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:

Colts Rookie Camp 2010

The Colts rookie camp is this weekend, starting yesterday and going through Sunday. There had been an extreme lack of official news from the Colts about rookie free agent signings. They did finally announce yesterday though (on their website) who all the rookie free agents are.

The players attending the Colts Rookie Camp are…

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:

WMD – March Madness

No, not Weapons of Mass Destruction. This obviously stands for Weller’s Musing and Divination. I have no idea if this will become a frequent type of post or not, but this one will be similar to the Bracketology that Joe Lunardi does for ESPN. And of course by similar, I mean that I will be doing exactly what he does: predicting the field of 65 and their seedings in each region. Don’t fool yourself though, Mr. Lunardi knows significantly more about college basketball than I do. In fact, I haven’t hardly followed college basketball at all this year but this seemed like a fun idea and thought I’d give it a shot. Feel free to tear it apart:

Congratulations to Alabama

I’m sure much ink will be spilled about Colt McCoy’s injury and how it affected the outcome of tonight’s National Championship Game.  I don’t really want to do that, though it’s very similar to a championship boxing match being stopped in the first round.  Garret Gilbert did a great job in McCoy’s absence but the game was already over.  It didn’t help that Texas’ wide receivers couldn’t catch anything.

If I’m being completely truthful, I flipped over to the Blues game just before halftime.  Blues-Ducks was much more interesting than Tide-Horns for me.  Anyway, congratulations to the Tide.  They stopped the media crush on Tim Tebow, so I can’t hate them too much.

My Heisman Ballot

I’m headed off to the Missouri basketball game in a few minutes so I won’t be around for the actual presentation but I can still give my ballot.  Truth be told, I don’t care who wins this award, it’s rarely given to the right player.  I’ll cut right to the chase here because I’m walking out the door…here’s my ballot if I’m voting:

1. Ndamukong Suh – Nebraska – If the award is for the best player, this is a no-brainer.

2. Toby Gerhart – Stanford – Eye popping stats for this running back make him number two.

3. Mark Ingram – Alabama – I just never jumped on the “best player on the best team” bandwagon.  Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  Still, Ingram is in the Top 3.

4. Colt McCoy – Texas – If I was picking based on who I wanted to win, McCoy would be the choice.

5. CJ Spiller – Clemson – It’s a shame that Tim Tebow is at this presentation while Spiller is not.

Big 12 South Preview

A while ago Weller and I decided we’d do some previews for the upcoming college football season.  Since we’re lazy we decided to do the only two conferences that matter: The Big 12 and the SEC.  I’ll be taking the Big 12 today and Weller will do the SEC whenever he gets around to it.  Maybe the Vandy fans will come back and give him crap for that too.

So let’s get started in the South.  Obviously the stronger of the two divisions, the South boasts two true title contenders going into the season in Texas and Oklahoma plus  the upstart Cowboys of Oklahoma State, rebuilding Texas Tech, up and coming Baylor and Texas A&M.

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.

Where Might I Find Michael Vick in 2009?

Last year around this time I wrote a post (I’m actually just one week short of it being the exact same date) breaking down each team’s quarterback situation. You can check that out here. This post is going to be similar except it will be to specifically address whether or not each team has a need for Michael Vick and if they do, how much of a need it is. Some teams may need him simply because they need a quarterback, while others might be looking to use him in the Wildcat formation. Just today on ESPN.com’s NFL rumors section they said that the Redskins may be interested in Vick. I’d be interested as to what our commenter, Michael, who is a Redskins fan, thinks about this.

Weller’s Fantasy Baseball Team

As you may recall, I am attempting to become a baseball fan this year. I took a big step in that direction by joining a fantasy baseball league on Yahoo. It’s a standard public league with 12 teams/managers and head-to-head scoring. My first real shock came when I found out that I was in a live draft league. I had actually thought that I’d signed up for a league with an automated draft because I knew that I wouldn’t have heard of enough of the players to pick my team, and I certainly wouldn’t know enough about the players that I had heard of to know which to draft and when. I was wrong, it wasn’t a auto-draft league. Here’s the story: