Blogpoll Preseason Poll Roundtable

A pretty simple one this week: according to the preseason poll, who is overrated and who is underrated?

First, a note about the Badgers: they're fine at #9. A little lower than I voted them (fifth; my ballot can be seen here), but just fine for the time being. They've definitely got top ten talent and top-notch coaching; the question is whether a first-year starter at quarterback is going to be a recipe for disaster. (Camp Lambeau thinks we're in for a year of underthrows, picks, and batted balls) ... I'm not as pessimistic but he's got some pretty solid arguments to back up his thoughts.)

Who's Overrated?

#3 Michigan. I voted them sixth and will be moving them down in this week's poll. Their white-hot offense will be a boon early on in games, but Lloyd Carr's deep-seated conservatism will shelve everything but running up the gut every time the Wolverines have a double-digit lead sometime late in the third quarter. Expect losses to Ohio State (for the fourth straight year) and in their bowl game (for the fifth), plus a loss at Camp Randall. Michigan finishes the season with three losses again. Mark it.

#10 Louisville. Yeah, they won their BCS Bowl last year. (They played Wake Forest, and someone had to win.) Brian Brohm and his offense is going to put up points, but every game will be a footrace as their defense is going to be atrocious. Look for these guys to drop a couple games, but those losses may not come until season's end -- their three November games are at West Virginia, at South Florida, and vs. Rutgers, and all three are potential losses.

#18 Florida State. Last I checked, these guys still had Drew Weatherford starting at quarterback, a guy whose resume conists of cringe-inducing losses. Maybe Bobby Bowden's new brain trust can get the house in order but until I have proof of that I'm not voting for the Seminoles.

Who's Underrated?

#16 UCLA. Their out-of-conference games (at Utah, BYU and Notre Dame at home) keep the Bruins relatively close to home all season long, and each will provide an above-average challenge, keeping them ready to play all season long. If UCLA can get past Cal, that season-ending date against USC might become the PAC-10 title game. I don't really have strong feelings about other teams; UCLA is the only one that stands out as egregiously underrated to me.

USA Today Preseason Poll: Badgers are #7

The entire poll is here. This marks the second-highest preseason ranking in the Coaches' Poll for UW, according to UWBadgers.com. Here is the list of the Badgers' preseason rankings by the coaches:

Year	Rank
1994	11
1995	22
1997	24
1998	20
1999	10
2000	5
2001	23
2002	23
2003	20
2004	22
2007	7

That's the sixth preseason Top 20 appearance for Wisconsin. This seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition for the Badgers; #11 in 1994 gave us a 7-4-1 season with a win over Duke in the Hall of Fame Bowl, #20 in 1998 was the 11-1 season that led to a Rose Bowl victory over UCLA, #10 in 1999 was of course the 10-2 season with the win over Stanford in the Rose Bowl, #5 in 2000 was another four-loss season capped by a one-point victory over UCLA in the Sun Bowl, and 2003 was a 7-6 fiasco with a two-score loss to Auburn in the Music City Bowl. So, when we're picked in the Top 20, we always go to a bowl game. Forty percent of the time, the season ends with 10+ wins and a Rose Bowl victory; the other 60% of the time we endure a campaign with four or more losses. I'll take those odds.

The Top 10 looks like this:

Rank	Team	First Place Votes	Points
1	USC	45	1481
2	LSU	4	1372
3	Florida	9	1278
4	Texas	--	1231
5	Michigan	2	1218
6	West Virginia	--	1205
7	Wisconsin	--	1114
8	Oklahoma	--	1026
9	Virginia Tech	--	1005
10	Ohio State	--	919

Three Big Ten teams in the Top Ten, and Penn State checking in at #18, means that there's plenty of opportunity for our beloved conference to be declared "overrated." My first impression is that a lot of people had a tough time filling out their ballots, and that Oklahoma and Virginia Tech don't seem like Top Ten teams to me, but there do, after all, have to be ten teams in a top ten, so who else are you going to pick? Hard to say.

Obviously, the choruses of "Wisconsin might be overrated" has already begun, which is predictable and, 60% of the time, not unwarranted.

Picking against the top-twenty preseason Badgers: 60% of the time, it works every time.

