This picture pretty much confirms every joke I've ever made about the Ohio State University Buckeyes, who recently blew their second straight shot at the BCS National Football Championship, and who also can't, apparently, manage to spell the name of their own state correctly:
(Courtesy of my old Michigan Review chums Ben Kepple (blog post) and Lee Bockhorn (photo).)
The overrated Acorns just lost the BCS Championship game to the LSU Tigers. Go Tigers!
I guess that shows the folly of letting a team like the Acorns back into the #1 slot. You could almost hear the shrill "beep-beep-beep" as OSU ended up in the game through the shrewd maneuver of not playing any games for the last two weeks of the season, while just about every other team in the top ten lost.
The Tigers just went ahead of the Acorns, 17-10. Woo-hoo!
Tonight the LSU Tigers and the Ohio State Acorns play for the BCS Championship. As a loyal Michigan Wolverine, those nuts from Columbus are my sworn enemies, so even though I otherwise have no allegiance to LSU, I'm pulling for them to win. I know the conventional wisdom says that I should root for the Acorns because they're in the Big Ten, but the hell with that.
Alas, the Acorns are currently ahead 10-0. But there's a lot of game left to play.
The BCS, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Florida should somehow move from #3 to #2 ahead of Michigan for the national championship game. Actually, it was coaches and sportswriters who made that decision -- the BCS computer rankings had Florida and Michigan ranked dead even (and even that is a bit sketchy, to me). There were all kinds of rationales for it -- "Michigan already had its chance to play Ohio State" being chief among them. But the BCS was never about "giving someone else a chance," it was about having the two best teams in college football play for the title. Few people, even those who justify the result, seem to argue that the two best teams are playing. Just that "someone else is getting a chance."
We'll see if they use that logic to change the matchup in the Super Bowl for two teams that played in the regular season. Oh -- wait, right, they actually have a playoff system in professional football. Well, college football, too, in every other division but I-A. But somehow, it just "wouldn't work" there. Translation? Someone who's getting paid now wouldn't be getting paid later.
I can't say I'm very surprised, nor is it at all a big disappointment to play in the Rose Bowl. But they do need to do something about this crazy system.
Well, amazingly, UCLA pulled it off! The highly unlikely loss makes it more likely that my beloved Wolverines will make it into the national championship game. Of course, it would help if Florida lost.
So the Michigan State Spartans just handed over a game they were winning to the Notre Dame Fighting Ethnic Stereotypes. Now, the Spartans are the University of Michigan's cross-state rivals, but I often will support them if they're not playing Michigan. And especially when they play the despised Fighting Ethnic Stereotypes. This wasn't at all because Notre Dame was the better team, but rather, because of some of the worst coaching I've seen. Some of the most hare-brained play calling in the history of play calling. You probably don't need to know much about football to know, for example, that you don't take a knee on a kick-off return with no one from the other team near you on your own 15-yard line.
I'm really disappointed -- would have been nice to see the Sparties put the Fighting Stereotypes in their place. Here's a hint -- Michigan got a lot better after changes in the coaching staff. Looks like changes in MSU's are long overdue.
It occurs to me that the only good thing about the end of summer is that college football starts again. Tonight is the first college pigskin match of the year, with USC facing Virginia Tech. After a dismal few weeks of baseball and Olympics, it's nice to have football back.
A lawsuit that alleges that the University of Illinois's "Chief Illiniwek" mascot (or symbol, if you prefer) is a racist stereotype resulted in this somewhat entertaining opinion from the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In his opinion, Judge Evans spends a couple of pages discussing various college mascots, and asks, among other things, the age-old question: Just what is a Billiken?
Tonight is Game One of the Second Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the Detroit Red Wings, who face the Calgary Flames this time around.
Ah, yes, my sports drought is over -- NASCAR is back. It will be the only bright spot in a sea of baseball, especially after basketball and hockey are over. Today is the Daytona 500, the Super Bowl of auto racing. Make all the redneck jokes you want, but I enjoy a good car race. Even better is that Comcast has eight channels of pay-per-view where you get to see the inside view for eight different drivers. And they are doing a free preview of it today, so I can watch the race from the inside, too. Add in picture-in-picture, and it's a redneck-geeky good time.
Right about now is where I really start to miss football. I am not much of a baseball fan at all, and it gets depressing to watch SportsCenter, and see 90% baseball, with golf and tennis sprinkled in (and I'm not too keen on those either). The Stanley Cup finals are over, NBA's done for the year, no college sports in sight. There's still NASCAR, but with the studying, my Sundays haven't been too oepn to watch a race. So it was nice to get my University of Michigan Football season tickets, which reminds me that the start of the college football season is a mere month away. With teams like Notre Dame and Ohio State at home this season, it looks to be a good fall in The Big House. Until then, I'm left wistfully waiting the fall, and stuck with baseball-laden SportsCenter highlights.
