Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Week One Predictions

Ok so here are my predictions for week one of college football.  They will come out every Thursday and I will predict all of the Big Ten games and will usually add in a couple of supplementary picks for the bigger matchups as well.  Let's get started.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Bowl Predictions: Preseason

Every week I will be putting up an updated bowl prediction out there.  It will include all the BCS and Big Ten bowls.  Every few weeks I will include all of the bowls.  The selection order for the BCS is
1) National Championship
2) National Championship
3) Bowl that lost a representative to the first NC pick
4) Bowl that lost a representative to the second NC pick
5) Sugar Bowl
6) Orange Bowl
7) Fiesta Bowl
Remember that the Rose Bowl, if it loses the Big Ten or Pac 10 representative must take the first non-AQ school. 


Monday, August 23, 2010

Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?



Boise State's president and athletic director are continuing their campaign against logic in college sports with their recent anouncement that they intend to talk to the NCAA about mandating home and home series.  The news first came to my attention here (you have to scroll down past the first part) and frankly my opinion mirrors that of the authors.  This has an absolute zero chance of happening since the NCAA is not stupid enough to start forcing teams like Ohio State and Florida to play road games at North Texas or Western Michigan.  I know the fans really hate those cream puff games but there are a number of reasons they are a nesscesary evil:

1) For coaches, it makes your already stressful job easier when you don't have to worry about playing the starters for a whole game or hurting your chances for a bowl game with a loss.  It is a proffesion dominated by results and cupcake games allow coaches to puff up the stats a little.

2) For big school athletic directors it allows you to schedule an extra home game to help make ends meet in your athletic budget.  Sports like wrestling and women's volleyball rarely support themselves so it is often up to football teams to plug in the gaps.  Extra home games allow you the opportunity to do that since fans will pack the house anyway.  Use a small portion of the gate fee to pay the opposing team and the rest can pay for that new track you need.


3) For a lot of small schools this is an opportunity to gain more money than they would playing at home.  Teams like Florida International don't make gobs of money at the ticket counter so being payed a cool million or so to play in Ann Arbor would be well above what they would earn playing a random opponent at home. 

So basically, because Boise State can't get a home and home with a lot of top notch teams, they want to dismantle the exsisting system which helps fund thousands of student athletes in non-revenue sports.  I get that Boise does the home and home thing with all of it's opponents (they play a home and home with Toledo from the MAC which starts this year) but the vast majority of athletic departments cannot afford to do that. 

Also, isn't it odd that while Boise continues to complain about not being able to schedule BCS teams they are making plans to play Virginia Tech and Oregon State (both ranked BCS teams) this season, and neither of which on the road?  I understand the Hookie game is in Landover but neutral site games have much higher ticket allotments for "away" teams than true road games do.  Boise is already playing more ranked BCS teams in their out of conference schedule than the vast majority of the BCS schools so I don't really see why they are complaining here.

Boise State is going to the Mountain West next ear a long with every decent program in the WAC so there is a chance they could be getting into an automatic BCS bid as well anyway.  Why is Boise State making a fuss about out of conference scheduling at this point?

Frankly this is a stupid argument by Boise State and it really irritates me since it joins a long list of other things that that the Broncos complain about (the BCS being another one) that they really just don't seem to understand.  I know Boise State wants what's best for their program and that is their motivation behind this (they are not evil).  However you would think that they could try doing something about their problems that didn't always involve making radical changes to the game to support their interests at the detriment of others. 

Saturday, August 21, 2010

My Pre Season Top 25

So in the spirit of the AP Poll coming out today, here is my own Top 25 for the preseason.  Since the Stones supplied the Big Ten expansion coverage here I decided that we should mix it up when it comes to the Top 25.  For now, I will use Chicago but if you feel like it should be something else then just leave a comment and it will be considered.