Big Ten Bloggers Roundtable I - Wrapup

On Monday, I came up with a few questions for our cadre of Big Ten bloggers to answer, timing them in conjunction with the Big Ten media days. If you read these guys frequently, you know by now that they didn't disappoint.

Pick your surprise team for the Big Ten this year. If your team's year is "surprising," is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Answers were all over the board, with bloggers pegging Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and even Minnesota(!) for better-than-expected seasons. Those who chose to focus on teams that would finish in disappointing fashion seemed to go with Ohio State. Additionally, with bloggers representing Northwestern, Indiana, and the Minnesota Gophers, it should not be a big shock that most fans thought that a "surprising" season for their team meant a very good season indeed. Even the Penn State fans thought that "surprising" meant good. Leave it to the guys from Happy Valley to be dissatisfied with the media dubbing their team a consensus top-four pick in the conference.

Which player/unit on your team needs to put forth a "player of the year" effort for your team to contend for a title?

Lots of quarterbacks on the list, obviously, but also a few actual interesting answers. According to Hawkeye State:

The defensive line will make or break Iowa in 2007. Norm Parker's one-play playbook is predicated on the pass rush, especially with a thoroughly mediocre secondary. When we have it (Matt Roth, Aaron Kampman, etc.), we win. When we don't, we lose. It's been that simple for 7 years. With Mattison and Iwebema on the ends, and the enigmatic Mitch King in the middle, they certainly have the capability of doing just that.

Representing Michigan, Maize n Brew also focuses on defense:

Safety Jamar Adams. Adams was burnt crispy by both Ohio State and USC. Bad angles. Bad reads. He and Willis Barringer looked horrible at the end of last year. Safety is as important a position on defense as you can get. A screwup on zone coverage and all of a sudden your corner gets posterized. As a result, Hall and Trent looked pretty bad at times when the fault was not their own.

If Michigan is a serious national title contender Adams will have to be Michigan’s rock in the defensive backfield. He'll have to improve is reading of the field and balls in the air. He's definitely got the talent. He just needs to harness it. Look for Stevie Brown to make an impact as Safety soon as well.

Lots of focus on the running back as well. Buckeyes in particular are singling out their RB as the guy who must step up. As Eleven Warriors explains, "A lot of talk is around the quarterback position, but this coach won a national championship with Craig-Freakin-Krenzel." Point taken. (My opinion? OSU will be fine. "Beanie Wells" is one of those names that, just by its very sound, seems destined to go down in Big Ten history. You don't come this far with the name "Beanie" to be forgotten.)

Whose out-of-conference schedule appeals to you?

Hoosiers and Illini have all the bomb frostings

Responses came in two varieties: the "give me 4-0 guaranteed" crew cited Illinois and Indiana for cupcakishness in the first degree, whereas the "give me some football I actually want to watch" contingent generally grumbled about scheduling and then picked Michigan. Gopher Nation joined me in lauding Michigan State's schedule, and a couple Ohio State bloggers singled out Wisconsin, noting that while a road game against UNLV may not make for compelling football, at least it's a hell of a destination.

Pick the Big Ten's biggest upset!
Looks like a lot of people went with the tried and true formula:

1. See who everyone's picking as the weakest of the "strong teams"
2. Check out that team's schedule
3. Pick one of the "pretty bad" teams to beat that team
   
4. Justify with a cliche like "momentum" or "trap"

Penn State, you are officially on notice! So are the Badgers. Our respondents see Illinois, Indiana, Michigan State, and Purdue as potentially upsetting the Nittany Lions. That would be one hell of an ugly season. Three people said Indiana over PSU, making that the most popular pick ... tied with Minnesota over Wisconsin. Citing the big Michigan game the week before and a date at the Metrodome, people see a stumble for the Badgers. Fine with me; we don't mind heading to the Twin Cities, because things like this happen there:


Other upsets: Gophers beat Wolverines (in Ann Arbor!); four picks from Run Up the Score include Indiana over Iowa, Northwestern over Michigan, and Michigan State over Ohio State; Minnesota over Ohio State; Penn State over Michigan; Michigan State over Michigan; and Illinois over the Badgers.

Now it's time to hand out some awards. The last two questions were basically throwaways, with bloggers being required to say nice things about certain conference foes and mean things about others.

