Bowl picking
OK, we have had several folks ask if we are going to have bowl picks this week. The answer is yes. Yes we are.
A sizzling conclusion to the season that included a 5-1 finish on championship weekend and a 2-0 mark in the Army-Navy game left us at 50-30-1, which is 62.5 percent against the number.
We will post our first round of picks, and while we go through the college season picking and choosing, this year we're going to pick every bowl game for a few reasons:
One, if gives us a vested interested, even if that is somewhat light.
Two, we want to try to help folks around the holiday. What's the saying, "Peace on Earth and Good Wagers to Man" or something like that, right?
Now to be fair, we started slow in the bowls last year before finishing 13-10 in the bowl season. This year, we're going to pick them all. So there's that.
Giddy-up, and check back tomorrow for the first slew of bowl picks. Deal? Deal.
As for that contest, if you have not entered, time is starting to dwindle.
We have more than 50 entries already. Deadline is Friday friends and all picks must be in by end of BID-ness on Friday, Dec. 15. Entries must be emailed - yes emailed - to me at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com.
Dilly. Dilly.
Note: Most of these games are in chronological order as they appear on the schedule. The Arizona Bowl is in late December, and we did not see the need to have NMSU and USU be a five-pointer.
ONE POINT GAMES (6 points possible)
- New Orleans Bowl: Troy (-5.5) vs. North Texas
- Autonation Care Bowl: Georgia State (-4.5) vs. Western Kentucky
- Las Vegas Bowl: Oregon (-7.5) vs. Boise State
- New Mexico Bowl: Colorado State (-5.5) vs. Marshall
- Camellia Bowl: Arkansas State (-3.5) vs. MTSU
- Arizona Bowl: New Mexico State (-3.5) vs. Utah State
TWO-POINT GAMES (12 points possible)
- Cheribundi Tart Cherry (now that's a name) Boca Raton Bowl: FAU (-23) vs. Akron
- Frisco Bowl: SMU (-5.5) vs. La. Tech
- Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl (another excellent name): Temple (-7.5) vs. FIU
- Bamahas Bowl: Ohio (-7.5) vs. UAB
- Famous Idaho Potato Bowl: Wyoming (pick em) vs. Central Michigan
- Birmingham Bowl: South Florida (-2.5) vs. Texas Tech
THREE-POINT GAMES (21 points possible)
- Armed Forces Bowl: Army (pick em) vs. San Diego State
- Dollar General Bowl: Toldeo (-7.5) vs. App. State
- Hawaii Bowl: Fresno State (-3.5) vs. Houston
- Heart of Dallas Bowl: Utah (-6.5) vs. West Virginia
- Quick Lane Bowl: Duke (-3.5) over Northern Illinois
- Catcus Bowl: Kansas State (-2.5) vs. UCLA
- Independence Bowl: FSU (-14.5) vs. Southern Miss
FOUR-POINT GAMES (28 points possible)
- Pinstripe Bowl: Iowa (-3.5) vs. Boston College
- Foster Farms: Arizona (-3.5) vs. Purdue
- Texas Bowl: Missouri (-3.5) vs. Texas
- Military Bowl: Navy (-3.5) vs. Virginia
- Camping World Bowl: Oklahoma State (-6.5) vs. Virginia Tech
- Holiday Bowl: Michigan State (-3.5) vs. Washington State
- Alamo Bowl: TCU (-2.5) vs. Stanford
FIVE-POINT GAMES (30 points possible)
- Belk Bowl: Wake Forest (-2.5) vs. Texas A&M
- Sun Bowl: N.C. State (-6.5) vs. Arizona State
- Music City: Northwestern (-7.5) vs. Kentucky
- Outback Bowl: Michigan (-7.5) vs. South Carolina
- Taxslayer Bowl: Louisville (-6.5) vs. Mississippi State
- Liberty Bowl: Memphis (-3.5) vs. Iowa State
SIX-POINT GAMES (30 points possible)
- Cotton Bowl: THE Ohio State (-6.5) vs. USC
- Fiesta Bowl: Penn State (-2.5) vs. Washington
- Orange Bowl: Wisconsin (-6.5) vs. Miami
- Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl: Auburn (-9.5) vs. UCF
- Citrus Bowl: LSU (-3.5) vs. Notre Dame
SEVEN-POINT SEMIFINALS (14 points possible)
- Rose Bowl: Georgia (-1) vs. Oklahoma
- Sugar Bowl: Alabama (-2) vs. Clemson
TEN POINT BONUS (10 points possible)
NATIONAL CHAMPION (no line, just the winner):
Recruiting Redos
New University of Tennessee football coach Jeremy Pruitt is a busy dude right now.
