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College Football Week 7 Awards (2021) October 17, 2021

Posted by intellectualgridiron in Sports.
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COACHES
Wish I were him:  Kirby Smart, Georgia

Glad I’m not him: Kirk Ferentz, Iowa

Lucky guy: Dabo Swinney, Clemson

Poor guy: Dino Babers, Syracuse

Desperately seeking a wake-up call: Herm Edwards, Arizona State

Desperately seeking a P.R. man: Pat Narduzzi, Pitt

Desperately seeking sunglasses and a fake beard: Kirk Ferentz, Iowa

Desperately seeking … anything:  Greg Schiano, Rutgers

TEAMS
Thought you’d kick butt, you did: Alabama (defeated Mississippi State 49-9)

Thought you’d kick butt, you didn’t: Oregon (defeated Cal 24-17)
Thought you’d get your butt kicked, you did: Rice (lost to UTSA 45-0)

Thought you’d get your butt kicked, you didn’t:  Purdue (defeated No. 2 Iowa 24-7)

Thought you wouldn’t kick butt, you did:  Colorado (Arizona 34-0)  

Dang, they’re good:  Georgia
Dang, they’re bad:  Rutgers

Can’t Stand Prosperity:  Iowa

Did the season start?  Arizona State
Can the season end?  Southern Miss

Can the season never end?  Cincinnati

GAMES
Play this again: No. 13 Ole Miss 31, Tennessee 26

Play this again, too:  No. 12 Oklahoma State 32, No. 25 Texas 24

Never play this again: Virginia 48, Duke 0

What?  LSU 49, No. 20 Florida 42

Huh?  Utah 35, No. 18 Arizona State 21

Are you kidding me??  Aurburn 38, No. 17 Arkansas 23

Oh – my – God:  Purdue 24, No. 2 Iowa 7

NEXT WEEK

rankings are current AP (week 8)
Ticket to die for:  LSU @ No. 13 Ole Miss

Best non-Power Five vs. Power Five  matchup: BYU @ Washington State; also, No. 16 Wake Forest @ Army

Best non-Power Five matchup: No. 15 Coastal Carolina vs. Appalachian State; also, No. 22 San Diego State @ Air Force

Upset alert: UCLA @ No. 10 Oregon

Must win: Wisconsin @ Purdue

Offensive explosion: (inconclusive)

Defensive struggle: Syracuse @ Virginia Tech

Great game no one is talking about: Clemson @ Pittsburgh

Intriguing coaching matchup:  Nick Saban of Alabama vs Josh Heupel of Tennessee

Who’s bringing the body bags?  Kansas @ No. 4 Oklahoma

Why are they playing? UMass @ Florida State

Plenty of good seats remaining: Washington @ Arizona

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  Arkansas-Pine Bluff @ Arkansas

Week 7 Thoughts:

Oklahoma State vs Texas

For the second week in row, Texas has blown a 4th-quarter lead to a ranked opponent.  Here’s a fairly disturbing stat to back up this observation.  In the 4th quarters of games against Oklahoma and then Oklahoma State, the Longhorns have been outscored 41-7.  Head coach Steve Sarkesian clearly has his work cut out for him on that side of the ball.  On the other side, it wouldn’t hurt to work on his offense’s performance, either, as scoring only 7 points in those two quarters combined is clearly unacceptable.

Purdue vs Iowa

File this under “Boy, did we get that one wrong/Boy, we didn’t see that one coming”.  In what could have potentially been a “body bag” game for Iowa, given Purdue lackluster performance against Minnesota two weeks earlier, the Boilermakers actually showed up to play, and both thrilled their faithful fans and stunned the college football world in the process. 

There are many layers one can slice-and-dice this game and the surrounding conditions that came with it.  Start with the premise of Iowa’s No. 2 ranking prior to said game.  Yes, they were undefeated, but that alone came about under questionable circumstances.  In the prior game against Penn State, the Hawkeyes were being outclassed by the Nittany Lions for more than half the game, before the latter’s quarterback was out of the game’s remainder due to injury.

Even had that injury to Penn State’s QB not occurred, and somehow Iowa would have righted the ship anyhow, I nevertheless must propose a thought experiment.  If an undefeated Iowa team (that of this season) were to go head-to-head against a one-loss Alabama team (likewise the current team of this season), which squad do think would emerge victorious?  Answering ‘Alabama’ would be a no-brainer.  Would it not thus be logical that the Crimson Tide be ranked ahead of the Hawkeyes, not withstanding the teams’ respective records, going into this week?

All that aside, the sad fact of the matter is that the Hawkeyes failed to live up to the prestigious ranking that had attained.  To close out the broadcast coverage, one of the commentators for ABC observed that “Purdue out-Iowa’d Iowa”.  Say what you will about head coach Jeff Brohm, but he put the extra week that he had with last week’s bye to very good use in preparing to take on this strong foe.

