Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 13 – Rivalry Madness!

Time marches on, and the old sanctity of Rivalry Weekend at Thanksgiving has been diluted a bit in the last few years what with COVID scheduling, conference osmosis, and the rise and fall of Inevitable Champions.  It would have been hard to imagine Bedlam outside of Thanksgiving weekend, back in that antediluvian year 2019, but now that OU is committed to the SEC move, we’ll have to get used to holding the game Whenever (maybe in Week 0.5, in Singapore, or something).

Anyway, we all know who’s got something really big to settle – Ohio State and Michigan, silly (Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler rise from the pumpkin patch…) – and the rest of it’s all good, even if the odds are it won’t be that significant to the C%FPozzlesquat, given that things are mostly going as expected.

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Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 12

For some reason we’re always a bit suspicious of high rankings for Oregon, but we admit, the loss to Washington last week was unexpected.  Let the “what ifs?” now proliferate, for the PAC 12 and yea, even unto the C#@Pflugenheimer.

For some other reason (probably; though in a metaphysical sense who knows), we had major computer problems this past weekend, and had no means of chiming in with the usual facts & insights as football did its roll.  It appears that running a diagnostic and system clean-up has put the evil boxes back on the path of righteousness.

We can’t proceed with this week’s Follies without mentioning the heartbreaking loss suffered by the Virginia Cavaliers on Sunday night in the shooting of a team charter bus.

Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 11

Naturally, the immediate result of the CF*P$quirt ranking was a royal upending of it with LSU’s defeat of Alabama.  I’m not convinced that that game, or Clemson’s loss, justified putting TCU at #4, but unless SMOD hits between now and Saturday, when our Inner Circle Frogs take on Texas, we’ll just see, won’t we?

The Thrilla in Toledo was a lot of fun on Tuesday night.  What a finish by the Rockets in a hard-fought game.  The go-ahead TD with 74 seconds left, and a pick afterward to seal the deal.  Nice!  The Rockets are just where they need to be for the MAC title contest.  As mentioned in the comments on the Week 10 post, Toledo and Ball State both had impressive pass defense, especially with the secondary coverage.  Ball State was a bit more prone to attract yellow flags with it.

The MAC has three games in progress as we type (Wednesday night),

Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 10 – MAC Rising

The sports babble earlier this week was all about the alarming CF&P+BXYZ ranking emitted via smoke signals and hand puppets, and we’ll get to that.  We, personally, are not alarmed, though we’re a touch skeptical.

But more importantly, it’s time for our annual MAC Attack! – and as so often, it couldn’t come soon enough.  Politics is on the highest volume setting and likely to be so for weeks, if promises from the media about how long it’s going to take to count the vote are an indication.

So it’s a major relief when the MAC starts playing weeknights as November steals in.  Between the MAC and the World Series, there are quality ways to do a little recreating in the den without having to listen to all the vociferous talking-head yelping.  So far this week,

Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 9

We assume everyone is getting ready for a Thursday night session with one of our own, as one of the bigger Inner Circle clashes of the year impends.  More below.

Utah will also be at Washington State Thursday night, but we wouldn’t dream of bothering you with that.  We do note that the 3-1 Youths are only laying 7, in spite of being categorically a better team than the 1-3 Cougars, and it’s a big game for the PAC-12 standings at this point.  But it’s awfully late for the East coast.  You can check highlights afterward.

It all feels kind of ephemeral and sad anyway, given the reminder from the PAC-12 commissioner this week that fans are “not in favor” of the USC and UCLA move to the Big 10.  (We’ve been kind of numb since the Chargers moved out of San Diego; we’ll start processing the Trojans and Bruins at some point, but not yet.  We still have to deal with Oklahoma and Texas.)