Getting his Alabama defense ready for a national title semifinal against a Clemson offense that when they last faced puts a ton of points and yards on the board.
That's his former job, which he is understandably and admirably trying to finish with style and hardware. His new job with the mush-larger check is also quite demanding.
Trying to hire a staff. Trying to figure out the best places for takeout on the Strip. (On the former, we believe Pruitt's staff was bolstered by adding Austin Thomas, the "general manager" of LSU football. Thomas has an extensive and impressive recruiting pedigree.)
Which brings us to a very crucial task for Pruitt and his new charges. Certainly, this recruiting cycle was going to be a tall order with all the turmoil. And yes, the first full recruiting year for any new staff is almost always noticeably better. But no program playing big-time college football can really afford a completel whiff.
With that in mind, Vols recruiting made news Wednesday, some good and some bad and some ugly.
First the good: Talented play-making wide receiver/athlete Alontae Taylor - ranked No. 46 nationally in the ESPN 300 in this class and 118th nationally on the 247sports.com composite poll - is back in the Tennessee fold. That's excellent for an offense that feels like it has constantly needed difference-makers on the perimeter. Taylor is the fourth four-star among 11 commitments and the second-highest ranked high school player pledged to the Vols.
As for the bad, well, Adrian Martinez, a top-10 dual threat quarterback from California flipped from Tennessee to Nebraska on Wednesday evening. Martinez is a player who had offers from everyone from Alabama, THE Ohio State and on down. And with less than a week before signing day, the timing of losing not one but both QB commits (more on this in a moment) in a class is especially tough. Of the 16 dual-threat quarterbacks listed as four-star recruits or higher, only two have not committed. Of the pro-style quarterbacks ranked as four-stars or better, 14 of the 15 have already committed.
The ugly: It's a tough part of the process on each side, but the other quarterback that was in UT's recruiting class when we awoke Wednesday was Michael Penix, a three-star from the state of Florida. He posted on social media that Pruitt and the new staff were not showing him the same type of love that Butch and Co. did. And that's part of this entire process when change happens. It makes it tough for programs - that said you can not keep a coach or a staff for one recruiting class when it was that clear that Jones and Co. had to go - and for the kids.
With the news of Martinez and Penix dropping from the fold, UT is ranked No. 46 in the 247sports.com team list. That's No. 12 in the SEC.
A CHA-ching in a CHA-change
Speaking of college football changes, well, ESPN BID-ness ace Darren Rovell tweeted out this morning a letter FSU is sending its boosters.
It surely will be a story later today and will be quite the talking point.
We have maintained that the ceiling on spending on college sports hovers around the next TV contract for football. We still believe that, but Rovell's tweet only magnifies the importance of TV dollars in the future.
Rovell shared the letter the FSU athletic department sent out saying that under the new tax codes which has been passed by the House and Senate, the tax breaks for the gifts given to colleges could drop from 80 percent tax deductible to not deductible at all.
The verbiage the FSU letter uses is "Under the current proposed legislation, annual contributions required for season ticket purchases, including club seats and skyboxes, would no longer be deductible after December 31, 2017."
Maybe that's a scare tactic to lock boosters into a commitment for next year. And considering FSU just went through its first coaching search/turnover turmoil since before Carter was sworn in, that could be the case.
And the letter does mention that the legislation could change, but the numbers in terms of football season-ticket revenue are kind of staggering for your power conferences. (And how that effects the overall gifts to colleges is also an issuer to explore. There is no mention in the FSU letter about gifts to academia, only the required gifts to purchase season tickets.)
For some background, here's the way this has worked. Alumni and boosters are charged face value for the season tickets they purchase, but to get in position to buy the primo seats, you have to make sizable donations. The bigger the donation, the better access to the better sections of seats.
So, if State U. Fighting Mongeese (Hey, Spy, is the plural of Mongoose, Mongeese?) club-level tickets are face value of $75 a piece and you buy four, that's $300 a game in tickets.
For a regular eight-game season that's $2,400 in tickets.
At one school in a power five conference that sounds an awful lot like Claw-Fern, we know that the $75 club-level (called 'scholarship tickets' when you watch the Clawfern War Plains Tigers) come with unlimited food and non-adult beverages on the concourse. This year, there was the chance to buy beer and wine in the scholarship level at Clawfern, too. War Co-Colas.
