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By Richie Weldon
Anyone watching the games last
week knows exactly what I mean by “close calls.” Just how
many games were decided by less than a touchdown? In the
Top 25, six games fit this bill. Texas got a
lucky leg
when a replacement kicker game in to win on the road in
Lincoln. Alabama could not score in the fourth quarter and
allowed Tennessee to
come back and
win the game.
Notre Dame got help by praying for a
last second
TD to beat UCLA.
California
almost
dropped a home
game against Washington, even while Washington’s starting QB
sat out with a
broken foot.
Boston College got
revenge
from last year’s 17-28 loss to Florida State. And Texas A&M
pulled out a
squeaker against
the Cowpokes.
For some, however, the closet
game wasn’t played from any team in the current AP Top 25,
but between unranked Duke and Miami. And who would have
thought this game would be that close as the final ticks
were coming off the clock. After all, one of the teams
usually blows opponents into oblivion while the other team
will usually to almost anyone. In last week’s
article,
I did mention this game would be close for 35-40 minutes,
but this was close for the entire 60 minutes. It wasn’t
until the last play of the game when Duke’s QB Thaddeus
Lewis, from about 5 yards outside the Miami goal line, threw
an interception right into the hands of Willie Cooper did
this game seem to be over with. Cooper was running towards
his own end zone and was about to score, but tripped over
his own feet and fell down around the 25-yard line of Duke.
A Duke player picked up the ball and ran it back for a TD,
but an official’s review of the play confirmed that Cooper’s
knee was down before he fumbled so the Duke TD did not
count.
That game was Duke’s best
chance at beating Miami in any foreseeable time as Miami
suspended 13
players, some of
them starters, for one game following that nasty fight
between Miami players and those from Florida International.
Since Miami won this game, I doubt any of those suspended
players truly learned a lesson. It was fortunate that Duke
was next on the docket, but what if the next game was
against a better team, one that had an actual chance of
beating Miami on any given Saturday? Do you think that
Miami would have kept those players suspended? If the Miami
Athletic Department really wants to send a message to its
team and to the rest of the country that Miami is not a team
full of conscious less thugs, then have those players
involved in the fight sit out this coming weekend’s game
against Georgia Tech.
More Off Officiating
Normally my ranting towards
officials this season has been thrown in the direction of
the Pac-10 officials. Those two poor instant replays in the
Oregon-Oklahoma game along with the failure of Washington to
get its last play off against USC when there was plenty of
time left on the clock to do so will stick in my craw for
quite some time. This week’s Off-ful Award is given
to the Big 10 officiating crew that worked the Virginia
Tech-Southern Miss. game. Their calls in this game were not
game-altering, but they were just, to put it mildly,
horrible. There was a safety called when Southern Miss’ QB
Jeremy Young threw the ball out of play across the line of
scrimmage and sort of near a Southern Miss player while his
foot on the goal line and VT’s DB Noland Burchette was
trying to bring him down. It could have been argued that
Young’s throw was off the mark because Burchette was
disrupting the play. The officials in the replay booth
should have reviewed it. Later in the third quarter,
Southern Miss RB Tory Harrison was called down on the 1-yard
line, but anyone in the stadium and everyone on TV clearly
saw the running back was more than a foot inside the goal
line with what should have been the Hokies second safety of
the game. Once again, the play was not reviewed by the
officials in the replay booth even though it should have.
Wasn’t instant replay supposed to fix such horrible calls?
Yes, the safety could be considered a judgment call, but
clearly the second safety that should have been and wasn’t
called should have been overturned by video evidence.
Random Predictions
What a perfect weekend of
predictions last week was! Granted, I was predicting games
for the worst teams in each conference, which is usually
easy to do, but I did correctly say that Cincinnati would
beat South Florida and, at the time, Cincy had the worst
conference record in the Big East.
This week all the predictions
will be for teams in the Pac-10. USC travels up to Oregon
State. The weather should be much better this year than the
heavy fog that was present the last time these two teams
played in Corvallis, so look for the Trojans to cover their
current 12-point odds that Vegas is giving.
Washington State travels down
to Southern California to take on the UCLA Bruins in a game
that I think Wazzu will win easily. Arizona State travels
up to Seattle to take on the Huskies in a game that will add
one more victory to the Huskies' resume this season.
(Washington has already amassed more wins this season than
the two previous seasons combined!) In the Pac-10 yawner of
the week, Oregon takes on Portland State in a game that no
one, not even in Eugene, will really care about. OK, maybe
they will in Eugene, but nowhere else.
Dangles
Going 7-0 last week on
predictions didn’t really produce anything to talk about.
On top of that, I didn’t get any hate / flame email from
irate readers. Wow. What a good week!
Perks
There won’t be any player
profiled in this week’s Perks as I was traveling most of
Saturday attempting to get to Lane Stadium to watch the
Hokies take on Southern Miss. Instead, I’m going to give
some trends and stats to keep tabs on while watching the
ESPN Thursday night game between Clemson and Virginia Tech.
From 1955 until 1989, Clemson
dominated this series winning 12 of the 13 games. Since
1990, the Hokies have won all three contests by a combined
score of 109-31. This will be the first ACC meeting between
these two land grant institutions.
Virginia Tech has been
dominate on Thursday Night games broadcast on ESPN, having
lost only twice, both times to Boston College. Clemson
comes into this game ranked #10 in the country; Virginia
Tech is 2-9 against Top 10 teams that come to visit in Lane
Stadium.
What might be the most
interesting part of this game is the
weather
forecast. As the
evening progresses, the chance of rain will increase. The
field at Lane Stadium has a special vacuum system that will
draw most the rain off the grass, but catching balls will
still be a problem. Clemson has the advantage running the
ball, which should bode well for the Tigers. Both defenses
are stingy, giving up less than 13 points per game. As Kirk
Herbstreit stated in the past: “Good things happen to the
Hokies at night in Lane Stadium.” So look for a close one in
Blacksburg this week.
Related:
Week
7 recap
Week
6 recap
Week
5 recap
Week
4 recap
Week
3 recap
Week
2 recap
Week
1 recap
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