I believe we may have passed the point where there is enough risk of a weather cancellation to warrant having an alternate game. If I'm wrong, then every player will be given credit for a correct pick on the cancelled game.

Here is the slate. Note that we have both a Thursday game and a Friday game.

Navy @Temple
UCLA @Utah
Florida @Missouri
Syracuse @Florida State
Georgia Tech @Virginia
Maryland @Rutgers
Wake Forest @Notre Dame
Northwestern @Nebraska
Iowa State @West Virginia
Clemson @NC State
Stanford @Washington St
Oklahoma @Oklahoma State
Ole Miss @Kentucky
Texas @TCU
Virginia Tech @Miami

Some tough games this week - hopefully it will help separate the men from the boys in the race for the season championship. Good luck everyone.

(10-29-2017 06:09 PM)ken d Wrote:  I believe we may have passed the point where there is enough risk of a weather cancellation to warrant having an alternate game. If I'm wrong, then every player will be given credit for a correct pick on the cancelled game.

Here is the slate. Note that we have both a Thursday game and a Friday game.

Navy @Temple
UCLA @Utah
Florida @Missouri
Syracuse @Florida State
Georgia Tech @Virginia
Maryland @Rutgers
Wake Forest @Notre Dame
Northwestern @Nebraska
Iowa State @West Virginia
Clemson @NC State
Stanford @Washington St
Oklahoma @Oklahoma State
Ole Miss @Kentucky
Texas @TCU
Virginia Tech @Miami

Some tough games this week - hopefully it will help separate the men from the boys in the race for the season championship. Good luck everyone.

I pick all road teams except West Virginia, Notre Dame and Miami.

You know it's a tough week to pick when Stanford, Oklahoma and Miami are all underdogs, as is Iowa State who has beaten 2 Top 5 ranked opponents so far this year.

Navy
Utah
Florida
Syracuse
Georgia Tech
Maryland
Notre Dame
Northwestern
Iowa State
Clemson
Washington St
Oklahoma State
Kentucky
TCU
Virginia Tech

Have absolutely no idea why anybody is choosing Georgia Tech. Since 1990, Georgia Tech has gone 2-10 in Charlottesville. The two wins were PJ's first year in 2009 and again in 2013, a 35-25 limp to victory over Al Groh shortly before he was fired.

The Georgia Tech offense this year is among the worst ever fielded by PJ statistically. Taquon is living off hype from Week 1, but has spent nearly every week since doing the "tepid jitterbug" in the backfield collecting a bunch of no gains and short losses. When the offense actually is working it has a very nasty penchant for turning the ball over in the red zone or failing to convert bread and butter plays for clinching first downs. The defense is at BEST spotty and when they take a nose dive they nose dive completely and turn into balsa wood. Tennessee is destined for last in the SEC East and the GT defense made them look like the New England Patriots in the second half. GT has no kicker ... literally no scholarship kicker available. Field goals beyond 30 yards turn into go for it on 4th. They can't cover kicks to save their damn lives, something PJ has openly b*tched about for weeks despite "reppin the FOOL out of it" in practice. The offensive and defensive lines are still weakness like they are every single year. I doubt GT has a single player on either line who would make the starting roster for Clemson other than all 350 pounds of Devine.... and it doesn't take a genius to figure out GT is going to duck behind him all game long.

So to those picking GT .... I gotta ask ... just what damn team HAVE you been watching wearing white and gold? And just what exactly are YOU expecting to change in Charlottesville?

Bonus points: I said after the Miami-GT game that it was putrid and both teams deserved to lose. All I got was LOL THE U IS BACK THE UUUUUUUUU CANES BABY CANES WE'RE GONNA WIN IT ALL BABY WOOOO THE SWAG IS BACK!!!!!11111111111. And then Miami looked just as terrible against demonstrably quite worse UNC. The Coastal is an unmitigated dumpster fire and grossly overrated. Sure, nobody in the Coastal is full on terrible. But nobody even rises to the level of simply "good in all phases" either. Every team, maybe even VT, has enormous gaping flaws you could drive a dump truck through.

