How do you like Romo now?
😀
Sorry, I’m a little giddy at the moment. I wonder what Drew Bledsoe is thinking.
Tag: football
Mark Schlabach perfectly sums up my feelings regarding the constantly overrated Fighting Irish. Those pollsters who had them at #2 in the rankings at the beginning of the season look, well, pretty stupid right now, don’t they?
Dear ESPN,
I realize that it’s a pretty big deal that Nick Saban deserted the Miami Dolphins to become the highest paid college football coach in the country, but don’t you think it’s newsworthy that LSU exposed how overrated Notre Dame is in the Sugar Bowl last night, and that that should dominate the College Football home page?
Please rectify this at your earliest convenience.
Thanks,
Retrophisch
Update: It appears I’ve been heard. (Shush and allow me this delusion, will you?) As of 12:20 PM CST when I checked the College Football home page, the upcoming championship game between Florida and Ohio State has replaced Saban as the main news of the moment. Still no love for my Tigers from the SEC-bigoted blowhards at ESPN.
Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick. How could you do this to us? How could you do this to the team you already had a commitment to?
I think I can speak for a lot of LSU fans in saying that we wanted to see the coach who brought the Tigers their second national championship do well. I’m not a huge fan of the NFL, and I don’t really cheer for any team in particular, but I wanted to see Nick Saban turn things around at Miami and lead a successful career as a NFL head coach. While I, like many, was disappointed to see Saban leave LSU, I could certainly understand his departure: after summitting the highest point in college football, he was ready for the next challenge.
Except Saban didn’t really give the next challenge the time–and thus, the effort–to do the same in the NFL that he did in the NCAA. It takes an extremely rare coach to turn a football team in a complete one-eighty in two years or less. Nick Saban, for all his prowess as a football coach, is not amoung that rare number. For Saban, the 2006 season in Miami was actually worse than 2005, and there must have been something in the Dolphins’ organization that told him 2007 wasn’t going to get any better. I could certainly be wrong, but Saban has never struck me as the kind of guy who would shy away from a challenge, unless he knew the challenge wasn’t worth it.
Then, of course, there’s the money. Nick Saban has become the highest-paid coach in college football, and he hasn’t won a game in Tuscaloosa yet. For all appearances, it appears that Pat Forde is right, and Saban is just as shallow as, well, pretty much anyone else. Not surprising, but certainly disappointing. Those who keep their word and stick around to the end of their contract become increasingly rare with each passing season.
But, Nick. Alabama? Alabama? LSU fans would be glad to welcome you back to the ranks of college football, even to the ranks of the SEC. But Alabama? Of all the teams you could have chosen to come back to, you have to pick the one with the most obnoxious fans in the Southeastern Conference. Fans who, though some of them aren’t old enough to remember Bear Bryant, pine for the glory days of Alabama football, and hope to see the ghost of the Bear return again to lead them to another championship. (And it doesn’t help that the same sports punditry which lauds USC and Notre Dame today for what those schools accomplished in yesteryear, do the same for Alabama and the days of Bear Bryant, as if there are no other schools in the south playing football and winning national championships.)
Then again, perhaps the Crimson Tide will get what they deserve. They want to win, and Saban has shown, at the college level at least, that he can deliver in that department. (After all, under Saban the Tigers were undefeated at Bryant-Denny Stadium, so we know it’s possible for him to win in Tuscaloosa.) But as Ivan Maisel points out, Saban is no Bryant, and now, having shown his true color–green–Alabama fans should in no way place any amount of trust in Saban sticking around for the long term. He may bring them a championship, but it’s unlikely he’ll deliver what they most lust for: a dynasty.
So it’s the biggest college football weekend of the year.
And I’m missing all of it.
I am not doing so willingly.
Friday, we had some thunderstorms in the area. Nothing too bad, though the rain was intense at times, and we had a few lightning strikes here and there. But it’s rained much worse, and we’ve had lightning last longer.
Our DirecTV satellite dish system became inoperable at some point Friday afternoon. Two days later, still nothing. It would seem, after all the troubleshooting I’ve done, that the problem is the dish is out of alignment.
My bride thinks the disalignment began with the severe cold snap we got last month, which brought in some ice, and we lost the satellite signal for about a day. She thinks, and I can’t find any fault in her logic, the weight from whatever ice collected on the dish was enough to begin the process, and wind since has steadily moved it more until it’s just off enough that we’re getting nothing.
Except last night.
At midnight.
When we were turning in, and I just kicked on the satellite receiver for the heck of it.
This morning, nada. Nothing. Reset all three receivers. Zip. Zero. On startup, the receivers never get beyond 0% in receiving the satellite signal. I’ve checked cables on all the receivers. I checked the cables in the OnQ box upstairs. My friend Drew suggested I disconnect one of the satellite lines from the multiplexer in the OnQ box and hook it directly in to one of the receivers, to rule out the multiplexer as the problem.
So I lugged my JVC 13-inch television, and the attached receiver, from the study, upstairs to the OnQ box, and plugged it in directly. Still nothing.
So, having ruled out everything else, it has to be the dish itself.
