What will come first: Pryor's announcement or G&R's "Chinese Democracy?"

When, Axl, when can we buy this missing piece to the puzzle?

Yesterday was a real beehive of activity in Columbus' corner of the interweb (though not so much at ye Olde Columbus Town.)

Wells was a big get, despite his relatively low-profile, any steal from the Sunshine State is fine by me. If thats not good enough to get the old ticker goin', Buckeye Commentary is already drawing comparisons to the departed Vern Gholston.

Then, as is he felt upstaged by Wells, Terrelle Pryor and his cronies at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette started a-fusin-and-a-feudin' about the date of his announcement. First he was "80-90% sure" about a Wednesday reveal, like originally planned. Then came a mudslide of characteristically unsubstantiated reports that said the young QB was OSU bound. Later, Pryor told Rivals that this wasn't the case and a delayed decision was still in the cards. The players, at this point, are still OSU, Michigan, PSU and Oregon. Guesses are that a Signing Day announcement means Us or Them but anything after levels the playing field, as a trip to Eugene would be likely.

Despite all this activity in the Great Lakes region, Stu Mandel had the gall to write yet another "SEC is better than you" column. Not only is this sentiment more stale than cargo pants from Tuttle Mall, this particular piece was as poorly conceived as a 3rd grader's illicit scribblings on the Midwest's collective bathroom wall.

You can tell Stubert was really digging deep to come up with an original Valentine sonnet for the beloved SEC when you look at his reasoning:

I wanted to focus not only on the aforementioned recruiting powers but all teams in every conference, to see if not only the SEC's best, but its worst, are more talented than everyone else's. Apparently, they are.

While going through the raw data, it occurred to me that some of the "averages" may be disproportionately affected by so-called "statistical outliers." For instance, in 2007, 10 of the 11 Big Ten teams ranked in the top 60 -- and then Indiana all the way down at 97th. Or, in 2006, the Pac-10 had USC at No. 1, but no one else in the top 15.

So I recalculated the scores using each team's "median" rather than its average. It didn't affect most of the leagues' numbers all that much -- except, of course, for the SEC, whose lead over the others grew even larger.

The attempt at statistical fairness is appreciated, Stu, but next time try to fashion your conclusion after you come up with the method.

It's in times like these I am thankful for the cooler heads at CFN and their series that retrospectively examines recruiting rankings.