This was a rough weekend for most of ALDLAND’s teams, with Michigan State pulling another no-show, this time against extremely beatable Nebraska, and Vanderbilt blowing two opportunities to beat #8 Arkansas. Clemson’s offense forgot to show up and remind Georgia Tech that the Tigers don’t have a defense, and our own Magalan and commodawg went head to head for Georgia’s come-from-behind victory over the heavily penalized Florida Gators at the annual Cocktail Party game in Jacksonville.
The Florida-Georgia rivalry played out on Sunday, too, when the Lions met the Broncos in Denver. Georgia grad Matthew Stafford, along with Georgia Tech grad Calvin Johnson, led Detroit in a dominant victory over Florida grad Timothy Richard Tebow’s Denver team, the only bright spot of which was Knowshon Moreno, running back and Georgia alum.
Elsewhere in the NFL, the Rams got their first win, shocking New Orleans with Sam Bradford on the bench, the Dolphins came from ahead to stay winless, and the Colts lost to an underperforming Titans team. Watching Chris Johnson this year, one understands why he held out for a big payday at the start of this season.
Today really isn’t a big day, and most of the weekend’s football games were duds, but there were a couple notable exceptions.
Saturday day was pretty slow around the college football world, but things picked up Saturday night, when two unbeaten teams, Wisconsin and Oklahoma, put their perfect records to the test and failed to preserve them. In East Lansing, Michigan State made it two in a row against the Badgers. Wisconsin dominated early, but the Spartans seized the momentum and the lead, which they held for most of the game. In typical MSU fashion, though, their attention lapsed and Wisconsin was able to tie the game at 31. With no time on the clock, QB Kirk Cousins threw a Hail Mary (or “Rocket” pass in Dantonio terminology– we always seem to learn the names of his game-winning plays) to the endzone that bounced off B.J. Cunningham’s face and into the waiting hands of Keith Nichol, who muscled it across the goal line for the walk-off score:
That game finished in time to watch Texas Tech complete its victory over Oklahoma, a game the Red Raiders mostly dominated, although the Sooners threatened to make it interesting late, after most of their fans had left. (Vanderbilt wrapped up a homecoming win against Army before both of these games.)
On Sunday, the Lions dropped their second straight game and looked a lot like their old selves. Speaking of which, I saw former Lion QB Dan Orlovsky on the sidelines in Indianapolis during their loss in New Orleans, which made me think that, of the three defeated NFL teams– Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Miami– the Colts may actually be trying to lose all their games. Orlovsky has to be a better option than Curtis Painter. He certainly was a serviceable player for the Lions last year, and Painter is not that. The Rams are suffering from critical injuries at QB and RB, and the Dolphins, who need Andrew Luck most of these three, really just are that bad. But Jim Caldwell’s decision to go with Painter over Orlovsky supports the notion that Indy is tanking this, although they really are pretty bad all on their own too. On the topic of rookie quarterbacks, Cam Newton turned his record-breaking stat parade into a win for Carolina, and Tim Tebow did what Tim Tebow now does, apparently, in his first start for Denver, coming from behind to beat the aforementioned and still hapless Dolphins in Miami.
In hockey, the Washington Capitals dealt the Detroit Red Wings their first loss of the year in a 7-1 Capitals home win.
And there used to be three men known as Marcus Lattimore, Steve Spurrier, and Stephen Garcia.
Within the last week or so, though, all that has changed. First, quarterback Garcia, who’d shown flashes of brilliance on and off the field, but not nearly as much of the former as the latter, got himself kicked of the team for failing a drug test.
In their first game without Garcia, young backup Connor Shaw helped lead the team to a gutty two-point victory over Mississippi State last Saturday, but the Gamecocks lost Heisman-caliber running back Lattimore to a season-ending knee injury. For many, this team was the favorite to win a weak SEC East, but without Lattimore, it’s tough to see much success left for SC this season.
And that brings us to the OBC. In seven years in Columbia, Spurrier has a 50-34 record, which stands in marked contrast to his overall NCAA coaching record (186-73-2), to say nothing of his record at Florida (122-27-1). Known as a quarterback specialist (due in no small part to winning a Heisman Trophy himself as a Gator QB), he’s struggled to develop quarterback talent for SC, where he’s given his starters (and some reporters) very short leashes.
But the Ol’ Ball Coach, bowling his headset like a dilapidated yo-yo seemingly with even greater frequency of late, definitely has looked ol'(d). A coach only is as good as his players. With an inexperienced quarterback and without his star running back, things very suddenly are looking very bleak in Columbia.
