Nebraska makes its first-ever trip to the Big House in Ann Arbor this weekend, and ALDLAND will be there. Grantland has named this meeting its Big Ole Game of the week, and why not. Their feature recalls this clip from the last play of the last game in which these two teams met:
They also place this game in the context of setting up the first-ever Big Ten championship game: Keep reading…
This weekend I had the opportunity to travel to Champaign to see the Michigan Wolverines take on the Illinois Fighting Illini. Those of you who know me are probably surprised that I even left the house this weekend, given that I had to save the world from both terrorists and dragons. But $65 tickets can’t be passed up, and luckily both the terrorists and dragons were there when I got back.
I got into Champaign with my friend about two hours before game time. My suggestion to any ALDLAND readers contemplating attending a game at Illinois is to get there earlier, because finding parking can sometimes be tough. By the time we parked, there was maybe an hour and a half to get our tickets from will call and head into downtown Champaign for lunch at Giovanti’s before the game. If you hit up Giovanti’s, get the chicken tenders, which are pretty awesome. The curly fries are not to be missed either.
Another reason to get to the game as early as possible is the tailgating scene. While we did not get a chance to tailgate, we did walk by various parking lots on our way to lunch, and from what I saw, I could tell that Illinois fans know how to tailgate. Most of the tailgates we passed by seemed to have ample food, drink and fun games to play like bean bag toss or that other game where you throw the little balls that are connected by a rope onto a ladder-like thing. You know what I’m talking about.
After lunch, we walked back to Memorial Stadium, getting into our seats in the very last row of the upper deck just before kickoff. They were not the best seats for someone like me who is not thrilled with heights, but that’s what I get for ordering them a week before the game. Memorial Stadium is a nice venue, holding about 60,000 fans and offering an unobstructed view to every one of them (unless you are looking at the scoreboard, because from our seats some sort of tower-like structure partially blocked our view of the scoreboard).
The game started with Michigan receiving the ball. Illinois’ run defense, which before the game was listed as one of their strengths, promptly let Michigan tailback Fitzgerald Toussaint bounce outside for a 60+ yard gain. A couple plays later, and Denard was in the end zone for Michigan’s first touchdown. Keep reading…
Another tough weekend for many of the teams followed with particularity here. Results were mixed, and it gets complicated now that college basketball is in full swing, but it’s somewhat remarkable how losses hurt more than wins feel good.
In the win column, MSU avenged last year’s embarrassing loss with a solid win at Iowa, and Vanderbilt demolished Kentucky at home. Clemson bounced back with a narrow win against Wake Forest, while other notable top 25 teams took their first losses of the season. Oregon was all over Stanford in Palo Alto, and Boise State fell at home to TCU on a missed last-second field goal, which sounds familiar. That leaves LSU and Oklahoma State atop the BCS rankings at 10-0. Houston, also 10-0, comes in at eleventh.
This morning, the eponymous hosts of ESPN Radio’s morning show, Mike & Mike, were discussing Kirk Herbstreit’s assessment of the final few games of the season, which, to Herbstreit, set up much like a playoff this year. The would-be national championship contenders, LSU and Oklahoma State, each face difficult tests over this final stretch. The former still must face Arkansas and probably Georgia in the SEC championship game, while the latter has to play Iowa State in Ames before taking on rival Oklahoma at home. Waiting in the wings should either team lose are Alabama and Oregon. Greenberg pointed out that the only thing Alabama and Oregon have in common this year is a loss to LSU (the Tigers beat Alabama last week in Tuscaloosa, and they beat Oregon on a neutral field to start the season), and both Mikes then roundly rejected as undesirable any scenarios in which these two teams would leap over a one-loss LSU team to play for the national championship, exclaiming that this is why college football needs a playoff system.
