Chicago -
By Mike Luce and Steve Rhodes
Whales, hookers, blow and food poisoning. Plus: We Miss The Beef O’Brady Bowl; Our Hypothetical Gambling Habits; Too Early For College Basketball; All About Niko; Don’t Tell Me The Cubs Couldn’t Afford Wade Davis; and The Bears, Ugh.
Posted on December 29, 2017
By Mike Luce
The Demon Deacons, Aggies (times three), Wolfpack, Sun Devils, Wildcats (twice), Trojans, and Buckeyes are in action today.
Sidebar: the Wolfpack are among 13 NCAA Division I football teams with a nickname that does not end in ‘s.’ Quiz yourself on the remaining 11* here.
Sidebar’s sidebar: Depending on how you split hairs, only one college team has an individual nickname. The Wolfpack, for instance, does not end in ‘s’ yet refers to a pack of more than one wolf. If you gave up on the quiz above or decided seeing the results wasn’t worth handing over your e-mail address, take a look at the list here and decide for yourself.
Sidebar to the sidebar’s sidebar: The Editorial Guidelines page provided by North Carolina State puts in plainly: Wolfpack is a singular noun that takes a singular verb and pronoun. Here’s a conundrum that has bugged us: what do you call a lone Wolfpack? A one-man wolfpack, if you will. Take the following example of how this question is easily resolved for other teams:
Posted on December 29, 2017
By Mike Luce
Boston College quietly claimed the top spot in the newly coined College Football Report Fourth Down Stupidity Index. A column by ESPN’s Gregg Easterbrook in 2009 convinced us that too few coaches make (seemingly) aggressive play calls on fourth down. A great example took place on Wednesday. As Easterbrook called out, faced with anything short of a now-or-never decision, head coaches (and Easterbrook was speaking of the NFL but the same holds true at the collegiate level) default to playing it by the book. Or so it would seem but the book, or conventional wisdom, call it what you will, makes no sense unless you’re looking to avoid mockery on message forums and drunken tirades from upset boosters. Fourth down on your own side of the 50? Punt. (For that matter, most coaches will often punt even if in opposing territory as most college kickers* can’t handle field goals over 50 yards.) In the red zone but not at the goal line? Kick the field goal.
If you thought Northern Illinois University’s ill-advised attempt to convert 4th-and-18 from the Huskies’ own end zone was asinine, you’d be right. Trailing by a touchdown in the first quarter of the Quick Lane Bowl on Tuesday, NIU inexplicably called a fake punt. To be clear, we are not advocating for this level of outright insanity.
What in the world? pic.twitter.com/QMahng8avM
— FootballScoop Staff (@FootballScoop) December 26, 2017
Posted on December 28, 2017
By The Minnesota Vikings
Mitch Trubisky’s growing pains and shitty passing personnel vs. Jordan Howard’s proficiency in the zone running game.
Posted on December 28, 2017
By Aliyya Swaby/The Texas Tribune
CARTHAGE, TEXAS – Watching his players dart up and down the field during a recent game, Carthage High head football coach Scott Surratt anxiously anticipated every pass, penalty and fumble, sometimes needing to be stopped from charging onto the turf.
A local profile of the man who has brought five state football championships to Carthage ISD refers to his arrival 10 years ago as “the best thing that could have happened to a lackluster football program.” Fans packing the stands dressed in “Bulldawg” red declare themselves lucky that he took the team’s reins. Though Surratt has had opportunities to coach at larger high schools and at the college level, he’s opted to stay in this small East Texas town 150 miles southeast of Dallas.
“I got very lucky, very lucky to get the job,” Surratt told The Texas Tribune. “[Our players] represent the seal on their helmet and do it with pride and play unbelievably hard for the community.”
As he succeeds on the field, Surratt, who’s also the district’s athletic director, has been rewarded off of it. Carthage ISD increased his salary this year by $21,400, the district’s biggest administrative pay raise this year. With a total salary of $154,900, Surratt is paid just a little less than the high school football coach in Lake Travis, where the district’s student body is nearly four times larger and its median income is six figures. Carthage ISD’s median income is $49,886, a few thousand below the state average.
This comes at a time when Carthage ISD also lost $6.9 million after a state funding program primarily supporting rural, oil-dependent school Texas districts expired, forcing hundreds of school leaders to take red pens to their budgets. Carthage ISD raised local property taxes, slashed most teacher benefits, packed students in classrooms, and cut 32.5 teaching, security, transportation and administrative positions.
