WhistlinDixie

The Greatest Football Play Ever!

I’ve never seen so many laterals in my life! You have to feel sorry for Millsaps after seeing this.

NCAA Football Preseason USA Today Coaches Poll Released

USA Today has released their preseason coaches poll for the 2007 NCAA football season. The Big Ten has three teams in the top ten (Michigan, 5th (2 first place votes); Wisconsin, 7th; Ohio State, 10th), four in the top 25 (Penn State, 18th), and five that received votes (Iowa, 18 votes). The three top ten teams is tops for any conference in the country. Go Big Ten!

Making the Case for Michigan

I never thought that I would see the day that I would be pulling for U of M to make it into the national championship game. Alas, that day has come. Now that USC has lost to UCLA and Florida has beaten Arkansas for the SEC championship, it looks like Florida might be the frontrunner for the opportunity to play OSU for the national championship. Heck, even the color guy who was doing the SEC championship game for CBS kept saying how much better Florida was than Michigan, even getting to the point of pulling out their schedules and comparing them side-by-side, a comparison that he said Florida won hands-down. (Chris is gonna love how he said how much better LSU was compared to Wisconsin. Don’t feel bad, I think Wisconsin could beat LSU too.)

It’s almost like no one is actually watching Florida play any of their games, even the TV announcers. They make claims about how good Florida is, but they look confused half of the time that they are on the field and it seems like they challenge themselves each week to see how quickly they can burn through their timeouts. For instance, today they burned through all of their second half timeouts before the six minute mark of the third quarter! Not only that, but Urban Meyer and his quarterback, Chris Leek, both seem to be unable to grasp the concept of clock management. Sure, they end up winning the game, but they sure as heck don’t deserve it. Also, I have never seen a team get so many bad penalties. Tonight, in a neutral stadium, they picked up at least five false start penalties and other stupid penalties.

Another point that the TV guys keep talking about is how Florida needs "style points" in order to get past Michigan. While I agree with this, they always go on to bring up the 2002 Ohio State team that won the national championship over The U (Miami University) while having a team that never won pretty the entire season. What they seem to forget was that we won all of our games that season. Florida lost to Auburn, and not by a little either. Please, stop comparing our team of destiny to this team of wannabes.

Michigan, on the other hand, only has a loss to OSU, the number one team in the nation. They also hold the credit of handing the only loss to Wisconsin, another top-ten team. In their loss to OSU, they looked much more impressive than Florida has looked all season, and this came against one of the best defenses in the nation. They have been impressive all season and are more than deserving to hold the number two spot, behind OSU.

I haven’t been looking forward to a rematch with Michigan, but at this point it would indeed be the best game that you could get. OSU would lay a Texas-sized smack down on Florida if they ended up as their opponent. USC would have been the ideal match up, but they went and screwed things up by losing to UCLA. At this rate, we will end up with a playoff, if only to just shut up Urban Meyer when he finds out how lacking his Gators really are compared to the top teams in the Big Ten.

You know what? I have a proposal. If Florida wants a go at OSU for the national championship, then they should have to go through Michigan first. When they get their butts handed to them by Michigan’s freshman class, then Michigan can bring out their first stringers for the real national championship game with OSU. Then the SEC and the rest of the country would be happy… Well, at least the rest of the country. The SEC would be too busy trying to reconnect with reality. (Yep, that’s right. SEC football is no better than any other conference. Just because you’re from down South where you can train outside year-round doesn’t automagically make you superior to everyone else in football. We grow athletes up in the Midwest too.)

I Love News

OK, I’m a little late with this one (originally published 15 Nov). Anyway, anyone who has seen old NFL Films clips from the 60s and 70s has probably seen clips of Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi coaching games. One of the first things that crosses my mind when I see them is why coaches never dress in suits anymore. Basketball coaches dress to the nines at games, so why not pro football coaches? It ends up that the NFL signed a deal with Reebok in 1993 to make them the only provider of clothing to coaches for game day. Please raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a Reebok suit in your local sports retailer. What? No one raised their hand? That would be because Reebok does not make suits. That is, until a few weeks ago, when they provided them to Jack Del Rio of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Mike Nolan of the San Francisco 49ers for a test drive. I guess that I was not the only one hoping to see coaches in suits again. And guess what? Both coaches won their games! I bet it was their professional look that intimidated the opposing teams. I just hopes that this leads to suits again becoming acceptable on the sidelines, because hoodies and pullovers just look like crap (especially you, Bill Belichick).