The Damning with Faint Praise Award goes to Hawkeye State, whose assignment was to say something nice about Indiana. Quoth the Hawkeye:

Indiana gave us Myles Brand, who is known far and wide as a scholar and a gentleman. His visionary leadership gave us the NCAA you know today.

Note to Hoosiers: ouch.

The Acknowledgment of a Cold, Brutal Reality Award is handed to Around the Oval, who recognizes the following about the rest of us as compared to Northwestern alumni:

It's all right, it's okay, we'll all be pumping their gas someday.

The I Haven't Been Paying Attention Since 2001 Award recipient is Lake the Posts. After a long tirade about classless, academically-deficient Ohio State fans, we get this:

Have fun complaining this year with your 50+ days off - you'll have plenty of time to gripe about how you got jobbed by the refs after getting smoked by Michigan.

Note to LtP: John Cooper is essentially a grease stain on the driveway of Ohio State and has been for better than half a decade.

The Man Award is destined, clearly, for the Hoosier Report, who questions Iowa's technique:

There's something profoundly insecure about a program that has to paint the visiting locker room pink.

And now on to the most important awards a blogger can receive. The Crown Their Asses award goes to Maize n Brew for their recognition of the USC Trojans as, in the words of Michigan's favorite alumnus Jim Harbaugh, "the greatest team in the history of college football."

After an exceedingly humbling throttling at the hands of USC, as a Michigan fan I must say greatest football team in the history of the multi-verse. When Pete Carroll is done saving starving orphans in China he dabbles in time travel and dimension swapping in an attempt to bring the finest humanitarian talent to Southern California.

Please note that for the purposes of the Trojans, college football started in 2001.

And finally the SOUTHERN SPEED Award goes to Around the Oval, whose profound statements help you think the Proper Thoughts about the SEC:

As for SEC speed, I understand that SEC players are so fast that when they get out of bed to shut off the light, they get to the switch only to discover they'd already beaten themselves to it. Then they are so fast that they can get back in bed before their past selves can even turn off the lights. The space-time continuum means nothing when southern speed is involved.

His thoughts on USC also make me want to subscribe to his newsletter; after awarding Southern Cal the national title at the beginning of the season, "we could just spend Saturdays watching Shelley Smith report on Pete Carroll and the Trojans having fun and being awesome."

Thanks to everyone who participated, great answers!

OPP - Other People's Previews

Big news from MSNBC.com -- some guy from Tampa, who's listed in the page's title as "Expert," doesn't think the Badgers will be playing for the national title this year. You have to admire the guy's temerity -- it takes a true daredevil to pick against a team that hasn't played for a national title in nearly half a century -- but before we address the content of his preview, let's review the rubric for creating the vast majority of Big Ten previews out there:

1. Check out last year's record. Pretty self-evident. Wisconsin went 12-1 last year, beating an SEC team in a bowl game. Noting this, we move on ...
2. Look to see who's sticking around and who bolted. John Stocco's gone. Joe Thomas is gone. PJ Hill is still here. The defense is mainly intact, and it was really good. So ...
3. Assess the losses, and assume everyone who stayed will be improved. Quarterback is a big hole to fill, so fret about that a little bit, but qualify the fretting with the fact that there's a QB battle in Madison, and both candidates have won conference games as starters. Pay lip service to the loss of Joe Thomas, because a lot of people said he was really good and he was taken really early in the NFL draft, even though most of us don't appreciate what the offensive line does except push the defensive line.
4. Check out the schedule. The non-conference games are a non-issue. Penn State and Ohio State on the road could be perilous, but PSU wasn't all that great last year (see step #1 ... it's all you need!) and OSU is depleted (see step #2. Isn't this easy!?) Michigan's at home, and they're supposed to be pretty good (again, step #2). Everyone else is irrelevant.
5. Try not to pick Ohio State or Michigan. Let's face it, they're usually the champs. But nobody wants to say, "put it all on OSU and let it ride" ... that's not sexy! It's too easy to be right with Ohio State! So, ignore the gaping hole at QB and declare Wisconsin "as good as anyone else in the conference."

