This week's games

It used to be that Jerry Wild was the only Tulsa fan in the pool, but now that they've got Malzahn, probably a third of the people in this are suddenly interested in Tulsa, which makes its first appearance of the season as an underdog to Central Florida, whose coach would probably have Notre Dame in better shape than it is in now had he been allowed to stay. It's championship week, the last week of the regular season before we hit the gauntlet and the bowls.

Conference USA Championship Game
Tulsa-Central Florida
11 a.m., Sat., ESPN
Line: Central Florida by 7
* Underdog worth three points in this game

ACC Championship Game
Boston College-Virginia Tech
Noon, Sat., ABC
Line: Virginia Tech by 4

SEC Championship Game
LSU-Tennessee
3 p.m., Sat., CBS
Line: LSU by 7
* Underdog worth three points in this game

The Civil War
Oregon State-Oregon
3:30 p.m., Sat., ESPN2
Line: Off

Big 12 Championship Game
Missouri-Oklahoma
7 p.m., Sat., ABC
Line: Oklahoma by 3


Good luck.
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Academic BCS

Click here for the full article...

Here are the big-bowl pairings if academics mattered, with the A/BCS ranking following the school name:

Allstate BCS Championship Game:
Boston College (127.80) vs. Cincinnati (97.25)

Rose Bowl Presented by Citi:
Auburn (73.15) vs. Boise State (68.90)

FedEx Orange Bowl:
Virginia (60.45) vs. Virginia Tech (60.15)

Tostitos Fiesta Bowl:
Clemson (59.35) vs. USC (51.65)

Allstate Sugar Bowl:
West Virginia (47.85) vs. Arizona State (46.35)

Tuberville staying with Auburn

Assuming there are no unforeseen snags, Mike Sherman is expected to be named the next head football coach at Texas A&M University, multiple sources told The Dallas Morning News on Sunday. The former Green Bay Packers head coach and current offensive coordinator of the Houston Texans served as A&M's offensive line coach in the 1990s.

Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville, believed to be one of the leading contenders for the A&M position, fell out of the running, a high-ranking university source said.
Tuberville has a $6 million buyout clause in his Auburn contract. A&M officials were not willing to pay that amount "just to talk to him".

Texas A&M-Arkansas series

Texas A&M and Arkansas officials are close to finalizing a non-conference football series at the new Cowboys stadium in Arlington starting in 2009, a source close to the negotiations told The Dallas Morning News.
The schools are close to signing a six- to eight-year deal that would bring a potential blockbuster matchup to the area that could rival the annual Texas-Oklahoma game at Fair Park. Arkansas officials are expected to fly to the area this week for one final look at the stadium and the contract, the source said.
A&M spokesman Alan Cannon said he could not confirm a contract with Arkansas. He did say the school was considering a non-conference game at the new Cowboys stadium. Arkansas and Cowboys officials could not be reached.
A&M athletic director Bill Byrne has made no secret about his desire to play a high-profile game in North Texas. For months, it was thought A&M would play Texas Tech. An Arkansas game would effectively take those plans off the table.
Byrne was asked about the possibility of bringing a Big 12 game to the Dallas area during an Internet chat with fans hosted by The News on Aug. 29.
"It's more likely for us to look at a non-conference game," Byrne said then. "We haven't established an opponent yet, but we're very interested in being in the Metroplex starting in 2009."
The game could generate millions for both schools, just like the Texas-OU game does. However, A&M and Arkansas would play in a new, $1 billion stadium, as opposed to the aging Cotton Bowl. The new Cowboys stadium can be configured to hold a maximum of 100,000 fans. If school officials charged a premium ticket price, possibly $90 to $100, ticket sales alone would generate at least $9 million.
One potential snag could be Arkansas' current scheduling of games in Little Rock, Ark.
The Razorbacks traditionally play a couple of games in the state capital every season. It's unclear how moving one of those games to Arlington would affect Arkansas' future schedules.
A&M and Arkansas played each other for decades as members of the now-defunct Southwest Conference. The schools haven't played each other since 1991.

Wild Weekend

First of all, I need to get some unfinished business out of the way
concerning the Alabama Auburn game. Instead of the iron bowl it needs
to be called the toilet bowl. With all the corndogs and burritos Auburn
fans have eaten this season, they spend more time sitting on the can than
watching the game.
Now on to business, both the no.1 and no.2 teams went down this weekend.
The Arkansas Razorbacks took out no.1 LSU, which is something Auburn
couldn't do.

Haiku for this week:
Arkansas Razorback prevail
Number one curse continues
Nutts' future undecided.

Lead of the weekend

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Crushing the national title hopes of the No. 1 team in the nation is one way to make a case for the Heisman Trophy.