The problem is that that sort of result is exactly what happens in a playoff system. In the NFL, it doesn’t matter when you lose, or how badly you lose, and to the extent it matters to whom you lose, predetermined, objective organizational and tie-breaking rules determine the consequences. For many reasons, the analogy isn’t perfect, but those wishing for a college football playoff must abandon certain mentalities of the current system, including the way we think about losses. If we take Herbstreit’s conceptual approach to these last few games of the season and consider them “like a playoff,” then we shouldn’t reject an outcome the way the Mikes did today. In a playoff system, once you’re in the playoffs, what happened before doesn’t matter (seeding and byes and such aside). Once you meet the qualifications to get into the playoffs, all that matters is that you “survive and advance,” to use Tom Izzo’s words. And the NCAA basketball tournament provides a ready analogy. Although they made it interesting early and didn’t give up late, Michigan State fell to UNC by a decent margin in a majestically set game on Friday night. If UNC also beats Duke this season, but MSU and Duke ended up facing each other in the tournament finals, no one would have a complaint about the legitimacy of that pairing. Similarly, if these last few college football games are seen as “the playoffs,” we shouldn’t care exactly how LSU, Alabama, and Oregon got to this point; rather, all that matters is what they do now and going forward.
On the topic of not caring, Vandy basketball embarrassed themselves at home in a 71-58 loss to Cleveland State, and the Lions looked abysmal in a 37-13 loss at Soldier Field that wasn’t even that close.
I can’t add a lot to what’s been written about the facts of the burgeoning scandal at Penn State, except to tell you how strange it feels to type the phrase “burgeoning scandal at Penn State.” I know that I’m in denial. I know that I’m working through multiple layers of anger and disgust and neurosis and angst. I know that I’m too emotionally attached to the situation to offer any kind of objective take, though I don’t think I realized how emotionally attached I was until this occurred. I never understood how much of an effect both football and a sense of place had on my persona. I apologize if what follows seems disjointed, because I am still coming to terms with the fact that this is real. “What can I say?” my mom wrote me from State College on Monday afternoon. “We’re sort of going around in a daze.”
. . .
I have two close friends, a husband and wife, both alums, who moved to State College from New York City a few years ago. They did this because they couldn’t afford to raise children in Manhattan, but they also did it because he couldn’t imagine a safer place to raise their kids than a little town in a valley situated three hours from everywhere. I don’t know what it feels like to grow up there now. I want these things to disappear from my consciousness, but they won’t. The place where I grew up is gone, and it’s not coming back. … Read More
(via Grantland)
In what was to be the best game of the college football season, LSU marched into Tuscaloosa on Saturday night and beat Alabama on an overtime field goal by Drew Alleman for a 9-6 win. Alabama missed four field goals, including all three they tried in the first quarter, and failed to convert in their first and only overtime possession. Neither team made it into the end zone in this meeting of two of the best defenses in the country. Alabama’s Trent Richardson found some running success, and I thought Alabama played slightly better overall, but it wasn’t enough, as they failed to take advantage of numerous opportunities, including two interceptions of Jarrett Lee. Following Lee’s interceptions, Jordan Jefferson largely took over the quarterback position, possibly raising questions about the starting position going forward. The loss dropped the Tide to third in the BCS rankings, making way for Oklahoma State to take the number two position. Unbeatens Stanford and Boise State round out the top five.
On the pro side, a twist in the Andrew Luck sweepstakes, as Miami beat K.C. for their first win of the season, leaving Indianapolis as they only totally defeated team at 0-9. As I’ve said from day one, this Colts team has what it takes to go 0-16. It won’t be easy, of course– their remaining schedule includes two games against Jacksonville and one each against unpredictables Carolina and Tennessee. Despite these hurdles, I’m unwavering in my prediction. Of note on the winning side of things, the 49ers and Bengals each are on minor tears, and the Lions defeated the Bye Week by an unrecorded margin.
At Churchill Downs in Louisville, this year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic turned in a very exciting race:
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).
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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
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.
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…
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…
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.
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