Going forward, it shall be very interesting to see how each of the two teams react to this big upset.  This time, the Hawkeyes have the bye, with their next game after that being a surprisingly winnable one against Wisconsin.  Indeed, the remainder of their schedule is all winnable.  Can they bounce back to seize such a opportunity, and to make a great season out of things regardless?  Last I checked, 11-1 for a program like Iowa is a great achievement.

For Purdue, can they stop celebrating long enough to re-focus and properly prepare for what lies ahead?  Many treacherous teams await the Boilers, starting with Wisconsin next week. 

Kentucky vs Georgia

Kentucky is a great team, but face it:  Georgia is that much greater.  This was plainly discernable going into the game, and the outcome therefore surprised no reasonable party.  That said, the Wildcats acquitted themselves well by covering the spread in the last minutes of the game.

Ole Miss vs Tennessee

For the first time in a long time, it felt as though Tennessee was returning to its glory days of the 1990s and early 2000s.  Neyland Stadium was positively electric last night when Ole Miss came calling.  They put up a valiant effort against a loaded Rebels team headed by their own former head coach, Lane Kiffin.  Despite being outmanned, in the end, they were only several yards shy of the opportunity to tie the game at the end of regulation.  It’s never a disgrace to lose to a better team, and, moreover, if the players continue to buy in to Josh Heupel’s vision, and the latter can bring in another good recruiting class or two, the Volunteers could continue to be on the upswing and legitimately bring back their glory days.

All that said, shame on the Tennessee fans who threw everything from water bottles to golf balls onto the field near the end of the game.  That is very classless; it reflects poorly on the fan base, and on many southern fans at large; the perpetrators of such a classless act need to see the error of their ways, and if some degree of ostracization to help guide them to the light is what is necessary to do so, then so be it.  Tennessee fans, do better and be better, so as to be worthy of such aforementioned glory days, should they return.

Looking ahead:  Oklahoma State @ Iowa State

Can the Cowboys now handle their own prosperity?  They are currently undefeated, ranked No. 8, and now head up to Ames, Iowa, where lately many ranked teams have gone to die.  The Cyclones are never to be taken lightly under head coach Matt Campbell.  Can he prepare his already-strong team to take down an undefeated foe?  Can Oklahoma State’s head coach Mike Gundy prepare his squad to be ready to face proven giant-killers?  We’ll find out shortly.

Clemson @ Pittsburgh

Queue the theme music from “The Twilight Zone”.  In this upcoming matchup, the Pitt Panthers are ranked (No. 23), whereas the Clemson Tigers are not.  It should thus be a very interesting matchup at Heinz Field.

Tennessee @ Alabama

No time for the Volunteers to lick their wounds after a close, emotional loss to Ole Miss.  Now they must travel to Tuscaloosa to take on their traditionally most-hated rival.  Such is life in the SEC.

LSU @ Ole Miss

Speaking of hated rvials, there is never any love lost between these two.  While recently this rivalry has been a bit one-sided in LSU’s favor, the Rebels are now the favored team, and could make this season full of questions for LSU and their head coach Ed Orgeron (who was previously the head coach at Ole Miss) all the more painful.  Then again, the Tigers pulled off a mild upset win over Florida, which leads many discerning fans to believe that this game could be a reasonably even, tough matchup on paper after all.

Final thought:  can we bring back the “Twlight Zone” theme music for a second?  Because Cincinnati is now the No. 2-ranked team in the country.  Ponder that for what it is worth.

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Louisville’s End-of-Season Collapse: A Postmortem November 27, 2016

Posted by intellectualgridiron in Sports.
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It’s still too painful to watch.

Without a doubt, Louisville’s upset loss at home to rival Kentucky is the most unsettling thing I have witnessed thus far in this entire college football season.  The Cardinals were rolling for so long, despite a relatively early-season loss to mighty conference foe Clemson.  But even then, that was on the road, in arguably the most hostile, difficult setting in the ACC, under primetime lights, no less.  The Cardinals quickly regrouped, and still managed to mount a plausible playoff campaign.

Until the game at Houston on Nov. 19.  The Cougars started very strongly as well, but then got upset twice, first to Navy, then mysteriously to lowly SMU.  But two Thursdays ago, Houston showed up ready to play, and, in hindsight, hungry for redemption.  It showed.  The Cougars had legitimate athletes on the defensive line that made Louisville QB Lamar Jackson’s life miserable the whole night.  Defensively, Louisville’s defense never could get dialed in.  In the end, Houston, then unranked, walloped Louisville, 36-10.

It did not help the Cardinals that it was a Thursday night game.  They had to make a quick preparation turnaround after facing fundamentally sound Wake Forest the previous Saturday evening.  But still, championship-caliber teams would not rest on that excuse.  They would show up to play, and win.