This is a halftime show, UA marching band

This week's games

My apologies to the Auburn fans for not including the Iron Bowl this week. Yes, it is a great rivarly, but who is going to pick Alabama after the Tide lost to Louisiana-Monroe? The same apologies go to the Georgia, Texas, and Texas A&M fans in the pool. There are just too many other good games this week to include every rivalry. Two things to note: The USC-Arizona State game is on Thursday night, and Kansas-Missouri, the biggest game of the season so far, is being played at a neutral site.

USC-Arizona State
7 p.m., Thu., ESPN
Line: USC by 3

The Commonwealth Cup
Virginia Tech-Virginia
11 a.m., Sat., ESPN2
Line: Virginia Tech by 3

Tennessee-Kentucky
12:30 p.m., Sat., CBS
Line: Kentucky by 3

Oregon-UCLA
2:30 p.m., Sat., ABC/ESPN
Line: Oregon by 2

The Border Showdown
Kansas-Missouri
7 p.m., Sat., ABC
Line: Kansas by 2

Good luck.
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Just because I love this picture

Run for the Border

Next week will be the last regular season game for all college football
teams. Colder weather is setting in at this time of year.
With the change in seasons, the Auburn fans are also making a change.
Instead of eating corndogs, they are making a run for the border.
I mean they are headed to Taco Bell and loading up on a sack full
of beefy cheesy burritos. They are really loading up so they can take
turns farting the Auburn fight song. That really will make the van
smell even worse. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where he
couldn't get an awful stench out of his car.

Haiku for this week:
Change of seasons
Run for the border
Farting fight song.

Comes first in alphabetical order?

I've seen a lot of crazy reasoning for picking a team, but here's one of my new favorites courtesy of Glenn Borkowski's picks this week:

"Harvard - comes first in alphabetical order."

UPDATE:

Here's another great reason for picking a team from Oscar Davis:

"Yale (because we had all those Yalees teaching at Ole Miss Law School and at that time, their Head of the Graduate Law School, Professor McDougal, was an Ole Miss grad)"

This week's games

Rivalry games really start to kick in this week, and we've got two of the best starting it off. In what has become a football pool tradition, Harvard-Yale makes the list and this year it's got the added weight of being for the Ivy League championship. With Ohio State-Michigan, you have to
wonder if the rumors are true about Lloyd Carr retiring after the game and the impact that will have on pumping up the team to win the game for him. And there's also an unpredictable Clemson game back this week.

Greatest Rivalry in Sports
Ohio State-Michigan
11 a.m., Sat., ABC
Line: Off

The Game
Harvard-Yale
11 a.m., Sat., HDNet
Line: No line

Battle for the Land Grant Trophy
Penn State-Michigan State
2:30 p.m., Sat., ABC
Line: Penn State by 3

West Virginia-Cincinnati
6:45 p.m., Sat., ESPN
Line: West Virginia by 6
* Underdog worth three points in this game

Boston College-Clemson
6:45 p.m., Sat., ESPN2
Line: Clemson by 7
* Underdog worth three points in this game

Good luck.
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Greatest rivarly in sports?

Some of you fans of other conferences, especially you Auburn fans who think the Iron Bowl is the pinnacle of rivarlies, probably disagree with the label "Greatest Rivalry in Sports" for the Ohio State-Michigan game. But it is called that because ESPN named it the greatest sports rivalry of the 20th century (in North America) during its "Sports Century" series. Also, no other college football rivalry has a war as part of its backdrop, which is what the Toledo War is to fans from the two state. Wikipedia says "the football rivalry is a modern manifestation of this historical tension."

TMQ highlights Little Rock Team

Tuesday Morning Quarterback, an ESPN Page 2 article spoke about Pulaski Acadamy never punting on fourth down...

There's a high school in Arkansas that has made the most significant football innovation we've seen since the veer option. This high school is tearing up its state and is on the verge of revolutionizing the way football is played. TMQ suspects that within a few years, the phrase "Pulaski theory" will be as widely known as the phrase "shotgun spread." In a copycat sport, Pulaski Academy of Little Rock has devised an offensive philosophy that is genuinely new, and it's winning games left and right.

I first heard about Pulaski from Peter Giovannini of Morrilton, Ark., a high school football official who wrote me to report in astonishment that he had just worked a conference championship game in which the winning team never punted, even going for a first down on fourth-and-6 from its own 5-yard line early in the game. "As a devotee of TMQ, I thought you might like to know at least one coach in the vast football universe has experienced the epiphany and refuses to punt the ball away," Giovannini wrote.

