Friday, November 8, 2019

Bring Back The Beer Barrel; Plus, LSU-Alabama and Week 11 College Football Picks


This is not the Saturday to go pumpkin patch picking.
Last week, I informed the readers that if they were ever going to punt on watching football during a fall Saturday in favor of paying attention to their wives/girlfriends and doing stuff with them that no man would normally enjoy in doing, November 2 would be the Saturday to do it. I wrote this because it was a weak schedule with one really compelling game (Georiga-Florida) sandwiched between a bunch of meh.
I hope you fellas that have had your lady threaten to throw a frying pan at your head if they see another football game on TV took my advice last week, because if she’s irritated at you right now, she’s definitely going to be calling that divorce lawyer on Monday morning after this weekend. You aren’t going to want to get off the couch from noon until after midnight tomorrow, because the schedule is absolutely LOADED this weekend.
Tomorrow is arguably the best day of the entire college season to this point, and everything is circling around what should be an epic LSU-Alabama throw down at 3:30. I’ll have a lot to say about that one shortly, but like always, we start with Tennessee.
Tennessee at Kentucky
The Vols travel to Lexington to take on the Wildcats in a meeting that they've only lost twice since 1985. Tennessee has been so dominant in this “rivalry” that they’ve only been defeated in Lexington four times since 1960.
Allow me to digress here for a second and give some further background about this game. From 1925-1997, this “rivalry” used to be a trophy game. As a 26 year old, I know some of the people my age and younger might not be aware of that, but the winner of this annual game used to get this 1/3 orange, 1/3 white, and 1/3 blue barrel, (what Manning is holding above) affectionately referred to as the “Beer Barrel”. It was introduced by Kentucky students during the Prohibition Era, which led to those guys painting "Ice Water" on the side of it. Hilarious. It's probably the only clever thing someone associated with that university has ever done.
The trophy wasn’t handed out before the 1998 game due to the tragic deaths of two Kentucky football players, who perished in an alcohol related car crash the week before the schools met on the football field. The universities eventually agreed to terminate the ceremony all together before their 1999 meeting.
Maybe handing out a trophy called “The Beer Barrel” would be in poor taste the week after two football players died in an alcohol related incident, but would it be in poor taste to continue the practice now? Would the mere existence of the trophy mean that the schools were dishonoring those two players? If that’s true, then how dare Tennessee sell alcohol in Neyland Stadium? How could Kentucky think it was okay to sell alcohol in their private sky boxes? 
It’s a damn trophy. Do you really think there’s ever been someone in the history of the world who was like, “I don’t like drinking alcohol” or “I do enjoy drinking, but I don’t make irresponsible choices with alcohol” who saw the Beer Barrel rolled out on the field and was all the sudden like, “Oh damn, come on boys, get me about nine shots of bourbon and bring me my car keys!” 
Plus, half the Kentucky students who show up to this game are going to be hammered. They’re going to leave whatever tailgate they were at or whatever frat house they were in and stumble into Kroger Field in a drunken stupor and shout obscenities at Jauan Jennings for three and half hours. I can’t promise those insults will be in complete sentences, or that the students will even use actual words, because people from Kentucky have a hard enough time speaking coherently when they’re sober. Maybe I should've said that they'll at least attempt to be insulting.
(Side note: the fact that Kentucky sold their stadium naming rights to Kroger just goes to show how little tradition they have in football, and how much of a joke of a program they’ve been historically. The same program that would let a grocery store chain own their naming rights is definitely the same place that would have a 1950 “National Championship” trophy constructed more than 60 years after they didn’t win it so they could have something to display in their football complex. Going into the Kentucky Football Complex and looking for trophies would be like going to Steven Seagal's house and searching for his acting awards. Speaking of Seagal, the Seagal/ UK football parallels are almost uncanny; Both are laughingstocks in their industry, yet have no self awareness about this and instead think they are badasses and “relevant”, based solely the content they put out/the way they talk about themselves. Seagal’s bar scene in Out For Justice is the movie equivalent of putting a trophy up in your football complex for a championship you didn’t win. Seagal’s fat, unsightly gut even resembles what Mark Stoops has in his midsection. Stoops always looks like a guy who is on step away from showing more belly than Will Ferrell during the “More Cowbell” skit.)