Step #5 is what Joey Joe Joe seems to dislike, so that leads to the next step in the rubric, the one that goes into effect after most people's previews are already out there:

6. Compile evidence that shows why everyone else shouldn't pick the sexy team. At this point, because of step #5, everybody's got his non-Buckeye, non-Wolverine pick out there. This makes your column really easy to write: just pick up on the evidence that the other writers had to willfully ignore in order to pick their second-tier Big Ten team to win the title.

And true to form, here's what we get. An immediate bet-hedge -- "Badgers not bad, but don't believe the preseason hype" -- and then all the usual warmed-over, lazy half-truths:

* The Badgers weren't THAT good last year. (What 12-win team was?) They lost to their only legitimate opponent, Michigan, and dodged Ohio State. (Extreme ultra bonus points for actually using "dodged," as though the Badgers had any say in who rotated off their conference schedule, and even if they did, they probably couldn't have guessed five years ago that OSU was going to play for the national title in 2006.)

* Michigan and Ohio State play in the Big Ten. OK, that's not a half-truth, but come on. We know. Those two teams win a LOT of titles. But this is what Step #6 requires: pick Michigan or Ohio State. Also, throw in the other dark horse team and give it superior status to the team you're addressing. This year, that's Penn State. In the recent past, we've seen the Badgers, Iowa, and Purdue play that role. Same old, same old.

* We don't know who the quarterback is! Well, we know it's going to be one of two guys, each of whom has won games in a starting role before. Presumably the schedule, which is front-loaded with cupcakes, will facilitate the development of either Donovan or Evridge -- or both.

Overall, this is a nice, simple column to write -- perfect for summer vacation.

Another Badger running back finds ignominy

I guess I'm going to have to create some original content so that we can be rid of all the doom and gloom around here. Evidently Lance Smith thought his girlfriend owed him $10 in cab fare; she thought she owed $5. So, he shoved her down, then told her to go into a convenience store and break the $20 bill she had. She went in, he followed her, and apparently pushed her down again. She dropped the money, and he allegedly picked it up.

Real nice. Great way to settle a dispute about five freakin' dollars. Lance Smith will evidently shove a woman for the low, low price of $2.50. As you can imagine, EDSBS is adding this to the Fulmer Cup standings.

Importantly, Coach Bielema is supposed to comment on the incident at some point today. With Clay (presumably) out, it'll be interesting to see whether any suspension Smith may face will stick. I bet you can't guess what I think will happen.

And just for good measure, Badger alum and Miami Dolphin Chris Chambers has been arrested for driving while impaired. U-rah-rah.

Answering Trev's Questions

The borderline ridiculous questions answered below were devised by the wily Trev Alberts over at Fire Mark May.

Give the more zealous portion of your fanbase a religion. What's this cult following? Feel free to give the splitters a derogatory nickname.

The most passionate fans in all of Badgerdom are those who fulfill all the stereotypes outsiders hold about Wisconsin. They're Wisconsin's biggest fans because they're, well, the biggest fans -- the older gentlemen who've grown obese after gorging themselves for decades on bratwurst, deep-fried cheese curds, and a whole mess of other foods and food-like substances. They drive in from the outskirts of Eau Claire and Manitowoc, find a prime parking spot, and down the LaCrosse Lager and Point like they were water (or, at least, really watery beer). To these portly, sauerkraut-scented gentlemen, I give the name Boozin' Buddhas. They're always so jolly -- are they close to enlightenment, or is that just the half dozen Korbel old-fashioneds they mixed up in the back of the truck?

Bucky dons his Boozin' Buddha gear

Your biggest rival is in town, and College Gameday is coming....to your citaaaaaaay... Create a blatant corporate sellout promotion to appeal to the mass unwashed.

Sack of gopher bait, anyone?

Sorry, not very creative. Instead, let's pass out free Hefty bags to the crowd as a tribute to the Golden Gophers' home field. This useful promotional item can be used to pick up plastic Miller Lite bottles after the game, or can aid our Gopher friends in hastening death when they realize the only thing they have to look forward to after yet another loss is a four-hour car ride to an academically-questionable campus located in a patently awful city in which to be young and irresponsible.

Add one local delicacy to your stadium's concessions. Post-tax pricing is optional.

