The Sports Curmudgeon®

As the NCAA Football season is about to begin, it’s time to engage in a bit of overview of the college football scene so that we can look for happenings that might just fall below the radar in the big time world of sports journalism. So please consider:

Linfield College (Oregon) has 52 consecutive winning seasons in football. No other school can make that claim; in fact, this represents the longest streak of winning seasons in sports in the US. Can they make it 53 straight winning seasons?

Duke was winless last year. Actually, they start this season with a 20 game losing streak, which is the worst in the nation, and the Blue Devils are 9-72 in their past 81 games. If this does not convince you that Duke is a “basketball school”, then I think you may be beyond hope.

Stanford has a new coach this year; Jim Harbaugh takes the helm and hopes to rebuild the Stanford program. There’s good news and bad news awaiting the new coach and his staff. The good news is that they have 17 starters back from last year’s team. The bad news is that those 17 starters return from a team that went 1-11 last season.

Texas A&M has a tailback – Jorvorskie Lane – who weighs 282 lbs. On third and short, you can count on Lane getting the ball or you can count on a fake to Lane and a bomb to a wide receiver on the fly pattern. Quarterback sneaks should be rare in College Station this year.

Gregg Drinnan had this note in the Kamloops Daily News recently:

“Alter High in Ohio has a 315-pound offensive lineman who can bench press 260 pounds and squat 525. Holley Mangold is a 17-year-old senior and her — yes, her — brother Nick is on the New York Jets’ offensive line.”

Penn State plays a bad out of conference schedule this year with nail-biters against FIU, Buffalo and Temple on the dance card. Someone in State College, PA ought to be ashamed.

Auburn’s homecoming opponent in November is Tennessee Tech from the Ohio Valley Conference. Someone in Auburn/Opelika, AL ought to be ashamed.

College Football Gameday has been a staple on ESPN for a while now; college football has been one of the important parts ESPN’s programming since they went on the air more than 25 years ago. Finally, they instituted a daily program – College Football Today – devoted exclusively to college football and one has to wonder what took them so long. After all, this is the network that created NASCAR Now and NHL 2Night; notwithstanding the intrinsic significance of those programming efforts, far more people watch college football games than watch NASCAR or NHL games. The afternoon time slot for the program is less than perfect, but it does represent a step in the right direction for college football fans.

Every once in a while, someone makes a comment that sums up all you really need to know about a story that has been around for a while and about which you may have missed some of the nuances. Here’s Greg Cote of the Miami Herald to fill you in on all you need to know about the University of Miami moving their games out of the Orange Bowl starting next season:

“City of Miami officials are reeling over losing UM, and stinging from criticism that years of neglecting the OB [Orange Bowl] all but forced the Canes to leave. Apparently the city erred in trusting that confidential internal study that suggested fans’ stadium experience is actually enhanced by leaky plumbing causing torrents of cascading urine.”

Games of Interest:

There are a lot of colossal mismatches in this first week of college football. I hope that the USC fans are entertained with that game against Idaho where USC is a 46.5-point favorite. Oklahoma and Texas are both 40-point favorites at home against teams they should not be playing in the first place. Penn State is a 37 point favorite against Florida International in State College where more than 100,000 fans should cease to pay attention somewhere in the middle of the second quarter. Meanwhile, poor Rutgers doesn’t get any respect this year either; it is only a 32-point favorite over Buffalo in a glorified scrimmage for the Scarlet Knights.

Those 100,000+ fans in State College will witness NCAA football history when Penn State takes the field on Saturday; no, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the visiting Florida International University team. Joe Paterno will start his 42nd consecutive season coaching the same college team and that has never happened before. At the moment, the record belongs to Amos Alonzo Stagg who coached at the University of Chicago for 41 consecutive seasons.

Early season college football has games that count; any team in the ridiculous “pre-season top 25” had better not lose its opening game if it aspires to BCS glory in January 2008. Nevertheless, these are usually not great betting opportunities because the make-up of college teams tends to change dramatically from year to year and until you actually see them on the field in games that mean something more than intrasquad scrimmages, you really don’t know what you are betting on or against. Therefore, my picks this week will be only a few.

Cal began the 2006 season as a trendy pick for the surprise team of the year who might just challenge for the national title. And then they opened on the road at Tennessee and got clobbered by a score of 35-18 - - and it wasn’t nearly that close. Starting at 0-1, their season never really recovered and the team was a big disappointment. This week, people who believe in revenge will be taking Cal at home to beat Tennessee. In college football, revenge is overrated since both Cal and Tennessee will be fielding different teams this weekend than the ones that played last year. It may be the best game of the week between two pretty good teams – Cal is ranked 12th in those pre-season polls and Tennessee is ranked 15th. But I shan’t be wagering on the game. If I were to wager, I’d probably take the home team just because they didn’t have to cross three time zones to get to the stadium. Oh, and USA Today says that Tennessee’s QB has a broken finger but plans to play anyway; just a bit more uncertainty to make the game even more inscrutable.

Another big time traveling game is Washington at Syracuse. Neither team looks to be very good this year; each would be a surprise to show up in one of the minor bowl games at the end of the year. I shan’t be making a pick on that game either, but once again there is that “crossing-the-time-zones” factor.

Hawaii QB, Colt Brennan set a record last year for most TDs thrown in a season. He’s back in school this year and if he’s going to break his own record, then opponents like Northern Colorado are ones the Rainbows need to schedule. I can’t find an over/under line on this game but just for fun I’ll “guestimate” the total score here at 73 points – Hawaii 63, Northern Colorado 10.

If Duke is going to break that 20 game losing streak, this might be their best shot at doing it. Duke is a mere 4-point underdog to Connecticut this week. If they don’t win here, they head out for road games in the next four weeks. The only other two games that seem winnable are Northwestern (on the road) and UNC (over Thanksgiving weekend).

Georgia Tech at Notre Dame – 2 (46): If Cal/Tennessee isn’t the best game on opening weekend, then this one is. Home field at South Bend has to be worth three points and probably a tad more than that; so, this line says that Notre Dame should be a slight underdog on a neutral field. That sounds about right to me. Georgia Tech lost the opening game last year to Notre Dame for a couple of reasons – one of which is their QB could not throw the ball such that it would hit the ground reliably. He’s no longer there. I’ll take Tech with the points here. By the way, Notre Dame has Michigan and Penn State coming up on the schedule soon; if they lose here they could dig themselves a huge hole in terms of making themselves bowl-eligible.

Navy – 21 at Temple (52): This is a Temple home game meaning a throng of about 5,000 Temple fans will show up for the game. Hey, it’s the season opener so it should be a bigger than usual crowd. In any event, they will be outnumbered by the Navy partisans. Navy will run the ball, run the ball, and then run the ball some more. I see the clock running inexorably in this game so I’ll take the UNDER here.

UNLV – 6 at Utah State (47): Utah State was awful last year; they couldn’t score and they couldn’t keep the other guys from scoring. For the sake of clarity, let me be certain to point out that’s not good. I don’t think UNLV has any pretensions to greatness, but I’ll take them here and lay the points just because they have such a bad opponent staring at them across the line of scrimmage.

Washington State at Wisconsin – 13 (no line): Wisconsin might just win the Big Ten this year and be really good. Washington State has a talented QB and a couple of guys who can catch the ball but not much else. Oh yeah, and they have multiple time zones to cross to reach the stadium. I’ll take Wisconsin at home and lay the points.

Good luck.