A CFB Newsletter about Baseball & Video Games

Good morning and welcome to 4th & Forever, Rand & Tate’s College Football Newsletter. It’s been a relatively quiet week, but a college football head coach decided he’d rather move to inland South Carolina to coach tight ends, while EA Sports provided a big update about the upcoming, long-awaited college football video game. So without further ado, let’s get to it!

For Those Who Never Stopped Believing

Oh yeah folks, the college football video game is back! Well, almost. The game will return in July this year after an 11-year hiatus that was caused by EA Sports being told by a California court that it would need to compensate players to have a game. Once NIL came into play in the summer of 2021, people wondered if it could open the door for new college video games, and EA Sports didn’t waste any time answering that question - it announced the long-awaited return of their college football game back in February of 2021. Three years later, we have an official teaser trailer to get us all excited for the next few months.

We’re certainly interested to see how the game handles all of the massive changes the sport has seen over the past few years. Am I going to have to buy high school recruits with NIL money? Am I going to have to pay my virtual quarterback $100k so he doesn’t transfer to Texas A&M? Do I have to give my star defensive back a Lamborghini so he doesn’t leave for… Texas A&M? Can I make a 64-team playoff? And how big can I make the Big Ten? I feel like they could use UConn.

Regardless, we couldn’t be more excited to have one of the relics of our childhood back in our hands this year. We all have our NCAA Football stories and legends - I (Tate) famously took the Idaho Vandals to 25 National Titles in 30 years in NCAA 14. When COVID hit in 2020, I went back to my old Playstation 2, pulled out NCAA 06 (the greatest sports video game ever made), and started making trailers and highlights for my games. 4th & Forever reader Waide Swain and I used to stay up until 5:00am the night that each new edition would come out every year, and we’re already making plans to do it again this July despite the fact that we’re pushing 30 years old. We don’t know exactly what the game is going to look like, but the unknown is what has us excited. Maybe we run an Online Dynasty with readers here at 4th & Forever. Maybe Tate quits his job and becomes a full-time video game streamer. But one thing we know for sure is that we’re going to be playing the hell out of this game come July, and we can’t believe we’re actually getting our favorite thing back. We never stopped believing.

We’ll be sure to let you all know how our dynasties are going, whether you want us to or not.

Diamond Deacs & Dawgs

College baseball is back, and as we do with college basketball at times, we plan on keeping you updated on how things are going with both the Deacs and the Dawgs. After making it to Omaha for the first time since 1955 last season, missing the championship series by one game after perhaps the best college baseball game ever played, and having a bajillion players drafted, the Deacs are back and the unanimous preseason #1 team in the nation. Led by pitcher Josh Hartle and 1B Nick Kurtz, Wake could break some MLB draft records this upcoming summer. Tennessee transfer Chase Burns lived up to the hype in his first start on Saturday by striking out the side in the first inning against Illinois on 13 pitches with a fastball that tops out at 102 mph and a slider at 92mph. He finished the day with 10 K’s, no ERs, and was throwing a perfect game through 4+ innings. He’s ridiculously filthy and not even Wake’s best pitcher. Kurtz and Wingate transfer Seaver King lead a lineup that won’t hit as many bombs as last year’s team, but that’s an impossibly high bar to clear. Point is, the Deacs might be better than they were last year which is a scary proposition for the rest of the ACC and potential opponents in the NCAA tournament. After the first weekend, Wake is 3-0 after picking up solid wins over Fordham, Illinois, and Akron. They’ve got weekend series against the rest of Tobacco Road, Virginia, and Clemson, all of whom are currently ranked in the top 15 too. 

For Georgia, things started off about as well as they possibly could over the weekend. New head coach Wes Johnson, who is one of the best pitching coaches in the country, was hired away from LSU’s staff last offseason to replace Scott Stricklin, who was at UGA for ten years and never won a single regional. The Dawgs went 3-0 this weekend over UNC Asheville, winning 11-2, 17-5, and 10-0. While the Asheville Bulldogs were certainly outmatched, it was great to see Georgia’s pitchers actually attack the zone consistently instead of looking like scared puppies as they did over the past two seasons. This Dawgs lineup looks like it might be able to score at will for the first time in over a decade. 

1st baseman/right fielder Charlie Condon, who will likely be a top 5 pick in next year’s MLB draft, hit .636 over the weekend, while transfers Slate Alford, Colby Branch, and all impressed as well. The Dawgs play Georgia State on Tuesday and have their big 3-game series against Georgia Tech coming up at the end of the month, so we’ll hopefully be able to test ourselves against some solid competition before we start playing SEC teams, of which 8 are ranked in the top 25 (6 in the top 10), in less than a month. 

I very much need a good Dawgs sports team to get me through the early part of this year since the Hoop Dawgs decided they suck again. So let’s go Diamond Dawgs!

Quick Hitters

Just when we think the coaching carousel has come to a close, some random asshole decides we have to start writing about him too. Late last week it was Georgia State head coach Shawn Elliott, who took the job as South Carolina’s Tight End’s Coach. If you’re wondering why the hell he would do that, you may remember that we just talked a couple of weeks ago about how the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the sport is leading to more situations like this. But this one seems a little different, because apparently, Elliott, who coached at South Carolina before taking over at Georgia State, never even moved his family out of Columbia. Not only that, he apparently did not miss a single one of his oldest son’s high school football games last year, meaning he drove back and forth from Atlanta to Columbia the night before Georgia State games several times last season. No recruiting necessary, I guess? In 2022, Elliott squandered what was one of the Sun Belt’s most veteran and talented rosters, falling apart over the course of the season and finishing second-to-last in the East division of the conference. While we’re sure that having to deal with the transfer portal and the chaotic world of NIL impacted this decision, this seems more like a case where a guy was simply mentally checked out knowing the team he’d be returning to wasn’t going to be very good and wanted to go hang out with his family. More power to you, Shawn. The Panthers were already two days into spring practice when this happened, and have hired strength and conditioning coach Mike Sirignano as the interim to hopefully keep things from completely falling apart in the short term. Again we say, if these coaches can just up and leave whenever the hell they want, including in the middle of spring practice, we don’t really want to hear any complaints when a player decides to make a move that he thinks would be better for him.

UCLA replaced Chip Kelly who left for the OC role at Ohio State with DeShaun Foster. A former All-American running back for the Bruins, after a six-year NFL career with the Panthers and 49ers, he got into coaching where he spent the previous six years as the RB coach for the Bruins. Is he a safe hire? Cheap? Is UCLA still in massive amounts of debt? Yes, yes, and yes. Predicting if college football hires will work out is a fool's errand but we’re interested to track his progress as UCLA enters the Big 10 this upcoming season. Foster can thank AD Martin Jarmond for hiring him and also bemoan his decision to schedule non-conference games @ Hawai’i and @ LSU. The Bruins also have to travel to Beaver Stadium in State College, Piscataway to play Rutgers, and Memorial Stadium to face Nebraska. Good luck new guy!

Hope you have a great day and we will talk to you again soon.

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Rand Fisher & Tate Smillie met a few years ago through their good buddy Dave Peljovich who went to college with Rand and high school with Tate. Tate went to Georgia and has spent the last two years collecting championship rings while traveling to watch the Dawgs. Rand went to known CFB powerhouse Wake Forest and currently pays rent in Atlanta but is rarely found there with all the work & CFB travel he does.