My home internet is down and that whole "legislative session" thing is going on. Posting will be sporadic until the end of the week or early next week. Apologies.

I sat down to look at the TSK stats for 2011 in Google Analytics today, and it was jaw dropping. Before doing anything else, I want to thank all of you who come here an make it a site worth writing for and visiting. The growth we experienced here was remarkable.

Team Speed Kills debuted in April of 2008. In 2011, this site had 1.25 million visits and 1.77 million page views. Both of those are larger than the cumulative traffic from the beginning of the site to December 31, 2010. That is unbelievable. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The year 2011 was a special one around here, and we'll work to make 2012 even better. After the jump are some more stats for nerds (like me) who find such things interesting.

Continue reading this post »

The NCAA has released this year's Graduation Success Rate report that guages the success of student athletes at the member instutions ability to recieve their diplomas. The GSR measures the single-year graduation rate for Division 1 athletes who began college in the fall of 2004 and were given six years to finish.

Later this week, the NCAA is expected to vote on stricter graduation rules that will require sports teams to graduate 50 percent of their student-athletes to participate in postseason tournaments and bowl games (the metric the association would use to determine eligibility would be APR figures and not GSR numbers).

If that restriction were in place last season, men’s basketball champion University of Connecticut would have been ineligible to compete. The new rules, if passed, are not expected to be in place for this year's football post-season or the 2012 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament.

In the SEC, that would not have a huge affect since every school save one, South Carolina, is well above that 50% threshold. In fact, the national GSR for football players at Football Bowl Subdivision schools was 69 percent and four SEC schools either matched or exceeded that number, Alabama, Florida, LSU and Vanderbilt. (UPDATE, C&F, 6:50 p.m. ET: South Carolina says there was an error in its submission, and the corrected data will show "a significant increase.")

SEC Schools 2004 GSR Scores for Football

Source: NCAA

The changes could have more impact to SEC men's basketball as half the schools men's basketball programs currently fall beneath the 50% threshold including two teams that participated in the 2010 NCAA tournament, Florida and Tennessee. (By the proposed APR metric the only SEC school that would have been ineligible for last year's tournament would have been Arkansas.)

For men's basketball, the national GSR Rate was 68 percent, a total four SEC schools bested; Kentucky, LSU, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt. This graph compares the conference schools numbers along with  possible future SEC members Texas A&M and Missouri.

SEC Schools 2004 GSR Scores for Mens Basketball

Source: NCAA

Tonight on Team Speed Kills Now at 9 p.m. ET / 8 p.m. CT:

• Alligator Army and Rocky Top Talk on the Florida-Tennessee game;
• Anchor of Gold on Vanderbilt's season and the showdown with Ole Miss;
• The latest on realignment and what it means for the SEC.

Join us.

FTC disclosure: This contest is sponsored by Gameday Depot and SB Nation.

Congratulations to  "Leak is my eskimo brother" and "ISayPetrinoYouSayPaterno" for tying for first place this past weekend in the pick 'em contest. As the latter won the Week 1 prize, the former wins the Week 2 prize and gets the second $10 gift certificate from Gameday Depot. Be on the lookout for a confirmation email with instructions on how to claim your prize. You can choose one that can be used for officially licensed NCAA apparel and merchandise or one that can be used for custom t-shirts you create yourself.

No worries for the rest of you, as we'll be giving away another $10 gift certificate this week. If you didn't get your picks in last week, there's no reason not to jump in for the rest of the season to try to win the weekly prize. And remember that a $50 gift certificate is on the line for whoever wins the entire season, so keep playing each week. This week's games should unlock on Yahoo! today or tomorrow.

This week's top ten standings can be found after the jump.

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TSK Now returns and is better than ever. Tonight we talk the beginning of SEC vs. SEC games. Join us.

Yahoo! unlocked this week's games yesterday, so be sure to get your pick 'em selections in before Friday at 4:25 pm ET. That's the deadline for the earliest game of the week.

If you haven't joined up yet, see the instructions in this post. We've got a $10 weekly prize and a $50 grand prize this year courtesy of SBNation and GameDay Depot, so you don't want to miss out. Remember: I must have an email address for you in order to win any of the prizes. Make sure yours is either unlocked in the system or shoot me an email as per the instructions post.

Good luck to all!

UPDATE

Apparently the Yahoo! system was just borked last night; new entries are being accepted. So you can still sign up!

READ THIS: If you want to be sure that you can win a prize, shoot me an email (year2.blog at gmail dot com) with "TSK Pick Em Pool" in the title and your entry name in the body. That's the best way to ensure that I can contact the weekly winner.

The SB Nation iPhone app is now available in the App Store! And it's Free!

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