become the best recruiting haul in the school's history.  

Coming in to Saturday's game in Knoxville, Franklin has accomplished the unbelievable -- his Commodores are a favorite over the Vols in Knoxville for the first time in modern history.  

Put simply, James Franklin is Vanderbilt football's own Bruce Pearl.

According to WZTV, the Fox affiliate here in Nashville, Vanderbilt safety Andre Simmons was involved in the armed robbery of a fellow Vanderbilt student yesterday. According to the WZTV article: "A Vanderbilt student was held up in his dorm room yesterday and robbed of about $5,000. The Davidson County affidavit states that two men armed with a handgun came to the room at Lupton Hall and knocked on the door. When the door was opened, the two men said they wanted the money from the safe. A fight ensued and the victim was struck in the head with the gun. The suspect with the money ran, while the other suspect, Andre Leigh Simmons, 19, stayed behind to keep the victim in the room."

Andre Leigh Simmons is a sophomore safety for Vanderbilt. While he is not identified as a member of the football team in the linked article, OKTC reached Vice-Chancellor David Williams for comment early this morning after a tip that Simmons was a member of the football team.   

Last night Bob Costas interviewed Jerry Sandusky via telephone. Airing at 9 central, the interview was must-watch television. Why? Because it's altogether likely that Jerry Sandusky will never take the witness stand in his own defense. Not after this performance with Costas. Sandusky appeared scatterbrained, slow, and his answers lacked specificity. When you're asked whether or not you're sexually attracted to young boys, your answer has to be no. Quickly. That's not a difficult question for most of us. At least if you profess your innocence. Instead it took Sandusky over sixteen seconds to get around to acknowledging that he wasn't really attracted to boys.

Costas's questioning was direct and confrontational. This was, for all intents and purposes, likely to be Costas's "A Few Good Men" moment, when he turned Sandusky into a stammering liar. But at least Colonel Jessup equaled the fire with brimstone of his own, Sandusky's meandering, grandfatherly answers, weren't those of a monster; they were merely those of a man who appears to have no understanding of the seriousness of his peril. It's no surprise that anyone who read the grand jury report could consider Sandusky a monster, but it is a surprise that Sandusky still doesn't seem to realize that the rest of the country considers him a monster.

What's he been doing for the past week? 

That lack of self-awareness was the overwhelming message that reverberated throughout the interview. Sandusky sounded like a man charged with speeding through a school zone one time instead of a man accused of terrorizing school children for decades. 

Here's the video for those of you who didn't see it, and then ten more thoughts about Sandusky's legal defense and more.    

With Oregon's whipping of Stanford and Boise State's shanked field goal against TCU, LSU moved into a nearly guaranteed title game appearance even if it loses to either Arkansas or Georgia. How so? Because if LSU lost one game, there would only be one undefeated team. (That's assuming Oklahoma State wins out. Houston isn't making the big game). Of the one-loss teams LSU beat Oregon and Alabama head-to-head so neither of those teams are going in front of LSU. Oklahoma's loss to Texas Tech was too bad. Meanwhile, if Arkansas beats LSU it still has an Alabama whipping on the books, so can you really make an argument that Arkansas would deserve to be in above Alabama and LSU? Especially when, and this is key, LSU is going to represent the SEC West in Atlanta even if it loses to Arkansas. 

I'll discuss the three-way SEC West tie scenario below, but suffice it to say that even if Arkansas wins LSU and Alabama are both going to be ranked above Arkansas in the final BCS standings.

Lose to Arkansas and LSU would get a chance to redeem itself in the SEC title game against a top-ten ranked Georgia team. Lose to Georgia and LSU would still have three top ten BCS wins. Either way the Tigers will be in the Sugar Bowl unless they lose to Arkansas and Georgia. And I don't see that happening.  

I haven't seen anyone else point out that LSU has a national title game mulligan right now, but they do.   

Two Games to Watch

Auburn at Georgia (3:30 ET/CBS) – The Deep South's Oldest Rivalry convenes again this weekend in Athens as Georgia looks to essentially lock up a trip to Atlanta with a win. The Bulldogs need to beat Auburn and Kentucky to punch their ticket. A split and a South Carolina loss to Florida would also do the trick, but the easiest path to an outright Eastern Division title is to just win, baby. Auburn enters the game riding a modest wave of momentum after enjoying a bye last week and dominating the second half against Ole Miss the week before en route to an easy victory.

