Rusty’s Blog

The essence of college football fandom is to revel in the theft of someone else’s joy. It’s a nice bonus when you can commandeer that joy for yourself, but it’s not totally necessary to consider an afternoon a success.

From that standpoint, there are worse things than Tennessee being winless in the SEC. Georgia spanked the Vols in Sanford Stadium this past Saturday, true. But since the Vols entered the game with a dismal record against meager competition and no reasonable expectation of victory, there was no joy remaining for Bulldog Nation to steal from the Tennessee faithful.

That, Russell, explains your malaise when the book was closed.

Once you factor in UGA’s red zone blunders and subsequent inability to translate yardage into points, it wouldn’t be outlandish to describe the game as a karmic wash.

Plus, there was Eric Berry’s immensely-satisfying (and perhaps dirty) hit on Knowshon Moreno:

Bon appétit.

Housekeeping notes

• I’m having surgery Monday and will likely sleep through Monday and Tuesday thanks to some prescription narcotics. Fortunately, a couple of (little v) volunteers have offered to enter the betting lines in the comments section. Those hopefully will be in place Monday night for you to base your picks on.
• You may have noticed the ridiculous lead rugbyfan just opened up in the overall standings. This is due to a well-placed side bet with Archibald, whose drop in the rankings is equally as stunning aesthetically. Obviously, we will all be expected to place some side bets as the contest progresses to close this gap. If you don’t remember how side bets works, read this comment.
• The I’s have spoken by a margin of 6 to 4 (including poll results and Alyssa’s comment), and Reggie wins last week’s tiebreaker. Moving forward, we will go with margin of victory over total points scored in counting Game of the Week tiebreaker scores.

Results

Week 7

Player	Points
Carl Lindecrantz	11
Jen	10
rugbyfan	8
Alyssa	7
Archibald Throngbow	7
Ben K	7
Griftdrift	7
Rusty	7
Tony	7
Garrett	6
Reginald	6
Sara	5
Tony Ventry	5

The full results spreadsheet for week 7 is here. If you find an error, let me know and I’ll adjust the results.

Overall standings

Player	Points
rugbyfan	98
Rusty	67
Carl Lindecrantz	63
Ben K	61
Griftdrift	59
Tony	59
Garrett	58
Tony Ventry	58
Jen	55
Reginald	55
Sara	55
Alyssa	49
Archibald Throngbow	8

The full overall standings with week-by-week scores and side wager results can be found here.

Week 8 schedule

Thursday, Oct. 16

Time	Game	Line
8:00 PM ET	Brigham Young (8) at Texas Christian (24)	See comments section Monday night *

Friday, Oct. 17

Time	Game	Line
8:00 PM ET	Hawaii at Boise State (16)	See comments section Monday night *

Saturday, Oct. 18

Time	Game	Line
12:30 PM ET	Vanderbilt (23) at Georgia (9)	See comments section Monday night *
2:00 PM ET	Colorado State at Utah (13)	See comments section Monday night *
3:00 PM ET	Baylor at Oklahoma State (10)	See comments section Monday night *
3:30 PM ET	Mississippi at Alabama (2)	See comments section Monday night *
3:30 PM ET	USC (4) at Washington State	See comments section Monday night *
3:30 PM ET	Ohio State (11) at Michigan State (17)	See comments section Monday night *
3:00 PM ET	North Carolina (21) at Virginia	See comments section Monday night *
4:30 PM ET	Michigan at Penn State (3)	See comments section Monday night *
8:00 PM ET	Missouri (12) at Texas (1)	See comments section Monday night *
8:00 PM ET	LSU (14) at South Carolina	See comments section Monday night *
8:00 PM ET	Virginia Tech (18) at Boston College	See comments section Monday night *
10:00 PM ET	California (22) at Arizona	See comments section Monday night *
TBA	Kansas (15) at Oklahoma (6)	See comments section Monday night *

^* - In my absence, either Alyssa or Tony Ventry will enter the odds in the comments section when they become available Monday evening. Make your picks against those.

Game of the Week

Missouri vs. Texas.

Previous number three Mizzou was upset by Okie State last week (this Tennessee fan wishes Cowboy co-offensive coordinator Trooper Taylor was still wearing the right shade of orange).

Texas pulled off an emotionally-charged win against hated rival and previous number one Oklahoma, good for their own number one ranking this week.

Conventional wisdom says both teams will start sluggish after last week’s draining contests. If that holds, which one will snap out of it in time to pull off the win? Could be a classic or a clunker, but there’s no shortage of intrigue here.

How to enter your picks

You read the rules, right?

The short version:

• You’re picking which teams won’t cover their spread. You must choose at least one team not to cover unless there is only one game being played that week.
• You’re also entering a predicted score for the Game of the Week, which cannot be the same as a predicted score another player enters.

Example:

Florida and Clemson don’t cover. Alabama wins the GOTW 19-14.

If I entered that, that means I think Florida and Clemson either would lose or not cover their spreads, and you then wouldn’t be able to predict a 19-14 win for Alabama.

I haven’t been in much of a blogging mood lately beyond NCAA Picks. It is worth noting that — barring another mishap of some sort — I’ll be having my wisdom tooth surgery for real on Monday. More on that in my original post about it.

Other items:

There’s a presidential election in less than a month. I have not written much about it here. Maybe not anything actually. If you can look at the last eight years and say, “oh yeah, gimme some more of that!” there’s probably not much I could say to you that’s going to change your mind.

I did have some fun with Photoshop the other night as I was waiting for the second presidential debate to start though, my friend:

Perhaps I’m a masochist, because I bought tickets to the Tennessee-UGA game this weekend. I’ll be traveling with Alyssa, who is good people even if she is a UGA fan.

UGA is a 13-point favorite despite losing the last two games by a combined score of 84-47. Even though history tells us anything can happen in this game, I picked UGA to cover in my picks. The tickets weren’t expensive, fortunately, and they do sell alcohol in Athens the last time I checked.

My 30th birthday is coming up in just over a month. I have no idea how I want to go about marking the occasion. Any ideas?

First, this note was posted in our apartment complex this morning:

Click through to read the full text of the note, it’s hilarious. We have a neighbor who lives on our floor who lets his stupid dog go on bathroom breaks without supervision. This is problematic because he’s breaking leash laws and illegally not cleaning up the dog’s pooh, but is even more problematic because the dog has gotten lazy and no longer walks all the way to the grassy area in the parking lot before dropping a bomb. I’m amazed I haven’t stepped in a pile already.

Next, we saw this license plate on our drive to work today:

That’s going to look pretty stupid if Obama loses. Like getting a Microsoft Zune tatoo. For more fun with license plates, see this thread at Drifting Through The Grift.

And finally, my Florida-Tennessee tickets arrived today!

I wrote some about this game over at Rocky Top Talk.

If you need game tickets, you should buy them from Larry at Take Me Out Tickets. I priced these out at Stubhub as well, and the overall price was $35-40 cheaper for equivalent tickets since Stubhub has extra fees and you pay shipping. Plus he’s local and a lot of you already know him, so you’ll get better customer service. And no, I didn’t receive anything to plug the site.

I can’t entirely explain why I find this so amusing, but here you go. University of Tennessee head football coach Phil Fulmer orders a latte at Starbucks:



From SportSouth’s Under the Lights series.