Friday 5 – Our Football Teams

For those of you that haven’t been counting down for nearly six months, football season officially starts in less than five weeks with the first games of the college season being on Thursday, September 2. This means I thought it would be a good time for us to evaluate our personal desires for how we would (realistically) like our respective teams to fare this season. Bryan and I are both Tennessee Vols fans, he’s a Missouri Tigers fan, I’m an Indianapolis Colts fan and he’s a St. Louis Rams fan. So for our Friday 5 I’ll put up the schedule for each game, how many wins we expect/hope that team to get and at then end for the final part, to complete the ’5′ in Friday 5 I will put up a total. I will also plan on putting up some sort of weekly chart or graph or both or something to provide something to look at for the progressions our teams our making towards the goals that we are setting for them. Let’s get started:

Friday 5 – Favorite Highlights

This is going to be short because I have a lot I need to do but figured this would be a good way to start my day. I’m simply putting up my five favorite football highlights. This isn’t including anything that has personal, emotional or any other sort of biased attachment or they would simply be plays from the Colts Super Bowl XLI win, the win during that year’s AFC Championship game, Peyton Manning throwing his 49th TD in 2004, the Vols 1998 National Championship and one of my favorites from Peyton at Tennessee. But alas, none of those will be included. These are just highlights that I love to watch over and over simply because of how awesome they are as football plays, not because they had any sort of meaning (to me or anyone) or influence over a game or season. This was hard to narrow down to five so there are a ton of honorable mentions, but I’m sure all those will come up in the comments. Let’s get started:

Final Field of 65 Prediction

I am currently in a car riding from Montana to Colorado so this is gonna be quick and to the point. I’m simply going to list the 65 teams in no particular order. I had planned on this being another full prediction with seedings and all but unfortunately the circumstances won’t really allow that to happen. Here’s the list of 65 teams that I think will make the NCAA tournament this year:

Consolidated Preseason NCAA Football Rankings

I have compiled NCAA football preseason rankings from a wide range of sources. I’m linking to each one and then including a chart at the bottom showing the rankings side by side and then put in an average ranking for each team and also and adjusted average. The adjusted average only includes the rankings from sources that actually included the team in their rankings. Rivals and Sports Illustrated are the only two sources I used that ranked all 120 teams. I took the top 70 from each of those sources and came up with 75 schools. For the rankings that didn’t have a school included, I gave the excluded schools a default ranking for that source that would be the next highest rank. So if a source only ranked their top 25 then the other 50 teams on my list that weren’t included automatically got the ranking of 26. That way the fact that they would impact the averages in comparison to one another. If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments section below.

The SEC Basketball Tournament

Yesterday I put up my predictions for the Big 12 Conference Tournament, and as promised I am putting up my SEC predictions today. I have a little more bias when it comes to the SEC side of things, so please forgive me when you disagree with my picks. An interesting tid-bit that has always intrigued me is that the SEC and Big 12 both have 12 teams in their conference, and both are divided into two divisions of six. The weird part is that for the Big 12 conference tournament, they seed all the teams 1 through 12 regardless of division, while the SEC seeds the two different divisions 1 through 6 and has it set up so that for the first round no two teams from the same division are matched up against one another.