Sunday Funday: A Wild Return.

Week 1 is in the books folks (finally) and my goodness were we spoiled! Over the weekend, the country was treated to images and echoes that lived only within our fondest memory over the last year and half. And on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday...Monday...... 

... all those sights, sounds, smells and emotions came SCREAMING back into our lives! From the images of the San Gabriel Mountains and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the thunderous roars of Kinnick, Camp Randal, and the Big House, to the University of Iowa water polo team trying to kick you out of your tailgating spot (actually happened to Ben and Derek this weekend) it all adds up to one thing... Real College Football is finally back. Alright enough with the sappy, emotional mumbo jumbo lets get onto what went down in what was a return to normal for the most part in the balance of power within the conference.

The East seems like it is trying to regain a stronghold on the conference as that division took 3 of the 4 match-ups pitting the two divisions against one another. It started on Thursday night with Ohio. St taking longer to snap their traps on the Gilded Rodents from Minnesota. I told Ryan day a month ago that when you set a Golden Gopher trap you don't bait it with cheese or peanut butter but rather, bait the trap with a hyper, mid level MAC coach with shitty nautical sayings and empty promises of grandeur. I promise, Golden Gophers will come sprinting in. On Friday, we all were "treated" to a game at Ryan Field between Michigan State and Northwestern. Other than the fact that Sparty picked up a home win at an away venue and the only value gained from this game was that I worked out for the first like the third time in 5 months during it. But none the less the East moved to 2-0 against the West. The real games however were on Saturday.

A noon eastern start at Camp Randal between Wisconsin and Penn State rang in the real start to the Big Ten football season. This game felt as though it should have been fought in late November with wind and snow blustering into the face of Wisconsin Quarterback Graham Mertz and Penn. St signal caller Sean Clifford rendering both offenses useless and allowing the defenses to feast. Well, there was no wind or snow, but with a 64oz Old Milwaukee in each hand, both QB's gazed into mother natures eyes and uttered the most powerful assemblage of three words in the English language...

The score was 0-0 at half time. Touché boys... touché. The second half saw the two offenses somewhat wake up and all in all, a very entertaining struggle finished with a 16-10 PSU win moving the East to a 3-0 record vs West foes with one to play.

Iowa vs Indiana was a hyped matchup of ranked teams until it wasn't. The game was over quicker than it took for you to read this sentence and maybe Indinia... er.. Indiana, isn't as good as their preseason ranking suggested. 

 Indiana setting the stage early for their performance to come in Iowa City.

Our two non Big Ten teams both squeezed by lesser opponents albeit one was much lesser. Notre Dame won on a field goal in OT in Tallahassee while Matt Campbell and Iowa State escaped an upset bid against a Northern Iowa team that was a 30 point dog to the 7th ranked Cyclones. It was not a pretty game from a program who says its "greatest team ever" is sure to win a Big 12 Championship, but Cyclone fans across the country were just excited they hadn't shit themselves in a season opener like last year. In fact, many fans (since the game was not on TV) were seen checking there phones for score updates and upon getting confirmation of the ugly W were recorded in the video below reacting to their squads performance.

There will be more to come about Big Ten teams in the weekly Power Rankings tomorrow but for now, lets talk about league performance! So without further ado, here are the current standings in the battle for the Golden Can.

As you can see there is much to talk about as the League saw a really mixed bag of results. Newbies to the action seemed to fair well this week and none more so than Luke who came out of the gates with the best performance of the week amassing a 7-3-1 record and 45 points. Tamper the optimism though Luke its a long ass season. 

Another member of the league (and the most shocking event of the week) Ben, posted a 7-3-1 record as well.  For those of you new to the league, Ben spent damn near the entire year last year in the basement of the league after running after his throw caution to the wind approach of picking games. Maybe this only happened because he sent them to me 2 minutes before the Ohio. St game and therefore didnt have time to screw it up. Look for Ben to drop off a cliff again though this year as evidenced by his continued need to pick brashly as evidenced by this text sent to me on Thursday night.

It wont take long folks.

After Luke sits a muddled mess of 6-4-1 records and that group includes Teddy, and Newbies Matt, Evan, and Derek. This is utter bull crap in my personal opinion as Matt and Evan were not punished for picking Nebraska to cover against Illinois last week. Your arrogance will catch up to you my friends. You deal with the devil and there is only one way to go... down. On one hand though at least Matt and Evan are still riding in first class to this point. The next five in the standings (LT, Buddy, Brent, Micheal, Ian) I would categorize as being near the very back of the plane. Not all the way back, but just far enough to where when the largest person on the plane takes a shit in the bathroom, you can still catch a whiff of it. So things could definitely be better, but they could also be worse.

 

And that takes us to the bottom four. Let me preface this first by saying that at one point last year, the Graber and Fullenkamp brothers ruled the league so much so that the two pairs were dubbed the Graberkamps... My how things have changed. Our current King Tyler, and his brother Blake amassed 4-6-1 records for a very Ben like performance of 21 and 20 points. Yes its only week one but if things don't change quickly for these two, especially Tyler whose relevancy has disappeared quicker than that of Nebraska's once the 90's ended, their days could be numbered. They are still better off however than myself or Ethan whose start to the year began much like this...

You would think a Purdue education would have helped Ethan out a little more but apparently he may as well have gone to Devry. It's a long season, but this was not an ideal start. Here are the lines for Week 2.

With that, the first installment of "Sunday" Funday is in the books. look for these to actually be released on Sunday night from here on out. Moving into Week #2 we have a few great match-ups including the fighting Shiano's of Rutgers making the list for the first time! The week is highlighted by Oregon at Ohio. St and two rivalry games including first ever top 10 matchup of the CyHAwk game between Iowa and Iowa State with Gameday headed to Ames, and the Holy War AKA the Mormon Bowl between Utah and BYU. PAC-12 after dark is one of my personal favorites but the football played in the Mormon Bowl can only ever be described in one way....

Goodnight folks!