NFL Season Starts Rules the Week College Close Second. The NFL kicked off on Thursday night. While the game was not the best game ever played. It did bring in a huge number. Even with a game that featured 20 penalties. Ten by each team. It did not matter. The ratings were up more than 20 percent over last year. College football already in full swing. Had some massive blowouts and some crazy interesting games. The U.S. Open tennis finals were going on. I am not sure how many people watched.
College Football Week Two
Week two of college football brought us a few surprises. LSU showed that not only did they get the right coach for them in Ed Orgeron. They have a team that can contend for the College Football Playoff. The SEC West have three teams in the top ten at this point. Alabama at 2, LSU at 4 and Auburn ranked 8. I am not sold on Auburn yet but LSU and Alabama are the real deal. The middle part of the LSU schedule will be the deciding point for LSU. When Tom Herman spurned LSU and picked Texas people got the feeling that LSU had to settle. It looks like they both made the correct choice. The Texas just was a bigger hurdle to get back to the top. Orgeron just feels like he should be at LSU. Herman is building Texas. He is just a year away at this point.
The Big 10 East is as loaded at the SEC West. They don’t have the three teams in the top ten but they do have two. Ohio State at 6 and Michigan at 10. Five of the seven teams in the B1G East are ranked. The biggest surprise there is Maryland. Maryland actually has the best win in that division with their 66-21 pasting of then number 21 Syracuse. Should Syracuse have been ranked at that point? Probably not. That does not change that Maryland absolutely destroyed Syracuse. It will be interesting to see what Syracuse does against Clemson next week. Maryland has to play Temple next week. They should be able to beat them and then go into B1G play the next week ready to roll. Too bad for Maryland that they have a difficult schedule to finish out the season. Even with that they look to have a pretty good run this year.
Michigan showed why if I was an Athletic director why I would not schedule Army. Army this year and last year has taken ranked teams to over time. Last year with Oklahoma and this year with Michigan. Army played very well but Michigan looked really bad on offense. They probably want to eliminate the butter from their pregame meal. Michigan fumbled the ball over and over and over. The worst person with the dropsies was Shea Patterson. Not a good look for a quarterback. Not sure if that means he is not getting it. Just having a few bad games or what. Patterson is not showing any of the ability that he showed while at Ole Miss. This is year two at Michigan he really should have shown more progress by now.
The PAC 12 is just an absolute mess. Utah is probably the best team in the PAC 12 now. Which is funny since there were people upset that Utah joined the PAC 12. Now they are one of the few teams that are going to hold out hope that they can get into the playoff. USC is a massive mess. They are ranked 24th somehow. Lynn Swann just decided to up and quit. They have held on to Clay Helton. Stanford just decided that they did not want to play last week. Or they are just not as good as people thought they were going to be this year. Probably a bit of both. Next week USC has BYU. They should win that but then they have Utah, Washington and Notre Dame. More than likely they will lose all three of those. Then they will probably be with out an AD and a head coach. Pretty sure by then Urban Meyer will be looking and USC will probably come calling. I am pretty sure that Urban will be coaching again next year. I think that there are only three places that he would go and coach. One of those would be USC. We will talk about the other two another time.
We are going to do the top five different going forward. We are going to make it Top five from the previous week. Not the teams we think are the Top Five for the season.
Five Things in College Football
- Maryland – that was an amazing win. For a team that few people though was going to be this good they had an amazing week.
- LSU – They came to play. They went into Texas and thanked Tom Herman for not taking the LSU job.
- Army – Even though they lost that makes two years in a row taking a ranked team to over time. That is a great showing
- The B1G – Even with Nebraska screwing up a great week the B1G has come to play two weeks in a row
- Jalen Hurts Oklahoma QB – Hurts has a lot to prove. He has put up some great numbers. It may be because of the Offense of Lincoln Riley but Hurts still has to perform. Perform he has. 591 Passing yards 6 touchdowns and 223 yards rushing in two games. Hurt is in the top three for the Heisman race.
NFL Week One for the Win
Week one of the NFL season started on Thursday night with the two oldest teams in the league. The Packers at the Bears. While the game was pretty sloppy and not the best game played it was an exciting game. The outcome of the game could also impact the post season down the road. With this being the 100th year of NFL football it is pretty exiting and amazing what the NFL has become. Week one brought a lot of other interesting match ups. There was also some interesting results. There is nothing more fun then to over react in week one of a season. Browns fans are crying and worried that they are going to go 0 – 16 again. They are not so get over it. The Browns will get better but I do not think that they are going to be a super bowl contender. Steelers fans are crying as well but trying to hide their tears. They are pretending that they are not upset about losing Antonio Brown and Laveon Bell. They are going to miss them bad and their game against the Patriots showed it. The Steelers should worry. As should the rest of the NFL. The Patriots are already a great team this year. They probably had one of the best skill rosters they have had. And now they have added Antonio Brown. I have heard a lot of talk about how disruptive Brown can be. This is all true. This is going to be his best bet to win a Super Bowl. I am pretty sure that he is going to be able to keep it in check for one season. If not the whole season enough of it to be an impact player for the Patriots. The Patriots are already good enough. They don’t really need him. He needs the Patriots more. Brown gave up $30 million to get to the Patriots. He can get half of that back this year if he gets all the incentives. If he balls out and proves he wants to be there and play. Then he will get all the rest of it back and more. It is up to him.
