NCAA Tailgate Cleanup: Week Nine
Published October 30, 2006
From No. 1 Ohio State to the No. 119 team — which should be Temple, but that's another story — there's a lot of football to keep track of. No sweat. Blogcritics has appointed a crew to clean up the mess left each week on the co-ed stadiums across the country and summarize (for you, the infallible reader!) the top games, conference by conference.
There was just a ton of coast-to-coast weirdness this week. Two top ten teams lost on the road to unranked teams (Clemson to Virginia Tech, USC to Oregon State) and three others were a touchdown away from similar catastrophic setbacks (Tennessee at South Carolina, Auburn at Mississippi, Texas at Texas Tech). And none of us shall not speak of the happenings in Philadelphia, where Bowling Green lost to Temple.
ACC
It was more bad news for the ACC in Week 9 as No. 10 Clemson didn’t do well with the short work week and was totally outclassed by Virginia Tech 24-7 on national television this past Thursday night. After their stellar performance in crushing Georgia Tech last week, the Tigers didn’t look anything like a top 10 team in a game that wasn’t even as close as the lopsided score indicates.
Maryland surprised the punchless Florida State Seminoles 27-24, which sets up a surprisingly meaningful game between the Terps and Clemson this Saturday.
The ACC’s other top 25 teams avoided upsets this past weekend. Boston College defeated Rocky 5 member Buffalo 41-0. Georgia Tech put the final nail in Larry Coker’s coffin, as the Yellow Jackets came from behind to beat the Miami Hurricanes 30-23. And Wake Forest came from behind to beat UNC 24-17. Wake is off to its best start since 1979 and hosts BC in a monster game this weekend.
In the meaningless ACC games Virginia beat NC State 14-7, and in a game billed as the “SAT Bowl” Vanderbilt rolled over Duke 45-28. Duke has lost 16 straight games which is the nation’s longest losing streak.
Big XII
Recently, every season in the Big XII North takes the same turn just about now. The teams leading all season seem to falter. The race tightens up, and until the final week of the season, we have no idea who will be representing the division in the Championship game.
So why should this season be any different?
While Colorado didn't seem a full test of Oklahoma without Adrian Peterson, the way Missouri had been playing should have told us what Oklahoma still had in them. Apparently, the Sooners' tank is very full. Paul Thompson and Allen Patrick both had very good games, as they led Oklahoma to a 26-10 win over Missouri. Thompson threw for 127 yards and two touchdowns while Patrick contributed 162 yards on the ground. The Tigers had four turnovers in the game, including three interceptions by quarterback Chase Daniel.
Matt Sussman is the sports editor of BC Magazine and also writes for Deadspin, SPORTSbyBROOKS, The Futon Report, and the Toledo Free Press. Catch him Mondays and Fridays at 8 p.m. ET with asst. sports editor Tuffy on Treehouse Fort, the official show of BC Sports. E-mail sports-related inquiries (or inquiry-related sports, such as full-contact Twenty Questions) to matt.sussman@blogcritics.org.
- NCAA Tailgate Cleanup: Week Nine
- Published: October 30, 2006
- Type: News
- Section: Sports
- Filed Under: Sports: College, Sports: Football (American)
- Part of a feature: BC Tailgate
- Writer: Matthew T. Sussman
- Matthew T. Sussman's BC Writer page
- Matthew T. Sussman's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
Reader James Rishel alerted me of my screw up on the PSU/PU recap. I don't know what I was doing when I wrote that game up. I even watched the game; well, I flipped back and forth between the five 12:00 Big Ten games. Honestly, that game was the most boring of the five, so I spent the least amount of time with it. I was trying to finish my column before going to the Browns game and that's where my egregious error came to play.
Here's what happened in real life, not in my head:
PSU won with two field goals and a touchdown by Tony Hunt with a missed two point conversion.
Aw, you and your "facts" when it comes to my impeccable analogies.
Each week, there's at least one conference game that is absolutely unbearable to watch. I think I tricked myself into thinking it was worse than what it really was. Four field goals is far more boring than a touchdown, missed PAT, and two field goals.
Least informative blog on sports I've ever seen.
You guys don't know anything about football.
Why keep trying??? Go back to flipping burgers.
Hey Adam (Pac-10 writer),
There's this thing...it's called the Internet...you might want to consider using it for research before you post false information.
In the case of a tie, the Pac-10's Rose Bowl representative is determined by the winner of the head-to-head match-up. Period. That's it. If there's a three-way (or more) tie and each team has equal records against the others, they go to a comparison system vs. the other teams in the conference.
Only as a last resort is the "who hasn't been in the Rose Bowl the longest" rule applied. And that will never happen, especially now with the 9-game schedule in place.
Check it out for yourself at pac-10.org
Sorry about the tiebreaker error. I stand corrected.
Adam,
Don't apologize to that Pac-10, Bruin Lovin' fan. He likes the Pac-10. Does it really matter what the tie-breaker of the worst conference in all of collegiate sports is? They could flip a coin or throw darts at all of the teams and the nation would even bat an eye.
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(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/55058)
When did Krispy Kreme start serving turnovers?