That team was Pulaski -- 9-1-1 after having just won its opening-round game in the Arkansas 5A playoffs. Coach Kevin Kelley reports that he stopped punting in 2005 -- after reading an academic study on the statistical consequences of going for the first down versus handing possession to the other team, plus reading Tuesday Morning Quarterback's relentless examples of when punting backfires but going for the first down works. In 2005, Pulaski reached the state quarterfinals by rarely punting. In 2006, Pulaski reached the state championship game, losing by one point -- and in the state championship game, Pulaski never punted, converting nine of 10 fourth-down attempts. Since the start of the 2006 season, Pulaski has had no punting unit and never practices punts. This year, Pulaski has punted just twice, both times when leading by a large margin and trying to hold down the final score. In its playoff victory Friday night, Pulaski did not punt, converting three of four fourth-down tries.

"They give you four downs, not three," Kelley told TMQ. "You should take advantage. Suppose we had punted from our own 5. The odds are the opposition will take over at about the 35, and from there the stats say they have an 80 percent chance of scoring. So even if you only have a 50 percent chance of converting the first down, isn't that better than giving the other side an 80 percent chance of scoring?" For fourth-and-short attempts, the odds of converting are a lot better than 50 percent.

As TMQ endlessly notes, NFL teams convert about 75 percent of fourth-and-1 tries. Yet highly paid professional coaches endlessly send in the punt unit on fourth-and-1, handing a scoring opportunity to the opposition. In the 2006 edition of my annual don't-punt column, I summarized the odds this way: "Nearly three-quarters of fourth-and-1 attempts succeed, while around one-third of possessions result in scores. Think about those fractions. Go for it four times on fourth-and-1: Odds are you will keep the ball three times, and three kept possessions each with a one-third chance of a score results in your team scoring once more than it otherwise would have. Punt the ball on all four fourth-and-1s, and you've given the opponents three additional possessions. (It would have gotten one possession anyway when you missed one of your fourth-and-1s.) Those three extra possessions, divided by the one-third chance to score, give the opponent an extra score."

Kelley says that when he began to shun the punt, people thought he was crazy: "It's like brainwashing, people believe you are required to punt." Players and the home crowd needed to get acclimated to it. "When we first started going on every fourth down," he says, "our home crowd would boo and the players would be distressed. You need to become accustomed to the philosophy and buy into the idea. Now our crowd and our players expect us to go for it, and get excited when no punting team comes onto the field. When my 10-year-old son sees NFL teams punting on short yardage on television, he gets upset because he's grown up with the idea that punting is usually bad."

Preparing the players for the no-punting future of football is a practical concern. If a coach unexpectedly kept his offense in on fourth down in his own territory, and failed to convert, the crowd would boo and the defensive players become demoralized. If the defensive players understood that a no-punting philosophy occasionally would hand great field position to the other side but overall would keep the other side off the field, they would buy into the idea. Imagine, in turn, the demoralizing effect on the opposition if its defense stops its opponent after three downs, only to realize that no punt will follow. For the 2007 edition of my anti-punting column, the stats service AccuScore did thousands of computer simulations based on 2006 NFL games and found that, on average, rarely punting added one point per game to the score of the teams that didn't punt, while not adding any points to their opponents' final scores. Computer simulations showed that rarely punting amounted to roughly one additional victory per season at the NFL level. At the college and high school levels, the bonus might be even higher.

Why do coaches punt on fourth-and-short -- and worse, when trailing or in opposition territory? "Most punting is so the coach can avoid criticism," says Kelley, who has coached Pulaski for five years and got his start in high school coaching in football-crazed Texas. "If you go for it and fail, the first question in the postgame press conference will be, 'Aren't you to blame for losing the game because you didn't punt?' If the coach orders a punt, the media will blame the defense." TMQ has always speculated that the desire to shift blame explains why big-college and NFL coaches send in the punting team. But take note, these days, the media and the postgame news conference are factors even at the high school level.

Pulaski Academy is providing real-world evidence of the future of football. The most important innovation in years is being field-tested by the Pulaski Bruins, and the test is going quite well. But don't just take Kelley's word for it. The decisive snap of Illinois' upset of No. 1 Ohio State on Saturday came when the Illini, leading 28-21 with six minutes remaining, went for it on fourth-and-1 in their own territory. Sports radio generally called this a huge gamble. Actually, it was playing the percentages; Illinois converted and held the ball for the remainder of the game. Had Illinois boomed a punt, the Buckeyes would have been in business. On Sunday, while trailing at Washington, Philadelphia went for it on fourth-and-1 in its own territory in the second half -- Fox television announcer Daryl Johnston called this "a huge gamble!" It was playing the percentages; the Eagles converted, and they scored a touchdown on the possession, igniting a comeback. Trailing 10-2, Buffalo went for it on fourth-and-1 from the Dolphins' 24 in the fourth quarter: a conversion, followed by a touchdown on the possession, keyed the Bills' comeback. Leading defending champion Indianapolis 16-0, San Diego went for it on fourth-and-2 at the Indianapolis 37, converted and scored a touchdown on the possession, going on to win by two points. Three times Jacksonville went for it on fourth-and-short in Tennessee territory, all three times converting and going on to score touchdowns; the Titans went for it on fourth-and-short twice in return, once failing and once scoring a touchdown. As noted by reader Rene Derken of Leuth, the Netherlands, Green Bay went for it twice on fourth-and-short in Minnesota territory, both times scoring on the possession -- but Minnesota punted from the Green Bay 42. Carolina went for it on fourth-and-1 from the Atlanta 20, and the play reached the Falcons' 2 before the Panthers' runner fumbled. Yes, New Orleans failed on a fourth-and-1 attempt in its own territory and went on to lose, and San Francisco failed on a fourth-and-1 on the Seattle 2-yard line when trailing big. But of the high-profile fourth-down tries in the NFL and in the Illinois-Ohio State game this past weekend, 10 were a total success, one a qualified success and three a failure. Not too shabby, compared with passively punting the ball.

