If Joseph Heller was still alive today, we think he would be amused by the current rankings system in college football. Of course, Heller was the brilliant author of the book Catch-22. For example, here’s a passage from that great work:
“Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them.”
You see, these lines remind us of the way the BCS works. The pre-season ranking don’t matter at all, except that they really do. Make sense? This year in college football is an excellent example of how messed up the college football ranking system really is.
If you look at the pre-season rankings for this year’s top-5 in the BCS, here’s what you will find… Read the rest of this entry »
We weren’t aware of this, but apparently those awful Buffalo Wild Wings commercials are filmed live. You know, the ones where the manager brings in the bad pitcher, or the ref sends the football game into overtime. Yep, filmed live. How else do you explain this?
We were looking over the Harris Interactive poll earlier today, as this poll matters since it counts in the BCS standings. Here’s what stood out to us: Michigan received 17 votes. Michigan! The team that just fell to 2-4 with a home loss to Toledo. There were people voting in this poll that felt Michigan deserved to be ranked. And it’s these same people that help determine who plays for the national championship. Is there any chance they get it right?
To us, there is just absolutely no possible way that any person who is qualified to vote on college football polls could think Michigan is one of the 25 best teams in the country. Some of the teams behind Michigan in votes for the Harris poll are: Connecticut (5-1 record), South Carolina (5-2 with 4 wins in a row), Cincinnati (5-1 record), Notre Dame (beat Michigan 35-17), and Illinois (beat Michigan 45-20).
Yet, there were still voters out there that thought Michigan deserved to be ranked. Michigan!
It seems highly likely at this point that voters will be deciding amongst a number of teams on who will play for the title. the chances of just 2 undefeated teams in the top 2 spots is not of high probability. Which means that these voters will be the ones deciding who gets that shot at a championship. And some guy out there will be filling out his ballot in December that right now thinks Michigan is a top 25 team. Are those voters relatives of Rich Rodriguez? Die hard Michigan alums?
There’s really no explanation for it. Yet, the same guy that thinks a 2-4 team is a good team is the guy who will send your team to the Fiesta Bowl instead of Miami.
Few people know this, but Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville has actually directed a commercial for SportsCenter. This came in his first year at Auburn, 1999. Tuberville received just one instruction for directing the commercial: ESPN wanted a tone of relaxation and not panicking in the face of Y2K. And as we know, Tuberville has a firm grasp on what’s considered not panicking.
Below is the commercial Tommy came up with:
On Tuesday, Tommy Tubberville explained that his coaching staff and players are not panicking after losing two games.
A day later, Tubbs fired his offensive coordinator.
Just so we’re clear: Firing your second in command six weeks into the season is not panicking. We repeat, that is not panicking. We can’t help wonder what would be panicking, but — as always — we’ll keep you posted.
Maybe we can even maneuver a top 10 list out of this somewhere down the road.
(You can click here to read the entirety of Tuberville’s interview about not panicking.)
We had this happen last week - a situation where we have too many quality comments on a topic and can’t decide on just one. So, like last time, we’ll throw them all out there and let JC and Vinnie decide.
As you may have heard, Auburn has just fired offensive coordinator Tony Franklin. Basically, Auburn was near the bottom of college football in just about every offensive category, and the team just lost to Vanderbilt. While Franklin has written books and sold his “system” to many high schools, the spread did not work too well for the Tigers. You can check here for more on Franklin’s firing.
With the backgorund out of the way, here are our many different takes on the firing of Tony Franklin…
(1) Apparently Auburn fired the guy who gave the term “offensive coordinator” a double meaning.
(2) Auburn fired its offensive coordinator for being an “offensive” coordinator.
(3) Tony Franklin, the man who put the “oops” in oop-de-oop offense.
(4) Word out of Auburn is that the Tigers have fired Tony Franklin, the man who gave new meaning to the job title, offensive coordinator. When Tuberville was asked who would replace Franklin as the head of the Auburn offense, Tuberville noted that just about anyone, or anything, could do a better job than Franklin in rallying the Tigers’ offense.
And with that in mind, we give you the number one candidate on the list for Auburn’s next O.C: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
We tuned in again last night to ESPN’s interactive Tuesday college football game. This time, it was Troy at Florida Atlantic. Unfortunately, the network decided to “upgrade” is commentators this week, giving us Rece Davis, Mark May, and Lou Holtz. We assume Holtz provided some comments to pke fun at last night, only we could not understand more than every 5th word out of his mouth. And we’re pretty sure that the crew spent 15 minutes discussing whether a guy with the last name Jernigan who played for Holtz at Notre Dame was related to Troy wide receiver Jerrel Jernigan (I think they decided he wasn’t).
Anyway, we gre to realize as the game progressed that the interactive comments scrolling atop the screen were chosen by the same people who choose ESPN.com’s featured comment of the day. Hence, too many spelling errors or totally generic statements for us to waste time with. However, there was one comment that stood out among the rest. This was from someone texting in the comment, so no username, and it read exactly as follows:
“LSU is overated based on they did last year.”
We need a little help on this one, as we’re not exactly sure what this means. Are they saying that compared to the team that won the title and finished first last year, this team is overrated ranked in the top5? Are they saying that this LSU team is ranked too high and got that ranking because of winning the title last season? Is LSU overrated this year because last year’s team lost 2 games and this year’s team is still undefeated?
We really are at a loss on this one.
Auburn defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads has an impressive group, allowing just 11.2 points per game and 248.8 yards per game - both in the top 7 nationally.
Auburn offensive coordinator Tony Franklin has led his gang to an equally UN-impressive 18.7 points per game and 309.2 yards per game.
The Tigers have scored 10 offensive touchdowns in 6 games (one that started on the Vandy 27) and 4 defensive touchdowns.
This leads us to wonder… when are we going to get a Kevin Gilbride vs. Buddy Ryan reenactment in the press box??? Come on, we need that to make this season complete!
We assume Franklin would dance around the press box in a really complicated way, then punt.
For those of you not familiar with the Gilbride/Ryan confrontation, click here and check no. 5 on the list.