DOWNS - your blogger, who's been a day off all week...not because of Labor Day per se, but because he was waiting for the results of the Ohio St/VaTech game Monday night before moving on into the next week...only to then be a day behind! I'll try to make it up by getting our Prophecies column out later today!
DOWNS - the Texas Longhorn football team, who in its last three games has looked nothing like the Burnt Orange Machine of old. The loss Saturday night was almost as devastating as the humiliation to Arkansas in its bowl game last winter, where the Longhorns had one TD drive of 43 yards (two good plays), and a game-total of 25 net yards - meaning that excluding one drive towards the end of the first half, Texas had negative 18 yards of offense for the game. In fact, over the last three games, the Texas offense has been outscored by the opponents' defenses 21-20!
UPS - Temple, who beat Penn St 27-10; Northwestern, who beat Stanford 16-6, and Illinois, who overcame its coaching mess to beat Kent St 52-3. All three have far brighter prospects today than they did a week ago!
UPS - the Canadian rivalries between Calgary/Edmonton, Saskatchewan/Winnipeg, and Toronto/Hamilton. CFL scheduling is a hoot! All three pairs of rivals play home-and-home series over last weekend and this one, building a chance for animosity, bragging rights, fights, and twice as many reasons as usual to hate the other team! Going into this second weekend, let's see if Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Toronto can manage to even the scales at home!
UPS AND DOWNS - it's too early for any adjustments in our Top Eights or Bottom Fives, but here's a sneak peek at the college teams we pushed towards the "first among equals" status on one end, and the "isn't there a tier lower than this?" on the other...
POWER FIVE CONFERENCES: Alabama, Ohio State, Texas A&M, and Notre Dame all looked remarkable this weekend! Meanwhile, Washington St and Colorado lost to middling-to-poor lower level teams (Portland St and Hawai'i, respectively) and don't appear to have improved as much as we'd hoped...i.e., at all.
GROUP OF FIVE CONFERENCES: While Boise St would probably still be sitting atop this group for now, their second half was not impressive, even given the Pac-12 opponent. More impressive were the wins by Western Kentucky (against a vastly improved Vanderbilt), Appalachian St, Temple and Houston of the AAC, and we'll count BYU in this group for now on the strength of its Hail Mary victory at Nebraska. (Speaking of which, don't skip the last UP today!) Downs to the usual candidates: Idaho, Georgia St (lost to newbie Charlotte 23-20), Kent St and Tulane.
FCS CHAMPIONSHIP CONFERENCES: Southern Utah absolutely should have a win over Utah St under its belt today - they dominated the Aggies on defense (13 USU punts!) and were it not for USU's special teams (a blocked XP converted on the other end, and a 4th quarter punt return), Southern wins easily. Credit to the Missouri Valley Conference and Big Sky schools, of course, winning in FBS stadia - South Dakota St, Portland St, and North Dakota. Jacksonville's victory over Chattanooga spoke highly of the OVC. On the down side, the Colonial Athletic Association went 2-9, and it would've been ten losses had Stony Brook's game with Toledo not been cancelled before halftime with Toledo already up 16-7.
HBC CONFERENCES: Alas, off to a bad start at 6-17 across the board, and the six wins included four against lower division opponents and two against each other (Prairie View def Texas Southern; Ark-Pine Bluff lost to South Carolina State).
And finally, UPS to the Mangum family of Eagle, Idaho, who were in Pocatello watching one son make the catch of the day (according to ESPN, who made it Top Ten Play #2) for Idaho State, and were alerted that their other son was in at QB for BYU after the starter was injured, and saw him throw a Hail Mary to the end zone which gave the Cougars the 33-28 win in Nebraska - and was ESPN's Top Ten Play #1 for the day! "What are the odds?" said Dad, "We're just going to enjoy it for now!" This weekend, one parent's headed back to Pocatello and the other to Provo, so they can watch both sons play!
Showing posts with label Southern Utah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Southern Utah. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Bonus college coverage of the Weird, Wild, and Wondrous!
Some interesting / amusing / head-scratching / curious notes from the weekend's action...
1. Kansas State marching band apologizes to Univ of Kansas for ramming a Jayhawk with the Star Trek Enterprise in their marching show. So, the marching band wars have begun...
2. After missing 2/3 of the season last year, Heisman candidate Taysom Hill of BYU will miss all but one half of football in 2015 after injuring his foot against Nebraska yesterday. We feel absolutely heartbroken for the young man, who is nothing but impressive when you hear him speak and watch him perform on the field. Having said that, his back-up is a local Idaho boy, Tanner Mangum, who literally got back from his mission just three months ago and is already a hero after the Hail Mary that made the Cougars 1-0 this season.