Second Time Around

I have had plenty of material to trash the Auburn Tigers with that some of you
might think I've forgotten about Gentle Ben. Well, I haven't. I'll get back to
him in the haiku. Auburn plays their second Bulldog team today with
Georgia. I predict they will get their A$$ES handed to them again by
this bulldog team. You Auburn fans better hope Sheriff Buford T.
Justice isn't chasing the bandit. Because he dosen't like you smelling up
his highways.

Here is the haiku of the week:
Second time around
Bulldog trees a tiger
Gentle Ben, moron.

This week's games

Here are the games for Week 11. As Tony Schiavone might say, this may be the toughest week in college football pool history. First you have Arkansas-Tennessee, a game so tough to predict that not even Vegas wants to take a guess. Then there's Auburn-Georgia, two teams that seemingly couldn't be more even. In the wild Big East, Connecticut is 8-1 yet a five-point underdog to surprise Cincinnati. In the Florida State-Virginia Tech game, you wonder which teams will show up in the unpredictable ACC. And then you have USC on the road at Cal in a game many people in the pool will complain about because they don't follow the Pac-10 well enough.

Arkansas-Tennessee
11:30 a.m., Sat., LFS
Line: Pick 'em

Oldest Rivalry in the Deep South
Auburn-Georgia
2:30 p.m., Sat., CBS
Line: Georgia by 1

Connecticut-Cincinnati
2:30 p.m., Sat., ESPNU
Line: Cincinnati by 5
* Underdog worth three points in this game

Florida State-Virginia Tech
2:30 p.m., Sat., ABC/ESPN
Line: Virginia Tech by 6
* Underdog worth three points in this game

USC-California
7 p.m., Sat., ABC
Line: USC by 4

Good luck.
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You know what Poolsville needs?

No, not more haikus.

I think Matt should be required to post a weekly column in the style of Larry King's USA Today column. You know the one I'm talking about, filled with random, stream of consciousness and out of left field thoughts. Like a thought about Darren McFadden's car followed by "We can put a man on the moon, but Subway can only offer three types of cheese for their sandwiches?"

Those columns and getting to vote on the Slabby champion are the only reasons I enter the various Escobar sports pools. (BTW, what's a guy got to do to get an invite to the Escobar Book Club!?!)

Matt's King-style columns > Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning QB > Peter King's Things I Think I Think.

Make it happen, Matt. Make. It. Happen.

My new wallpaper

Franchione negotiating buyout deal

According to the rumors, Fran's buyout of $8.5 mil was reduced to $1.9 mil - a savings of more than $6 million. Tuberville's buyout is $6 million - coincidence? Hmmm.

Just screwing with you Auburn guys. I don't see any reason he should jump to A&M. Seems like a lateral move at best. He'll probably just get a nice raise out of it.

Sheriff Buford T. Justice

Some Auburn fans were on the way back home from the game and
had to pull over and get some fresh air. After eating corndogs all
day the Auburn van was smelling rather rank.
They pulled over and got out of the van and a sheriffs car pulls in
behind them. He gets out of the car,lights his cigarette, and closes
his lighter. It was none other than Sheriff Buford T. Justice.
He tells the Auburn fans to put their hands on the van. Then
he says: don't go home, don't go to eat, don't go to the bathroom,
and don't fart on my highways, it wouldn't smell too nice.
You boys just keep your hands on the van until one of my associates
arrives. You can think about it,but don't do it!!
If you're trying to remember what movie line that is, its from
Smokey and the Bandit. Sheriff Justice got him soem Auburn
fans while in hot pursuit of the bandit.
Here is my haiku for the week:
Comebacks are weak
You'll never beat me
My haikus rock.

Play of the Year or Worst Defense in History?