I never buy food at Camp Randall, so I don't know whether they serve cheese curds, but if they don't then WHY GOD WHY.

But the item they really ought to be stocking is the deep-fried pickles from Ella's Deli. Honestly, dill pickles, ranch dressing, deep-frying ... what's not to love?

With an unlimited AD budget, add or subtract one thing to your school's gameday experience that has nothing to do with football.

Good thing the budget's unlimited, because we're razing the engineering buildings, most of the apartments across Breese Terrace from the stadium, and re-routing University Avenue and Campus Drive about half a mile to the north. We're paving half of it for dedicating surface tailgating lots and making the rest of it verdant splendor, perfect for tossin' around the ol' pigskin before the game. The fact is that Camp Randall Stadium is shoehorned into a weird little corner of campus, and all the congregation and mingling has to be done at private residences or establishments of wildly varying quality along Regent Street. Or if you don't want to do that, you have to take the party WAY down to State Street ... a fun place, a nice walk if you're in the mood, but this all adds up to a discontinuous fan presence. Maybe if the kids didn't have to drink their Kool-Aid and Fleischmann's at Chadbourne and instead could carouse with their friends and treasured alumni just steps from the stadium gates they'd actually get to their seats before the second quarter begins.

Coin a hilariously unrealistic stereotype that you would like to "make stick" for this upcoming season.

Bring back "three yards and a cloud of dust" for the Big Ten! No more of this wacky forward-pass flim-flam, Vegas is setting the over/under of the Purdue-Ohio State game to 15.5! When I think Big Ten football in 2007, I want 90% of the action to occur between the 35-yard lines.

Redesign your conference or independent schedule with reckless abandon. Be prepared to include compensation for jilted schools and conferences in your explanation.

This year, the Badgers play the following teams out of conference: Washington State, UNLV, the Citadel, and Northern Illinois. Compared to previous years, this isn't so bad. We'll keep our local MAC school (NIU) and weak PAC-10 opponent (WSU) for starters. We'll expunge that road game at UNLV; we all remember when the freaking power went out at their crap-ass facility, and we're pretty bitter about the whole Big Dance fiasco, so they're gone. Also, the Citadel? Please. D-IAA has no place on this schedule, and horrible D-IAA teams are just plain out of the question. Instead, we'll replace those opponents with two more major conference opponents. What we need to do is travel for one game, but we must be certain that we can win there, and we need to invite a generally-decent team to Madison and smother them at home. So, we'll play an away game at Syracuse ... after all, if that undermanned Iowa team from last season was capable of winning at the Carrier Dome, we'll have no problem. For our home foe, we'll go with a middling Big XII team ... say, Oklahoma State or Nebraska.

The conference schedule is actually very good as well; coming to Madison are Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, and Indiana, and we travel to Ohio State, Minnesota, Illinois, and Penn State. That means we miss Northwestern and Purdue, both of which register a big fat "so what" from me. The Badgers seem to do pretty decently in Columbus, so the only thing we change is making Penn State visit Camp Randall. In exchange, we play MSU on the road. That makes things a little more favorable for UW.

Following up on your new realignment, blow up the BCS and devise a national playoff system, money grabs and missed exams be damned. Using your new fantasy conferences is optional.

Well, now that (1) defense wins championships, (2) the Big Ten is the best defensive conference in the land, and (3) it's a big deal when Big Ten games feature more than 13 points between the two teams, the parts of the country with short attention spans will be paying minimal attention to college football when our conference's teams grind away national title games with paralyzing 15-play, 88-yard, 11-minute touchdown drives. (For the curious, these are the short-attention-span parts of the country: the East Coast, any region with PAC-10, ACC, or SEC representation, and Texas.) That will allow us to sneak in a twelve team playoff:

* 6 automatic berths: 1 each for the Big Ten, Big XII, SEC, ACC, Big East, and PAC-10 champions
* 6 at-large berths, no restrictions on who can fill these slots (could be a MAC team, Notre Dame, a Mountain West team, and three major conference teams, or 4 Big Ten teams and 2 SEC teams, or anything else!)

