Da'shawn Hand's New Top Three
This must have been the story that spiked all the crystal ball predictions because Bama, Florida, and Michigan all got a few more votes today.
You grow ferns and peppers in your backyard and Mone Drake.
Then go down to Marshall and start Bunting for Cole.
On your way back, stop in Ohio and get a Hand-job
You will wake up the next day a champion
To everyone unsure of Hand's excitement over Bama's engineering program, while ours is clearly superior, you have to realize that our program is extremely intense, both in course difficulty and in workload, and your average football player can't just take a couple of engineering classes, pass them easily, and walk away with a degree. Guys like Jordan Morgan are absolutely the exception. What I get from him being impressed by Alabama's program is less "it's the best I've ever seen!" and more "it's the best I've ever seen that I could reasonably balance with being a star athlete at a major university," which I think is reasonable. The head of the department being a "football guy" just says to me that he understands what Hand's football workload will be like, and won't make his life impossible with academics, as Michigan's elite engineering program would do.
Only school out of those other four (including the two that "could" get visits) that concerns me is Alabama, and that didn't concern me until the rumblings that have just recently been coming out. Until last week, I would have considered this a lock (basically us and then putting a couple others out there to make it feel like a contest) but now I see it as maybe 75% us, 25% Alabama.