(10-29-2017 06:09 PM)ken d Wrote:  My picks this week:

Navy @Temple
UCLA @Utah
Florida @Missouri
Syracuse @Florida State
Georgia Tech @Virginia
Maryland @Rutgers
Wake Forest @Notre Dame
Northwestern @Nebraska
Iowa State @West Virginia
Clemson @NC State
Stanford @Washington St
Oklahoma @Oklahoma State
Ole Miss @Kentucky
Texas @TCU
Virginia Tech @Miami

Still time to get your picks in. Remember, we have a game scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday) evening, so don't be late.

Navy
Utah
Florida
Syracuse
Georgia Tech
Rutgers
Notre Dame
Northwestern
Iowa State
NC State
Stanford
OK State
Kentucky
TCU
Miami

(10-29-2017 06:09 PM)ken d Wrote:  I believe we may have passed the point where there is enough risk of a weather cancellation to warrant having an alternate game. If I'm wrong, then every player will be given credit for a correct pick on the cancelled game.

Here is the slate. Note that we have both a Thursday game and a Friday game.

Navy @Temple
UCLA @Utah
Florida @Missouri
Syracuse @Florida State
Georgia Tech @Virginia
Maryland @Rutgers
Wake Forest @Notre Dame
Northwestern @Nebraska
Iowa State @West Virginia
Clemson @NC State
Stanford @Washington St
Oklahoma @Oklahoma State
Ole Miss @Kentucky
Texas @TCU
Virginia Tech @Miami

Some tough games this week - hopefully it will help separate the men from the boys in the race for the season championship. Good luck everyone.

Given the narrow point spreads on many of our games, it's not too surprising that we are picking a lot more "upsets" this week. I use quotes because it's hard to call a game an upset when the spread is less than a field goal.

Here are the underdogs (based on the starting betting line) with the number of players who picked them in parentheses.

Temple (0)
UCLA (5)
Florida (7)
Syracuse (8)
Virginia (0)
Rutgers (3)
Wake Forest (0)
Nebraska (3)
Iowa State (8)
NC State (1)
Stanford (5)
Oklahoma (2)
Ole Miss (1)
Texas (4)
Miami (5)

Could anybody at the start of the season have imagined that so many players would pick Syracuse over Florida State? Or so few pick Oklahoma?

This could be a wild and woolly weekend.

Well, no harm, no foul on the Navy game, I guess. The football gods are trying to keep us all humble.

Some interesting, albeit almost useless, data about win probability vs point spreads. This data comes from an analysis of all games in 2015 between two FBS teams (693 games in all).

75% of teams favored by 7.5 - 14 points won, though nearly a third of the winners failed to cover the point spread.

In games where the point spread was 3 points or less, favorites only won 53% of the time and covered the spread 50.5% of the time.

Between these two (3.5 - 7 points), favorites did surprisingly well, winning 72% of their games, covering 56%.

Using that data, we would expect that 9 or 10 favorites would win this week. What makes the data nearly useless, though, is that our sample size (15 games) is way too small to let us generalize from it. We may know approximately how many favorites we would expect to win, but we surely can't predict which ones.

All this really tells us is that bookies really know their stuff.

(10-30-2017 06:02 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Have absolutely no idea why anybody is choosing Georgia Tech. Since 1990, Georgia Tech has gone 2-10 in Charlottesville. The two wins were PJ's first year in 2009 and again in 2013, a 35-25 limp to victory over Al Groh shortly before he was fired.

The Georgia Tech offense this year is among the worst ever fielded by PJ statistically. Taquon is living off hype from Week 1, but has spent nearly every week since doing the "tepid jitterbug" in the backfield collecting a bunch of no gains and short losses. When the offense actually is working it has a very nasty penchant for turning the ball over in the red zone or failing to convert bread and butter plays for clinching first downs. The defense is at BEST spotty and when they take a nose dive they nose dive completely and turn into balsa wood. Tennessee is destined for last in the SEC East and the GT defense made them look like the New England Patriots in the second half. GT has no kicker ... literally no scholarship kicker available. Field goals beyond 30 yards turn into go for it on 4th. They can't cover kicks to save their damn lives, something PJ has openly b*tched about for weeks despite "reppin the FOOL out of it" in practice. The offensive and defensive lines are still weakness like they are every single year. I doubt GT has a single player on either line who would make the starting roster for Clemson other than all 350 pounds of Devine.... and it doesn't take a genius to figure out GT is going to duck behind him all game long.