This is what was determined yesterday afternoon, when, after 24 hours of no signal, I called DirecTV technical support. (Note: If you have to do this, never waste time with the first-line customer service reps. All of the ones I’ve spoken with have been pleasant, but they’ve got limited knowledge, and your best bet is to ask them to connect you to “second-tier tech support”, where more knowledgeable folks reside.) The tech rep I spoke with, after I explained to her everything I had done to that point, said it sounded like everything had been ruled out but the dish itself. So she scheduled a technician to come out to the house to get up on the roof to realign the dish.
Thursday.
Thursday.
Just in case you didn’t catch that, the tech is coming on Thursday.
Thursday, January 4th. After which there is only one bowl game of any significance, the BCS Championship Game.
There are times when it’s nice to be wrong, and I’m glad I was wrong regarding the poll voters living in yesteryear. They did the right thing, and put Florida in the BCS Championship game opposite Ohio State. That will be a great football game.
It looks like there will be several great football games featured in the upcoming bowl season. My Tigers will face Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, and that looks like a great match-up. Michigan is going to face USC in a classic Big 10-vs.-Pac-10 Rose Bowl, and as usual, should be a good game, though I think Michigan is going to roll right over the Trojans. The Wolverines will be looking to prove something after seeing Florida vault over them in the standings, and I’m not sure the USC ego is going to recover from losing to UCLA. I’ll set aside my normal dislike for Michigan to root for them, as my dislike for the Pac-10 in general, and USC in particular, is so much stronger. (My best friend in high school–hi, Matt!–was from Ohio, and a huge OSU fan, so I picked up the Michigan dislike from him.)
Boise State against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl should yield another great game between well matched-up teams. Likewise with Arkansas and Wisconsin in the Capital One, West Virginia versus Georgia Tech in the Gator Bowl, and Tennessee against Penn State in the Outback. I know Brent is probably beside himself in anticipation of potentially seeing in person his beloved Auburn take on Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl. That should be another great game.
The only snoozer I see is the Orange Bowl. Will that many people really tune in to see Louisville take on Wake Forest? Granted, it will be the only college bowl game on that night, so I’m sure they’ll get a lot of viewers that way. (I confess, I’ll probably be one of those.) But I can’t imagine it pulling in the sort of ratings the other BCS bowls will. Louisville’s going to crush Wake Forest. I still believe the BCS needs to seriously consider the automatic bid for the Big East, and to a lesser extent, the ACC.
There look to be some good match-ups in the lesser bowls, too. Our local TCU Hornfrogs are in the bowl season opener, the Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego, on December 19th. And what’s with these two minor bowls, the International Bowl in Toronto, and the GMAC Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, being held after the first of the year? Get back to being scheduled before December 30th, as all minor bowls should be. ESPN has the entire schedule for your TiVo-setting pleasure.
So, go Florida! Go Michigan! Go Arkansas! Go Auburn! Go Tennessee! But most of all, Geaux Tigers!!
Say, worshipers of the University of Spoiled Children: for there to be a dynasty, don’t you need to actually make it to the title game? Pardon me while I congratulate the Bruins of UCLA for an outstanding defensive effort, stifling the Trojans and keeping the overrated Pac-10 from a national championship shot.
So now all of the attention is on the poll voters, who will determine if Michigan or Florida deserves to play Ohio State on January 8th.
My two cents: the SEC is the toughest conference in all of the college football. To emerge undefeated from this conference, as Auburn did in 2004 (and was denied the national title shot) is one of the greatest team accomplishments in all of college football. Florida fell one game short of that goal this year, which is still a heck of an accomplishment, considering this is the SEC.
Michigan has a hell of a football team this year, no doubt about it. But Florida played one more game this year, and the Wolverines failed to win their conference, as that honor went to Ohio State. Frankly, I don’t think you should be allowed to play for the national championship if you fail to win your conference; this caused a lot of angst in 2003, when Oklahoma got to play LSU in the Sugar Bowl, even though the Sooners lost the Big 12 Championship game to Kansas State. In my mind, USC has a legitimate gripe they didn’t get the title shot in 2003, and I would hate to see the same thing happen to Florida this year.
I think the problem Florida will have with the poll voters is that too many of them are living in the glory days of yesteryear when the Big 10 and the Pac-10 did rule college football. Gentlemen, those days are over. The Pac-10 is a dim shadow of its former self, and the Big 12 has risen to national prominence. The SEC, Big 10, and Big 12 conferences are now college football’s elite. Florida and Michigan come from those conferences, but of those two, only Florida emerged as conference champion. My fear is that too many voters will overlook that fact.
Send Michigan to face USC in the Rose Bowl; you’ll get your big Pac-10 vs Big 10 bowl game to remind you of the yesteryear you seem fixated upon. Florida deserves to be in the desert facing the Buckeyes in January.
We’ve known for quite a while now that the BCS was rife with flaws, but there is something seriously wrong with college football when Wake Forest is going to the Orange Bowl.
With St. Louis’s victory in the World Series Friday night, the perfect sports month comes to a close, even with three days left on the calendar. This was a less than perfect sports weekend for yours truly, given that the Tigers didn’t play yesterday, and in three weekend nights, the Stars only played once. They made the most of it, however, beating the Kings last night, 3-2, giving rookie netminder Mike Smith his second win in as many starts, and equalling the team’s best start ever at 9-2.
Oh well, I suppose I can always root for Carolina against Dallas tonight…
My observations on the commercials shown during the Super Bowl. My top five are at the bottom.
I’ve moved the entire work below the break.