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Westsider Rider

Thursday, October 19, 2006

BlogPoll Roundtable from My Opinion on Sports

This weeks BlogPoll Roundtable is brought to us by My Opinion on Sports:

1. Which coaches are clearly on the hot seat at this point? Who is surprisingly not?

Definitely after last week's embarassing incident, more on that later today, Larry Coker is at the top of the hot seat list. Another name would be John L. Smith at Michigan State. Sure we expected a typical Michigan State meltdown, but I never saw something like this coming. Dirk Koetter over at Arizona State has lost control of his team as well and punting the ball back to USC with such little time is just so stupid he should be fired just on the grounds of that. Especially with the new clock rules a coach should know that he has to go for it there, especially with only 2 timeouts. John Bunting has been terrible at North Carolina and will probably be gone as well, which could hurt considering they are starting to turn it around on the recruiting trail already securing a commitment from Mike Paulus and making Greg Little's final 2. Also you've got to wonder how much longer Stanford will take it under Walt Harris, they are probably the worst team in Div I-A right now.

Not sure who qualifies as who is surprisingly not on the hot seat right now. Dennis Franchione had some heat on him but with A&M off to a 6-1 start that seat could be cooling, dependent upon how they finish the rest of the season.

2. Pick three of the undefeated teams and state your case as to why they won’t run the table.

First one would be USC as I have stated before I am not impressed with them at all. They are squeaking by inferior opponents and one, if not three of the end of season gauntlet against Oregon, Cal and Notre Dame will defeat the Trojans, even though the games are at home.

Next is Rutgers, I have them ranked pretty high but I do not seeing them beat Louisville and West Virginia. I do think they will take care of business this week against Pittsburgh though.

Lastly, I'm not touching the Michigan-Ohio State or Louisville-West Virginia situations so I'll go with Boise State. Sure they have an easy schedule but the teams they will face still have some talent and for them Boise State is by far the biggest game left on their schedule. Whenever a non-BCS conference team is undefeated and starts to talk about how they should be included in the BCS if they go undefeated, that team always seems to lose a game somewhere along the way, I remember it happened to Fresno State a few years back and I think TCU as well.

3. Which conference is playing the best football right now?

When you take into account the conference as a whole I'd have to say the SEC. Week to week anything can happen because there are so many good teams, you can even look at Vandy's upset at Georgia last weekend that there are a lot of tough teams in the SEC.

4. Which team is playing above and beyond your expectations this season?

There are a number of teams that come to mind which include Rutgers, Clemson, Arkansas and Tennessee. We knew Rutgers was improved but not to this extent, although their schedule has played a big part of it. Wake Forest no one knew about, especially considering their starting QB and RB were lost for the season early on.

Arkansas has a lot of talent especially with Bryant McFadden and Marcus Monk but I don't think anyone expected the Razorbacks to make this type of noise especially if Mitch Mustain was to be handed the reigns to the offense.

I had Tennessee as my preseason #24 team, I did not think they would rebound this year the way they did as I expected them to start the season with a loss to Cal and be a good but not as good as they have shown themselves to be at this point.

5. Which team is crashing and burning in regards to your expectations?

I've got a number of teams who I had highly ranked in the preseason and have made me look like an idiot. We can start off near the top with LSU who I had as the #3 in the country preseason. I expected them to lose to Auburn but pretty much run the table the rest of the way, if they still run the table it will be a pretty good year for them. Next 3 are my I'm a complete moron picks which include FSU who I had at 6, Georgia at 12, Miami at 16 and TCU at 18, all now unranked and not looking very good in any way.

6. Is your pre-season BCS championship game prediction still alive?

Technically yes, but it would take a lot of upsets, upsets I don't want to happen, as I predicted Auburn and Texas to battle for the crystal football this year. Auburn is in very good shape if any of the other teams ahead of them falter, 2 of which will, so they could still make half of my preseason prediction come true.

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