The exact whereabouts of the old Beer Barrel are unknown, but you know what, even if you couldn’t find the old one, making a new, replica one would literally take less than a couple of hours. It’s the most simple design imaginable.
You know what else? There’s no buzz in this “rivalry” at all. Kentucky hasn’t really been competitive in this game year to year in a long time; in fact, they haven’t taken consecutive games from Tennessee since 1977. Wouldn’t throwing a trophy into the mix every year give a little more flash to what has become a stale rivalry? How great is it at the end of the game when the Wisconsin and Minnesota players run around with Paul Bunyan’s Ax? You’re saying there wouldn’t be a ton of energy after the game if the winning side got to dash around the field with the Beer Barrel lofted like it was the Stanley Cup?
There’s no reason not to bring this thing back. The Beer Barrel only brings fun and positivity.
In terms of the actual game on Saturday, the Wildcats will be attempting to beat the Vols with a  converted wide receiver starting at quarterback for the second time this decade. Lynn Bowden has been the starter in the last three Kentucky games, guiding them to victories over Arkansas and Missouri sandwiched around a shutout loss at Georgia. In his three starts, Bowden has attempted only 37 passes, completed just 15 of them for a total of 188 yards, and guided the Wildcats to just 53 points. I know this comes as a shock, but this isn’t a dynamic offense.
If I were Tennessee (and this is what they’ll do), I’d just line up 8 or 9 guys in the box every time and beg Bowden to throw it. Every time he drops back to pass is a win for the defense. And if they can be stout on first and second down, Kentucky might as well punt because there’s no way their crappy passing attack is going to be able to convert third and longs.
I don’t think the Wildcats have the guys upfront in the offensive line to blow the Vols off the ball and dominate the line of scrimmage so severely that they rush for over 300 yards and control the clock for 38 minutes. And there’s no way they’ll be able to win this game depending on the passing game. Things look good for Tennessee on that end.
Of course, the Vols can’t let their foot off the gas, and they’ll have to show the same defensive effort they’ve had the last six quarters (they’ve given up a total of seven points since halftime of the South Carolina game). Of course, I’m not as concerned about that as I am about their offense, which looked incredible against the Gamecocks but then puttered around a bit against what is admittedly a good UAB defense. Kentucky doesn’t have an incredible, all time defense, but they also haven’t give up more than 29 points in any game this season, and in fact, haven’t given up that more than that since Georgia laid 34 on them in early November of last year.
Jeremy Pruitt has yet to name a starter at quarterback, though if we’re basing it on what has happened so far this season, I’d bet that Jarrett Guarantano will get the majority of the snaps, even if he doesn’t start the game. That’s concerning because 1. He hasn’t played that well outside of the South Carolina game all year and 2. He has a broken left hand. Pruitt seemed confident in Guarantano during the week leading up to the UAB game, but then mentioned, since it was cooler on Saturday night than it was during their practices, that it affected him negatively. Temperatures in Lexington will be in the low 40s at kickoff, and could dip into the upper 30s in the second half. So unless JG spends the entire week practicing in an igloo, I’d say the weather will affect his hand again tomorrow.
Which begs the question; why isn’t Brian Maurer starting? Pruitt said he was a full go last week, but the closest Maurer got to the field was when he ran through the T in the pregame. Is he actually not 100%? The only thing that changed from when he was named the starter for the Georgia game until now was the fact that he got concussions in back to back games. I get it, teams don’t have to fill out injury reports in college, so Pruitt can basically get up there and say whatever he wants week to week about the health of his players, but since Maurer hasn’t played the last two weeks, the evidence points to him not making an appearance on the field the rest of the season.
