Category Archives: ALDLAND

The de facto national championship preview: Everything else

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We’re less than an hour away from kickoff in the game some are calling the Grass Bowl, others are calling the Game of the Century, and we’re calling the de facto national championship. We’ve previewed the coaches, the players, and the fans. All that’s left is you, the viewer (assuming you didn’t spring for those $10,000 tickets).

  • If you’re a fan of one of these teams, your prediction is a foregone conclusion, but what about the rest of the country? According to Covers.com via Deadspin, Vegas likes Alabama as a 4.5 point favorite, but America likes LSU. So there’s that.
  • If numbers are not your bag, maybe the LSU/Alabama drinking game is more your style. Even if it’s too late to place a bet on the game (and I doubt it is), there’s still plenty of time to get set up with that thing.
  • In beard/viewer/fan news, there’s this.
  • Nick Saban has made it to the game and says hello.
  • I haven’t polled the other contributors, so I can’t offer a full slate of expert predictions for this game, but I’ll give you mine, which is worth less than the corndog you’re about to eat: LSU 28, Bama 24.
  • I think that’s it for the gameday news. Leave your comments below, or join us on twitter during the game.

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Previous de facto national championship coverage
The fans — 11/4
The players — 11/3
The coaches — 11/2
The de facto national championship – 11/1

The de facto national championship preview: The fans

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College football’s de facto national championship, #1 LSU vs. #2 Alabama, is tomorrow night. We’ve already previewed the coaches and players. That leaves the fans.

I am not a fan of either team, but I have seen both teams play a couple times and had a chance to observe their fans in person. I don’t remember much in particular about Alabama fans, except that I don’t care for their particular shade of redcrimson and there are some people who should not use houndstooth as a full-body-covering textile. I do remember LSU fans tailgating so hard it resulted in the permanent closing of the prime visitors’ tailgate area at Vanderbilt games.

Instead of extolling deep insights– of which I have none– about these two fan bases, and how they will affect the game atmosphere, which in turn will affect the game itself, I’ve collected (or are we supposed to say “curated” now, and what ever happened to mere “compiling”?) a few bullet-pointed items on the surely crazed fan bases of these two teams. I hereby reserve the right to add to this list without telling you I’ve done so. Reader submissions welcomed.

  • As of Monday of this week, ESPN reported that individual tickets to this game were going for $10,423.14. “Oh, and these aren’t even close to being the best seats out there. They are in the lower level of the end zone and in row 25. You can choose between seat 17 or 18. That doesn’t come with catered food or secure you from sitting behind someone who you might consider a giant.”
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  • Click to see the rest of this mess of fandom

Friday Bangs

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From the moment that the video for Bangs’ single Take U 2 Da Movies hit the web, I knew he would be a star.  Since then he has topped that song multiple times over, with such awesome tunes as Meet Me on Facebook and I’m Going to the Ghetto.  His musical prowess has propelled Bangs to such great heights as starring in his own Honda commercial.  While he is not super famous on this side of the Pacific Ocean yet, that will come in time.  With music this awesome, people will one day talk about Bangs in the same breath as they talk about The Beatles or Elvis.  Do yourself a favor and check out his two albums, Hard to Be Up and Reflections.  And hey, at your next Christmas party, why not throw on the best holiday song of all time, Christmas Story?

MLB Free Agency 2011

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I was hoping that this article would still be topical by the time I started writing it yesterday night, and lo and behold the only free agent of consequence to sign on November 3rd was Juan Rivera.  I have literally no idea who he is.  I watch at least a hundred Mariners games each year (MLB.tv FTW), plus a good number of Phillies games and even as much of a Tigers game as I can stomach now and then.  Between that and fantasy baseball, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on who’s who in the MLB and I had literally no idea who this guy was.*  So basically he wasn’t going to be on this list anyway.
 
Here is a list of ten of the top free agents and where I think they will sign:
 
Albert Pujols
2011 team: Cardinals
2012 team: Cardinals
Why: Everyone has been jawing all season long about Pujols testing the market, but I think a lot of that was ESPN puffing the subject up so they had something else to talk about during Sports Center besides whether Tom Brady having longer hair than Aaron Rodgers makes him a better QB.  When all is said and done, I think this is going to turn out like the Matt Holliday-STL deal where there weren’t a ton of other serious suitors for the money and the player didn’t want to leave St. Louis anyway.  Add in that two of the big free agent spenders, the Yankees and Red Sox already have top tier 1Bs and you don’t have anyone to seriously compete with the Cardinals at the price Pujols wants.  So in the end St. Louis will end up overpaying a bit, talking heads who said that Pujols would sign for 300 million will complain about how St. Louis overpaid, St. Louis fans will complain about how they overpaid, but inside everyone will be happy.
Outside shot: Real Madrid?  At that price, I don’t know.
Keep reading…

The de facto national championship preview: The players

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Yesterday’s de facto national championship preview focused on the coaches. Today’s looks at the players.