Read part one of OKTC's Kirk Herbstreit profile here.

The day before LSU and Alabama take the field for the biggest regular season game in SEC history, ESPN's College Gameday crew sits around a horseshoe shaped table inside Bryant-Denny Stadium. Desmond Howard, Chris Fowler, Urban Meyer, David Pollack, and Lee Corso sit alongside one side of the table, on the other side are Erin Andrews and two producers. In the center of the table sit Tom Rinaldi, Kirk Herbstreit and Gameday producer Lee Fitting.

Herbstreit has an iPad propped in front of him, he's typing notes and discussing the next day's two-hour Gameday show.

It's not even noon, but already Herbstreit's orange tie has provoked a minor Twitter storm. Some Alabama fans are convinced that Herbstreit's orange tie is a coded message designed to send a message of solidarity to Auburn fans.

When he hears this Herbstreit groans.  

"Will you Tweet out that it's just an orange tie, it isn't an Auburn tie?" he asks. 

It's 7:30 on a Friday morning and the face of college football, 42 year old ESPN College Gameday host Kirk Herbstreit, jogs across the University of Alabama campus in a dark dri-fit shirt, blue shorts, and grey Nikes. It's a cloudless sky, late morning dew rising and evaporating into a light fog and Herbstreit, in Tuscaloosa for the latest game of the century, #1 LSU at #2 Alabama -- the first 1 vs. 2 match-up in regular season SEC history -- comes to a sudden stop at the back door of the University of Alabama's football offices. He stops because he and Alabama coach Nick Saban have arrived at the door to the football complex at the exact same instant.   This is the moment that College Gameday sells to its millions of fans, the chance on-campus meeting that makes college football's biggest coaching stars willing accessories to Gameday's reigning gridiron dominance, just regular guys in the football neighborhood. Rarely have sports stars been more closely wedded to the men who cover them.    It's a small college football world, after all. Forget the tens of millions of screaming fans in the stadiums, the alums staring intently into television screens across the country, Gameday's promotional spots sell this exact moment -- the accessibility of the inaccessible, the humanizing of the great, the meeting of fan and coaching luminary, the entire college football universe fitting onto a postage stamp's worth of campus. 

Did Vinnie Verno really make a give y'all a boobie milk game of the year?

Yes, yes he did.

And posterboard logic on why Arkansas is going to cover against Tennessee?

Pure genius, I tell you, pure genius.

Seriously, these just keep getting better and better.

Dive in now, we can all  use a good laugh after the mess at Penn State.

Last night ESPN demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt why it desperately needs real competition. Because if you had to give a letter grade to ESPN's live coverage from State College, Pennsylvania you'd need a grade worse than F. To say that ESPN dropped the ball does injustice to the cliche. Last night ESPN was to live news television what sex with a blow-up doll is to sex, a pale imitation that is completely humiliating to anyone who considers it as an option.

But maybe I'm being unkind, if your goal was hearing non-ESPN reporters call-in from the scene of rioting last night then you were well on your way to great coverage. Nobody turns television into radio better than the worldwide leader.

How bad was it for ESPN? Gregg Doyel of CBS's live Twitter feed was more compelling content than anything ESPN could muster.

His. Twitter. Feed.

This was, perhaps, the biggest live story in college sports history and ESPN was utterly incapable of providing any semblance of decent coverage. ESPN was bad that anyone with a brain flipped over to CNN and watched a British woman with no clue about American sports completely dominate the "worldwide leader in sports." We haven't seen a sports upset like this since Chaminade took down Ralph Sampson's Virginia.  

I don't hate ESPN, and I don't have a vendetta against the network. In fact, as you'll see in a Kirk Herbstreit profile piece going up later today, I like a lot of their guys and gals, but this was pathetic. Every time I come to expect more, ESPN shows me why I should actually expect much less.  

Like most of you I watched the Board of Trustees press conference this evening. It was riveting television. For about twenty minutes homer Penn State media peppered the Board of Trustees spokesperson John Surma with a barrage of insulting questions. It was insane. You halfway expected for someone to throw a shoe at Surma, who acquitted himself admirably.

Truly, it was amazing television.

We'll have more on this tomorrow on OKTC, but in the meantime, here is the full press conference for those who missed it.

Enjoy.

And thanks to @andtinez for sending me this link on Twitter. You can follow him here.