The top four teams in the RPI (details of which are not yet clear to me), regardless of whether they won their conferences, get a bye. Then #5 plays #12, #6 plays #11, #7 plays #10, and #8 plays #9. This will give the top teams a chance to let their students take exams, and after four teams are eliminated, they can take exams immediately, leaving only four schools in the whole country with exam conflicts after one week of the playoffs. SO THERE.

Anyway, then #1 plays the lowest remaining seed, #2 the next, and so forth, and this re-shuffling of seeds continues throughout. Finally, after four weeks, we have an undisputed national champ. Well, undisputed by everyone but team #13. But who cares about #13?

Elect one public figure to replace NCAA president Myles Brand. Anyone with proper name recognition is eligible.

What characteristics does the NCAA president need to have? He needs to be reasonable -- he needs to be the type of guy who realizes that providing a star player's family with a million-dollar house or giving a recruit keys to any Escalade in Columbus is a different offense altogether than buying the O-line pizza when they show up to practicing weighing 245 apiece. He needs to realize that football and men's basketball are different animals than field hockey and gymnastics, and those lame sports need to be de-emphasized. He needs to be so rich that he doesn't care who's making what kind of money. And he needs to be willing to throw himself completely into the job ... and we all know the best way to do that is to have something from which you need to escape.

For those reasons, why not former President Bill Clinton? He's been sick to death of Hillary for nearly a quarter century, he can make six figures by shaking hands for forty-five minutes in Manhattan, and he's so manipulative that nobody'll notice that he wrote Title IX out of existence ... they'll all be captivated by that swarthy Southern drawl.

Phil Steele might need to submit a hair and urine sample

Picking the Badgers to finish in a three-way tie for fourth in the Big Ten? Come on now! Yes, quarterback is a huge hole to fill, but I suspect Allan Evridge will step in quite capably. Beyond that, the Badgers have every piece of the puzzle: a stifling defensive line, role players in the secondary, wide receivers who are coming into their own, big-booty P. J. Hill powering through a capable offensive line.

Mark it down - the Big Ten title will come down to the winner of the Wisconsin-Michigan game at Camp Randall. Period.

It's an odd, topsy-turvy year, with Steele being so wrong and CFN picking the Badgers to head to the Rose Bowl. Wait and see, I suppose. Wait and see.

Fightin' words

The sometimes cliquish, sometimes petty world of blogging occasionally becomes tiresome, but the gems that a certain rare type of argument can produce make sifting through the reast of the average stuff well worth it. Take, for instance, the feud between Georgia-based Braves and Birds and widely-read HeismanPundit.

I've been an anti-fan of HeismanPundit ever since I first ran across his writings for two reasons: (1) his primary focus is on one of the least meaningful awards in all of sports, and (2) his tireless insistence that, even with piles and piles of evidence to the contrary, offense wins championships. Given this, you can imagine my private glee when Braves and Birds wiped the floor with HP's "insight" last Wednesday, and then burned the mop earlier today.

My bottom line is this -- anyone who offers up "offensive scheme" as the deciding factor behind why teams win and lose games must be an unapologetic selective listener. As an example, I offer up the Michigan Wolverines. Did they win 11 games this year because they "outschemed" opponents? I mean, did you watch the Ohio State game or the Rose Bowl? Their scheme was run, run, lob or screen pass, punt. Just as it had been all year long. Michigan's offensive coordinators call a damn boring game, which features "run right" and "run left" with rare inclusions of "bomb it to Manningham" and "set up the play-action screen." But their defense takes the field and stops their opponent from scoring.

Another team that doesn't exactly rewrite the playbook is our very own Badgers, although Bielema and company are more willing to deviate from their tendencies than the Wolverines are. The Badgers did win their bowl game, after all. And who did they beat? Only the schemiest bunch of schemers this side of Urban Meyer, the WILDCAT FORMATION-loving tricksters from the University of Arkansas.

How? Why?

How do these teams that can't gameplan to save their lives wind up in prestigious bowl games? How can these dinosaurs win a dozen games as Wisconsin did, or keep their names in the national title conversation into December like Michigan? To HP, this must be a huge mystery (either that, or he deems these squads "outliers" and as such discards them). To most people, it's not. Good on Michael at Braves and Birds for getting HP's attention ... and getting the better of him.

Hey Blogpollers

If Florida wins tomorrow, would it be wrong to vote Boise State #1?