Let’s talk a little college football

The great thing about football season is you never run out of things to talk about. This week, Alabama coach Nick Saban and Florida coach Will Muschamp fired some shots at each other. Since Will is one of Nick’s protégés it makes it all the more interesting. Nick isn’t happy with the way the BCS bowls will be selected after the conference games.

One of the unfair elements of the process is that those voting in the various polls tend to look at a team’s losses, not their wins. So this year, Alabama and Georgia both have one loss and will play for the conference championship. However, the loser of that game will have a second loss and almost definitely be ranked behind one-loss Florida in the BCS rankings.  Because they won’t play in the conference championship, Florida won’t have the “opportunity” to pick up that additional loss. That means Florida will probably get a BCS invitation, while the Alabama-Georgia loser will not.

No fair! Says Nick.

“It’s not really a great scenario for either team. You play your way into the championship game, which means you’re the best team in your division. It doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t feel good about it for our football team or their football team.”

Actually, I agree. What’s interesting, however, is that Nick didn’t express that opinion last year when his Alabama team…

1.) Finished second to LSU in the Western Division and did not go to the championship game.

2.) Advanced to the #2 BCS ranking, when Georgia lost to LSU.

3.) Picked up the SEC’s second BCS invitation, to the national championship game.

4.) Won the national championship even though they did not win their division or play in the conference championship.

I love a little hypocrisy.

By the way, Muschamp’s response – “I can switch and go to Atlanta if he doesn’t want to go to Atlanta and play the ‘Dogs. Be careful what you wish for Nick.”

Is young Will channeling a little Stevie Spurrier?

Meanwhile the discrepancy in the strengths of the conferences is creating some interesting situations.

Georgia Tech, with a 6-6 record, will play FSU in the ACC conference game this weekend. If they win, they get a bid for a BCS bowl, probably the Orange Bowl. Meanwhile, the Big East doesn’t have a single team in the top 25, but guess what conference does? The MAC! Right now, Kent (“Four dead in O-hi-o”) State could move into the top 16 with a win in their conference championship game.  The BCS rules state that a school not from a “guaranteed-bid” conference earns a spot in one of the BCS bowls if it finishes in the top 16, and is ahead of the top-ranked team from one of the “guaranteed-bid” conferences.

If you were running the Orange Bowl, how excited would you be to host a 7-6 Georgia Tech playing Kent State? (Sorry, son-in law.)  One columnist, Pat Dooley, from the Gainesville Sun, wrote he wouldn’t watch that game if were played in his backyard.

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I’ll bet that tingled a little!

The sports world is providing all kinds of interesting videos this week.

I watched an outstanding Florida-Georgia basketball game on ESPN last night. It went to double overtime, with lots of amazing shots.

But the shot everyone will remember happened when Florida forward Chandler Parsons drained a three from the corner, right in front of the Gator bench, and fellow Gator Vernon Macklin popped him in the “jewels” with a towel.

Ouch!

I’ll bet Chandler and Vernon had a little chat about that in the locker room later.

Thanksgiving week

It hasn’t been the most exciting week, but here are a few updates.

Mrs. Poolman’s shrimp and grits turned out great! Being a “born and raised” Yankee, this is a dish that I should not be inclined to like. When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded disgusting.  At the time, I could tolerate grits, but wasn’t real excited about them. And shrimp in some sort of gravy on top of them just sounded gross.

Oh my, has my mind been changed. I had them a year or two ago at a restaurant and fell in love. Mrs. P’s dish is even better. She sauted the shrimp with some blackening spice and then made a spicy creamy sauce to go with it. The leftovers are dinner again tonight. As soon as I can get Mrs. P to write down the recipe, I’ll post it.

Our barrier island boony stomping expedition last week produced fruit today. Reporter Mary Landers wrote a nice article on the project and her editors put it on the front page of the Savannah Morning News. If you are interested, you can see it here.

Mrs. P and I are both off work through the weekend. No CCD class tomorrow night, so we’ll just be kicking back until heading down to Gainesville for the Gator season finale on Saturday.

We are staying home for Thanksgiving. We’ve managed to juggle schedules so that both our kids (Poolboy and Writer Princess), Son-in-Law and Poolboy’s GF will be able to join us for dinner. Some of our good friends, the W’s will also be here. Like us, they have no family in town, so we almost always do our holidays together.

