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| Let's add another team to the 11-team Big Ten Conference. Also, let's play football in a baseball park that can't fit a field comfortably. |
Ok, so I'm generalizing a little by lumping all twelve teams (counting Nebraska) into the idiocy label. I just don't get how the conference can be hyping up the Northwestern/Illinois game so much while not taking into account that they might not have designed the field properly for football. You would think this would be the first thing they would take care of before anything.
How they should have done it:
(1) Use computer generated model of a standard college football field to see if they can play inside what is now a baseball stadium.
(2) If such dimensions exist, organize field as such so that THE WHOLE FIELD, endzone to endzone, can be used.
(3) Play the game, which will bring some excitement to Wrigley Field for the first Autumn season since 2003 (I can't count the other appearances which resulted in Cubs sweeps).
How they actually did it:
(1) NCAA, desperately seeking new ways to exploit amateur athletes, enthusiastically announce that Wrigley Field will be the site of a Northwestern home game.
(2) People start randomly painting yard lines in a certain direction. They soon realize that there's about a foot to spare between the back of an endzone and the brick wall (now covered by padding).
(3) NCAA, Big Ten, and NU/UI officials agree to play offense going only one way on the field, a DAY before the event they started organizing a year ago. Apparently, their goal of having the players practice for their future Arena League careers wasn't in the cards.
(4) Executives of aforementioned organizations are drowning in too much money to actually give a shit about this major embarrassing flub.
Stupid Big Ten and stupid Wrigley Field.
With that being said, my pick for the week.
Northwestern (+8) vs. Illinois: I'm not quite sure why this number is so high. I know NU is starting a new QB, but NU had a similar issue years back with an injured QB and came out just fine with the newbie. Fitzgerald has done well in his short coaching career versus U of I, and I believe they've won their last two against the Illini as underdogs. Illinois is coming off a pair of embarrasing defensive performances, the latest to the bottom-feeding Minnesota Gophers, to whom no legitimate team should lose. I don't see this game being a two-score win for Illinois, so take the points.
I don't feel like looking up my record, but I know my record two weeks ago was 3-0 for $150. I'm fairly confident in this one and am putting down $110 to win $100 on NU.
For Sunday, so far I'm liking the Bills getting 6, Indy getting 4, and the Jets/Texans under of 46.
Peace out everyone and have a great weekend.
-B-Bo
