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After focusing on Coaches on the Hotseat in the ACC on Wednesday, we ended up surfing around a little bit and ran across a couple of items that definitely deserved some mention.
(1) Even though he isn’t linking to an SFN piece, Joe Ovies penned something I was thinking coming out of this past weekend related to ACC Football – nothing seems to be good enough.
Nothing the Atlantic Coast Conference does is ever good enough, is it?
In first week, the conference was hammered because they couldn’t win. The ACC actually won games the following week, but detractors still found fault in the manner in which they were victorious. What will the media complain about after this week? My money is on the possibility of Florida State getting hammered by BYU and East Carolina beating North Carolina being the latest material for more wasted column space telling us what we already know. The ACC isn’t the SEC.
(2) In addition to Ovies’ comments on the perception of ACC Football, he also brings up the topic of watching football on the internet which I have been doing with a lot of frequency this year. For the record, my experience with ESPN360 has been really nice. Lots of games. Quick loading. Relatively good picture. I have even hooked up my laptop to my television with an HDMI cable and watched on the big screen.
Unfortunately, the ACCSelect/PackPass service proved to be just as horrible and bad as you would fear. I paid $10 for the Murray State game this weekend and the service finally started working near the end of the 3rd Quarter. It was AWFUL. You can see some of the comments in real time on our message boards and Pack Pride’s message boards had dozens of posters also complaining Completely incompetent and embarrassing.
If you told me 15 years ago that watching any college football game in the country would be as easy as logging into my CompuServe email, I would have asked to see your flying car. Well, no flying cars yet…but we’ve got ESPN360 piping in football to my MacBook. Which is great, but equally lacking. Football is meant to be watched in the stadium or on the couch with an HDTV. Not on a 12-inch screen. It’s a growing sentiment in ACC markets, where the World Wide Leader is relegating games to the online-only service. Oh, you’re a Time-Warner Cable subscriber? No soup for you anyway.
(3) Despite being tempted, we haven’t directly linked to “Ricky’s Rant”…but, this entry from CollegeGameBalls provides enough value on other topics to merit a link and that way we don’t completely ignore something that a lot of people are talking about. They have the links we were going to post highlighting how Ohio State fans are criticizing one of the most successful coaches in college football history, Jim Tressel. The next time any MORON criticizes how NC State fans are different and worse than other fanbases then please remember this type of lunacy.
Of course, in the Lee Fowler School of Athletics Directorship, the conclusion is simple — ‘Who would want to coach at Ohio State with their crazy fans?’ You are starting to get it by now, I hope.
(4) Lastly, a bowl game continues to garner potential in Yankee Stadium. (Link to the Dr.) I love New York and would use any excuse to get there. And, I love the new Yankee Stadium that I visited for the first time on the Saturday afternoon of CC Sabathia’s masterpiece against the Red Sox about six weeks ago. But, the following says it all for me:
We’re sure this is a beautiful venue, given the money poured into it, and we’re all for football games staged in grand settings, but two things stop us from cheering this development: First, it’s an outdoor game in New York in the dead of winter, the type of locale that typically has trouble filling seats for a postseason match and has killed previous bowl games in the Big Apple with more attractive match-ups. (Although this is where the idea strikes us as sort of accidentally brilliant; the marketing hordes sure to be employed to publicize this thing are going to have more resources at their disposal than, say, the Pizza Pizza Bowl drones.) Second … the third-place team from the Big East and the seventh-place team from the Big 12 are rewarded with a trip to New York at Christmas? Really? Shipping them to half-empty stadiums in Birmingham or Boise is one thing, but no 6-6 also-ran deserves to set foot on Broadway.
