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TDBs College Football Preview

Posted on August 27th, 2006 by JTk
Posted in football, sports | 1 Comment »
Welcome to This Damn Blog’s College Football Preview. I thought that it would be fun to post some college pigskin prognostications for the upcoming season and then check back in at the end of the year to see how I did.I think that Adrian Peterson’s Heisman chance left Norman with his erstwhile quarterback. Teams should now be able to key on Peterson making him less effective then he would have been with the threat of a credible passing attack. That opens the door for QB’s Troy Smith and Brady Quinn. In the end I think that the Notre Dame factor kicks in and Quinn wins the Heisman.

With all due respect to Boston College I think that the ACC Atlantic division should be decided early. If FSU beats Miami in week 1 and Clemson in week 3 Look for the Noles to win it again. Since I think the Miami may very well loose 4 games I am giving the Coastal conference to Virginia Tech.

Auburn, LSU, Georgia, and Florida look like they are the cream of the SEC. So the Tigers vs. the Tigers on September 16 should determine the winners of the SEC West and the worlds largest outdoor cocktail party the winner of the east. I’m taking Auburn at home and it would be poetic justice if the Dawgs beat an undefeated, higher-ranked, favored Florida squad.

USC is still the best team out west. Cal could give them some competition but the smart money is on the Trojans taking the Pac 10 again - but losing a game somewhere along the line. Louisville and West Virginia are pick’ em in the Big East - they meet in Kentucky on November 2. This game will not only determine the winner of the weakest BCS conference it very well may have nation title implications.

The big question in the Big Ten is will Lloyd Carr be fired when the Wolverines loose to Ohio State again this year. I would take the Buckeyes to win their first four games ( including against Texas in week 2 ) and win all the rest after losing to Iowa on September 30. Yep, Kirk Ferentz leads the Hawkeyes to the Big Ten Championship and with the help of a week non-con schedule an unbeaten season. How’s that for a dark horse?

Texas will rebound from the early loss to Ohio State to win their half of the Big 12 with Nebraska winning the North. I bet all those boomer sooners are pissed -knuckeheaded QB…

Notre Dame gets a BCS game invitation.

As you probably have already guessed, I am going out to the very end of the limb with my National Championship predictions. Sure, it would be much easier to pick two of the pre-season top 5 teams and write them in - but I am not going to do that.

National Championship Game: Iowa vs. the winner of Louisville - West Virginia.

Come on, you saw that coming, didn’t you? This is just as much about schedules and conferences as it is about these 3 teams. The Mountaineers should destroy everyone but Louisville on their schedule with Maryland, Pitt, and South Florida being the only (small ) potential road bumps. Louisville has a tougher non-conference schedule but if they can close the deal on Miami ( so close last year ) they benefit from the same soft Big East conference schedule.

I’m picking Iowa over whoever gets the Big East bid. So there you go Iowa fans, Drew Tate leads coach Ferentz’s Hawkeye’s to the 2006 National Championship.

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Atlanta Falcons - Trade Michael Vick

Posted on August 14th, 2006 by JTk
Posted in football, sports | 21 Comments »

Being down here is the South I get to see a lot of Atlanta Falcons games, and they have a pretty good team, but if they want to have a championship team they need to make a big move.

Trade Michael Vick.

Michael Vick is the World B Free of the NFL - he is exciting, even amazing, and sells a lot of tickets. What he is not, imho, is a championship caliber NFL quarterback.

Okay, maybe the World B Free reference was a low blow, and he seems like a good guy so I don’t want to be attacking him personally - but his trade value is not going to be any higher then it is right now. The falcons could get some defensive help up the middle for this year as well as a couple good future draft picks for him, and give themselves a chance to become a contender.

Matt Schaub is a good quarterback and I think he gives the Falcons at least as good an opportunity to win now as Vick does. Is Schaub as exciting as Vick? Not even close. Will he complete more third down passes then Vick on average? Yes. Schaub will be a starting quarterback in the NFL in the near future if the Falcons let him go and he is a better fit for the Falcons offense. If Schaub was given the offense and got all of the reps, I think that he would be a more efficient quarterback then Vick in short order.

Vick was the 25th rated quarterback in the league last year, that is 25th out of 34 - that is there were only 9 quarterbacks that qualified that were rated lower then he was.

By and large if you look at the list, the teams with the higher rated QB’s went to the playoff’s - only one quarterback in the lower half directed his team to the post season and that was Chris Simms who was in his first year at the helm and got significantly better as the year went on.

Vick starts the bottom quarter of this list.

Look at the division that the Falcons play in, the 2 top teams, the Bucs and the Carolina Panthers have both figured out how to stop Vick. Not even his dazzling running is effective against those teams. With Vick at the helm you can just about pencil in 4 conference losses for the Falcons.

Vick completed just 55.3 percent of his passes last year. The conventional wisdom is that a NFL quarterback needs to complete over 60% of his passes to be effective. His yards per attempt rank him 26th in the league and his 13 interceptions rank him 25th.

Vicks quarterback rating: 73.1
Schaub’s quarterback rating of 98.1

Not to mention that I am surprised every time Vick gets up from a hit and is not holding his knee or ankle. He has yet to prove that he can survive the rigors of the NFL season playing the game the way that he does.

Now, lets look at Vick’s perceived value - do you think that one of the other quarterback challenged clubs would not part with some really good players and or picks to secure Vick? Of course, because the egos of coaches are such that they think that the only thing Vick is missing is THEIR scheme or THEIR coaching.

And if you need proof of what a team can do by trading one superstar for draft picks, just look back at what Dallas did when they built their championship juggernauts by trading Herschell Walker to Minnesota for all those draft picks.

So the value proposition for fielding a winning football team is clear to me. Now Mr. Blank may be more interested in selling tickets then winning championships - and if so he should keep Vick. He is exciting as hell. But, if Blank, McCay, and Mora want to put together a championship team the solution is clear.

Trade Michael Vick

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