College football week 9 thread: The Midshipmen Who Stare at Goats

Update: I think it's possible for the ACC to have three teams go 8-0 in conference play: Miami, Clemson and SMU.

 

Found out today one of our dogs, dogs we rescued two years ago from an older woman who couldn’t care for them anymore, has an aggressive form of bone cancer and we have maybe six months.

So I kinda needed this tonight.

Hail to fuckin’ Pitt. No excuse to not be 8-1 going into the Clemson game.

 

Bama rang up a Pick 18 on Texas A&M back in 2015. Wasn’t all in the first half though.

 

Sorry to hear that. Hell, I'm not giving up on 9-0 going into the game against Clemson. I just wish Narduzzi wasn't stupid enough to endanger his quarterback in the fourth quarter of a blowout tonight.

 

Hell Syracuse played McCord the entire game

 

I know, which also seemed like some odd form of punishment for all those interceptions.

I don't even mind that Holstein was still in the game, but maybe stop with the designed quarterback runs in that situation. Maybe don't have the backup throwing the ball with under two minutes left of the blowout, too.

 

Watch Navy - Notre Dame. Odds are that ND wins, 'cause they can run it up the middle on them, but it shouldn't be a walkover. Navy prolly beats the spread and it isn't inconceivable that they win. Their offense gives defenses fits, because they don't give you anything solid to read, plus they throw a lot of motion and eye candy at you. You'll find your eyes following a fake and someone else is eight yards upfield. It's not just a veer... they grafted the single wing and a pro passing attack onto it. They don't throw much, but when they do it's usually over all the D that has crept up into the box to try to stop the run. Really interesting offense, I've never seen anything quite like it.

Their QB is a stud too, for a service academy guy. Might be a blowout, might be a really entertaining game.

 

Will Levis has accepted the challenge

 

The Navy offense will have to be good because, like most years, I think the Middies’ defense will struggle to stop the Irish.

While the novelty and expertise in running the option usually allows the service academies to offset their talent differential on offense, they don’t have the same scheme advantage on defense. And by this point in the season, if there are injuries, Army, Navy and Air Force don’t have the depth that other FBS teams do.

 

This summer, we did a feature obit on a guy who was the son of one of our more famous football coaches. Quarterbacked for the dad for a while, did a pretty good job as an assistant after that, and we found out his dad left him in once in the 1980s to throw six picks in one game. We left that out of the obit but it's come up several times in the last couple weeks. We were joking tonight that McCord might get a "Full (That Guy's Name)"

As for gambling, still not legal in Minnesota, and I don't have the time and energy to F around offshore or elsewhere, though the FFL league is proposing the low scorer fronts $10 for a parlay in which everyone else in the league picks one leg the following week.

As an experiment, in 2023, I placed one bet for an imaginary $10 each day, and my rules were I couldn't repeat sports or methods on consecutive days (so NFL vs. the spread one day, CMBB total the next, NHL ML the next) and no teams that I followed or that our paper covered (for additional knowledge). On New Year's Eve, I was up 36%. Continued a couple months into 2024 before I got bored. I had eaten into that margin a fair amount. Not sure if I'd ever want to put real money on it. Gambling was a no-no in my very Methodist upbringing.

 

This Pitt team feels like fools gold at 7-0, having not played a complete game on offense or defense yet, but I'll gladly take it after last year's 3-9 disaster.

 

Yes. You should absolutely take an undefeated team heading into November no matter how suspect it may seem under the hood. Ask me how I know.