Skip to main content

Polls and Polls; My Lousy Picks

New poll on your right; and we're #21 in the Any Given Saturday and #20 in the Sports Network polls. This could be a very good thing should Lehigh run the table the rest of the way. You know that some of the teams above them in the polls will fall when all is said and done. Lehigh should have an opportunity, no matter what happens with Holy Cross, to be able to qualify for the playoffs, as long as they win games.

I think we re going to see what Lehigh is made of next Saturday. I think we're going to see a mad, dangerous team that will be playing at their best. I think when the Mountain Hawks play at their best, they can beat anyone in the country. The only question is, will they play their best for 6 more games this season? The Yale game will be the answer to that question.

My Lousy Picks
4-2 Patriot, combined with a horrible 8-12 in the rest of the Top 25, equals a 12-14 record. Incredibly lousy. Good thing I don't do this for a living (contrary what you might believe).

Really Right: UMass 27, N'Eastern 0. One of my few bright spots was predicting a UMass shutout. Sure, mine was 16-0, but I'll take it however I can this week.
Should Have Been Right: Western Kentucky 37, Illinois St. 34. The Redbirds couldn't hold the Hilltoppers for 50 freakin' seconds, then they lose it in OT? I knew it would be close - I had ISU 21, WKU 17 - but I thought Illinois St. could get it done when it counted. Obviously not.
Was I Ever Wrong!: Hampton 52, Gardner-Webb 21. You could have picked any number of my picks for this dubious honor this week, but my big mistake was thinking any Big South team had any business being in the same league as Hampton. This blowout was never close. Note to self: Hampton is nationally-ranked for a reason.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who