Michael Lewis' incredible college football book The Blind Side tells the amazing true story of professional footballs talent search for someone capable of blocking Lawrence Taylor. This search leads to inner city Memphis, where an incredibly athletically gifted young man who has been in and out of foster care and from the most difficult possible of circumstances improbably gets the opportunity to attend a private school and is adopted by a wealthy family. If Michael can get eligible to play college football, he will probably earn millions protecting the quarterback's blind side in the NFL.

The Blind Side is put into the context of the debate over IQ and education reform here:

http://jaypgreene.com/2008/05/10/charles-murray-vs-michael-oher/

Hey Alligator Army,

Today is the big day. We've switched your community over to the new SB Nation sports blog platform. My name is Trei, and I'm here to help you get adjusted to the new home we've built for you. If you have questions or trouble with the new system, post a comment in this thread and myself or one of the team (lovitt, sixfoot6 or odacrem) will try to point you in the right direction.

Before we begin, I want to let you know we still consider this a beta platform, so don't be surprised if you find a few bugs or if everything isn't exactly right yet. We hope you'll take the time to report any problems you encounter at bugreport@sbnation.com. We'll be continuing to make changes and improving things.

Please take a few minutes to read about what's new below. But if you just can't wait to jump in, here are some quick things to check out:

1. Sign up for your SB Nation network account and claim your old blog accounts
2. Once you're logged in, press your  Z  key in any thread with new comments
3. Explore your dashboard and setup your profile
4. Read the guide to the new FanPost editor
5. Install the FanShot bookmarklet and post videos to Alligator Army from YouTube or images from Flickr
6. Click the "Rec" button on posts and comments to help other people find the good stuff.
7. Customize display options on your Edit Settings page

What Has Changed

SB Nation Network Accounts - the Big Change

Readers across all of our blogs told us they wanted one account to use on every SB Nation blog. To make this work, we're requiring that everyone create a new SB Nation network account. In most cases you should be able to keep your old username, but a few of you may have to choose something new, since every other community in SB Nation will be going through this same transition. We tried to be as fair as possible in deciding who gets to keep which name, using a formula that takes into account length of membership and frequency of activity.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate on all of our blogs, but we don't want to encourage everyone to start visiting rival team blogs and initiating flame wars. To maintain friendly communities we ask that you explicitly join each blog in order to participate. It's a two-click process, but it does means accepting each blog's community guidelines. Just as you join each blog individually, you can be banned on each blog individually.

You can claim old accounts from multiple SB Nation blogs, and your new username will be retroactively attached to all your old comments and diaries. So now you'll be able to access all your writings from your single profile page... like magic.

To get started, click here to claim your old blog accounts and create a new SB Nation network account.

FanPosts (the Section Formerly Known as Diaries)

We changed their name. Why? Because we took this major upgrade as an opportunity to leave behind some vocabulary that never made much sense for a sports blog. SB Nation is the network of, by and for fans, and these are the blog posts we make. So we call them FanPosts. When you're at a bar telling someone to check out your online sports opinions, you don't have to suggest they read your diary.

FanPosts are displayed differently on the homepage - we include your avatar to give more credit for the time you spend writing great posts. The new post editor has a WYSIWYG view that provides easy formatting. It also auto-saves drafts so you don't have to worry about losing your work when you compose a post within the web browser. And you can now associate teams, players and games with your posts: these tools promote your FanPosts on our new team, player and game pages - across the entire network.

The new system does not work like the old diary editor. For example, in HTML mode the new editor doesn't auto-create a new paragraph from two line breaks. But it does offer a whole array of new features. Look for the blinking help button on the right side of the FanPost editor for quick tips, and take a look at our full guide to writing FanPosts on the new platform.

IMPORTANT - if you write your posts in Microsoft Word or some other off-line editor, you will get the most reliable behavior if you cut & paste your post into the HTML view of the FanPost editor. And if you do that, remember to wrap <p></p> tags around each paragraph so your text doesn't run together.

Visual Redesign

This one is probably the most obvious change of all. Like other major websites working to improve readability for their audience, we've adopted a fixed-width layout optimized for the 1024 x 768 resolution used by the majority of Alligator Army and SB Nation network users. Use the switcher below the user menu if you prefer the wider layout designed for 1280 monitors. We've introduced a top navigation bar with quick links into old and new sections of the site. We also polished a few edges, made some things larger, others smaller and moved a few boxes here and there. More changes and adjustments to come.

Search

We've completely replaced the old search engine with a new one. We're excited to make it easier to find old posts and comments, but we've only taken our first pass on the tools we're offering. We're focused on making search even better than what you had before, so please know that we're aware search is missing key features and we're working on it.

What's New

Schedule, Scores, Stats and Roster

Alligator Army now has all the basic information about the Florida Gators and hundreds of other teams. During games you'll see a regularly updated line score, and as the season progresses we'll track team stat totals and leaders. This is just our first step, so look for us to publish more detailed and archival stats in the future. The best part about all this sports data is that we've integrated it directly into the blog so. We now have special pages that aggregate all blog posts written about games, players and teams.

Recommending FanPosts

Some writing deserves more attention and more conversation. If you want to bump a FanPost up to the top and keep it there for awhile, just click the 'Rec' link under the body of the post. When a FanPost receives enough recommendations it will make the recommended list.

