Week 10 Poll
1. Penn State (Change: 0)
2. USC (0)
3. Florida (+1)
4. Texas Tech (+3)
5. Texas (-2)
6. Oklahoma (-1)
7. Oklahoma State (+2)
8. Alabama (-2)
9. Utah (+1)
10. Ohio State (+1)
11. Boise State (+1)
12. TCU (+1)
13. Georgia (-5)
14. LSU (0)
15. Cal (+6)
16. Missouri
(-1)
17. BYU
(-1)
18.
West Virginia
(+8)
19. Ball State (0)
20. Michigan State (+3)
21. North Carolina (+3)
22. Maryland (+4)
23. Florida State (-6)
24. Georgia Tech (+2)
25. Pittsburgh (+1)
IN:
West Virginia,
Maryland, Pittsburgh, Georgia
Tech
OUT:
South Florida, Tulsa,
Minnesota, Oregon
ON DECK: Northwestern, Oregon, Tulsa
********** ********** **********
Hail to the Chief
With Election Day tomorrow, time to be
nice to some swing states at the last minute:
Ohio
On TV, in print and online, I
have been hearing the college football punditry shriek in fear of Penn State,
another Big Ten team, making it to the title game, for fear of another Ohio
State-esque gag of a performance. As a Big Ten slappy at heart, I can’t help but
feel frustration when I hear this type of “analysis.” These are two very
different teams and very different programs.
Now, it pains me to defend the
Buckeyes, but prior to the 2007 BCS Championship woodshed experience, Ohio State
was known for rising to the challenge in big games. Who can ever forget the epic
2003 Fiesta Bowl win over Miami, one the most dramatic BCS Title Games ever? In
2006, they won in Austin, albeit against a reloading Texas team that had just
won its own championship. Three losses does not a choker make. In the game
versus Florida, Tressel admitted bringing a fat, under-motivated team. And,
last year, LSU just turned out to be a significantly superior team. (Okay,
the less said about this year's USC debacle, the better.)
However, I
would say that this Ohio State team is different now than the team that lost so
badly to USC. In two of the three major losses, Todd Boeckman, a glorified
caretaker until the transition to the Pyror era, was at QB. Boeckman
will never win a game for the Buckeyes himself. Terrelle Pryor
will.
Pennsylvania
This Penn State program
has not displayed the Buckeyes’ recent propensity for high-profile flops.
(Struggling to win at night in the Horseshoe does not warrant such an
unfavorable comparison. Tressel had his team ready for a major conference
showdown with homefield advantage, and they had Pryor at quarterback.) With only
two more significant games remaining, against Iowa and the season finale at
Michigan State, I look forward to a different Big Ten representative gunning to
bring home a national title. Penn State, and Joe Paterno will bring a
drastically different team out of the Big Ten than Ohio State, I don't think
Texas Tech or Alabama are juggernauts, and so Penn State could become the most
northerly school to win an indisputed national title since Notre Dame in
1988.
2000 all over again…
Let the chaos
of 2008 officially begin with the best game this season, Texas Tech’s win over
Texas. We all know Tech plays Oklahoma State and Oklahoma in the next two
weeks, an exceedingly difficult gauntlet. If Tech loses to OU, who lost to
Texas, who beat OU, welcome back to the musical chairs atop the polls of 2007.
(Or the uncertainty well into December and January as to who’s atop the polls,
hence the 2000 reference.) Or maybe all of Mike Leach’s idiosyncrasies and
pirate fancies will bring that school from the dry flatlands of West Texas all
the way to humid coast of South Florida, who knows?
Oklahoma State also plays
OU, who Kansas State bombed all over to the tune of 486 passing yards. (Graham Harrell will throw for what, 600, in two weeks?)
Florida looks to be the rage
of the SEC after they pantsed preseason No. 1 Georgia, but they could still be
thwarted in the SEC Championship game. Alabama is undefeated and No. 2 in
the country, but might not even be the No. 2 team in the SEC. If they can make
it past LSU this weekend, Auburn and Florida still lurk. Not to repeat "Dewey
defeats Truman," but I don't see them winning out by any stretch of the
imagination.
********** ********** **********
And finally, call it our 30-minute informerical.
Here's our thoughts on what makes both politics and sports so
special...
On November 1, 1869, Princeton and Rutgers played the
first college football game, just four years after the end of the Civil
War. This past Saturday, college football began its 140th year. Along
the way, the massive stadiums were built during the roaring 20’s, men went off
to war in the 40’s, temporarily crippling the game, segregation in society and
the sport came to an end in the ‘60s, and digital technology and scientific
advances in equipment, nutrition and conditioning have come to play an
ever-increasing role in the game today.
The parallels between politics and sports are
undeniable, and that’s especially true in the most quintessentially American of
all sports, football. (Baseball was the game of my parents’ generation, sorry.)
Just look at all the football stars turned politicians, or the way elections are
covered now – not substantively primarily, but as a horserace between two
opposing sides.
Heck, even the problems in college football have their
political equivalents. The liberals among us can point to the inequity in the
game – that there are haves (BCS schools) and have-nots (the rest of the FBS),
and the disparity between the two is so great it makes all those cupcake games
in September unwatchable. (And if ever a school needed governmental
intervention, it would be Washington State.) Conservatives can point to how the
85-scholarship cap is forcing successful teams to artificially spread the
wealth, destroying the dynasties and iconic teams that have made our game
great.