Now, on to political correctness gone overboard. The athletics director of Dartmouth University has preemptively apologized to the student body for scheduling a game against the University of North Dakota (UND). Why would you ever apologize for scheduling a game, you wonder? In this case, it is because the AD thinks that the mascot of UND, the Fighting Sioux, is "offensive and wrong". He went on to say, "I must offer a sincere apology to the Native American community, and the Dartmouth community as a whole, for an event that will understandably offend and hurt people within our community." Honestly, what is offensive and wrong about calling yourself the Fighting Sioux? I could see how Redskins could get that billing, since it is an (old) slur against Native Americans. How do you suddenly become offensive and wrong by naming yourself after an actual tribe? They don’t even have a stereotyped mascot like the Cleveland Indians. (Check out www.fightingsioux.com for a look at their logo.) I think that the NCAA needs to stop their witch hunt of hunting down schools with Native American mascots, regardless of how they are presented, and forcing those schools to change. Also, someone tell that hippie, aka the AD of Dartmouth, that you only apologize for scheduling a team when you’re a D-III school and you scheduled a D-IA school by mistake. Other than that, let the schools and their athletic departments and traditions be.

Lastly, from the It’s About Time category: Ever buy a phone from one provider, discover that you really like it, then, when you change providers, find out that your old provider will not let you take the phone with you or that your new provider will not let you use your old phone? That situation should be quickly changing thanks to new copyright rules enacted by the Library of Congress. Among these new rules are the right of the consumer to take a handset (ie, cell phone) to a new provider (assuming that your new network supports your old handset; ie, a CDMA phone still won’t work on a GSM network). Also, film professors are now allowed to make compilation works from DVDs. This had been illegal, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbade circumventing copy protection, which is present on all DVDs, and is necessary to break if one wants to get an excerpt of the film.

News Dump

If you thought Michigan was a crappy state just because U of M was located there, just wait for this. Osconda High School canceled their football season just because they were loosing! True, they may have been 0-4 and had not scored a point all season, but that is not a reason to cancel the football season. All I can say is that people in Michigan are inhuman and un-American to cancel a high school’s football season just because the team stunk. Football is America’s past time, and has been for many years, and it is just wrong to take that away from kids.

Continuing on the football theme, the state of Texas has proposed a college bowl game pitting a team of college football players that were raised in Texas versus a team of college football players from all the other 49 states. How can a state be so pompous to believe that they have a chance to win such a game? All I can say is that I hope that they get their butts handed to them so that they’ll be put back in their place. Even how, if a state were able to pull this off, I would think that California would have the best chance. Not that they would win either, but they would keep it the closest.

Lastly, I ran across a great quote made by The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, at ESPN.com’s Page 2:

You know what the biggest difference is between baseball and football, other than the ferocious hitting and the fact that you don’t actually have to be in shape to play baseball? TV networks are allowed to interview baseball managers as the game is going on. And we’re supposed to take this sport seriously? Can you imagine if the Redskins were driving against the Texans in the second quarter and Gus Johnson said, "Right now we have Joe Gibbs live on the sidelines … Joe, you must be feeling pretty good with your team driving right now!" Ridiculous.

Amen, my brother! Baseball is indeed a joke and should no longer be referred to as the American past-time for this very reason, among others.

Mack Brown is a Sore Looser

Mack Brown, the coach of the University of Texas football team, placed the bulk of the blame for his team’s 24-7 loss to Ohio State on the new clock rules instituted for this season. According to him, the new rules robbed his team of 22 minutes that could have been used to mount a comeback. I think that he needs to watch the game again. At most, the new rules took about two minutes of game time away from both teams, combined. Two minutes is hardly enough time to rattle off 17 points against a defense that had stopped all but one of the team’s scoring attempts. If 22 minutes of the game were lost due to the new rules, it would be like loosing over a quarter of the game, which certainly didn’t happen. I think that Mack just needs to cope with the fact that his team is not the best in the nation (and that he will never win a national championship without Vince Young) and get on with his life. At least he has a pretty ring to look at for the rest of his life. (He’s lucky that Troy Smith didn’t start last year’s game, otherwise he wouldn’t have any championship rings, but that’s another story.)

Boo Michigan!!!

I got a good laugh out of this. Every week during the college football season, ESPN publishes a bunch of polls. Most are the usual: AP Top 25, USA Today Top 25, ESPN Power Rankings, etc. The most interesting (read: funny), however, is the Bottom 10. In it, ESPN usually collects a group of nine college football programs that are on monumental loosing streaks or just really doing bad. Teams like Duke and "Directional Michigan" (Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan, and Western Michigan) are perennial bottom feeders.

