Ben’s Blog

The bowl season is one quarter of the way through, and I picked the wrong team for two of the eight games. That puts me in third place in the 27th Annual Lafayette County Bowl Pick. While that sounds good, it’s really not. Out of 357 people in the pool, 13 of them (3.6%) have picked every game correctly so far. Another 49 (13.7%) have only missed one game, and 114 (31.9%) have missed two like me. That means 49.3% of the pool is doing as good or better than me. I could be doing worse, but not much.

I had chosen Rice over Troy in the New Orleans Bowl, along with 67.5% of the pool. I also chose New Mexico over San Jose State in the New Mexico Bowl along with 49.6% of the pool. I thought both of them would be close games. San Jose State was definitely the better team, but I picked New Mexico because the game was played in their home stadium. Oh well.

Still, if the rest of my picks pan out, I’ll be in a seven-way tie for first place. The tie would be broken by the score of the national championship game. It’s rather unlikely that the rest of my picks will be correct, but I can dream. The winner of the bowl pick will get $5,962, second gets $1,071, and third gets $357.

Last week Jevan Snead committed to play football at Ole Miss. This fall Snead has been playing backup quarterback for the University of Texas Longhorns as a true freshman. He requested that UT release him at the end of the regular season in order to find somewhere where he could be a starting quarterback. The Longhorns’ starting quarterback, Colt McCoy, started all twelve games this year as a redshirt freshman, meaning that Snead wouldn’t start a single year without beating out McCoy for the job.

Snead had narrowed his choices down to Houston, TCU, and Ole Miss before finally choosing Ole Miss. It would seem we had a major advantage over other suitors due to the fact that our starter and our backup will be graduating after next season.

Snead will enroll at Ole Miss beginning in January, but won’t be eligible to play until 2008 due to NCAA transfer rules. This gives him two Spring practices and a regular season to get acquainted with the system. This gives him a distinct advantage over Brent Schaeffer, who had to come in and play after only a few weeks of practice. He’ll be eligible for three seasons.

Snead certainly looks like the real deal. He’s 6′3″ and 215 lbs. This fall he completed 26 of 49 passes (53%) for 371 yards, two touchdowns and two interceptions. (more…)

Larry the Barber talked me into participating in The 27th Annual Lafayette County Bowl Pick, which bills itself as “A spirited contest for a paltry $20.” You pick the winner of 32 bowl games as well as the score for the national championship game as a tie-breaker. The winner gets 80% of the pot, second place gets 15%, and third gets 5%.

The picks were harder to make than I had initially thought. As it turns out, most bowl games are fairly evenly matched, at least on paper. I used ESPN.com and a few sports betting sites to make my predictions. The games are listed in chronological order, and my picks are in bold.

Poinsettia Bowl - 12/19
Northern Illinois vs. TCU
Northern Illinois has a great running back in Garrett Wolfe, but not much else. They lost their QB to a knee injury late in the season. TCU hasn’t lost since early in the season and has a strong running game, a decent passing game, and a solid defense.

Las Vegas Bowl - 12/21
BYU vs. Oregon
Oregon has a strong running game and a tough defense, but has over 30 turnovers this season, lost their last three games, and has a QB controversy on their hands. BYU has a balanced, explosive offense and an adequate defense. Both have top ten offenses, so it should be fun to watch, but BYU will come out on top.

New Orleans Bowl - 12/22
Rice vs. Troy
Troy likes to spread out opposing defenses to make room to run. No doubt they’ll have success doing that against Rice. However, they’ll probably turn the ball over a few times, and their defense won’t be able to stop Rice either.
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Cassie is pregnant, and she’s due on May 29th. She had an ultrasound last Friday, and they’re 95% sure it’s a boy, but they’ll confirm it at her next visit in January. On the ultrasound we could see his spine and all four chambers of his heart. The ultrasound technician said everything looked good, which is comforting. He was hiccuping during the ultrasound. I’ll post some of the ultrasound images if I can find a good scanner.

Cassie is 17 weeks pregnant, so I’ve had a while for the reality of the situation to set in. However, it feels much more real now that I’ve seen the little guy and we know he’s going to be a boy. They did an ultrasound back at around 7 weeks, but he looked more like a tadpole back then. We’re both very happy and can’t wait for him to get here.

Let’s see, where do I begin? We did go to New York City in June, and I still haven’t managed to post anything about it or even go through our pictures. I’ll try to do that soon. We really enjoyed the city, and we both want to go back soon. We also went with my family to Gatlinburg later on in June.

In August, Cassie started a new job teaching fifth grade Language Arts and Social Studies at Holly Springs Intermediate School. Holly Springs is a smallish town about thirty minutes north of Oxford. Luckily she has found someone from Oxford to carpool with.

I also taught a course on UNIX for the Computer Science department this semester. We finished up last week.

I had intended to finish my thesis in the Fall semester, but didn’t. I try to blame it on the two week business trip in November, but I was already behind schedule on my thesis before that. I will finish it this spring.

We have some more big news, but I think it deserves a post of its own. Stay tuned…

As you can see, my blog is back up. I have reposted the majority of my posts from before. I apologize to those of you who are subscribed to the RSS feed that got to see everything for the second (or third) time. I promise not to do it again. Importing around sixty posts by hand is no fun.

A lot has happened in the past six months, and I’ll start updating you soon. Stand by for new posts.