Which means, if JG stinks it up for a couple of series, that the Vols will now be reliant on JT Shrout, a freshman who, while he looked good against South Carolina, only has 27 career attempts and has never played a meaningful minute in a road game. In fact, the Vols haven’t won a road game all season, and have been outscored 69-16 away from Knoxville.
This game is going to be a low scoring brawl for three hours. I feel so confident about the rock fight nature of this game that I’m making the under my “Bet The Mortgage” Pick of the Week (we’re 5-1 on these now guys). The over/under is 42 points, and this game will assuredly be played in the teens or single digits. The Vols have scored more than 26 points against a Power 5 team once this season, South Carolina, and they did that with the help of two special teams TDs. The 26 points they scored against BYU happened only because the game went into double overtime. Their high in points against SEC competition (outside of South Carolina) is the 20 they scored against Mississippi State. In fact, that game is probably a pretty good litmus test for how this one will play out. The Vols knocked off the Bulldogs 20-10 in a slog of game that ended with a long Tennessee TD drive late in the fourth quarter. Kentucky is going to try and control the clock and keep the Vol offense off the field, meaning the already average Tennessee attack is going to be even more limited due to their lack of opportunities.
I don’t think anyone will care about the game being uglier than Mark Stoops’s post hot wing bathroom break as long as the Vols win. Moving another victory closer to bowl eligibility inspires confidence and keeps everyone from railing on the internet about how they need to pull Jarrett Guarantano’s scholarship, or how Pruitt didn’t go far enough in yanking his facemask, and in fact, literally should’ve ripped his head off. Well, actually, hell, the JG stuff will probably still happen regardless, but at least everyone won’t be AS depressed on Monday morning when their wives finally get tired of dealing with their college football habit and make a call to that divorce lawyer.
Hell, it’s Kentucky! It doesn’t matter how low the Tennessee program dips, they can always hang their hat on dominating this “rivalry”. Hell, half the stuff I’ve written about this game was how much of a joke the Kentucky program is.
Plus, there’s no way Tennessee could lose to the Wildcats starting a wide receiver at quarterback again, right? Right?
Prediction: Tennessee
#2 LSU at #3 Alabama
The game of year in college football on paper, at least to this point. It may be replaced by something down the road, but for now, this is it.
Ed Orgeron has been the LSU head coach the last three years in this rivalry and has lost all three times by a combined score of 53-10. The Tide have shut the Tigers out two of those three times, and haven’t lost to them since “The Game of the Century” matchup between the two, the 9-6 slugfest in 2011.
Back in 2016, when the Tigers were spurned at the last moment by Tom Herman (he went to Texas), they decided to remove the interim tag from Ed Orgeron and make him their full time head coach. At the time, I killed the hire in a piece, and topped it off with this immortal headline: “LSU Craps Their Pants, Hires Ed Orgeron”.
Some relevant quotes from that story (quotes in italics, my updated commentary in normal font):
When I texted my dad this morning to inform him that LSU was going to remove the interim tag from Ed Orgeron and hire him as their full time head coach, my old man, after the initial shock, replied by saying, “That is a good hire for the rest of the SEC”.”
Wow! Piping hot take from my Old Man! And yes, if you were wondering, I’m sure he went back to stuffing his face with Cheetos immediately after texting me that.
“Here’s a question; did you even call Bobby Petrino? I know I know, personally he’s unpalatable, but the offense would’ve been fixed overnight, and he would’ve at least made Saban sweat during the week before their game, worried about how he was going to stop that up tempo, hurry up attack.”
Yikes! Coach O has the Tigers at number 2 and is just a few wins away from the playoff. Meanwhile, Petrino, since the published date of my piece (November 26th, 2016) went 10-15 in his final 25 games as the coach at Louisville before getting fired in November of last year. I spent large portions of 2016 hyping up Petrino as a legitimate option as a head coach for all of the big time programs (including at Tennessee), only for his career to go completely down the toilet over the next two years. Probably my worst take of all time.
