83rd Academy Awards
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Just so I'm time stamped and on record here are my Oscar Nomination
Predictions:
BEST PICTURE:
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids are All Right
The...
13 years ago
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2 comments:
Pre season polls mean nothing. Call me in October after everyone plays a few games.
I predicted that ucla was not going to be as bad as the media was telling us. They have excellent coaching, a very good defense and an athletic QB that Chow can work with.
The SEC keeps telling everyone how great they are but their record against the Pac10 is a losing one over the last ten years.
Thanks to TrainerDave here's a great article from The Birmingham News regarding the SEC vs. other conferences. Very interesting numbers...
SEC should avoid opening football season with road games
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Tennessee became Exhibit A Monday night. By embarrassingly losing in Los Angeles to UCLA and its string of reserves one year after getting trounced at Cal, Tennessee represents the latest excuse for the SEC to avoid testing itself on the road.
Why fly 2,200 miles to lose when you can pay several hundred thousand dollars for a win - and collect millions in gate revenue - at your place?
The SEC has gotten better in scheduling. Besides UT at UCLA, this year also brings Arkansas at Texas, Georgia at Arizona State, Auburn at West Virginia and Florida at Florida State.
But it shouldn't be pulling teeth to play these games. Not when you're typically the best conference in the country - and never miss a chance to say so. Not when you've got more than a billion dollars tied up in unprecedented exposure on CBS and ESPN.
The inconvenient truth about conference supremacy is that it runs in cycles. Games that dominant SEC teams don't want to play today could be ones they need in the future for credibility and national championship hopes.
MapGameDay.com put together a fascinating study of non-conference games by charting the number of miles each conference traveled between 1998 and 2007. The SEC finished dead last among the 11 Division I-A conferences, at 42,141 miles.
Among BCS conferences, the Pac-10 traveled the farthest (152,802 miles), followed by the Big Ten (107,881), Big 12 (73,183), Big East (69,777) and ACC (60,865). The SEC had seven of the bottom eight teams in mileage traveled.
Georgia has traveled 358 miles in a decade - the equivalent of a day trip from Birmingham to Nashville. Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi and Auburn have nothing to be proud of, either.
The SEC isn't simply staying in the Southeast for road games. No conference played fewer nonconference games away from home in the past decade than the SEC.
Auburn was the worst in the country with only three of its 34 nonconference games on the road. Alabama had just four, joining Arkansas, LSU, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee in the bottom top 12, according to a study by The NationalChampionshipIssue.blogspot.com.
Besides losing a payday, leaving home means this harsh reality for the SEC: It's pretty mediocre on the road. Since 1998, the SEC is 40-39 in nonconference road games. That mark drops to 24-31 at schools from BCS conferences.
The Pac-10, which SEC fans conveniently shoo aside, is now 10-6 this decade against the SEC. Whereas the SEC is 1-6 at Pac-10 schools, the Pac-10 has gone 4-5 at SEC stadiums.
The SEC takes its most important 2008 road trip on Sept. 20, when Georgia travels to Arizona State for its first trip west of the Mississippi since 1964. That traces back to Uga I, if you're counting in dawg years.
Yes, a loss in Tempe could doom Georgia's national championship hopes. But the opposite is also true. Georgia may eventually need an impressive nonconference win for its resume.
Whether it cares to admit this or not, the SEC might one day need the rest of the country, too.
E-mail: jsolomon@bhamnews.com
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