Posted on December 27, 2017
Tried To Give Game Away; Cleveland Didn’t Bite
“There might be a very different feel about Trubisky [and the Bears] today if Carl Nassib had taken one step back before the first snap of the second half,” Dan Pompeii writes.
This was the play. Nassib lines up correctly, and the score would’ve been 10-6 Browns, presuming they kick the PAT. Turning point!
Trubisky throws a pick six but the browns were offsides and instead the bears gain 5 yards
— Windy City Sports (@ThreeGuySports) December 24, 2017
Posted on December 25, 2017
By Mike Luce
A short list of games round out the first week of bowl season. This weekend will see a rare intersection of the college and pro schedule with three bowls Saturday coinciding with Colts-Ravens (3:30 p.m.) and Vikings-Packers (7:30 p.m.) followed by the NFL’s full slate and a lone bowl on Sunday.
The tail end of the regular season always attracted a mix bag of NFL fans: in addition to the diehards, a small number of contrarians (although we’d prefer realists) perversely root for their squad to bomb and thus improve draft position (ahemBEARSahem), fans of teams in the hunt watch with one eye on the scoreboard particularly for teams still technically in contention due to the NFL’s arcane tie-breaking rules, and, even otherwise meaningless games draw passionate interest from fantasy owners. (For most fantasy leagues the playoff championship culminates this weekend.)
However we find another aspect of the overlapping schedules most intriguing: putting action on pro and college “teasers.” (See some examples here.) Love the dogs? Tease the Colts (+19.5) with Army (+12.5) on Saturday. Prefer frontrunners? Buy the Patriots (-11.5) down to -5.5 and Toledo to a Pick (favored by -6.5). The latter looks especially attractive: a two-team tease gets you a 6 and 6.5 swing, asking an otherwise healthy favorite (Toledo) just to win and dropping an otherwise intimidating spread (Patriots) to under one touchdown. (Check this out for more on teaser strategy.) Don’t even get us started on three-league teasers: with the NBA’s marquee match-ups on Christmas day, the number of options start to multiply exponentially. Of course, you’re exposed to greater risk. Even a Push in any game is a loss.
Of course, if you see an otherwise live teaser bet headed south in the second game, you can always hedge at halftime . . . or if you’re a high-risk, high-reward bettor, put your money on parlays like these. The books love parlays (especially with three teams or more) almost as much as Super Bowl prop bets because suckers tend to flush cash on longshots. But never mind that. Betting is easy! You just have to pick the right side!
Posted on December 23, 2017
By Mike Luce
We missed it! Perhaps – although it’s a tight race so awarding this honor could go to any number of contenders – the most ridiculously named bowl game went down on Wednesday. Temple trounced Florida International 28-3 in The Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl in a game that went sideways in a hurry. Panthers stud senior signal-caller Alex McGough went down with a broken collarbone early, leaving FIU with an untested backup at quarterback. How is it that college coaches can’t find a solution to this predicament? Quarterbacks go down like dominoes these days yet the victimized team rarely has a better plan than flinging a human clipboard to the wolves. In FIU’s case, the sacrificial lamb was a second-year QB who had attempted all of six passes. We try to avoid trashing college players – making rare exceptions for the likes of Jameis Winston – so let’s just say McGough’s backup is a work in progress. Following the Bad Boy Bowl, Maurice Alexander’s two-year career touchdown-to-interception ratio stands at 2-8 with two picks coming in the bowl game. Tough break (ayyooo) Panthers.
Posted on December 22, 2017
By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes
Is this really happening? Plus: Are The Blackhawks, Um, Good?; The Cubs Are Having An Interesting Offseason!; Can Loyola Ramble Into The Dance?; and The World’s Greatest College Football Report’s Bowl Preview.
Posted on December 22, 2017
By VICE Sports
“In this 3-part series, Kyle Turley takes us on his journey to to deal with the damaging effects of football through the use of marijuana. After an NFL career that saw him take home All-Pro honors, Turley was diagnosed with pre-CTE. After taking a laundry list of pharmaceutical drugs in order to deal with the associated issues, Kyle found marijuana to be the best available treatment for the problems that he was facing. In this episode, we meet Kyle and see the beginning of his journey.”
1. Chasing Strains.
Posted on December 21, 2017