“Which brings me to my next point; hiring a guy because he’s, “in the family” or, “from the state” is one of the dumbest rationales for giving someone an immense amount of power that I’ve ever heard. Why the hell should it matter if LSU’s never hired someone born in the state? That’s like saying, “I’ve been the CEO of this company for five years, but we just had to fire a member of our board of trustees. Who should we hire to replace him…. Hmmm…. I know! How about my alcoholic Uncle Ed! I know he’s got some issues, but screw it, he’s family!” I don’t care where the guy comes from, the most important factor in hiring a football coach should be how many games he’s going to win. The fact that “Orgeron is from Louisiana” was even mentioned is ludicrous.”
I actually stand by this one. Just because Coach O has exceeded my (and let’s be honest, everyone’s) expectations doesn’t mean that, if the main rationale for hiring him was because he was from the state of Louisiana, then that’s a dumb as hell reason. Hey, if Jeremy Pruitt doesn’t work out, screw it, let’s go get Jim Bob from Bucksnort, Tennessee to be the head coach! That guy is in the family dammit!
“BUT MATT BUT MATT BUT MATT!!!! HE'S BRINGING LANE KIFFIN WITH HIM TO RUN THE OFFENSE! THEY USED TO WORK TOGETHER AND THEY'RE GOOD FRIENDS!”
Even back then, I was strawmanning the opposition with “BUT MATT BUT MATT BUT MATT”. (I was right by the way; Kiffin was never going to LSU. He may be at FSU in 2020 though! Keep your eye on that! Or hell, Deion Sanders might be who they hire! What a joke.)
“Here’s the other problem; LSU just hired a guy who, if he wasn’t coaching college football, would probably be a middle school gym teacher in the midst of his third divorce. That’s never a good sign; Brady Hoke had the same look, and that submarined quicker than the Titanic. It’s just an absolutely reprehensible hire.”
I hadn’t stumbled into calling Orgeron the Cajun Swamp Monster yet, so I went with the more classic, “this guy is so in over his head that he should be doing THIS job” joke. That joke now looks dumb as hell, of course.
(Side note: I haven’t called him the Cajun Swamp Monster all year as far as I can recall. He’s been too successful for me to even really make fun of him, outside of a couple references to the fact that he sounds like a nine pack a day smoker when he talks. He’s won so many games that I've semi-retired that nickname. I might have to get rid of it permanently if he beats Saban on Saturday)
“But is Orgeron really the best you could’ve done? He’s not coming close to Saban; hell, I’d be willing to wager the entirety of my future earnings that the 10-0 score those teams played to this season will be the closest Coach O gets to Saban the rest of his tenure.”
So far, I’ve been right about this. 2017 was a two touchdown win for Alabama, and last year was a 29-0 shutout. 
This is really the key part of this. Saban is a tidal wave to rest of the SEC, and schools have had a hard time trying to figure out what to do about it. No program should hire their football coach expecting to get Saban-level results from him, because what Nick has done in Tuscaloosa has made him arguably the greatest coach in the history of the sport. Since 2008, Saban is 147-15 with the Tide. That’s a winning percentage of just over 90%. No one will ever do that in the SEC again.
But what you should expect from your coach, particularly if you’re at a place like LSU, is that you don’t get completely outclassed by Saban every single time you play him. Hell, can you even make him sweat every once in a while, or even find a way to win sometimes? Gus Malzahn has two wins against Saban. Kirby Smart is 0-2, but could very easily be 2-0. So far for Coach O, it’s been three ass kickings. When they lost 10-0 in Baton Rouge in 2016, LSU had only 125 yards of offense. That was the closest they came and that was the level of offense they put out.
I’ve said all year that if there was ever a time for Orgeron to beat Saban, this would be it. Joe Burrow has a chance to be the best LSU quarterback of all time, and gone are the days of the Les Miles “run into the line of scrimmage and fall down offense”. The Tigers have a modern passing game, equipped with an NFL quarterback and loads of excellent offensive skill people.
