Tuesday Morning Football Bytes

Off to work, so I just wanted to get a few things up for your viewing pleasure:

* The most important item of the entire weekend was the new 3-2-5-e rule supposedly designed to shorten games. I never got this to begin with. Who really cares about shortening games? Honestly. I pay all of that money to go to the game, why would I want it to be shorter and not longer? Additionally, college football has never been more popular than it is right now. If the old rules facilitated such an enormous rise to popularity, why would anyone want to risk messing that up? Well. you have got to check out this link and the links within it.

Saturday’s Alabama Birmingham-Oklahoma game featured only 110 offensive plays, the fewest for a Sooner game over the last 50 years! That bested the 112 offensive plays in the 1960 game against Colorado and the 1962 matchup against Missouri.

Here is where it gets interesting: The game lasted three hours 16 minutes. Last year, Oklahoma’s shortest game was three hours 13 minutes (against Kansas in Kansas City). As a point of reference, the shortest Oklahoma game in the Bob Stoops era was the 2004 affair against Nebraska, completed in two hours 49 minutes.

So the 3-2-5-e rule results in fewer plays and games that last just as long. Frigging brilliant!

Judging by this example, 3-2-5-e doesn’t work and officials are merely running circles around the real problem: Too many commercials!

Now if you haven’t checked out John Niyo’s fabulous piece in the Detroit Free Press we linked to Monday, you must take a look. The Vanderbilt-Michigan game had 125 plays. Last season, Michigan games averaged 145 plays. At this alarming rate, it can only be a season or two before we have more commercials than plays.

* Section Six has some quick Wolfpack hits of interest. (Link).

* Additionally, the N&O has some “Late Hits” on their ACC Now blog. (Link)

* Congratulations to Florida State for extending the Atlantic Division’s success this past weekend and emphasizing the imbalance between the strength of the ACC’s two divisions.

* Ron Cherry’s crew comes across as one of the worst in college football even when they are earning kudos from ESPN’s announcers.

* Stewart Mandel says the FSU-Miami game is losing is its luster (Link). $*#& Doyel actually wrote a similar piece that was very good yesterday on CBS Sportsline, but I do not dare link up a Doyel article here on SFN.

* Many Wolfpackers profess to being huge Pittsburgh Steelers fans because of Bill Cowher. Therefore, a lot of you should be very interested in this link.

* If you didn’t have the opportunity to visit SFN late last week or over the weekend then we encourage you to scroll down and do some catching up.

'06 Football General

27 Responses to Tuesday Morning Football Bytes

  1. noah 09/06/2006 at 10:21 AM #

    “Trestman was in Cleveland for 2 years, after 3 poor seasons in Min and SF. He was basically run out of Cleveland and went back to Min for 2 more bad seasons.”

    No, he wasn’t.

    He was the QB coach at Univ. of Miami from 1981 to 1984, running backs coach for the Vikings for two years (85 and 86), QB coach for Tampa Bay in 1987 and then the QB coach for the Browns in 1988.

    1989 was his first year as OC and without a single decent running back, Bernie Kosar still had a strong year and the Browns made the AFC title game. The Browns were totally built around their defense and as I said before, they had no running game whatsoever (after Mack’s injury), so why would you “run out” your OC after finishing one game away from the Super Bowl?

    He went back to Minnesota and was NOT the OC, he was the QBs coach. His pupils were Rich Gannon and Wade Wilson. He left the Vikings after 1991 because Jerry Burns got fired and Denny Green brought in his own staff.

    Furthermore, Gannon’s #s were average under Trestman — but they were nearly identical to the numbers he put up under every single coach from 1992 to 1998. He didn’t develop into a decent QB until 1999 in Oakland (his first season throwing for more than 3,000 yards).

  2. Wolfpack4ever 09/07/2006 at 10:25 PM #

    Noah,

    I’m developing a love/hate relationship with your posts — not that you could or should give a squat. So I re-read some of them to see what it was that was so different about them for me.

    I’ve come to the conclusion that you and many solid State Fans, I include myself in that group, have been burned a few too many times by getting your hopes up and then having them dashed by loses that should not be… especially to the Heels. So I’m guessing that the dire predictions is to mask and protect yourself from the disappointment of another mediocre season. This is what I found myself doing.

    Please don’t get upset at my amateur and over-simplified explanation for myself as to the gap between some of your posts and what I refer to as Gloom and Doom posts pertaining to our chances of winning.

    No matter, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Go pack! Make me right on Saturday. Let’s have stats by Stone that has us comparing him to Philip Rivers. BTW I watched the game again last night on some link I picked up here and Stone did not seem lost or even to have happy feet. The only really silly thing I saw was him passing to Bedics. 🙂

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