Best Team in NC, Dez Bryant, and Early BCS thoughts
First of all, I never thought I’d write this. But right now, currently, Duke is the best football team in the state of North Carolina. I know, shocking. I’m shocked. Wake not only got creamed by Clemson two weeks ago, but lost last week to Navy. Duke is talking about which bowl game they will go to. NC State somehow managed to upset Pitt, but has looked anemic otherwise. All the while, Duke talks about how Thadeus Lewis is the second coming of Wallace Wade. North Carolina can’t even hold onto a 21 point lead late against a mediocre Florida State team. If they didn’t get bailed out by the officials against UConn, they’d have a losing record right now and their only wins would be against non-BCS opponents. Meanwhile, at Duke, they’ve postponed talk of basketball season until at least November! November! Normally, they switch from football talk to basketball talk up in Durham in August. With Elon’s big win over Chattanooga last weekend, I think the second best team might be Elon. Unbelieveable. Hopefully Duke will upset overrated Georgia Tech in a few weeks and we can put this “left out of the BCS” talk to rest for the Yellow Jackets. Which leads me to my next thoughts…
It’s still too early too talk about who is getting ‘left out’ of the BCS and who the two teams that should be playing in the title game are. Too early. Way too much football to be played. I’ve heard people actually say that if all 7 teams went undefeated how unfair it would be to particular teams, etc. Like 7 teams are actually going to go undefeated! Not happening. Two of them play each other. How are they both going to be undefeated after that game? The most teams I can ever remember being undefeated at the end of the season is 3. So, the likelihood of 7 teams ending up without a loss is slim to none. USC will lose at least one more game so everyone can stop talking about how the computer polls rank them so low. The computers understand that the Washington loss was a bad loss and the USC defense has looked weaker and weaker as the weeks go by. And just because the humans despise the Big 10 and think that the best team in the Big 10 doesn’t deserve consideration and ranks Iowa poorly, that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be ranked highly in the BCS by the computers. The computers realize that all Iowa has done is win, that they have beat more teams with winning records than any other team country. Even though they have scraped by a few times, so has Florida, so has Alabama, so has Texas. Ohio State’s misfortunes in BCS title games is Iowa’s biggest enemy right now. Our biggest problem with the BCS is going to be the shear amount of one loss teams. Some of the numbers I look at when evaluating teams are turnovers, points per game (both scored and given up) and yards per point. According to one of my power polls that uses these stats, Cincinnati is the best team in the country. And yet, everyone discounts them as second class citizens. I’m not saying they should be the number one team, I’m just saying that statistically, there is no reason for people to dismiss them, especially as easily as they do. There will probably be 7 or 8 or those. I think the amount of 1 loss teams are going to be the biggest issue come season end. But hear this, I think the current BCS rankings are fine, I have no issue with how any team came out in the rankings except that maybe USC is ranked a spot or two above where they should be.
No one should ever try to understand the NCAA. Never. It will cause your head to explode. Want to know why people have brain anurizms? It’s becaue they are pondering NCAA rulings. The most recent one that bewilders me is Dez Bryant. I work at a law firm. I understand that lying is normally just as bad as committing the crime. In e-discovery there is term called spoliation. Spoliation basically means that once litigation has begun, deleting or losing data, either on accident or on purpose, then the missing data is considered to be incriminating, even if it wasn’t. You could simply be cleaning up your mp3 collection and blow up the entire case. So, I understand that what Bryant did was wrong and the severity of it. However, suspending him for not just the rest of this year, but into next season too is absurd. I hate it when they try to make statements when a case like this one is high profile and in the media. We don’t need a statement case just beacuse it’s being covered by the media more. Dez was apologetic and fessed up. All indications is that he’s a good kid that got nervous and made a mistake. Why not make a statement with someone who isn’t. It’ll make it to mainstream media if you do. I guess it just seems unfair to me that Bryant is effectively missing all of this season and parts of next season for jogging with a former NFL player who is not an agent and then Oregon is allowed to bring LaGarrett Blount back after 7 games when he sucker punched an opposing player on national TV on opening night of the season when everyone was watching. And Blount has a history of getting in trouble. He’s the one that should be told to never play college football again.