So to those picking GT .... I gotta ask ... just what damn team HAVE you been watching wearing white and gold? And just what exactly are YOU expecting to change in Charlottesville?

Bonus points: I said after the Miami-GT game that it was putrid and both teams deserved to lose. All I got was LOL THE U IS BACK THE UUUUUUUUU CANES BABY CANES WE'RE GONNA WIN IT ALL BABY WOOOO THE SWAG IS BACK!!!!!11111111111. And then Miami looked just as terrible against demonstrably quite worse UNC. The Coastal is an unmitigated dumpster fire and grossly overrated. Sure, nobody in the Coastal is full on terrible. But nobody even rises to the level of simply "good in all phases" either. Every team, maybe even VT, has enormous gaping flaws you could drive a dump truck through.

I chose GT because I saw UVA get trucked by a pedestrian Pitt team last week.

(11-03-2017 02:31 PM)Shannon Panther Wrote:  I chose GT because I saw UVA get trucked by a pedestrian Pitt team last week.

If the game was in Atlanta I would agree.

(10-30-2017 06:02 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Have absolutely no idea why anybody is choosing Georgia Tech. Since 1990, Georgia Tech has gone 2-10 in Charlottesville. The two wins were PJ's first year in 2009 and again in 2013, a 35-25 limp to victory over Al Groh shortly before he was fired.

The Georgia Tech offense this year is among the worst ever fielded by PJ statistically. Taquon is living off hype from Week 1, but has spent nearly every week since doing the "tepid jitterbug" in the backfield collecting a bunch of no gains and short losses. When the offense actually is working it has a very nasty penchant for turning the ball over in the red zone or failing to convert bread and butter plays for clinching first downs. The defense is at BEST spotty and when they take a nose dive they nose dive completely and turn into balsa wood. Tennessee is destined for last in the SEC East and the GT defense made them look like the New England Patriots in the second half. GT has no kicker ... literally no scholarship kicker available. Field goals beyond 30 yards turn into go for it on 4th. They can't cover kicks to save their damn lives, something PJ has openly b*tched about for weeks despite "reppin the FOOL out of it" in practice. The offensive and defensive lines are still weakness like they are every single year. I doubt GT has a single player on either line who would make the starting roster for Clemson other than all 350 pounds of Devine.... and it doesn't take a genius to figure out GT is going to duck behind him all game long.

So to those picking GT .... I gotta ask ... just what damn team HAVE you been watching wearing white and gold? And just what exactly are YOU expecting to change in Charlottesville?

Bonus points: I said after the Miami-GT game that it was putrid and both teams deserved to lose. All I got was LOL THE U IS BACK THE UUUUUUUUU CANES BABY CANES WE'RE GONNA WIN IT ALL BABY WOOOO THE SWAG IS BACK!!!!!11111111111. And then Miami looked just as terrible against demonstrably quite worse UNC. The Coastal is an unmitigated dumpster fire and grossly overrated. Sure, nobody in the Coastal is full on terrible. But nobody even rises to the level of simply "good in all phases" either. Every team, maybe even VT, has enormous gaping flaws you could drive a dump truck through.

Now for Miami to get curb stomped to make me look like Nostradamus.

Oh, the carnage!

I'm not sure I can remember a week when we did collectively worse than this one. With two games to go, only one player has 8 correct picks. If TCU holds off Texas and wins, then Buckminster Fuller stands alone atop what will be for everyone else the weekly list of shame. If not he would still tie with yours truly and Lenvillecards. One way or the other, this will be his third weekly win, tieing him with 4x4hokies and Bigtexnole.

The season race is a lot more complex, so I'll just wait to see who wins tonight before revealing this week's Top Five in the standings. We could still see some tightening at the top.

It's a good thing we get an extra hour sleep tonight. It will take that long to help us put this week behind us.

(11-04-2017 05:00 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Now for Miami to get curb stomped to make me look like Nostradamus.

Oh well. And the last potentially respectable team in the Coastal shows it too is seriously troubled.