Sunday, November 16, 2014

As for the FCS games of interest yesterday,

...let's start with our usual topic of intrigue, really bad teams. Of course, if you're in the Ivy League, you're allowed to be good, bad, or indifferent about football - you're too busy getting ready to run our country in the coming years. 

But in Cornell @ Columbia, two winless teams squared off. Sagarin had this projected as a 3-point Cornell win, and the Big Red did win, 30-27. But the how and why are hysterical: each team scored four touchdowns, but Cornell blocked the extra point on Columbia's last TD and ran it back for their own two point conversion, making it 27-23 at the time and setting the stage for their own game-winning drive in the fourth quarter. 

As for the three other bottom-feeders we follow (three?), Rhode Island actually put up a fight at Stony Brook, losing 14-35. But good ol' Savannah St managed zero points, negative 8 yards rushing, and just 165 yards of total offense in the entire game in losing to North Carolina A&T 34-0. In the true tradition of a body-bag school, Savannah goes to BYU next week, where the early Sagarin ratings list them as potentially a 54-point underdog. And history says they'll lie down and take their beating appropriately.

Who's the third bottom-feeder? In two of those ratings that we linked you to earlier this week, we noticed that there's a team below both URI and Savannah St: Davidson, Stephen Curry's alma mater, apparently doesn't play football as well as they do hoops. They have a record of 1-10 this year, having lost nine straight against FCS opponents and one more to Catawba, who we think is D2. Their one victory was to "College of Faith-Charleston", for whom we cannot even find a listing at any level of NCAA or NAIA, 56-0.

Anyway, playing Marist yesterday, Davidson was down 38-0 with a minute to go in the third, having produced a total of two first downs and 58 yards of offense. As Marist started their mass substitutions, Davidson finally produced a twelve-play, TWO yard drive (that required getting to a 3rd down on the Marist 16 and then ending fourth down at midfield!), which was finally followed by a 13-play drive in the fourth against the last-stringers that scored a late TD to make the score 38-7. It'd be fun to watch them play Savannah St...

In higher-quality news, North Dakota St started a new winning streak, beating Missouri St 45-10, while their vanquisher Northern Iowa also won, beating Southern Illinois 40-21. And out in the Big Sky conference, we were happy to see alma mater Sacramento St win 48-41 at home against Portland St! Montana St held off Idaho St at home 44-39, and Montana beat Southern Utah 35-17.

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