The week is nearly over and the weekend is almost upon us. The new BlogPoll is out, the latest SEC Power Poll has been released, and I have provided my picks for this weekend’s contests around the SEC and the national games of interest. Accordingly, the time has come to identify this week’s national game of disinterest.
This week’s national game of disinterest is . . .
Just kidding. I know better than to josh around about the Buckeyes after last week’s national game of disinterest. I dared to suggest that Ohio State’s date with Ohio was the weekend’s least compelling outing, and the Buckeyes proceeded to roll up a 34-0 halftime lead on the Bobcats in a near-record rout during which even the mascot battle was less than competitive. Rather than risk raising the ire of our I-dotting brethren from the Midwest by suggesting that perhaps Eastern Michigan, with its 0-3 overall record and 0-2 MAC mark, might not be a worthy foil for the Bucks, I will look elsewhere and declare that this week’s national game of disinterest is . . .
Oh, for crying out loud, didn’t the Aloha State Adventurers learn their lesson last time? The best case scenario for scheduling like this is a season that ends like this. Bear in mind that Hawaii announced a month ago that it was considering football independence, based upon the school’s apparent belief that "it is an attractive option for ESPN."
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s been many a Saturday night on which I have, while trying to come down from that day’s trip to Athens, found a midnight ESPN2 telecast of a WAC game brought to me live from Honolulu, prompting me to do a Kirk Gibson-style fist-pump in the middle of my living room to celebrate my good fortune, but let’s not confuse being the westernmost college football team in the United States, and, therefore, a suitable candidate for late-night broadcasts for the benefit of insomniac college football addicts like me, with being a Polynesian version of Notre Dame.
This is junk scheduling. If you consider yourself an ESPN darling and your conference games are played against the weak WAC, man up and bring in a Division I-A opponent. If you want to play Charleston Southern, do it in baseball or basketball, but don’t fly a team from Fort Sumter to Pearl Harbor just to get a rent-a-win. That’s bush league, and it’s beneath me to pick a winner in this clunker of a football game.
Go ‘Dawgs!