college
Dennis Dodd needs to apologize. Notshould, not would be wise to, but needs to. And needs to first thing Monday morning.
Each Friday during college football season, Dodd publishes his Weekend Watch List in which he discusses the upcoming games. But this past Friday, he took it a step further.
Maybe the irrelevance of the team shouldn’t bother me. Maybe their recent struggles shouldn’t impact my personal judgment of the program. Maybe the name should still scare me. Maybe they should still be a measuring stick. I mean, they have won “11” national championships (that number is debatable), have had 7 Heisman trophy winners and were a dominate force for about 80 years. Yeah they got history, tradition, pride and everything a major program could want. So maybe, I should give them more justice. The respective AP writers seem to, so why shouldn’t I?
Welcome sports addicts to another week of my literary lullabies. It’s hard to believe a third of the regular season is already over. But on the glass is half full perspective, we still have 4 months of TV viewing for followers of the pigskin persuasion. The field is becoming clearer and with several weeks worth of battles left the cream will soon rise to the top. But here at Dozier’s Diary we take it one week at a time. And so we begin with some thoughts from the previous weekend.
Week 3 finally brought us some interesting games and at the same time offered us the equivalent of paint drying excitement. For twelve hours there seemed to be an intriguing game on, from the SEC battle between the Hogs and Dawgs to kick the day off to the nightcap out west between Big-10 opponent [Iowa] and Pac-10 foe [Arizona]. Get your popcorn ready because we’re about to roll!
You can thank the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. You can thank Don Myers. You can thank Sunkist. Hell, you can even thank Penn State and Miami. The highest rated game in the history of college football put the BCS on the map and controversy on the horizon.
For the past 6-8 years, teams from non-BCS conferences have started to make some noise: Utah, Boise State, BYU, Hawaii and TCU for the most part. These teams have started to match the perennial powers of college football and even win against them. These teams are so intimidating that 2 teams from non-BCS conferences were ranked in the top 6 for the first time in BCS existence. Are they deserving of such a ranking? Perhaps. And to a lot of college coaches, preseason rankings are irrelevant, and for the most part they are correct. The BCS conferences flux during the season; rarely do a handful of teams run the tables.
However, a non-BCS conference team such as this year’s Boise State and TCU are very likely to go undefeated. The competition of their respective conferences is somewhat pitiful. This means for these teams, preseason rankings are everything. Boise has a clear path to the national title game, as does TCU. No BCS conference team can say that.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh. We can finally relax knowing the calming feeling of our College Football season is with us. It’s like our pillow, very comforting, even more so if you reside in or around the Tuscaloosa or Columbus area and very UN-comforting if you’re in the booming Metropolis of Boise (we’ll get to that later.) These past two weeks have literally taught us nothing and at the same time taught us nothing; wait. Didn’t I already say that? It sounds funny but we have honestly learned nothing while getting Xed and Oed at the same time like we’re on Rex Ryan’s JV squad from Hard Knocks. I feel like I should be ranting a testimonial into the camera (looking left and right……DAMN! No camera.) Oh well. We’ll talk NFL in another column, right now we’re talking about CFB…..I mean Hell, I’m 40! I’m a MAN! Let’s get to it.
And so it is upon us once again. College Football Season. Christmas come early for so many of us. What any one of us would do or give up — 2 weeks worth of vacation time / Christmas or birthday presents/ that new car we hoped to buy / the Vegas trip with the boys that our wives and girlfriends “promised” we could go on this year– for the chance for our Laundry Liaisons of the Gridiron to hoist that prestigious Crystal (foot) ball up in the air. And the great thing about this year is that there are no one or two teams that everybody loves.
There seems to be a hope and glitter in most every college football fan’s eyes for this season. We could easily have our first back-to-back national champs since USC did it in 2003-2004. (Or did they really since this whole scandal approached them — thanks Reggie! –and USC did not even really play for the championship in 2003. But I digress.) Or could we have the first Non-BCS conference team hoist that trophy? I’m sure some angry hillbilly from Norman is waiting for that with his hunting rifle so he can blow it to smithereens. “Damn you Statue of Liberty! I mean fake Statue of Liberty!”
More March Madness talk and calling bs on Roger Clemens and Pete Rose’s sex life.
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We discuss what might be the best opening weekend of the NCAA tournament since the field expanded to 64 teams.
You can download this week’s podcast directly (running time 120 mins) or subscribe to the feed.
If you use iTunes, just click here and then click subscribe and iTunes will take care of the rest.
This week’s topics include:
We finally joined . So follow us and make us feel special.
Hope you guys enjoy the podcast. If you did enjoy it, please give us a good rating on itunes so we can rise up in the rankings. If you didn’t, send us an email ([email protected]) and give us some suggestions. Thanks for listening.
After watching 98.6% of the NCAA basketball tournament over the last 4 days (hey, the NCAA wrestling finals are on too as I discovered when I inadvertently switched to ESPN), I’ve concluded this has to be the best opening week in tournament history — well, at least in my tournament watching history. (There should be a rule that people who weren’t alive at the time should not be allowed to try to argue some nonsense such as YA Tittle was somehow the most underrated QB in NFL history or wax philosophic about the heyday of John Wooden. If you did not exist, you should not be able to comment on a team or player of that era.)
After upsets galore on opening day, the tournament gave us a tremendous OT win by Purdue over Texas A&M to end the weekend. Oh, and there was that little matter of Northern Iowa beating Kansas in between.
So, in honor of opening weekend, here are 48 + 1 thoughts (do the math) on the 2010 NCAA Tournament. Some are good, some are mediocre, and some are clunkers — yep, just like the games.