Anyhoo, it's not uncommon for the donation for the right to buy those club level tickets to be more than $1,000 per seat, and some schools are higher than that. (There's no telling the donation needed to buy the tickets for the sky box, but it assuredly adds another digit or two.)
But let's just stay in the even $1K for the scholarship seats for easy math purposes. So that entire bill for four tickets to see your beloved Mongeese or War Plains Tigers would be $6,400, and that's just for four seats of the more than 85,000-seat stadium that likely includes tens of thousands of upper-echelon season-ticket holders.
The kicker has always been that while you can not write-off the price of the tickets, you can write off $800 of each $1,000 per seat you have to pony up to get on the list.
So that $6,400 has been cut in half. Still steep for those of us who work at a newspaper, but more doable with the tax-write off.
When Trump signs this tax plan, if there are not any changes, the literature FSU is circulating states that the deduction will be gone.
This and that
- Disney announced it is acquiring 21st Century Fox for cash and stock in the value close to $52.4 billion. Here are some details. As for the sports and news overlap - remember the Disney/ESPN imagine is strikingly opposite to the Fox News optic - here's what the release says: Prior to the acquisition, 21st Century Fox will separate the Fox Broadcasting network and stations, Fox News, Fox Business, FS1, FS2 and Big Ten Network into a newly listed company that will be spun off to its shareholders.
- Well, news that Disney has announced a deal to acquire 21st Century Fox certainly has been rumored - as far back as 20 years ago. Here's a screen grab of a scene from The Simpsons that first aired on November 8, 1998 with the sign saying "20th Centruy Fox A Division of Walt Disney." Remember, The Simpsons also had a 2000 episode that had Lisa Simpson being elected President and she said her team was inheriting a budget crunch from President Trump. Seriously. And The Simpsons also picked the Greece finical collapse and the FIFA scandal. So there's that. (Side note: Some industry experts think this acquisition could spell the end for The Simpsons' marathon run.)
- Side note: While we are here, if you did not see Hangtime's post Wednesday about the Panthers cutting Roberto Aguayo and the insightful take of someone who obviously has dealt with the pressures of being a football specialist, take a moment and check back to yesterday's 5-at-10. Very interesting stuff. (And since HT is clearly not a Star Wars fan/aficionado/junkie like the rest of us, he gets his own Rushmore today: Rushmore of best NFL punters ever. Go.)
- We failed Wednesday. We did not mention the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. That's on us. Bon Jovi made it. So did the Moody Blues and The Cars. (Side note: The Cars making it seems very Alan Trammell-esque to me.) Dire Straits, Nina Simone and Sister Rosetta Tharpe completed the class, which was picked from 19 nominees. The nominees left out included Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, the Eurythmics, the J. Geils Band, Judas Priest, LL Cool J, MC5, the Meters, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Rufus featuring Chaka Khan, Link Wray and the Zombies. Dude, if you are going to have rap artists in that thing - and they do - how LL Cool J is on the outside looking in is tragic. Tragic. The Cars? PUH-lease.
- Here's Yahoo's year-end list of worst TV shows of 2017. Here's betting that list was harder to quell down than the best of TV in 2017.
Today's question
OK, well start here: For those of you folks in tune with the ways of fantasy football, here's our predicament.
One of the reasons we are in the semifinals is because we got Philip Rivers in the penultimate round. Bona fide steal. Well, a couple of weeks ago when news started to circle that Aaron Rodgers may return, we stashed him on our bench. Rivers has been aces, but Aaron Rodgers is Aaron Bleepin' Rodgers.
Who would you start this week in the semifinals?
As for today, well on Dec. 14:
Nostradamus was born on this day in 1503. He died in 1566, but he probably knew that was coming. Other than that, well, there's not a ton.
Nero did die on this day in 68. (Not '68 but actual 68.) He's the famous Emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. Man, if we have to pick some one to fiddle by a fire, Charlie Daniels is Jordan on that list.
We have been on a Rushmore kick of Star Wars all week, and srry HT, we're going to finish the drill.
Today, list the Rushmore of Star Wars battle scenes. Can be individual light saber duels of full on assaults. (Gotta tell you friends, the opening to Empire Strikes Back in the snow is a far-left contender for this guy.)
Go and remember the mailbag and to get your contest stuff in before COB tomorrow.