On Twitter @TheCoachBart
Happy college football season and whatnot. Also, happy Tuesday, which for a lot of people means a four-day work week, which can have varying degrees of either happiness or anger. Either way, it’s not Belgium, where full time hours are 35 per week, average wages are $44,000 per year, and you get a year at any point in your life to take a sabbatical where you get a government allowance and the entire year off. Hmmmm …
I won’t write a column on the Michigan game even though I want to, but my thoughts are as follows:
1. Looks like Doug Nussmeier walked in and said, “Why are our skill position guys here so fat?”
2. Devin Gardner multiple times passed up running lanes to go through progressions, set his feet and his eyes, and throw.
3. WOOOOOOOOOO.
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Rough go of it for the Mountain West. It basically has become Corey from Boy Meets World where you see him on TV and say, “Hey, I remember when he was doing stuff!” Boise State looked too small for Ole Miss; Utah State wasn’t even on the same field as Tennessee; and nobody else inspired much of anything either. The wedge further drives between the Power 5 and the rest.
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Keep catching these terrible Kia commericals on television. Nothing makes we want to buy a car any less than hamsters jamming out to techno music. I’m not entirely sure how anyone hasn’t pulled the plug on that terrible campaign.
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Give the SEC some credit. They’re actually caught on the other side of one of those hard to get over perceptions like other conferences are about how good they may or may not be. The SEC always gets hammered for having weak out of conference schedules, but they sacked up this year. You know less about your team going into the first game than any other time of the year, yet several SEC teams (LSU, Georgia, Texas A&M/South Carolina, Alabama, Auburn/Arkansas, and Ole Miss) played teams in games that when scheduled, there’s a good chance you start out 0-1. Just like I always say conference strength is a year-to-year deal and we need to evaluate it and rank it that way, so is the idea of weak out of conference scheduling sometimes.
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This week’s idiot driver is once again a stop-sign guy. Gotta love the fellow that pulls up to a stop sign later than everyone but never fully stops and you can just feel that he’s running it … so you either prove a costly point by engaging in a car accident or just let the moron roll through. He always does the same thing: the old California roll, where you make like you’re going to stop but sort of coast through slowly, never actually stopping. I get it. You have places to be. Those french toast sticks aren’t serving themselves to customers through the drive thru. You’re questionable at driving.
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A 2013 BCS conference defensive player of the year didn’t make the final NFL cut this past week, nor was he picked up on a practice squad (as of this being written). Jackson Jeffcoat, formerly of Texas. I expect wailing and gnashing of teeth. Plan your outrage accordingly.
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Holidays are always a great time to watch things you otherwise never would because you have family over and that sort of is a ritual. So Jeopardy found its way onto my TV this past Monday, and there was some sort of category about modern words. At one point, the contestants were asked what “skrilla” means. The camera pans to them. You’ve never seen three more confused people in all of your life. It was like Trebek was trying to teach horses to read Braille.
Yet the next one was about defining YOLO. The two younger people on the end smashed that answer stick so fast, it screamed of “bad decisions last night based on someone saying YOLO.” Also, for the record, there was a category called “booze” and I got 4 of 5 right. Jeopardy is funny that way. IF you know anything about sports or liquor, you’re almost guaranteed second place if you answer those and just sit on it. Their sports questions are pretty much, “This quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers has won two Super Bowl titles in the last 20 years, and his name is Ben.” Then, the camera pans to three people who look like the Kardashian sisters if you asked them to change out brake pads.
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Bobby Petrino did what Bobby Petrino does … which is pile up unecessary touchdowns, in this case, late against Miami. People on Twitter got mad. Yawn. Apparently, it’s not just his job to win, but to play hard only to the point where the win is gained and then do his best to make sure no one’s poor feelings get hurt.
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Foot-long millipedes were discovered in a package shipped from Germany to the United States over the weekend. They were considered as “exotic pets.” I’m not entirely sure what the hell one does with a giant pet millipede. Lord knows you can’t walk the thing or play fetch with it.
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So Will Muschamp apparently used a game that was never played as part of a suspension levied on three players and had no real excuse for why, other than pretending the game had been played. Thus, they sat out something important. Just go ahead and put “Urban Meyer” in there for “Will Muschamp” and see how that gets reacted to instead …
Really though, it’s a disservice to his players. I know nothing about why the suspensions existed in the first place, but when you say “your punishment is sitting out a game” and then renege on that, you’re teaching nothing.
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Pretty sure the fake Twitter account thing has jumped the shark with McNeese State this week. The somewhat more famous than the actual coach @FauxPelini interacted with the McNeese State Football Twitter account about having any “super fast players,” and the Twitter account responded with a “We have some talented players. Will be very fun to watch against your talented squad.” People do know that the guy running the Faux Pelini account doesn’t actually coach the team, right?
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Your guy to watch this week is Cyler Miles of Washington. Chris Petersen sat him for game one stemming from an altercation after the Super Bowl, where you assume he was telling someone how good the Seahawks just played and someone else didn’t like it (not really). It nearly ended with Washington losing to Hawaii, a 1-11 team last season. No idea how good Miles is, but man, the Huskies had some rust on them, so you hope he’s fairly dynamic and stuff.
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Why isn’t the World Cup of Basketball getting as much pub over here as the soccer version? More people in America like basketball than soccer. Sort of odd, especially considering we actually have a shot at this particular cup.
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In terms of this season, this is probably one of the better weeks to be a college football fan. USC-Stanford; Oregon-Michigan State; Michigan-Notre Dame; and Virginia Tech-Ohio State cap off a pretty solid weekend for you to tell family that they need to let you sit on the couch in your boxers and stare at the colored box all Saturday.
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Good job by college football to not pretend that it is trying to take on the NFL, which starts Thursday. Only one game … Arizona-UTSA … makes its way onto the schedule. With the NFL giving its Thursday night attention some Red Bull and vodka, it’ll be interesting to see how college football handles it. They’ve had such a lock down on the Thursday night schedule for so long. The NFL was having none of it.
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Beer of the Week: Upland Helios Pale Ale: Goes well with everything in life