3. Similarly, the top defensive player in the country, Scoobie Wright of Arizona, also got injured this weekend, but with surgery should be back in a month or so. Wright is a transcendent player, and you wonder whether a repaired knee will maintain his remarkable athleticism, no matter how "minor" the surgery. Prayers.
4. Thanks to a blocked extra point by the Aggies in the first, much of the Southern Utah/Utah State game took place with the scoreboard set at 6-5. Utah State may have been the least impressive winner of the weekend, lucking out with a punt return TD in the last six minutes to win the game. But their offense did nothing, even with "Chuckie" back at the the helm, against an FCS team. A field goal on a short field, the two point XP which was the difference on the scoreboard, and the special teams touchdown were all they could produce against a lower-echelon team from the Big Sky. Hardly the stuff of the potential Mountain West "favorite".
5. Week One routs were the order of the day in some parts of the world. We understand the theory, the mutual back-scratching that goes on in these games: The powerhouse conference team wants an easy warm-up game to start the season; the lower-level team needs the paycheck from the host team to balance their athletic budget - win/win situation. But it makes for some unwatchable games: Syracuse 47, Rhode Island 0; Wake Forest 41, Elon 3; Georgia Tech 69, Alcorn St 6; Miami-FL 45, Bethune-Cookman 0... and that was just in the ACC! Of course, when you get the really weak teams like Savannah State or Davidson, you get games with more penalties than offensive yards, with more turnovers than first downs, and so forth. Read the play-by-plays of either of the games these two played on Saturday, and imagine what motivation it would take to watch the game (unless you love car wrecks...).
6. Not a funny...New Mexico State not only got robbed on the field by Florida, they got robbed off the field as burglars broke into their busses and stole the athletic staff's bags.
7. What do you do if you can't get off the field in time? Like, say, when your shoe comes off? If you play for Bowling Green, you play dead. If you play quarterback for Tennessee, you're not too happy about it....
8. Oh! We almost forgot to mention the name font on Louisville's unis yesterday!
1. Kansas State marching band apologizes to Univ of Kansas for ramming a Jayhawk with the Star Trek Enterprise in their marching show. So, the marching band wars have begun...
2. After missing 2/3 of the season last year, Heisman candidate Taysom Hill of BYU will miss all but one half of football in 2015 after injuring his foot against Nebraska yesterday. We feel absolutely heartbroken for the young man, who is nothing but impressive when you hear him speak and watch him perform on the field. Having said that, his back-up is a local Idaho boy, Tanner Mangum, who literally got back from his mission just three months ago and is already a hero after the Hail Mary that made the Cougars 1-0 this season.
3. Similarly, the top defensive player in the country, Scoobie Wright of Arizona, also got injured this weekend, but with surgery should be back in a month or so. Wright is a transcendent player, and you wonder whether a repaired knee will maintain his remarkable athleticism, no matter how "minor" the surgery. Prayers.
4. Thanks to a blocked extra point by the Aggies in the first, much of the Southern Utah/Utah State game took place with the scoreboard set at 6-5. Utah State may have been the least impressive winner of the weekend, lucking out with a punt return TD in the last six minutes to win the game. But their offense did nothing, even with "Chuckie" back at the the helm, against an FCS team. A field goal on a short field, the two point XP which was the difference on the scoreboard, and the special teams touchdown were all they could produce against a lower-echelon team from the Big Sky. Hardly the stuff of the potential Mountain West "favorite".
5. Week One routs were the order of the day in some parts of the world. We understand the theory, the mutual back-scratching that goes on in these games: The powerhouse conference team wants an easy warm-up game to start the season; the lower-level team needs the paycheck from the host team to balance their athletic budget - win/win situation. But it makes for some unwatchable games: Syracuse 47, Rhode Island 0; Wake Forest 41, Elon 3; Georgia Tech 69, Alcorn St 6; Miami-FL 45, Bethune-Cookman 0... and that was just in the ACC! Of course, when you get the really weak teams like Savannah State or Davidson, you get games with more penalties than offensive yards, with more turnovers than first downs, and so forth. Read the play-by-plays of either of the games these two played on Saturday, and imagine what motivation it would take to watch the game (unless you love car wrecks...).
6. Not a funny...New Mexico State not only got robbed on the field by Florida, they got robbed off the field as burglars broke into their busses and stole the athletic staff's bags.
7. What do you do if you can't get off the field in time? Like, say, when your shoe comes off? If you play for Bowling Green, you play dead. If you play quarterback for Tennessee, you're not too happy about it....
8. Oh! We almost forgot to mention the name font on Louisville's unis yesterday!
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.
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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