By Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
We have several things to discuss, so we will put them on our plates like we would at a tailgate party at a football game — with heaping portions.
Purdue Football Coach Barry Odom was addressing the media last week and admitted that playing Notre Dame as a non-conference opponent is not his idea of a good time.
Odom drew a lot of criticism from his own fans and the general college football population by saying that he doesn’t think scheduling the Irish helps what he’s trying to do to build the Boilermakers.
Those who voiced opposition wondered what playing Indiana State and Southern Illinois is doing to make them better, and that’s a fair question.
But Odom is right. He should be in the athletic director’s office when they both have a free minute and say, “ya know, Notre Dame is top 5 in the country right now and how am I supposed to get us back to being competitive and fun to play for if I am getting clobbered by Notre Dame?”
I understand that comes across as weak. But Purdue IS weak! They aren’t good and, in the era of “professional college football”, the Boilers are naturally going to suffer because they don’t have the obvious revenue streams that other Big 10 teams do.
Purdue’s game against Wake Forest was a competitive game, and that’s the caliber of non-conference opponent they should be scheduling until they can get back to where guys like Rondale Moore show up on campus and make others want to join them.
Yes, the Cubs’ playoff games are late this week.
Blame that on the Cubs themselves.
If the Cubs had won three more games this season, they would have the home field advantage in this best-of-3 series.
There is no way that games at Wrigley Field would be scheduled for 9 p.m., Chicago time.
That being true, it’s still a little baffling that the Cubs and Padres are at 10 p.m. Eastern and the White Sox and Astros are playing at 5 p.m. Eastern in Houston.
We all understand that any team from New England (like the Yankees and Red Sox) will get the prime spot.
But Cubs fans are conditioned for day baseball, and having games at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT) is far better for ratings than 10 p.m.
After three weeks of the NFL season, we normally have a pretty good line on each team in the league and what they are good at, and what they are not.
But I think this season might break that mold.
As is often the case, there are a lot of 2-1 and 1-2 teams, but because of injuries, we just don’t really know how good most of the teams in the league are.
The Rams are an example of this. They are 1-2, but they have injuries that make that record make sense.
The problem is those injuries could impact the team’s roster over the next month.
We’ll just have to wait three more weeks before we try to draw any conclusions.
Can I circle back to baseball for a second?
I think Major League Baseball’s challenge system for balls and strikes is pretty good and I love it.
One thing I was mistaken about is that I thought it would virtually snuff out arguments with players and managers about pitches.
It has not.
It has only delayed those arguments until the later innings. Why? Because teams burn up their two unsuccessful challenges too early in the game.
Once their challenges run out, they can only complain to the umpire about a pitch or series of pitches, and that gets them tossed from the game.
That said, I think it’s clear that not all umpires have been receptive to the criticism that comes with the results of the ABS challenges.
I think the younger umps who came up through the minors with the ABS System handle it better than the older guys. Veteran umpires are clearly embarrassed by having 30,000 fans watching a video showing that the pitch they just called a strike was two full inches outside the strike zone. You can hear it in their voices when they announce, “the call of a strike is overturned…Chicago (for example) has two challenges remaining”.
There is a little “Eeyore” in their tone.
That makes them testy, and we have seen umps react poorly to even the most basic ‘chirping’ from the dugouts.
Can we do one more thing in sports?
Can we just admit that college football’s ranking system is useless?
I mean, for some teams they can lose and not drop in the polls because the voters still believe they should be highly ranked. And maybe they aren’t as good as they were forecasted to be, but it doesn’t matter—they will still be right up there in the end.
Can someone please pass the buffalo sauce?
