Weekend Watching

I find the mystery genre disgusting. I hate being titillated. Dunder Mifflin. Limitless paper in a paperless world. The weekend is off to a decent start as BC won, but VT lost last night. It was a win-win or a lose-lose or addition by addition? So number 2 holds on after playing like a hot circle of crap for the first 46 minutes of the game. There are plenty of other good games this weekend with major bowl implications.

USC vs. Oregon--Oregon is ranked fifth with only a loss to California to blot the resume. Remaining schedule after this gets much easier as Arizona State is the only other ranked team the Ducks will play. Dennis Dixon is has 1728 yards passing and another 416 rushing to go with 23 total touchdowns. Oregon runs a vertical version of the offense run by WVU. Leading receiver Jaison Williams averages 16.3 yards per catch for the Ducks (over 4 more yards per catch than Reynaud). USC is beginning the stretch run of their season and still have Cal and Arizona State upcoming in November before ending with UCLA. It appears as though Mark Sanchez may start despite being worse than JD Booty in every statistical category. Completion percentage, yards per attempt, and quarterback rating are all worse for Sanchez, but he didn't lose to Stanford. Staforn Johnson is the second leading runner for USC with 425 yards behind the 426 yards of Chauncey Washington so you could say the Trojans use a running back by committee approach.

Florida vs. Georgia--The party of cocktails that is very large considering other similar party's held in this world kicks off this weekend as well. Florida is back into SEC championship contention as the East now has every team except Vanderbilt with 2 losses. Georgia is one of the three teams, including Florida, sitting at 3-2 in conference. Georgia has losses to South Carolina and Tennessee thus far in the season. The Bulldog offense is currently 80th in the country while the defense is 25th. Georgia is only averaging about 40 more yards per game than they give up. The Bulldogs also use a running back by committee with Knowshon Moreno and Thomas Brown. Mathew Stafford has thrown for over 1300 yards and 10 touchdowns, but is only completing 55% of his passes.

Ohio State vs. Penn State--This game shows the generational divide of Mountaineer fans. Penn State has never really been a rival during the last 20 years, but for older WVU fans Penn State still ranks up there with VT. Either way this game is probably similar to BC/VT in that it's really hard to ROOT for either if these teams. Ohio State dominated Michigan State in their last game for 3.5 quarters then held on at the end for the victory. The remaining Buckeye schedule is PSU, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. 4 victories means another birth in the BCS championship for OSU and no one wants that. Penn State is 6-2 with losses to Michigan and Illinois. The Nittany Lions are 49th in total offense relying almost equally on the pass and the run and 7th in total defense. All signs point to a typical Big 10 game of keeping it close to win in the fourth quarter for one of these teams. Hooray.

Cal vs. Arizona State--Did you know that Arizona State is 4th in the nation? Well things could change quickly for the Sun Devils in the next 4 games as they take on 3 ranked teams in Cal, Oregon, and USC. The Sun Devils are led by the 27th ranked offense in the country and the 14th ranked defense. Offensively Rudy Carpenter has thrown 1730 yards and Ryan Torain and Keeqan Herring have combined for over 1000 yards rushing. Cal is coming off back to back loses to Oregon State and UCLA. Against UCLA Cal was held under 300 total yards and had 4 turnovers. The Golden Bears averaged only 2.2 yards per rush in that game. In the Oregon State game Cal had 478 yards, but had three turnovers. Cal will need to establish a running game and protect the ball to knock Arizona State out of the top 5.