The Monday Rewind: 12/5/16

Things started out poorly on Friday night, but we were able to continue our winning ways this weekend with a big night on Saturday night.  I went 5-2 in the biggest games of the weekend, while I went 3-2 in college gambling picks and 1-1 in NFL picks.  Chris did not do as well, but he's built a pretty good bank thanks to his past successful weeks.

On the year, in all picks combined (NFL & CFB gambling, and our head to head), I'm sitting at 104-87-8 while Chris is at 87-104-7, with his last pick coming tonight in the Monday night game between the Colts and Jets.  Still plenty of time over the NFL season and college bowl games to get back to even.

ESPN swayed the CFB Playoff Committee & why a 6-team playoff is better than 8 or 4.

Ok, let's start off with this:  Let's say a team was 11-2, and were conference champions from the
media-stated most difficult division in this year's best conference in college football.  They had won 9 straight games (8 straight by 14 or more, and the 9th was the title game over a top 6 team), had gone 9-1 in that conference, and in their 2 losses (one to a top 5 team, one to a top 25 team), both in September, they had injuries all over the field, and were starting walk-ons at linebacker.

But once they got healthy, they were on fire and beating teams up.

Let's say another team goes 11-1, with a loss to that conference champion head to head, and they had a really good non-conference win over a top 10 team in the 3rd game of the season.  But they didn't get a chance to play for the conference championship, so they played one less game.

If I flipped the names of the team, and said the conference champion was Ohio St, and the team that didn't make their championship game was Penn St, would the committee have put in Ohio St over Penn St?  If the roles were reversed, it wouldn't matter, because Ohio St was getting in no matter what.

It's almost like I didn't watch Penn St beat Ohio St back on Oct 22nd.  And that leads to questions...

Final Playoff Resumes (what's really going to happen): 12/2/16

We've finally reached the end of the college football regular season, and the Championship Weekend is now upon us.  And what a long, strange season it's been.


We're now to the point where the playoff committee has to show whether they're interested in viewership, or retaining their credibility.  They stated one of the most important criteria for getting into the playoff would be conference championships... but the way things are ranked, and how they are talking about teams leads one to believe that TV ratings may be more important, especially after how poor the ratings were last year for the Alabama / Michigan St game in Dallas and the Clemson / Oklahoma game in Miami.  The ratings were so bad, in fact, that ESPN had to give away $20M in free ads due to the viewership being so horrible.

Why Lane Kiffin would leave Alabama for LSU

I've had several people ask me to help make sense of the idea of Lane Kiffin leaving Tuscaloosa for Baton Rouge.

It's really not as hard as some people think it is.

Yes, Alabama is, currently, a better, more stable program.  Yes, Kiffin and Saban appear to be working together well, getting to 3 straight SEC Championship games, 2 straight playoffs, and winning the playoff last year.  LSU just hired their interim head coach as full-time head coach, and, yes, it's the same coach that went 10-25, and 3-21 in the SEC, as head coach at Ole Miss from 2005-07.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't work out for Lane.

WCE Thursday Picks (11/30/16)

Good gracious.  Life comes at ya fast, right?  We are actually on the final weekend... CHAMPIONSHIP weekend... in college football.  Yes, we have Army - Navy next weekend, and then we get plenty of bowl games to keep us occupied (and yes, we'll be picking bowl games throughout December), and we'll continue to pick NFL games... but we've really made it to the end of the season.  And we've done fairly well, if I do say so myself.  Between all of the games that we've picked against the spread, between our gambling picks and our big game picks, I'm now at 95-82-8 while Chris is at 83-95-7.  We've both go a chance to hit over 100 wins before the NFL season is done.  And that's a pretty big deal. On to the games for this week!