For Americans and probably a lot of Canadians, this is the best time of year for sports. Well, the next 5 months are anyway. A lot of this has to do with our favorite sport that the rest of the world mostly ignores goes into full swing and there are dozens of games on that sports fans are interested in.
This past week was a real banger of a week with some big upsets such as number 5 ranked Notre Dame falling to NIU in what has to be one of the most shocking upsets of the year. Personally, I feel that Notre Dame, because of their unique positioning in conferences and the preferential treatment they receive are constantly over-ranked. They are normally a good team, don't get me wrong, but it seems like every other year they end up getting upset early in the season because of critics over-estimating how good they are going to be. Or perhaps it is just the opposite of the "luck of the Irish" at play here. Who knows?
What exactly went wrong for Notre Dame? Well a lot of things actually.
According to Las Vegas lines the Fighting Irish were 28.5 point favorites to win this game and when that happens you expect the favorite team to just be dominating and scoring left and right on damn near every play. But instead they found themselves going for a last minute field goal attempt at 62 yards on the last play of the game. These are almost never converted and it wasn't even close in this instance either.
After handily defeating Texas A&M in their last game, the experts had their playoff hopes at over 70% but after this one loss that possibility dropped to just over 30%. Don't count them out just yet though, anyone can have one bad week. I recall many many years ago when number one ranked Miami went on the road to play a nicely performing, but not yet truly tested by any real big team Conference USA opponent in East Carolina University. UM played the first half like one would expect, completely dominating their opponent only to have them start the 2nd half with a pick-six (an interception returned for a touchdown) on the very first play of the 2nd half. The momentum didn't change at all from that point forward and ECU went on to win the game. Miami ended up finishing the season without losing a single game after that and ECU enjoyed a very infrequent spot in the top-25 in the nation only to drop a game to unranked Army and then later losing a minor bowl game in a very similar fashion by blowing a 30 point lead they garnered in the first half.
What I am trying to say is that people shouldn't get all worked up about NIU being some sort of amazing team although the did celebrate this win as though they had just won the national championship much to the chagrin of the home fans.
They blew out Western Illinois 54-15 in week one but even if they went on to win every single game they are playing the rest of the season, they would be hard-pressed to make a claim to being in a national tournament
Other than one or two teams including struggling NC State, this list is mostly a list of who's who of who cares as far as competition is concerned and this is a problem that teams in the lower divisions always face. Perform well and everyone just assumes that you didn't face good enough opponents to be truly tested. Lose a few of those games and everyone just points at the Notre Dame win and says "see, I told you it was a fluke!" NIU started out the first quarter with 10 points that mostly went unanswered by the Fighting Irish and it's not like Notre Dame was taking it easy. Well maybe they were at the start but after that the momentum just never really switched back.
So confident were the bookies in a Notre Dame victory that the betting lines was an astounding -10,000 to bet on a straight win for ND. This is something that you rarely see and what that means is that you would have to bet $10,000 to win $100 and honestly, there were probably a bunch of people that lost their shirts on doing exactly that.
Now something to keep in mind here is that this game was mostly decided in the middle parts of the field. The only touchdown that NIU got in the entire game was a stunning breakaway pass for 83 yards. The rest of their points were made on medium range field goals. A point is a point as they say. The game was basically a done deal when NIU marched down the field, burning all of ND's timeouts in the 4th quarter but they managed to make it all the way to the 19-yard line which is extremely easy range for a kicker that has already proven in this very game that this is not going to be a problem for him. This left around 30 seconds on the clock and just a few plays later, the game was over.
Notre Dame's defense showed extreme weakness in this as NIU pushed their way slowly down the field on mostly short running plays that a truly top-tier defense would be able to shut down and honestly, if ND cannot improve upon this they are going to slip a lot further in coming weeks than they did after this week where they went from ranked number 5 to number 18.
In other news my team, who hasn't had a winning season, let alone a visit to the playoffs in many years, has gone 2-0 thus far including defeating an unofficial rival Colorado in a fairly one-sided contest. This ended up landing them in the top-25 for the first time in recent memory. I am not holding my breath on them being able to maintain this though because every time in the past when I have gotten my hopes up about Nebraska returning to their distant former glory, they have let me down.
One thing I appreciate about "Big Red" fans is that their team has really really sucked for more than a decade yet the home games have always been sold out. It is nearly impossible to get tickets to these games despite the fact that when they have a home game, the stadium becomes more populated than all but 2 cities in the entire state of Nebraska. They have sold out every single game since 1962 in a stadium with a capacity of 90,000 people. There are no fair weather fans in Lincoln, Nebraska! The "sea of red" is there, rain or shine, win or lose, without fail. Perhaps they will finally have something to really get excited about this year.
How did your team do this week?