I made it into town on Friday night in time for a ceremonial pregame dinner at Music City’s finest anti-internet fried chicken establishment and a chance meeting with Taylor Hicks, and I was up the next morning to watch the early games (11:00 am Central) at Nashville’s newest sports bar. After victories by our party’s favored teams, Michigan State and South Carolina, we made our way to our usual tailgate spot, the sunny, low-70s weather being perfect for the activity.
Like most of Vanderbilt’s conference foes, Georgia is on the winning side of a lopsided record that stretches back to 1893. Saturday’s game followed suit, omitting the adjectives. Georgia won, but not handily (much to commodawg’s chagrin), as Vanderbilt missed three game-winning opportunities in the final seconds. Milking a five-point lead, the Dawgs tried to run out the clock, but defense and Vandy’s use of its two remaining timeouts forced a Georgia punt that Vanderbilt blocked. With nothing between them and the endzone but a loose ball, the Vanderbilt defenders were unable to scoop it up and run it in, falling on the bouncing ball instead. With eight seconds left in the game, QB Jordan Rodgers took two strikes at the endzone from about twenty-five yards out, but the Commodores were unable to convert.
Our seats were good for watching the game, but they didn’t allow us to gain any particular insights on the postgame scuffle between Vanderbilt head coach James Franklin and a Georgia assistant coach or the alleged dirty play on Georgia’s part that may have instigated it. Keep reading…
While this Saturday features a full slate of college games, Sunday will see the Lions and Packers each try to push their records to 6-0 against the 49ers and Rams, respectively, and the conclusion of the ALCS, ALDLAND is highlighting two of the college games for special attention.
First up is the noon o’clock (Eastern) meeting between Michigan and Michigan State in East Lansing. State has taken the last three games in the series, but this year feels like a tipping point. MSU is the better team, but its stock is falling right now, while the undefeated Wolverines’ stock seems to be rising weekly. The question is, where on the relative spectrum will these two teams be when they face off on Saturday? Michigan may be rolling right now, but it’s a home game for the Spartans, who have had two weeks to get ready for this one. Of course, with a team that has had discipline problems even under coach Mark Dantonio, that extra time off could cut either way.
The featured night game is in Nashville, where Georgia (4-2 (3-1)) will take on Vanderbilt (3-2 (1-2)), and commodawg and I will be in attendance. The obvious subtext, to readers of this site, will be the conflicting allegiances of the two writers. There is a less obvious game within a game going on here too, however. While we aren’t quite talking about The Inner Game of Tennis, the future trajectories of these two programs also are at stake, to some degree, on Saturday night.
The reason is recruiting. Vandy has made inroads in Georgia in recent years, and first-year coach James Franklin has been putting in a lot of effort there so far in his short tenure. The university has been encouraging fans to show up early (contrary to current tradition) because a large number of recruits are scheduled to be at the game for their official visit. From Stanimal at Vanderbilt Sports Line:
If there has ever been a more important weekend in Vanderbilt history in terms of recruiting, this is it. Unlike previous years, Coach Franklin has made a committment to competing with the rest of the SEC and the nation as a whole for top-shelf talent. He is not afraid to go after anyone, and he and his staff have worked very, very hard to get these kids interested in Vanderbilt. In no other state is this more apparent than in Georgia, where CJF has made massive in-roads in one of the best high school football states in the country. For a lot of these kids visiting this weekend (and we are talking some very high-level prospects), they are deciding whether to wear their black with Bulldog red or Commodore gold. This does NOT need to be a free recruiting visit for Mark Richt and his crew. It needs to be a show that this University and its fan base is behind Coach Franklin, his players, his staff, and this team.
His full call to action is available here. What effect this will have on our tailgating plans is not yet clear. As usual, readers can expect coverage of the game and the weekend here and on twitter and flickr.
Across the state, the weather had been somewhat crummy all week. I got into town on Friday night hoping to watch Game 1 of Tigers-Yankees. I thought I might’ve seen snow in Ann Arbor, but everyone saw rain in NYC, necessitating a suspension of that game after about an inning of play. Our Saturday-morning tailgate (for a noon game) was a cloudy windstorm punctuated by grilled bratwurst. It turns out that those are the best kind of windstorms. Even better was that things calmed down and the sun came out just in time for kickoff.
I cannot immediately recall a more one-sided game between teams in equivalent classifications above the high school level. I’m told Minnesota was without its senior quarterback. Given that the Gophers have a win on the year and apparently played USC close, he probably deserves some Heisman votes even if he doesn’t take another snap. It wasn’t so much that Minnesota made a lot of mistakes– they only had one turnover, which I predicted right before the play occurred– as that they just couldn’t function on either side of the ball, while Michigan seemed to gain an easy 8-10 yards on every play.