Tua Tagovailoa is definitely going to play tomorrow, but one weird turn or hit on his surgically repaired ankle and he’s out of the game. It doesn’t matter how mediocre the LSU defense has been at times, I don’t trust Mac Jones to come in and be able to pick them apart.
This is also probably the worst Alabama defense that Saban has had since probably his 2007 team, his first year, but what’s crazy is that they still rank second in the SEC in points allowed and third in yards allowed. Granted, they haven’t played a quarterback anywhere near the level of Burrow, so we don’t really know what they’re capable of against a good offense. A couple of teams (Tennessee, South Carolina, Ole Miss) that don't have elite attacks have been able to move the ball on them at least a little bit.
The case for Alabama is that 1. They’re at home 2. They need the game more and 3. They’ve got the best coach in the history of college football. The Tide have played one of the worst schedules in the country, and based on that and the fact that the committee ranked them behind LSU in the initial playoff rankings that came out Tuesday, I don’t think they would get the reputation pass like they did in 2017, when they didn’t win either the SEC or the SEC West. If Alabama doesn’t win tomorrow, LSU is going to win that division, barring something catastrophic.
The Tigers have played a tougher schedule, and that win at Texas in September should start looking like a more quality one as long as the Longhorns can get things cleaned up here at the end of the season. LSU is more likely to make it into the playoff with a loss tomorrow than Alabama is.
Assuming Tua can stay out there the entire time, we could get a really fun shootout between these two. LSU’s doesn’t have their traditional dominant defense (they rank 4th in yards allowed per game and 6th in points allowed per game in the SEC), and they just lost Michael Divinity due to personal reasons, shortening up an already thin linebacking core. If there were ever a week for Alabama to get their strangely anemic running game going, this would be it (they rank 8th in the SEC in rushing yards per game! 8th! How is that possible for a Nick Saban team?).
Of course, why isn’t “The Alabama defense turns in their best performance of the season and holds LSU to a season low in points and yards" just as likely of an outcome? I kind of feel like a shockingly low scoring game is in play here. Not 9-6 like 2011, but somewhere in the 20s for both teams. This the biggest game anyone on LSU has ever played in, and while Joe Burrow might’ve been the best quarterback in college football through the first ten weeks, should we really trust him in a spot as big as this? Burrow was the picturesque example of an average college quarterback last season; now, all the sudden, he’s Peyton Manning? I’d like to see it this week.
Plus, the Saban thing. Both schools have had an extra week to prepare for this game, but come on, who do you trust more coming off a bye, Saban or Orgeron? The Tigers aren’t going to catch the Tide napping, and they don’t have the defense to maul Alabama either.
This is final test for Orgeron. He’s answered every criticism that I (and everyone) had for him, besides this one. He may never have a better opportunity to win the SEC, go to the playoff, and win a national title than this. He can take the first step towards that tomorrow by going into Tuscaloosa and leaving victorious.
Will he do it? Is he still the Cajun Swamp Monster?
Prediction: Alabama
I’ve written almost 4,000 words about these two games so I’ll try to move quickly through these last ones.
#4 Penn State at #17 Minnesota
The biggest game for the Golden Gophers in decades is harmed a bit by the fact that it is kicking off at 11 o’clock in the morning local time. I think it’s pretty much impossible to get a crowd incredibly jacked up for a game that happens before lunchtime. I’m not saying they won’t be rowdy and ready to go, but it’s going to be in the upper 30s at kickoff, and due to the early nature of the game, the fans aren’t going to have the hours upon hours to get that liquid lubrication that they would have if this game was in the late afternoon or at night. Minnesota is going to need all the help they can get too, because Penn State is, let’s be honest, a much better football team than them.
