Monday, September 03, 2007

Touchdown Jesus and Ann Arbor Got Worked Over At the Football Orgy

Now that the hangover has lifted and the dust has settled, it's time to take a quick look back at what was a very entertaining opening weekend of college football:

While Lloyd Carr will deservedly be on the hot seat after the Wolverines' historic loss, it was actually poor coaching by Appalachian State that provided viewers with such a frenetic finish. Trailing 32-32 with no timeouts remaining, App State drove down to the Michigan five yard line for a first down with 30 seconds remaining in the game, at which time Michigan called timeout. Even tho App State didn't have a timeout to rely on, 30 seconds would have been plenty of time for the Mountaineers to run a play up the middle (or more conservatively, take a knee), then line-up and wait to spike the ball with little time remaining so that the field goal attempt would be the last play of the game. Or at the very least, force Michigan to burn one more timeout before kicking the field goal. Instead, coach Jerry Moore elected to kick the field goal on 1st down and left 26 seconds on the clock for Michigan to respond. Then with 15 seconds left and Michigan at their own 34 and needing to go deep, App State called a defense that somehow allowed Mario Manningham to be single covered running down the sideline for a 46 yard bomb that put Michigan in field goal range. Fortunately for the Mountaineers, their kick block team was able to salvage the upset victory; however they never would have been put in that position in the first place if it weren't for some very shoddy coaching decisions...

If you're a Wolverines fan still mourning this weekend's loss, perhaps you can find solace in this glass-half-full stat: Never has a top 25 team that lost to a I-AA team not won the national championship in that same year. So see? There's still hope.

The person most disappointed by Michigan's early loss is Jim Harbaugh, who undoubtedly believed that he had a few years to make an impression at Stanford in order to get consideration to be Carr's successor at Michigan. Now it appears that Carr has to be given the boot sooner rather than later, and I doubt that's enough time for Harbaugh to establish himself. However despite a 45-17 loss, Jim Harbaugh's debut has to be considered a success if for no other reason than that unlike his predecessor, Walt Harris, Harbaugh actually appeared to be aware that there was a football game being played on the field; and the object was to score points while preventing the other team from doing the same. In Palo Alto, that's progress...

The best development to come out the UCLA-Stanford game for Bruins fans may have been that Kai Forbath, UCLA's kicker, missed two field goal attempts. Perhaps now, whenever the Bruins get inside an opponent's 30 yard line, Karl Dorrell may have to actually focus on getting the ball in the end zone instead of being satisfied with just reaching field goal range...

I'd like to apologize to Brady Quinn for all the times when I suggested that he was just a product of Charlie Weis's system at Notre Dame. As we all saw Saturday, the system really isn't all that great...

I'd also like to apologize for dreaming of a 0-8 start for the Irish. I was selling their ninth opponent, Air Force, short. The Falcons certainly have enough talent to keep the Irish winless through nine...

Notre Dame fans are really wishing that Darius Walker had returned for his senior year. For that matter, Darius Walker really wishes that Darius Walker had returned for his senior year. I don't know just how good of a year the Irish could have had with Walker on the team, but for Darius it would have had to have been a better year than sitting on the practice squad for the Houston Texans will be...

"Everyone just go deep" stat of the day: Tim Tebow threw for 300 yards. On only 13 completions...

There have only been two wide receivers to ever win the Heisman trophy award, and both of them also returned punts (Tim Brown 1987, Desmond Howard 1991). It's a longshot, but with his performance against Tennessee on national tv, DeSean Jackson just put his name in contention to become the third.

Colin Cowherd is now part of one of ESPN's announcing teams, and while I'll admit that I was rooting against him, I also must admit that as far as ESPN talking heads being put in the booth go, Cowherd is vastly superior to his NFL counterpart, Tony Kornheiser. Cowherd chose to work the game as a straight-forward analyst, and while I don't think his qualifications in that arena are any stronger than those of anyone reading this site, I'd still rather hear someone with that approach as opposed to someone just looking for moments to squeeze in the one-liners they wrote down the night before...

Finally, you might think that there isn't a food in existence that corpulent Kansas head coach Mark Mangino doesn't enjoy. But as it turns out, he isn't the biggest fan of hot dogs (audio, NSFW but quite entertaining...Hat tip: Every Day Should Be Saturday):

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1 Comments:

At Thu Sep 06, 11:04:00 AM PDT , Blogger Jake Lloyd said...

Hey,
I enjoy reading your insightful and informative writing. I’ve added a link to your site on mine, http://thesportscolumnist.blogspot.com/. If you get a chance, check out my site and feel free to comment on any of my material or add a link to my site.

Thanks,
Jake Lloyd

 

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