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:

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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.

February 2009 – Important Events

This is something new that I’m going to try to do each month. I will give each date and list important events, games and/or something in sports history that have happened on that date. I will do my best to provide at least one thing for each day. If I forget anything feel free to let me know if a comment. Without further ado, here it is:

Draft Thoughts for Bryan

First let me say that this won’t interest a whole lot of people, and will only probably intrigue people that are fans of an NFL team drafting in the top 10 or just want to gather as many different thoughts and perspectives on the 2009 NFL Draft as possible. With that out of the way, let’s get down to it.

As many of you know Bryan is a huge Rams fan and because of this he is already looking ahead to the draft for obvious reasons. So he asked me “if the Lions take Andre Smith and you were drafting for the Rams, what would you do?” This was an interesting question, because I believe (and Bryan agrees with me) that the Rams goal for the first round should be to get one of the top 3 offensive tackles in the draft: Andre Smith, Eugene Monroe or Michael Oher. They are all easily top 10 players on my big board. So what I told Bryan is that if I couldn’t trade down to a spot where I thought Monroe or Oher would still be available, then I’d reach for Monroe, but that I’d definitely be trying to trade down to get something extra out of it. He said that in addition to the team’s 2009 first round pick he’d also want a first rounder in the 2010 draft as well, but that he might settle for the team’s 2009 second rounder.

Next Bryan asked me how far I would trade down and who it would be with. This was a harder question to answer than I would have first thought. My answer to the first part of the question was simple: “I’d say we need to stay in the top 10, preferably the top 8, but I think top 10 would be fine.” The second part of the question was much more difficult. I first needed to find a top 10 team that was behind the Rams and had a big enough need for a player to jump up to the second spot because a team currently in front of them would likely take that desired player. After that I then had to figure out who I thought the remaining teams would draft to see if one of the previously mentioned offensive tackles would still be available for the Rams.