Speaking of the Golden Gophers, and this is a conversation my old man and I have had between his Cheeto breaks, but why can’t the Minnesota football program be on the same level year to year as Wisconsin? They’re both cold, Midwestern states with almost identical populations, yet Wisconsin has been to five New Years Six Bowl Games this decade, while Minnesota hasn’t been to a bowl game anywhere close to that prestigious since they were in the 1962 Rose Bowl. Obviously Barry Alvarez was a great coach that turned Wisconsin into what they are today, but they’ve had three different guys since then and the program is still rocking and rolling. Maybe PJ Fleck is the coach that turns Minnesota into a good program year in and year out. They did just give him a pretty big contract extension through 2026 this week. Of course, what if he has higher ambitions? What if he wants one of the blue blood jobs? Because that’s the thing about Wisconsin, and it’s probably true of Minnesota as well; there’s a ceiling at both places that is lower than winning a national title, and probably even lower ever than making the playoff. If Fleck is happy in Minneapolis and wants to turn this into a good program year in and year out, good for him. But there are better jobs where you can win at a higher level.
Prediction: Penn State
Maryland at #1 Ohio State
This is our “Big Noon Kickoff” on Fox this week. Really. I don’t know how the contract works between the Big Ten, ESPN/ABC and Fox, but why isn’t Penn State at Minnesota the “Big Noon Kickoff”? Because that game is significantly better. And I thought Fox was putting their best game at noon every week. Maryland-Ohio State is going to be 81-7.
Not a great debut year for the Big Noon Kickoff. Maybe they can salvage it the rest of the month.
Prediction: Ohio State
#18 Iowa at #13 Wisconsin
Or better yet, why the hell isn’t this the Big Noon Kickoff? THIS GAME IS ON FOX! THEY HAVE THE RIGHTS TO IT! Are we just slapping Ohio State at noon because they’re going to get a great number, quality game be damned? You know what won’t get a great number? When Ohio State is up 42-0 on Maryland midway through the second quarter and Maryland’s Mike Locksley is sneakily eating hot dogs on the sidelines while struggling to fit into his size 66 pants.
Prediction: Wisconsin
Missouri at #6 Georgia
If Kelly Bryant had it to do over again, would he still have transferred to Missouri? The Tigers have lost back to back weeks at Vanderbilt (ugh) and Kentucky, can’t go to a bowl game due to NCAA sanctions, and Bryant is attempting to get ready for the NFL by receiving coaching from Derek Freaking Dooley. This is shaping up to be the worst career decision since when Hamilton agreed to duel Burr.
You know what would’ve been really fun? If he’d chosen to go to Washington State and play for Mike Leach. He would’ve finished the year with like 5,000 passing yards and got to hear weekly unhinged press conferences from Leach where he talked about things like how zombies have been played out.
Prediction: Georgia
#5 Clemson at N.C. State
The fly in the ointment for what is otherwise a phenomenal college football weekend. Normally I wouldn’t care about this game, except for the fact that the television networks are trying to make me since it’s the ABC Saturday Night Game. Clemson is going to run through this crappy Wolfpack team about as easily as those hot dogs will through Mike Locksley.
Prediction: Clemson
Iowa State at #9 Oklahoma
The Sooners have a long climb to get to the playoff. Based on the committee’s rankings, they’ll be behind Oregon at the end of the year if both teams win out, meaning the Big 12 looks like they’ll be left out of the playoff for the first time since 2016 (that is, unless Baylor wins out OR there’s a ton of chaos in front of OU). The only thing Oklahoma can do is win as impressively as possible each week. It won’t be easy for them to beat the hell out of this solid Iowa State team though, but they’ll come away victorious by at least two TDs.
Prediction: Oklahoma
#16 Kansas State at Texas
If the Longhorns can’t find a way to win on Saturday, they’ll be 5-4 on the year and far from Sam Ehlinger’s prediction after last year’s Sugar Bowl that Texas was “baaaaaack”. Joe Tessitore made the same statement after they beat Notre Dame in 2016, only to see Charlie Strong get fired only a few months later. Can everyone stop doing the whole “Texas is back” thing until they actually, hell, I don’t know, win the Big 12 again? It hasn’t happened since 2009.

Enjoy football this weekend, you deserve it.

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