Auto-refreshing Comments

You no longer need to refresh the page to see new comments. If you're logged in, new comments will automatically appear on the page every few seconds. When you post a comment, the page will not refresh either. If you want to quickly cycle through all the new comments, you can press the C key on your keyboard. Unmark a new comment after you've read it with the X key. And use the Z key if you want to umark comments as you're cycling through them.

As you use these shortcuts to cycle through comments, press the R key to reply to the current comment. All these helpful keyboard shortcuts are listed at the top of each comments section for reference.

Recommending Comments

Now you can reward those folks who take the time to look up stats and make smart arguments in the comments. Next to each comment there is an 'actions' link that you can click to find the recommend and flag options.

Flagging Comments

To help the moderators on a site, we've built-in tools that let you flag comments that are spam, trolling or just plain inappropriate. Only moderators can see those flags.

FanShots

Many members of the community just want to post that one link, video, photo or quote, but don't need a full FanPost. We've got you covered: FanShots let you share YouTube videos, Flickr or PhotoBucket photos, quotes from articles, portions of chat transcripts, top 5 lists and simple links. If it's a video or image we'll put a thumbnail on the homepage when you post it.

For those of you who are experienced internet hunter-gatherers of Florida Gators material, install the bookmarklet onto the links bar of your browser and share FanShots with the community from wherever on the web you find that killer quote or photo.

Archives

It's much easier to find that post about a certain deadline trade or prospect retro feature. You can browse by year and month.

Avatars

Upload an image so folks can see your custom avatar on your profile, your FanPosts, and all your comments.

Network Profiles

Now that we have unified SB Nation network accounts, your profile will be your central hub for all of your activity on any blogs where you are a member.

Network bar

The top bar stays with you on all SB Nation blogs. It's a quick way to login and logout. When you're logged in, you'll see your avatar and screen name which links to your profile. The icon to the right leads to your Dashboard area where you can edit your settings, profile, account details and any FanPosts or FanShots you've published. As we add more blogs to the new SB Nation network, the My Blogs menu will be a handy way to navigate between the blogs you've joined.

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There are plenty more small changes and additions we've made, so please take a careful look around and explore this new system. We appreciate your patience and hope you'll help us improve the new platform for this and all the other SB Nation blogs.

And in case you missed it, you'll want to start by claiming your old blog accounts and creating a new SB Nation network account.

On May 15, Danny Wuerffel will be the keynote speaker at a luncheon at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium'sTouchdown Club to raise awareness for Desire Street Ministries.

Wuerffel has already earned the support of some well-known Jacksonville residents, including the Tebow family and Kerwin Bell, Jacksonville University's head football coach and former Gator quarterback, who are scheduled to attend the event. Former Florida Gator players Chris Doering and Shane Matthews will also be in attendance, among others.

Tables seat 10 people and are $500 each.  Individual tickets are also available for $50 each for the noon event.

For more information call Lisa Kaviani at (407) 571-3906.  To register for the event, e-mail June Holden at june.holden@comcast.net.  For more information about Desire Street Ministries visit www.desirestreet.org.

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All true Florida Football fans, there is a new Professional football league starting this April that will feature former college standouts from all over Florida.

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Okay, so last time around, I talked about Points Per Play (PPP) as the football version of Slugging %.  In baseball, OPS (On-Base + Slugging) is one of the most telling, easy, reliable stats around.  It's great because it's flexible.  There are two different ways to put together a strong OPS--either by getting on base a lot or by hitting for power--and the best hitters do both.  You find consistency and explosiveness in one measure.

So if PPP is equivalent to Slugging % (explosiveness), what's equivalent to On-Base % (consistency)?  Success Rate, that's what.

In its most basic form, Success Rate is simply the percentage of time in which a play is deemed `successful'.  It is a measure I culled from Football Outsiders and tweaked to fit my own purposes.  How is `success' determined?

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Hey, this is The Boy from Rock M Nation.  I posted this over at Sunday Morning QB a couple days ago, but I figured I might as well post it on some other blogs too...let me know what you think.

OFFSEASON PROJECT!  Over at RMN, I've been playing with the `Beyond the Box Score' idea (calling it that as an ode to the wonderful SBN sabermetrics blog of the same name) as it applies to college football stats.

I've been cranking out play-by-plays for 2007 games as fast as possible--as I post for a Mizzou blog, I've focused on Big 12 teams, Mizzou opponents, and teams with fellow Heisman finalists--but this is a massive undertaking, and I need some volunteers to enter play-by-play for the games I have yet to enter from the 2007.  They take about 30-45 minutes each, and I'm figuring I'll need about 6-10 volunteers to finish this stuff in a timely enough fashion to do something about it before the 2008 season starts orbiting everybody's attention span, so...actually, how about I just show you why I'm doing this?

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Wow, I knew Tim would get it, the way he thanked almost every single person he has met in his life. Tim Tebow is the real deal America!

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Hawai'i Head Coach June Jones just implied that Tim Tebow is an average QB in a great system.

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1. Better Defense. There is not a national Championship on the line. However even in a spoiler game the best defense wins.
2. Ron Zook didn't recruit this team. Say what you want about him, but you won a championship with his team.
3. FSU is a different team in the 2nd half of this year. They are responding to the new coaches, and they are going to rock you...
   

If we had won instead of lost, we could have been ranked #1 in the BCS rankings. This site helps you figure it out:
www.PlayWhatIf.com

These seem to be good estimates of future BCS rankings.

Right now we are ranked #18 on the site, but if we had beaten Georgia and Auburn, then we'll be ranked #4. Of course, if we went undefeated, then we would have been ranked #1.
Go Gators!!!