I searched and researched and I came up with some aspects of college football that are really pathetic. Duke, Temple's 20 straight losses, Colorado's loss to Montana State and the Florida International/Miami fight stuck out to me as the lowest of lows so far this season.
These are the parts of the college football world that make even Pwang want to change the channel. Who wants to see Temple play a football game? Who cares about Duke football? I don't.
But then I thought a little more and decided that all of these things, as bad as they are, are still a hell of a lot better than CFA's movie.
That thing was putrid. Have you ever wanted to gouge your own eyes out with a spoon after watching anything else on TV? If you didn't see the movie, just imagine the most self-absorbed, pointless and shameless attempt at self-promotion you've ever seen at Princeton and multiply that by infinity.
Things as fake as CFA help remind Pwang of why he loves college football so much. College football is a zero-sum game with winners and losers where success makes you a hero and failure is easy to recognize; a team knows if it is good or bad because there is no ambiguity in victory.
College football, even when it's being played by Duke or Temple, has a purity to it: it's real. It has real emotion and real consequence, and it has to be played out in a physical space where simply thinking that you are good isn't enough to make you good.
All too often in real life people don't realize that they suck; they just don't realize that they aren't good at what they do. College football forces teams and players to accept the reality of their performance regardless of whether or not that reality is satisfying.
Georgia (+14) @ No. 9 Florida
The world's biggest cocktail party is here. The NCAA won't let the schools call this game by that name any longer, but Pwang is going to do his part to keep it alive.
Florida's offense goes for a solid 394.1 yards per game and Chris Leak is completing 63.6 percent of his passes. He's thrown 15 touchdowns against only six interceptions and his QB rating is at 158.24. Just think of how good his numbers would look if he didn't get pulled in favor of Tebow every time Florida gets inside the 10.
Georgia has looked pretty bad for five straight weeks now. The Bulldogs are 3-2 over that stretch, and their best victory was a 14-9 nail biter against lowly Ole' Miss. The defense has kept them afloat by holding the opposition to 16.6 points, but the offense has managed only eight TD tosses between quarterbacks Matt Stafford, Joe Tereshinski and Joe Cox combined. Georgia's 27-24 win against Mississippi State, the worst team in the SEC West, combined with its 24-22 loss to Vanderbilt, the worst team in the SEC East, gives me little reason to think its even has a chance against the mighty Gators.
Pick: Florida (-14) over Georgia.
No. 19 Oklahoma (+2) @ No. 23 Missouri
Did anybody think they would actually see the day when Missouri was favored against Oklahoma? Pwang didn't. Which led me to ask, is Missouri actually a decent team or has it just run up a 7-1 record against a bunch of cupcakes?
Missouri does have the best tandem of tight ends in the country with Martin Rucker (29 catches, 3 TD's) and Chase Coffman (35 catches, 5 TD's). The Tigers, however, haven't played a ranked opponent all year, and their biggest win came against a Texas Tech squad that just got lunched by 1-7 Colorado. Missouri is okay but not good enough to beat Oklahoma, yet.
Pick: Oklahoma (+2) over Missouri.
Miami (+5.5) @ No. 21 Georgia Tech
The winner of this game is probably going to represent the Coastal Division in the ACC championship game. I just think it's pretty funny that Miami can be involved in one of the ugliest incidents in college football in a long time and still be on the inside track to a BCS bowl. You know what, I'm going to root for Miami to win just so I can hear coach Coker try to justify playing around 15 players that should have been suspended for this game.
Pick: Miami (+5.5) over Georgia Tech.
Penn State (-3) @ Purdue
This game is actually a lot bigger than people might realize. The Big Ten is most likely going to get both Michigan and Ohio State into BCS bowls, which means the third and fourth place teams in the league will still get invites to the Capital One Bowl and the Outback Bowl.
Wisconsin is currently sitting at third in the league and already went to the Capital One Bowl last year. It is rare for a team to go to the same bowl two years in a row since the Bowls themselves like to get different mixes of teams. This means that the winner of the Penn State versus Purdue game will most likely get to play on New Year's Day against Auburn, LSU or Tennessee from the SEC.
I'm going to try the reverse jinx this week.
Pick: Purdue (+3) over Penn State.
No. 15 Princeton @ Cornell
This is a classic letdown game for Princeton. It is going to be all too easy for the Tigers to come out flat against Cornell. With Harvard in the rearview and Penn and Yale still to come, the Tigers are going to have to avoid laying an egg in Ithaca if they want to keep their dream season going. There's no doubt that Princeton is the better team, but it's hard to be hungry after you feast.
Pick: Princeton 17, Cornell 14.
Overall Record: A.T.S. ( 22-17-3) Last Week: A.T.S. (3-3)
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