We also keep an eye out for holiday “widows and orphans,” a practice Mrs. P and I have done since the early days of our marriage when we were moving around the country and never had family close. I know one nurse from Mrs P’s unit will be here. We might pick up another widow or orphan before it’s over.

Saturday’s Florida-FSU game should be a good one. FSU is a traditional rival. Also, it’s Senior Day, which means it’s the last home game for Tim Tebow and a pretty great group of seniors. When they introduce Tim T, the applause may register on the Richter Scale.

And finally, Gator fans can breath easy. Urban Meyer put the issue to rest; he is not going to leave UF to go to Notre Dame. I never thought he would, but the rumor persisted. He’s got a great thing going where he is. The grass isn’t always greener. As a matter of fact, in February in Indiana, it isn’t green at all. Ha!

We have much for which to give thanks. Life is great!

Monday rambles…

We had a busy weekend. We left for Florida Friday afternoon and didn’t get home until late Sunday afternoon. 48 hours of travel for a three-hour football game. Oh well.

Apparently, the controversy with this game (Florida-Vanderbilt), according to the announcers, was the stadium noise, or lack of it. Not counting my time as a student, I have been going to Florida home games since the early 90s. There is no problem with the noise. The fans get up and make noise to disrupt the opponent’s offense when there is a reason to do so. Sorry, ESPN guys, Vandy just wasn’t an opponent to really get everyone screaming themselves hoarse. The one time they actually did get into scoring position, the crowd got loud. Otherwise, the UF ‘D’ didn’t need the help.

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I got a call late last week from one of the organizers of a local charity event, the Chili Bowl.

Chili Bowl III 2008

Mrs. Poolman and I have helped with this event for the past two years. It is an outdoor chili cook-off and multi-band concert in a large downtown park in early December. The idea is to raise money for one or two specific individuals who have serious medical issues and need help with the bills. Each year they pick a different person(s). We got involved two years ago when the beneficiary was the son-in-law of one of our friends, and a co-worker of Mrs. Poolman.

I can offer some assistance in advance publicity through my contacts. Mrs. P and I both go down the help out on the day of the event. The beer truck is the most popular work station. Wonder why? More on this as it develops.

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I talked with the middle of my three sisters last night. She and her family live in South Carolina. I have been considering a short run to see my Dad in Pittsburgh sometime around Christmas. I didn’t want to fly due to the expense, which means driving, roughly 11 hours each way.

Mrs. P was not looking forward to making the drive at all. “After eight hours in the car, I just want to cut my throat,” she said.

I said I would just go on my own, to which Mrs. P said, “No way, are you going to drive that much in four days by yourself. I may cut my throat, but I’ll come with you.”

Knowing how unpleasant this would be, not to mention messy, I have been looking for alternative plans. So I asked Middle Sister if she would like to come along. Mrs. P can stay behind and keep the home fires burning, and I would pick Middle Sister up along the way. It looks like that is going to work. We’ll talk in a day or so to confirm.

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I heard a report on Georgia Public Radio this morning that the state mental health folks are going to make all the state mental hospitals smoke-free in January. I don’t smoke and never have, so I don’t really understand the problem. However, a person-who-shall-remain-nameless, to whom I am very close, is a rather enthusiastic smoker. Judging from her reaction when she is deprived for as little as a couple of hours, I suspect if those mental patients weren’t nuts before they gave up their butts, they would be afterwards.

Maybe this is a job-security program for the mental health folks.

A football weekend & movie review

We had such a lazy weekend. It was great.

Mrs. Poolman had a work-related event on Friday. Once a year, they have a reunion of the former baby/patients and families. It’s a big party.  Mrs. Poolman is a regular participant.  She helps the kids make paper flowers or something of the like.

I ran some errands on Saturday morning and then utilized the help of one of my friends with a pickup truck to take an old couch to the dump. Later I made a big pot of chili for our informal football viewing party Saturday evening.

Football thoughts….

Alabama barely held on to beat Tennessee on a blocked field goal by nose tackle Terrence Cody. This guy is 370 pounds. He is big enough to have his own gravitational field, which I think just sucks the ball to him.

