Paul Johnson Passes Out the Burnsauce

From CBS Sportsline:

When Georgia Tech’s leading returning receiver James Johnson said “… we’re going to hope that Coach does not do all that much running. We just hope he’s saying all that to trick people,” Johnson came out firing.

“He caught 30 balls (actually 25) and they went 7-6,” Johnson said. “If something wasn’t wrong, if what they were doing was so great, we wouldn’t be here. It’s not like we’re coming in here and dismantling this high-powered machine that was lighting everybody up.”

In other news, OOC Schedule previews are coming Real Soon Now. Rutgers and Kansas State have completed their swap of Fresno State, but Rutgers still had a vacancy in its schedule. While that’s likely to be a DI-AA team, I’m going to wait and see a couple more days.

Edit: Apparently James Johnson has left the team. Double burn. (More likely, though, it had to do with his injury issues.)

Opening Day!

Well, sort of. The season started last week in Japan, and most teams don’t play a game until tomorrow, but tonight belongs to the Nationals and Braves at the opening of their new ballpark. Since I’m still waiting for Rutgers to announce their schedule (and if the rumors are correct, Kansas State also) the OoC Schedule Review will continue to be postponed. So while I enjoy the second half of Kansas-Davidson, let’s talk a little baseball.

  • One of the benefits of starting the season on ESPN is I guess they feel the need to talk you up. Jayson Stark is calling for the Braves to win the World Series. Peter Gammons says they’ll make it there, and several other contributors say the Braves will win the division or wild card.
  • Now I don’t know about all that. I got my copy of this year’s Baseball Prospectus the other day and I can’t say enough about it. What I’ve mainly taken away from the Braves’ section is what I thought anyway, and it’s always nice to have someone confirm your gut feelings with data. Basically, it goes something along the lines of “if the rotation doesn’t implode upon itself like it did last year these Braves have a real shot”. Of course, the top 4 of the rotation looks like it’ll be Hudson, Smoltz, Glavine, and Hampton. Yes, that Hampton. Smoltz and Glavine are old; the former will start the season on the DL, and the latter was horrendous at the end of last year. That said, when Smoltz is healty he should pitch well, which is something I’m not sure we can say about Glavine anymore.
  • That said, something that caught my eye in Stark’s article was that Teixiera represented a 60-run improvement for the Braves last year. That tells not only that Tex is good, but also that Scott Thorman and company were very, very bad at the 3-spot last year.
  • As for the Nationals, the read on them seems to be “going in the right direction”. Of course, BP wrote that before they cut John Patterson. So the Nats opening-day starter will be former-Brave-turned-Dodger-turned-Royal Odalis Perez. The Royals declined their option for him, which should tell you something right there.

Anyway, some thoughts on the NCAA tournament while I’m here:

  • The thing that is annoying me the most is the NCAA’s brilliant plan to continue to have the Sweet 16 and rounds thereafter in football stadiums. This year, they’ve moved the courts to the middle of the field so they can sell more seats in the football seats in the stadium. In a word, it’s stupid. Most of the fans are so far away from the court that I doubt they can really see anything and, worse, it makes the arena really quiet. Take Houston versus Charlotte, for instance. The former was held at the Texans’ stadium, while the latter was held in a basketball arena. Both featured large contingents of fans that were playing in the games. Which was louder? Charlotte, by far, because the games were being played in a dome designed for basketball! Probably a better experience all around for everyone.
  • I’m going to ahead and post this even though there’s less than a minute left, so I just wanted to make sure I mentioned that if Kansas wins it will be the first time 4 #1 seeds have reached the final four.

Rating the Non-Conference Slate 2008: Prologue

It’s almost that time again. I’d start, but the Big East and some other teams haven’t released their schedules yet so we can’t finish the rankings.

You may recall the series I did last year, where the rankings were almost completely arbitrary. This year, A5 and I went through and assigned each BCS team a ranking on a scale of 0.25-1, where 0.25 was the least desirable and 1 the most desirable. “Desirability”, of course, is still subjective, but generally our criteria were “would I look forward to playing this team?”, “how consistent has this team been in the past 5-6 years?”, and “how good was this team last year?” This means the rankings have a good mix of last year’s flashes in the pan (Mississippi State) and traditional powers that had bad years (Notre Dame).

Since we’ve already ranked all the teams, I can tell you which teams got 1’s and where each conference stands. So first, the teams: Boston College, Clemson, Virginia Tech, Nebraska, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia, Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Penn State, Notre Dame, Arizona State, California, Oregon, Southern Cal, Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee.

The conferences ranked as such:

  1. SEC (0.854 average)
  2. Big 12 (0.75)
  3. ACC (0.729)
  4. Big Ten (0.727)
  5. Pac-10 (0.725)
  6. Big East (0.656)

Is there some bias here? A little. But the main thing hurting the Pac-10 is that the bottom of the Pac-10 is pretty terrible: Washington State, Washington, Stanford, and Arizona got 0.5 or less, and so with 10 teams this affects their average a lot.

Anyway, once we have complete schedules we’ll start the whole series. Until next time!

Bowl Games: Dessert

Well, since it seems Hawaii is completely outmatched by UGA, it’s time to get the last 5 games out o the way. As usual, all times Eastern and all predictions wrong.

  • Oklahoma vs. West Virginia, Tostitos Fiesta Bowl (Jan. 2, 8:00, FOX): It’s hard to get a read on these teams as they head into this game. West Virginia certainly backed their way into the post-season, as the vaunted Slaton-White duo looked pretty flat. I like Oklahoma here not because of anything they do particularly well, but just because of how West Virginia looked against Pitt.
  • Virginia Tech vs. Kansas, FedEx Orange Bowl (Jan. 3, 8:00, FOX): I really don’t give KU much of a chance here. They lost to the only other decent opponent they’ve played all year and I think Virginia Tech is just as good, if not better, than Missouri.
  • Ball State vs. Rutgers, International Bowl (Jan. 5, 12:00, ESPN2): Lost in the shuffle of bowl season, there are so many bowls that they have to squeeze a couple in between the BCS games. At any rate, as long as Rutgers bothers to show up they should win easily.
  • Bowling Green vs. Tulsa, GMAC Bowl (Jan. 6, 8:00, ESPN): A few years ago, I might’ve liked BGSU here, but the C-USA runner-ups are almost certainly better.
  • Ohio State vs. Louisiana State, BCS National Championship Game (Jan. 7, 8:00, FOX): And here we go. Some observers may say that OSU should be favored here due to being number 1, but let’s face it – Ohio State is ranked first only because they had the good sense to lose 3-4 weeks before everyone else finished their season. I don’t like LSU because Florida won last year, I like LSU because they’re a good football team who are, in my mind, the cream of the two-loss crop.

Anyway, it’s been a crazy year kids. My next football related item will probably be my out-of-conference schedule round-up, which will hopefully be a lot less depressing than it was last year.