Such a loss should have been a wake-up call, to both the coaches and the players.  Bobby Petrino should have used this as a teaching tool to his players, to remind them of the need to bring your best game no matter the circumstances, and to not take all teams seriously, no matter how inexplicable their previous losses may have been.  Frankly, how a team like Houston could have lost to either of those other two teams remains the biggest mystery of the season.

Win or lose, Louisville nevertheless had extra time to lick their wounds, recover, and prepare for the season-ending game, at home, to rival Kentucky.  The oddsmakers had Louisville favored by three touchdowns.  Except that Kentucky continued to slug in out in the brutal SEC, against NFL-grade bodies.  In short, the Wildcats were battle-hardened, and like the Cougars before them, they showed up ready to play, even though this time they were the visitors.

What should have, on paper, been a borderline body bag game in favor of the Cardinals quickly turned into a game-spanning grind.  On offense, the Cardinals committed four turnovers, while their defense continued to be as porous as they were against Houston over a week earlier.  A last-minute field goal clinched it for the Wildcats, who took home the Governor’s Cup for the first time since 2010.

A long-time truism said by many a coach is that the team that make the fewest mistakes wins.  Obviously, those four turnovers on the part of Louisville cost them dearly.  One less interception, and the outcome would likely be different.

But even so, systemic problems have developed that have, in hindsight, become evident in the past two debacles of games.  For one, while Petrino has done an outstanding job recruiting skill position players, he seems to have neglected his lines (yes, both of them).  Surely his time in the NFL, brief though it was, would have taught him that one builds a team from the inside out, not vice-versa.  In other words, a wise man/coach builds his team around his offensive and defensive lines.  That deficiency became very glaring during the debacle against Houston, where again, the Cougars had real athletes on their defensive line, and it retarded Louisville’s offensive production accordingly.

Perhaps Petrino did know this vital maxim but delegated the building that part of the team to an assistant coach.  If so, that was an obvious mistake.  If he were not aware, hopefully these last two embarrassments will bring this deficiency to his attention.

Another issue is that the offense seems to have come to rely too heavily on QB Lamar Jackson, making Louisville a one-trick pony.  As insanely, freakishly talented as Lamar is, he relies, at this point, too much on rhythm.  If he is off-rhythm, the whole offense suffers.  The Cardinals have at least two good runningbacks, both productive, and yet they were under-utilized on account of the coaches being seduced by the siren song of creating sexiness and sizzle with Lamar at the expense of wearing down other teams’ defenses with methodically-sustained drives.

But perhaps the biggest problem of all is a chronic deficiency in discipline, which was evident by too many penalties.  These penalties obviously hamstrung the Cardinals during key moments throughout the season.  Any discerning fan or coach would also point out that relying on raw talent to overcome these penalties and mental mistakes is a fool’s errand, for there are teams such as Alabama and Ohio State that are both incredibly talented athletically and for more disciplined.

Yes, Louisville is a very talented team, but obviously they are not exempt from paying a heavy price in the end from such a lack of discipline.  The most effective systemic solution, as politically incorrect as this may sound, is for Petrino to recruit a few more white players.  This is serious.  The comparative analysis of the black player vs white player goes something like this.  With black players, there is the obvious benefit of greater athletic talent, but the drawback is, one cannot count on a consistent performance from many, if not most of them.  Conversely, with white players, the athletic talent/output is usually not as great as it is with most black players, but on the plus side, one can always count on a consistent effort from the whites.

Bottom line:  too many blacks on a team tends to lead to a lack of discipline, and Louisville this year has been a perfect example of this.  On the other hand, having too many whites leads to insufficient athleticism and comparative, well, sluggishness.  Nevertheless, to be a consistently effective team, one needs both.  Think of it as building a wall.  One needs both bricks and mortar.  Think of the black players as bricks.  A wall just of bricks can be well-stacked, yet easily toppled because there is nothing to bind them together.  Conversely, the white players are the mortar.  A wall of just sculpted mortar is theoretically possible, but it’s limited in terms of how one can practically build said wall.  One needs both bricks and mortar in order to build a wall of optimal size and strength, hence optimal effectiveness.  In the same vein, a strong, consistently effective team needs both black players for athletic prowess and white players for consistency and examples of discipline.  A good example of this is Pat Narduzzi’s Pittsburgh team, which clung tenaciously to Clemson for that entire game in Death Valley, and capitalized on the last-second opportunity they earned.

Petrino would thus be well-served to recruit a few more whites.  Doing so will instill much-needed discipline in his team.  That, along with better line play and more of a running game will eliminate the risk of a sudden collapse like this year, and at the same time, put the team in a far better position to make the playoffs next year.  Onward and upward.

Disclaimer:  You self-appointed, politically-correct thought police better sit down and shut up.  We all know how hysterical you are, crying “racism” even more often than the boy who cried wolf.  There are no racist statements here at all regarding the aforementioned observations of black vs. white players.  The more you cry racism when none exists, the more you cheapen it and make normal people all the more apt to ignore it when such an abhorrent thing actually occurs.  Sell your crazy somewhere else.