New Year’s Night’s college football action will feature the Fiesta Bowl, as the Baylor Bears and the Central Florida Knights take the field in Tempe (8:30 PM ET, ESPN). The nine key points to take into this game—the Notebook Nine—based on personnel matchups, season-long performance, historical context and the view from Las Vegas are below.
The major bowls get started in the late afternoon of New Year’s Day, with the kickoff of the Rose Bowl between Michigan State and Stanford (5 PM ET, ESPN). What follows is the Notebook Nine—the nine points to keep in mind, covering everything from personnel matchups, to each team’s season performance arc, to the Las […]
The NHL season hits what I would consider its first real breakpoint of the regular season, and that’s New Year’s Day. The league’s new tradition of the Winter Classic will feature the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs playing outdoors at the University of Michigan football stadium on January 1, and its good a vantage point as any to see how the new season is shaping up.
New Year’s Day doesn’t bring an end to the college football season and settle a national champion the way it used to, but in terms of raw volume, January 1 still brings the biggest feast of the college bowl season. Four games will set the table in the early afternoon, with three Big Ten-SEC matchups.
The regular season is in the books and it’s time to take a look at how each team fared against the NFL win futures posted in Las Vegas every summer. For those unfamiliar, it’s simple—we’re talking about an Over/Under betting number on how many games each team will win. It’s a black-and-white to tell exactly who the disappointments were and who the surprises were, and do it in a quantifiable way.
NFL Week 17 promised excitement going in, with 13 of the 16 games having playoff or seeding implications, and two de facto playoff games for division titles. Sunday didn’t disappoint, with an incredibly exciting finish to the 2013 regular season and fittingly, the two games with the highest stakes were the best.
In this first year of the new conference, Villanova looks like the early favorite, but the new Big East looks balanced from top to bottom and a fun run of league games, starting this week, are ahead for the next 2 ½ months. Here’s a run through all ten teams…
The American Athletic basketball conference—an offshoot of the old Big East, sans the Jesuit basketball-only schools—could go one of two ways when the seasons started. With defending national champion Louisville as their foundation, the Cardinals could be joined by up-and-comer Memphis to give the league two national powers, with UConn and Cincinnati leading a secondary group that could lead to American putting half of its ten teams in the NCAA Tournament.
The college bowl season took a break for the NFL on Sunday, but gets back going full blast on Monday. We’ll take a look at the eight games that will go over the course of December 30-31, as the SEC swings into action and the Pac-12 looks to build off a strong early showing as most of their upper crust takes the field.
The ACC has been on display over the last two days of the college bowl season, both the present and the future and no game was more eye-opening than the whipping Louisville, arriving in the conference next year, put on current ACC member Miami.
This year was supposed to be different for the Edmonton Oilers. The franchise that had fallen on hard times since the dynasty run of five Stanley Cups from 1984-90, was poised to return to the playoffs. The fans of Edmonton haven’t seen so much as a single postseason appearance since a surprise run to the Finals in 2006, and it looked like an improving young team would make this the year. Instead, Edmonton is nowhere close. What’s the problem?
The NHL Pacific Division is proving to be the superior of the two Western Conference divisions in the league’s new alignment for this season. A format that locks in three playoff spots for each division and then floats the final two berths in the postseason bracket, would see the Pacific put the max of five teams into the playoff field.