In the rest of the NFL the Bengals showed that they are the Bengals. They came up one point short against the Seahawks and considered it a win. It seems like Marvin Lewis never left. Maybe he is just wear a mask on the sidelines and is really still coaching the team. The Lions showed that they can throw away a game with the best of them. Up by 17 in the fourth quarter they decided that winning the game was not the right move for them. They watched as Kyler Murray brought back the Cardinals to end up in a tie. How long are the Lions going to keep Matt Patrica as their head coach. Every week he looks like a homeless man and has shown that he had no identity. It seems like the Lions will just crash and burn. The Lions have had a tendency to hang on to certain people well past the point where it seems they will not be able to do the job.
The Saints pulled out an amazing win. Monday night football could not have asked for a better game to start their season. A flurry of activity the last two minutes led to the exciting end as the Saints Kicked a field goal as time expired to pull out the win. In the second game the Raiders were able to win against the Broncos. Raiders fans really needed this after the beating they took over the weekend. This was not the Start the Broncos wanted to their season. The Vic Fangio era did not start out as planned.
The Dolphins may have over shot on their tanking. The Ravens have a pretty decent team but the way they took care of the Dolphins was like an NFL team playing a mid level College team. It is so bad that Dolphins players all want out of there. Really can’t blame them. I have always maintained that I am not opposed to tanking. The Dolphins are taking it to an extreme. After week one I will call it. The Dolphins are on the clock.
The Browns showed that they may not be the super bowl darling that a lot of people were making them out to be. Their performance against the Texans almost looked like they were still in tank mode. They will get better it will just take a little more time than people were thinking. Not certain that Freddie Kitchens was the right pick for head coach here. Of course he is not as bad a choice as Matt Patricia.
Top Five things in the NFL
- New England Patriots – Not only did the Patriots destroy the Steelers. They showed they are the team to beat this year. Next week they add Antonio Brown. Tom Brady and the Patriots are going to score a lot of points this year.
- Lamar Jackson – It was against the Dolphins but wow he put on a nice show. Five Touchdown passes and he only ran the ball three times.
- Lions – Cardinals – Tie in week one. The Lions just crashed and burned. The Cardinals got to the tie. This will not impact one of these teams making the playoffs
- Steelers – They were the big losers this weekend. The Patriots now have Antonio Brown and made the Steelers look really bad. It is going to be a long season for the Steelers
- Dak Prescott is going to get a huge pay day and he should give Kellen Moore part of his check. The new looks that Kellen Moore has implemented in Dallas looked very nice. He is putting in plays that work well for Prescott. He is going to put up some big numbers that lead to a huge deal.
U.S. Tennis Open
Yes other things were going on this week other than football. The US Tennis open Finals were this week. All I heard was about records for how many majors two of the players in the finals. Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams are one grand slam win away from setting records. I get it. But like it football where I am sick of the Patriots winning all the time. I want to see new people win. Nadal did win his but Williams lost hers. I to not root against people in tennis but when it comes to matches like this I usually root for the competition. I am not sure how the numbers looked on TV for these matches. For The Serana loss to Bianca Andreescu it looked like the stands were mostly full. For the Nadal win against Daniil Medvedev it looked like there were a lot of empty seats. I don’t know how that stacks up but the numbers at least for the men were looking a bit sparse.
Finally The NASCAR Regular Season Ends
In what has been a marathon NASCAR has finally come to the end of its painful regular season. Kyle Busch will lead the points for the field of 16 in the playoff. Not sure why or how we got to 16. I guess it is not much different than the NBA or NHL where half the field makes the playoffs. In the NBA and NHL it makes sense. Eight teams in each division is a nice round number. 16 in NASCAR just seems like a lot. I am not actually complaining about the number in the playoff. The problem is that there is still ten weeks to go in the season. Holy ratings drop off batman. It was nice last year that Joey Logano won the championship. What they really need this year is one of the even younger drivers to win. Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman or William Byron would be good. They need some fresh new people for fans to rally around. Even if that happens I am not sure that it is going to be enough.
On the Tube TV not You
We are big fans of fake reality TV. We have been watching the Alaskan Bush People since the beginning. Yes we know it is not real and they are pretending to live in the bush. Pretending they live in the bush is fine, they could stop that part and I don’t think that it would change the amount of viewers that they have. I have seen a lot of people complaining about that part and informing everyone that it is fake. To that I say. If you don’t like it don’t watch. We know it is fake. Clearly you were the only people that were under the impression that this was a documentary and not a tv show. Staying in the same genre Discovery has a new show this season that it pretty interesting as well Raising Wild follows another family and their dream of living off the grid. This family has the potential to be as interesting as the Alaskan Bush people. If you are a fan of those types of shows like we are I would recommend checking it out.
You Can Find Last Weeks Post here
I am looking for people that are interested in writing posts on biglakesports.net If you are interested you can send me an email at jbigalke at biglakespots.net and we can go over what I am looking for and see if you are a fit. There would be no pay at this time but you would be able to put your writing out there and could post it on other sites if you wanted to.
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