Conservatives can point to how excessive bureaucracy is
preventing the solution the free market, the paying fans, would naturally
gravitate towards: an eight-team playoff. Liberals can say we don’t have a
playoff because the greed of those bowl CEOs, out of touch with the concerns
of Joe Six Pack sports fan, is preventing real change.
America is suffering through the painful demise of its
manufacturing industry, which won wars and made this country what it is today,
and the Rust Belt region. College football is seeing its identity, the
three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust between-the-tackles offense, increasingly
stymied by spread attacks, and teams from the Midwest have suffered painful
collapses too – just ask Michigan or Nebraska or Ohio State.
But, whether in sports or politics, hope springs
eternal. For every Phil Fulmer, whose day has now officially come and gone,
there’s a Mike Leach, successful with a scheme that wouldn’t have been possible
a generation ago, and further changing the national landscape with his every
step.
Many of our country’s problems won’t disappear
overnight, whoever wins Tuesday, yet most of the country will believe, on some
level, that things really will improve with new leadership. Similarly, no matter
how many games our team lost last season, no matter how badly overmatched we
were, we starts every season undefeated and most of us, on some level,
truly believe that a bowl, a conference title, a Final Four berth -- this is the
year.
I don’t mean to equate a game with people’s livelihoods
and the most serious problems our society faces, and obviously some of my
comparisons above were tongue-in-cheek. What I would say in complete
seriousness, though, is that my love for college football stems from the
seemingly irrational passion it inspires, even in the most solipsistic and
sarcastic of us.
It’s just a game, but that’s not the way I felt after we
beat USC, driving down University Avenue, holding down my horn, screaming with
joy. That’s not the way I felt at age 11, high-fiving random strangers in a bar
as Michigan won the 1997 Rose Bowl: I truly cared. I started making weekly polls
when I was 12 years old, and would print them out and faithfully file them away
in my bedroom dresser. No one ever saw them, no one cared who I thought should
play in the Rose Bowl, but that didn’t matter to me. (To think that, half my
life later, I’d still be writing those weekly polls is truly special.)
The daily grind of high school or Stanford or whatever
pressing commitment was breathing down my neck has taken up most of my
brainpower since the days of those childhood polls, but my formative years have
also given me a grown-up passion to compliment my love for sports. I really do
care about helping others, about making a real difference in this world, and to
that end, I’m studying public health and want to enter politics one day.
I’ve lived an incredibly lucky life, but one of my
biggest regrets is that as we get older, our lives get increasingly cluttered
with the day-to-day minutiae and we lose perspective on what really matters to
us. And, for me, whether I'm following politics or sports, I feel like I’m part
of something bigger than myself. I just care, way more than I should. And while
I’m still plenty young, maybe I’m old enough to realize that when you find
something that makes you irrationally care, you hang onto it as hard as you
possibly can.
So I’m going to vote tomorrow, and this
weekend, I’m going to cheer on 13-point underdog Stanford and 2-7 Michigan.
Tonight though, I’m going to reflect on how lucky I am to have both
opportunities in my life.
********** ********** **********
We close with our picks section, also known as
Don't Quit Your Day Job:
Last week: Global
warming may be a hot-button issue (pun intended), but the Sweep loves
staying nice and crispy.
2-1 this past week, with Florida and Cal rolling along enough to
overcome the Texas Tech shocker.
2-1 straight-up, 2-1 against the spread.
Season:
19-8 against the spread,
21-6 straight-up.
Cal (+17) at USC
Cal
is quietly pretty good and
USC isn't as dominant
this year as you think when you hear
"USC," but I still can't get over the home-away split
in both teams' performances I described
in my post-Washington
State piece. USC against good teams is what, 12-1 the last five years, with an average margin of
victory of 25? All those Rose Bowl routs, the annual Oregon, Cal and Arizona State beatdowns,
Ohio State this year... I'm not forgetting.
USC 42, Cal 17
Alabama (-3) at LSU
I don't think either of these teams are that good. The
difference is LSU's already been exposed by Florida and Georgia. Alabama will be
clocked by Florida in the SEC Title Game soon enough, but first, the clock turns
midnight on them this week. Neither team can score, so I'll take
the points,
the team without
any pressure, the team with better recruiting the last four years (save the 2008 class which has yet
to see the field in any meaningful way) and the team with one of the
most intimidating homefield advantages in all sport.
LSU 27, Alabama
14
Oklahoma State
(+3.5)
at Texas
Tech
I don't understand this line at all. You
figure homefield advantage is worth three points (heck, probably more
considering how much these teams score), so Vegas is telling me Oklahoma State
and Texas Tech are even? Okay, I know who I'm picking in that one. Yeah, Texas
Tech still has Oklahoma and needed the last-second score to beat Texas, but the Red Raiders outgained Texas by 205 yards --
the fluke wasn't that
Texas Tech won, it
was that it
was that close. Plus, Texas Tech's
rush D surprised me mightily, holding Texas to 80 rush yards. If they can
do that to Oklahoma State, this won't be close.
Texas Tech
45, Oklahoma State 24
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