Thursday night the Florida Gators defeated the Oklahoma Sooners 24-14 to win the BCS National Championship. The game was closer than the score made it sound. Twice in the first half Oklahoma drove into the red zone only to be stopped by the Gators. They were driving in the fourth quarter when one of their receivers bobbled the ball on a long pass and the Gator defender grabbed it out of the air. Both quarterbacks, Heisman winners from this year and last, threw two interceptions.
Even before Florida had beaten Oklahoma, some were arguing that Utah should be the national champion. They convincingly beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and were the only undefeated team in Division I football. I don’t have much sympathy for that claim. If you look at their schedule, they only played three top 25 teams. Florida played four top 10 teams and two more top 25 teams. Could Utah beat Florida? Maybe, but we’ll never know. If they had a stronger schedule maybe we would have.
Should we have a different way of determining the national champion? Yes, we need a playoff. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. Utah’s Attorney General has announced an investigation into whether or not the BCS runs afoul of antitrust laws. This could get interesting.
The last AP poll of the season came out today. Florida is No. 1, Utah is No. 2, USC No. 3, Texas No. 4, and Oklahoma dropped to No. 5. Ole Miss came in at No. 14, making it the fourth highest ranked SEC team. Does anyone know how we were ranked after Eli’s senior year? One of ESPN’s prognosticators has Ole Miss at No. 12 in his list for next year. Don’t get your hopes up too much, but there is a lot of promise there.
In The 29th Annual Lafayette County Bowl Pick, I placed 35th, tied with 41 other people. (They didn’t bother breaking ties past the first few people.) Not too shabby. I picked 23 of the 34 bowl games correctly. The winner picked 27 correctly and won $9,196. Even though I’ve done this before, I’m still amazed at how tough it is to pick these things. We weren’t even picking against the spread.
To all you sports haters, that should be all the football for a while. Be glad the NFL doesn’t interest me that much. College baseball does start in a few weeks though. :)
By my count 11 of the last 26 posts have been sports related. (Counted from the beginning of November) Avid “Ben’s Blog” readers should prepare for the upcoming scarcity of posts.
I have come up with a few suggestions to help get through this bleak time:
1. Read old “Ben’s Blog” posts when you feel the cravings start
2. Randomly combine different paragraphs of related posts. If one makes sense with random paragraphs, consider it a new post.
3. I assume you made it to step three because you completed steps one and two. Having done this, you should now have a good idea of what Ben posts about and where he stands on most issues. Attempt to write an article from Ben’s perspective on a topic of interest to Ben. Email said article to Ben asking if he agrees with it. If he agrees, consider it a new post.
If all avid “Ben’s Blog” readers follow these simple steps and communicate with one another, we should be able to weather this tough time.
It’s official, Andy has too much time on his hands. We need to find you a hobby, or maybe a girlfriend. :)
Seriously, yes, things have been a little sports heavy lately. The sports posts tend to get written because if I don’t do them a day or two after the game, it’s too late. Everything else I intend to post about doesn’t go stale quite as fast, which means they often just don’t get written. Next year I will definitely think twice about the weekly football post. I think it got a little old for everyone involved.
I’ve got several posts in mind that I think most of you will find at least mildly interesting. Look for them to start in the next couple of days.