By now, you are probably thinking "OK, Bottom 10, nine teams. Doesn’t make much sense. Did they assign a bottom 10 mathematician to compile the list?" Well, let me finish. You see, the number five spot is reserved for programs that are just plain disappointing. These are teams that are normally in the top 25, but that have really sucked lately.

Anyway, guess who received the #5 ranking on the Bottom 10 last week? If you actually took the time to read the title of this post, you will be on the way to giving the right answer. It was great to see. To save you the trouble of clicking on a link, here’s a glimpse of Michigan’s entry:

It was also funny reading the user feedback for the week’s Bottom 10. It’s funny that U of M fans can’t even take a joke, or admit that their team just plain sucks this year. It’ll be great if this continues. It isn’t like it will hurt Michigan’s rankings any more.

Back to the Blog

In case you haven’t noticed, I have hardly touched my blog over the past couple of months. I’ll choose to blame this on school. When you are taking 20 credit hours AND have a TV in your room, time for blogging just seems to disappear.

Now, next subject: the Buckeyes. Since most of my readers happen to hail from Buckeye country, I am sure that you have been hearing plenty about the Bucks. At this point in the season, with two losses, we are extreme long shots for the national championship game, the Rose Bowl. Our only losses this season have come to unbeaten teams: #2 Texas and #9 Penn State. I hope that it stays this way: no more losses for us or Texas or Penn State. I would rather loose a close one to a unbeaten team than one that has lost a few. Even how, we need Penn State to lose two, Wisconsin to lose once more, and to win out, to have a chance at winning the Big Ten.

Now, who or what could we attribute the two losses to? I think that the first one could be placed squarely on the quarterback carousel that we ran during that game. Our loss to Penn State, and our poor offense, I think can be attributed partially to the unproductive season that Ted Ginn is having. Six games into the season, he only has two touchdowns and has been ineffective almost every time that he has touched the ball. If Ginn can get on track, I think that our offense could really start rolling. Considering that our running attack is doing better this year with Antonio Pittman at tailback, we could be even more effective than last year. Right now, I can only hope.

Expect to hear more from me in the near future. Even if I haven’t been writing much in the past few months, I have been collecting things to write about, so I am not short on material.

The Maurice Clarrett Saga Gets Funnier

This just in from ESPN: the Denver Broncos are going to cut Maruice Clarrett tomorrow morning. The saddest part about this is that the Broncos are probably the best team in the league when it comes to taking sub-par running backs and making them big producers. What was even funnier was Maurice’s contract that he signed. He was originally offered a contract with a signing bonus. He instead opted to negotiate a contract with no signing bonus and instead laced with performance-based incentives. That means that he will get exactly $0 from the Broncos. Who knows, he might actually get an NFL paycheck one of these days. All I can say is that he had it coming to him.

Finally, Some Respect

I’m sure that most of you probably remember all of the OSU bashing that ESPN has been airing since we won the national championship in 2002. Always saying how we didn’t deserve it and how Miami actually beat us and we just got lucky because of an official’s call. Then they started talking about Maurice and how stupid he was and then all of the allegations against us for the alleged academic affairs of our players (none of which ended up turning into anything).

Well, it appears that it might be coming to an end. I was watching the College GameDay season preview special yesterday morning and, as usual, the hosts did a pole of Heisman hopefuls and conference favorites and who would go to the national championship game (the Rose Bowl this year). I was a little peeved when they barely mentioned Ted Ginn at all. About all they said is that if we lose to Texas, he’ll be out of the running. When it came to national title discussion, I expected USC and U of M to dominate discussion since a lot of the people were high on Chad Henne (QB) and Michael Hart (RB). As I expected, everyone had USC making it to the title game, and I believe that they all said that they would come in with a perfect record. The surprise came in when, first off, U of M did not come out of any of their mouths. Instead, both Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit put OSU in the title game. Not only that, but they also said that OSU would win and end the evil West Coast/USC empire! It’s nice to finally get some much deserved attention. Of course, the other two guys, Mark May and Trev Alberts, both looked at them like they were idiots. What else do you expect? They were the two that came down on OSU the hardest over the past few years.

BTW, sorry about being so silent the past few weeks. I’ve been busy doing other things, like homework. I’ve also been messing around with a program called MoveableType (used by LiveJournal) that I might employ in my blog so I don’t have to hand-edit the code for my web page every time I want to make an update. Not only that, but it would give me the ability to edit it from anywhere that had a web browser, instead of being anchored to my laptop.

One last thing. I will be coming home over Labor Day weekend, so if you want to get together, give me a call.