And thus Michigan improbably moves to 5-0. I want to say they aren’t as good as their record, but I’m really not sure anyone has a basis to say anything about them because, outside of the strange Notre Dame game, they really haven’t been tested. The next two weeks will provide that test, though, as they go on the road for the first time this season, first at Northwestern and then at Michigan State.
Look for ALDLAND to take you to a couple more Big Ten games this year, and maybe even another SEC game.
It’s First Monday over at the Supreme Court, and this Monday feels like a pretty good one here in ALDLAND too. Of course, half the teams that played this weekend lost, but, fortunately, the teams I was tracking were not in that half of the teams.
More on the Little Brown Jug schellacking I witnessed later. In Columbus, Michigan State gutted out (aka failed to choke away) an ugly win, and their sister Southern school, Clemson, dominated Virginia Technological Institute. Illinois had an exciting win at home against would-be in-state rival Northwestern, and Wisconsin welcomed Nebraska to the Big Ten by beating them by a lot of points while keeping them from scoring many in Camp Randall.
In baseball, the ALDS between the Yankees and Tigers got off to an awkward start due to wet Gotham weather. Detroit comes home today with a split in the Bronx and the aces back on the mound tonight. The rain suspension on Friday night means Verlander and Sabathia effectively will appear only once in this best-of-five series. It also means that A.J. Burnett probably will have to go for the Yankees, and he is not very good these days.
Back to football, the Lions overcame a 20+ point deficit on the road for the second straight week, an NFL first, handing Dallas their worst ever come-from-ahead defeat. (The twenty-four-point third-quarter deficit made it the largest road comeback in NFL history.) Two pick-sixes and a third interception by the Detroit defense spurred Matthew Stafford, Calvin Johnson, and the Lions offense into action. The undefeated Lions meet the 2-2 Bears next week on Monday night.
Unlike the other BCS conferences, the Big Ten hasn’t yet begun conference play. That changes this week, though, with a slate of exciting matchups.
Number 8 Nebraska heads to Camp Randall to take on the #7 Wisconsin Badgers in the weekend’s biggest B1G (when did that start, by the way?) game. Suffice to say by the words alone, this is a Big game, making no mention of the large, corn-fed humans who will be colliding with each other throughout the contest. This is Nebraska’s first game in their new conference. Both teams have the same colors, which will make the Huskers feel welcome.
Saturday’s Big Ten schedule also includes Northwestern in Champaign and non-conference Notre Dame headed to West Lafayette to take on Purdue. That pairing leaves Indiana out in the cold, but they get to stay at home and host Penn State in a game that promises to be ugly and unwatched.
Besides Nebraska/Wisconsin, the other major conference matchup is Michigan State at Ohio State. After putting MSU on a one-week suspension last week for their zombie-like performance against Notre Dame the week before, I’m looking for them to make a statement and win a close one in Columbus that finds them ahead early and not quite choking it away late in the fourth quarter.
That leaves one game, a noon contest between 1-3 Minnesota and improbably 4-0 Michigan at the Big House in Ann Arbor to decide the rights to the Little Brown Jug. The Jug is the oldest rivalry trophy, given to the winner of the Michigan-Minnesota game since their 6-6 tie in 1903. For more on the Jug, including a short video of an old man sharing overly dramatic Jug lore in a noticeably informal setting, click here.
The point of all of this Jug business is that, just like ALDLAND took you live to the opening of the college football season (see here and here), so too will ALDLAND take you live to Ann Arbor for the opening of the Big Ten season. In addition to the game, I will attempt to decipher the particulars of the conference’s new divisions, Legends and Leaders, although I suspect that will be impossible, and I’ll be left with Mark Titus’ conclusion: call them Razzle and Dazzle and be done with it.
Just like last time, stay tuned here, on twitter, and on flickr for updates throughout the weekend, along with a recap next week.
The Colts have not contacted free agent QB David Garrard. With the inept Kerry Collins being evaluated for a concussion and Peyton Manning (neck) likely out for the season, Colts fans are clamoring for an addition. But the team might be best off going with Collins and Curtis Painter, thus entering themselves in the Suck for Luck sweepstakes. The Colts have not shown any interest in Kurt Warner or Marc Bulger either, although they are both retired anyway.
I was thinking last night that Indy should make a move for Garrard, whom Jacksonville almost certainly shouldn’t have let go. They probably will have to lose every game– something of which they’re undoubtedly capable– to get Andrew Luck, but it still is amazing to think that a team like the Colts would even be in a position where flushing a season looked like the team’s best (and possibly only) option. Keep reading…
Elsewhere in the NFL, the Rams got their first win, shocking New Orleans with Sam Bradford on the bench, the Dolphins came from ahead to stay winless, and the Colts lost to an underperforming Titans team. Watching Chris Johnson this year, one understands why he held out for a big payday at the start of this season.
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