Sunday (Not So) Fun Day: "I Got A Rock"

 

Its currently 30 degrees on this Sunday after Halloween here in Southern Michigan. Snow is already falling, and so is my enthusiasm for this college football season. I will not try not to be a depressing writer in the future but I simply must vent on what was one of the saddest, sleepiest, most disappointing weekends of football I can remember. Never mind, I will save that for tomorrow. I legitimately just wrote and deleted two paragraphs on Iowa and Michigan's performances alone and deleted them because it is not yet time for me to have that very personal conversation with myself and my expectations. But I digress.

Steering clear of the Hawkeyes and Wolverines, the rest of the Big Ten can be summed up as such... 

Minnesota lost again after giving up over 40pts to a Maryland squad who mustered just 3 against Northwestern the week prior. This would normally bring me immense joy (because PJ Fleck losing should do that for everybody) but not so much today. This game is the epitome of what Covid-19 has done to the very nature of college football's power structure. Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, and Penn. St are 1-7 combined to start the season while Indiana, Northwestern, Purdue, and Rutgers are 7-1. Read that last sentence ten times and then one trillion more. What has happened? Parity is not a bad thing for college football, but this is crossing the line. Chaos on the field coupled with chaos off the field is driving this season to the brink in the Big Ten and across college football. Wisconsin has shut down their football program for the second time as they have 22 positive cases and counting and looking more and more like they won't even play 5 games. Nebraska is trying to schedule teams like Chattanooga because they think it will help them with playoff selection😑. Hell, the only sliver of legitimacy this season has almost flew entirely out the window Saturday when Clemson had to comeback from 18 down to beat a mediocre at best Boston College team because the best player in the game has Covid. Trevor Lawrence will also miss next weeks matchup against Notre Dame and it already looks like reporters are ready to write the "Playoff Controversy" headliners should the Irish win. I'm not ready for it guys. With everything else going on right now it seems college football is nestled right where it should be in between hopeful and illegitimate. That's enough, on to league business.

Week 2 featured the same type of performances (save for Luke and Brent) as we saw in week 1. I had an excellent week record wise at 9-1 but only grabbed 3 more points then last week with 46. Tyler tallied another 6-4 performance and collected a healthy 40 points. Blake and Ethan stayed steady with another weekend of 5-5 but Blake collected 10 more points (34) than Ethan (24). After that... it was a disaster. Teddy and Ben got onto each others shoulders to punch a hole through the basement floor and escape with sub par 4-6 weeks with Teddy collecting 28 points and Ben doing his best Iowa impersonation with 20 for the second straight week. After Ben and Teddy scurried away from the hole in the floor that led to the burrow they once called home, they sat quietly in the corner watching Brent and Dalton, who, not noticing the hole, fell right in. Ben and Teddys reaction was caught on film.

Brent and Daltons two putrid performances leading to 8 points each should surely stand atop the league all year as the lowest weekly points haul. However, while Dalton posted a 2-8 record to amass his 8 points, Brent again taught us that anything is possible by going 3-7 to accrue his 8. Buddy and Luke also posted records of 3-7 with 19 and 16 points gained. While Ben followed the Iowa Formula of "lets have a bad performance in weeks one and two", Luke decided on a more Michigan like route of "lets open up hot and then crap our pants". 

The games that did the league in this week were first Notre Dame, who won 31-13 over Georgia Tech resulting in the Yellow jackets covering by 1 point. None of us had Georgia Tech and the loss took a whopping 77 points from the league! Three other games tied by dealing the league a record of 2-8 for each. The winners will be in (). These games were Sparty over Michigan (Ethan, Alec), Maryland over Minnesota (Tyler and Alec), and Texas over Mike Gundy's mullet (Tyler and Alec). The Texas result was the second most devastating loss for the league as 51 points were lost. I was honestly a little shocked by the Michigan fans (Blake, Dalton, Tyler) picking Michigan to cover the spread against Sparty having watched the game for so many years. 

Here are this weeks standings:

Notice Brent at the bottom with a higher winning% than the next three ahead of him. 😂Add caption

Movement was everywhere except at the top. Luke is hanging on inside the top 5 bolstered by a strong week 1 while Blake and Ethan's steady performances have them one high scoring week away from the top. Meanwhile, Buddy, Teddy and Ben are all clawing to reach the 50 point mark while Dalton struggles for relevancy. That leaves Brent... I was going to continue mocking the path Brent has taken to get to the basement but I will spin this into a positive. At 8-12, Brent should statistically be around 45 points... he has 28. The positive is at some point, Brent will start landing some of these big point games along with the tougher games he has picked correctly worth fewer points. To you Brent, I leave  an inspirational performance of a brave man who never gave up and to whom you must model your season moving forward after.

 

I will be posting the matchups tomorrow in the Monday Mull Over as we await a decision on the Wisconsin vs Purdue game. I am also from this moment on going to release the points table which lets you guys look at all of your previous weeks points accumulations. Here is the table:

That will do it for this weeks addition of "Sunday Fun Day". As mentioned previously, sorry the mood was so somber. It should not happen moving forward either because the Hawkeyes are so bad it doesn't matter or the world and college football universe rights themselves. Tune in tomorrow for Week 3 matchups as the WRBL(NA) train plows ever forward.