Monday, December 28, 2009

Bowl Pool Update: December 28, 2009

Well, since our last update, five games occurred. The Mountain West continued their pwnage of the Pac 10, as Utah outscored Cal 37-27 in the Poinsettia Bowl, in a game that CFN unknowingly wrapped up perfectly in a four-word sentence: why isn't Cal better? Maybe you guys should remember that sentence when you decide to rank the Bahrs in your preseason top 20 next year. Pick 'em effect: significant, as this is pretty much the only game so far where there is an approximate 50/50 split in who people picked, and, by and large, the people who picked Utah trend toward the top, while the people who (stupidly) picked Cal are, on average, lower.

The Hawai(slight pause)i Bowl gave us our second blatant no-show of the bowl season. Nevada, who was picked to win by 31 of the 32 people in our pool, got nuked by bowl debutantes SMU 45-10. Would the news that Nevada would be without not one, but both of their 1,000-yard running backs had helped (remember, by the deadline to make your picks, we only knew that one of them would be out)? Probably not. June Jones's offense bombed away on Nevada mercilessly, and the Wolfpack were seemingly powerless to stop it. The sneaky untalked-about story emerging so far in bowl season has to revolve around the WAC and Boise State. You want to know why the Broncos get relatively little respect for running roughshod over their conference year after year? This game and the Fresno State loss to a bad Wyoming team illustrate the reason perfectly. That's all I want to say about this disgrace, other than the fact that if Colin Kaepernick's eyes were any closer together they would merge into a single entity and he would be a cyclops.

Marshall beat Ohio 21-17 in a game that no one watched or cared about.

The Pick 'Em's other bowl darling, Pittsburgh, scraped by North Carolina 19-17 in the something-something auto maintenance bowl. A Panther loss here would have meant mild disaster for an astounding 31 of our 32 entrants. Considering that Pitt had significant no-show potential, as they dropped from a BCS game (if they had held on against Cincy) to the muffler bowl against an ACC also-ran that happened to be playing in its own backyard, I am a little surprised so many people in the group were riding the Panther bandwagon. Nothing interesting happened in this game, other that Dion Lewis continuing to show that Pitt has not lost its supernatural ability to pull fantastic running backs seemingly out of the ether.

USC knocked off Boston College in a relatively yawn-worthy game that did nothing to make me less nauseous about the fact that our Rose Bowl-bound Buckeyes choked away a victory against this mediocre, begging-to-be-beaten Trojan outfit. This game was boring and I don't want to think about it anymore.

Finally, thirty of us picked up points last night as Clemson held off Kentucky 21-13 in the Music City Bowl. C.J. Spiller was good, and the ACC's "elite" finally picked up a victory over a mediocre SEC team (after Georgia Tech's loss to Georgia and Clemson's defeat at the hands of South Carolina). The upshot of all of this? Kristin, who freely admitted that she made her picks based on, in order, 1.) the teams' colors and mascots, and 2.) which teams other people picked, is in first place at 8-2 with 204 points. She also claims that she received advice from our cats, but that is possibly apocryphal. Now, she's lost her 34- and 31-point confidence games ... but almost everyone else has lost similarly high-confidence games. Will the insanity end? Stay tuned to find out. The only game today features Texas A&M and Georgia squaring off in the Independence Bowl, the result of which will certainly lead to premature proclamations of SEC or Big 12 superiority heading into the BCS title game. Hooray for conference wars.


Rank
Team
Owner
Record
PPR
TOTAL
1
Shiva Bowl
Kristin
8-2
326
204
1
jimlaipply 1
Jimmah
7-3
300
202
3
Super Snavely
Donnie Smavels
6-4
300
174
4
Cantstandya120
Frange
6-4
307
170
5
mjn1980
Mike Neary
6-4
306
162
6
d32moyer 1
Di
5-5
300
147
7
What's YOUR Hang Up?!?
Christina
6-4
320
146
8
Pocket full of Posey
Katey
5-5
310
143
9
Kitten Mittons
Wolfe
6-4
349
142
10
Super Happy Fun Bowl
Evan
5-5
300
141
11
Birds of War
Fred
5-5
313
138
12
BenKarrasch 1
take a guess
5-5
355
132
13
ChrisHenrysDeathmo-Bowl
Elliott
5-5
326
131
14
Where's the meatloaf ma!?
Chris B.
6-4
362
126
15
Joel Bribes the Jury
Rob Durham
6-4
360
125

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