I watched the Penn State-Temple game on Saturday afternoon, to see if my prediction of Nittany Lions to the Rose Bowl (assuming Ohio State would win the Big Ten and make the Playoff) had any chance of bearing fruit. After the Owls put a 27-10 beatdown on PSU, it’s time to ask not only if […]
The Baltimore Ravens have been in a gradual re-tooling process the last two seasons, since winning the Super Bowl in 2012 and then saying goodbye to franchise legends Ray Lewis and Ed Reed, along with other key contributors on defense. They missed the playoffs in 2013 and were in danger of doing so last year. […]
..we know up front that the top eleven teams in the final rankings are going to make big bowl games, with the highest-ranked team from the so-called “Little Five” conferences (Mountain West, American, Conference USA, MAC, Sun Belt) also qualifying.
While we won’t know what the committee is thinking until October, we can at least use the preseason AP poll as a reliable guide to the early favorites be in these games
There’s a wide range of expectations for Notre Dame football coming into the 2015 season. There’s a lot of talk about the Irish making the four-team College Football Playoff, as they bring back 17 starters from a team that beat LSU in a bowl game and was one controversial call from beating Florida State in […]
Darrelle Revis took his Super Bowl ring and went back to the Jets. How important was Revis for the Patriots? He gave the team a true lockdown corner and was 1-for-1 in Super Bowl trophies per season in Foxboro. Brandon Browner on the other corner is also gone, as is stalwart nose tackle Vince Wolfor
…the Giants and Dodgers come down the stretch in what looks to be baseball’s best division race in the final month-plus. Los Angeles holds a 1 ½ game lead. The wild-card is a longshot, with the Chicago Cubs seven games up on San Francisco. It looks like winner-take-all in the NL West.
Beamer put the football team in Blacksburg on the map. They’ve gone to a bowl game every year since 1993 and eight of those have been invites to a major. Beamer played for the national title in 1999 and led Florida State after three quarters, before it got away and he’s played in the Sugar Bowl as recently as 2011. But a run of three mediocre seasons, two of them 6-6 and other at 7-5, has put the head coach on the hot seat.
If you assume Ohio State is going to make the College Football Playoff—and for the time being that’s a prudent assumption—that means there’s going to be a Rose Bowl berth available for a Big Ten team. I count no fewer than seven viable contenders, three from the East and four from the West that can harbor legitimate hopes of winning the race to Pasadena as a runner-up…
Las Vegas believes, having made the Jays the (-150) favorites to win their division and placing them at 6-1 to win the World Series, even with St. Louis and just narrowly behind 9-2 favorite Kansas City. I dove deeper into the Blue Jay numbers thinking I might find some cracks beneath the glittering façade. Instead, it’s impossible not to be impressed with just how complete this team is.
I suppose if we want to put it simplistically, we can say offense pretty good, but defense and special teams very bad, at least as far as the first stringers go. There were some positive building blocks, which we’ll get to, but in looking for reasons to be optimistic in an NFC East where I think Dallas and Philadelphia are each taking a step back, I just didn’t find them.
So now it’s about picking up the pieces and going forward. What does Boston have to build on? Fortunately, there are some good building blocks…
By the end of last college football season, you had the sense the Big Ten was regaining some of its mojo. The proud conference had become more powerful in negotiations with TV networks and cable providers than it had been on the football field for about nine years. Then, the positive dominoes started to fall. […]