Alabama and LSU players were in the news before the season even started, which, given each team’s potential for success isn’t surprising by itself. That both teams’ players were in the preseason news for off-field reasons is notable, though. It may seem like an age ago, but Alabama was one of the places hit very hard by the tornadoes that devastated parts of the lower Midwest and Southeast earlier this year. Tuscaloosa was a direct hit. A month later, Sports Illustrated ran a cover story by Lars Anderson that is one of the most powerful sports pieces I’ve read. Facing personal losses themselves, the Tide football players nevertheless had to stand tall in a community and a state that looked to them– as they always had in good times– for support in bad times. Terror, Tragedy And Hope in Tuscaloosa.

LSU players made their way into the preseason, non-sports news in a manner less worthy of an emotional SI cover and an earnest letter home. Keep reading…

Lions not backing down from anyone (via Yahoo! Sports)

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Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the 2011 Lions, a team depicted as “evil” by the NFL’s own website even before they disrespected Tim Tebow.

Now allow me to let you in on a little secret: They just don’t give a damn.

In fact, there is a very clear message behind the Lions’ insolence: We’re not the pushovers we used to be. We’re here, we’re fierce – get used to it.

Determined to break an extended cycle of futility, the 6-2 Lions are exuding ‘tude at every turn. They are very much in step with the ethos of the city they call home: Tough, industrious, proud and very far from subtle.

Think transplanted “Beverly Hills Cop” detective Axel Foley meets “8 Mile” rapper “B-Rabbit” meets the 1980s Pistons Bad Boys, and you’ll get a sense of the way the Lions view themselves. … Read More

(via Yahoo! Sports)

The de facto national championship preview: The coaches

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In college football, players come and go, and it’s the coaches who are more likely to become the lasting face of a particular team. Adding to this is the common college football notion of coaching “systems.” Coaching in the NFL is more about coordinators and their “schemes”– the Wide Nine really isn’t a defensive “system,” and the Wildcat really isn’t an offensive one, though it may be offensive to some– although coaches have developed systems at that level, including Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense and Tony Dungy’s Tampa 2. Systems certainly are in play at the high school level, but they frequently are crazy and not at all viable even at the college level. Think Wing-T, A-11, and, of course, the Wishbone.

The major college level is the Goldilocks of coaching systems, however, and along with this comes coaching personalities and attitudes that can influence the on-field performance of the impressionable, yet quite capable yoots.  

This installment of our ongoing coverage of LSU vs. Alabama, the de facto national championship, therefore focuses on the two coaches …Keep reading…

The de facto national championship

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One of college football’s biggest challenges, from an institutional perspective, has been its ability to crown a consensus national champion at year’s end. The first memory I have of controversy in this regard was the 1997 split championship between Michigan and Nebraska that precipitated the implementation of the BCS in 1998. (I don’t know if that decision actually precipitated the BCS, because that system may have been in the works already, but it felt that way at the time.) The BCS did not bring peace and happiness across the land, however, and the criticism that started then– I recall writing an editorial on the arbitrariness of BCS outcomes as sports editor of a newspaper in the early 2000s– has only grown in scope and volume, even reaching the halls of the U.S. Senate and the Department of Justice, and the favors it grants upon certain athletic conferences certainly has been part of the fuel for the conference realignment conflagration that burns to this day.

By some magic mix of scheduling, on-field performance, coaching, recruiting, and everything else that goes into making one particular football game happen the way it happens and mean what it means, though, we have been gifted a national championship game this year that really is as free from controversy as one could imagine, a matchup of two undefeated teams, either of which could be ranked #1, playing in the toughest division of the toughest conference in the country, and largely dominating their opponents to this point. On Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, #1 LSU will meet #2 Alabama for what many see as the de facto national championship. The BCS’ noncomical Rube Goldberg machine may churn out a pairing at season’s end that will garner national consensus, but this Saturday’s game is a guarantee; it provides certainty and assurance, things the BCS largely has failed to give teams and fans since its inception.

In anticipation of this game, plan on daily coverage this week* from ALDLAND to get you ready for it.

* Disclosure: This is likely to severely decrease our unplanned coverage of the Breeders’ Cup. In our stead, I recommend the sports page of the Louisville Courier-Journal.