Florida’s offense played poorly, but won again. Tim Tebow threw up two “pick sixes.” (That’s an interception run back for a TD, for you non-football fans.) He hasn’t been quite the same since the concussion in the Kentucky game. I hope he is OK, and especially for this weekend’s game with Georgia in Jacksonville.

We had a few folks over to watch the game. It wasn’t a formal party, just some friends and fellow-fans watching the game together.

On Sunday, the Steelers beat Brett Favre and the Vikings. One Gator favorite-son, Percy Harvin, ran back a kick off for a TD. I hated to see that against the Steelers, but if someone was going to do it, I’m glad it was a Gator.

Sunday evening, Mrs. Poolman and I watched “The Proposal” with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds on DVD. This movie had a lot of potential but fell short. I’m sure you probably have heard of the plot. Bullock convinces her secretary, Reynolds, to marry her so she can avoid being deported to Canada. The film has a good cast with Mary Steenbergen and Craig T Nelson playing Reynolds’ Alaska parents and Betty White his grandmother.  It all goes along fine, until the Reynolds character decides he is actually in love with Bullock. The problem is this. The writers failed to give Bullock’s character any redeeming social graces at all. She plays a cold-hearted bitch who even the dog hates. When Reynolds decides he loves her and chases her down, the plot falls off the end of the cliff. It would have been a much better movie if the writers had given Bullock just a little charisma and “likeability.”

Back to work today. It is a short week, due to another furlough day on Friday. The timing works well on a personal level. The Florida-Georgia game is always one of our big parties of the year. Mrs. Poolman’s family will be coming up from Jacksonville for the weekend and we’ll have a bunch of other friends over too. We may have to segregate the viewing areas by teams like they do in the stadium. Ha!

Go Gators!

Good weekend!

We had a good, if not very exciting weekend.

The winning field goal.

That is, unless you count the Florida-Arkansas game yesterday. The Gators pulled out a game they deserved to lose. They gave up four fumbles (2 in the redzone) and six sacks. They got the “W” but not without a lot of angst, especially here in Gator Central-Savannah.

It was a home game for Florida, but we let our nephew, niece and her husband use our tickets, and we stayed home. I’m on the backside of that bronchitis, and really needed to just hang out and take it easy for a day.

Poolboy, his GF, his roommate, Writer Princess and SIL all came over to watch the game. That was nice. We threw a couple of London Broil’s on the grill after the game and had a nice dinner before they all headed out for other Saturday night plans.  SIL is a  big Georgia Tech fan, so he ate dinner in front of the TV watching that game. I was the good FIL and watched the game with him. A big sacrifice for family unity. (Ha!)

Today, I actually made it to 11:15 mass for the second time in three weeks. This afternoon I shampooed the carpet in our bedroom. That is the only room in the house that still has carpet. We put hardwood-laminate in all the living areas about 7 years ago. I did that work myself. I don’t want to do it again. It took all darn summer.  We have tile in the other bedrooms, but carpet still in ours. Between animals sleeping there and general use, it was really nasty. Ugly job but it needed to be done. I think we need to go ahead and finish off the wood flooring in all the remaining bedrooms.

I’m going to grill some chicken for dinner this evening and then an early bed. Back to work tomorrow.

Ciao!

Hitler hates Tim Tebow!

Many folks have already seen at least one version of this video. About a year ago, someone took a clip from a German war movie, “Downfall,” and inserted their own dialoge captions, usually involving some sports team. This is one of the latest. The schtick is getting a little stale, but I still think it’s funny.

A valuable part of the team

We received a lovely gift in the mail today. The Gator Boosters sent us a miniature model of the Gators’ national championship trophy. The enclosed card said in part:

“…Along with the Gator players and coaches, you played a vital role in this championship and we want you to have your own trophy as a thank you…”

Who ‘da thought? We always thought we did our part but we never realized the importance of our role, or that the coaches and players really acknowledged and appreciated our efforts. I’m touched. We do try. Our efforts include:

• Mrs. Poolman’s telepathically “channeling” Coach Meyer to get him psyched up for every game.
• Sometimes driving on-campus before dawn on game-day to get our favorite tailgating spot for an early game.
• Joining 92,000 of our closest friends to scream our throats sore to drown out the opposing quarterback’s signals.
  

  92,000 of our closest friends on a Saturday afternoon

• For the away games, sitting in front of our TV and intently concentrating on every play of every game, yelling encouragement to the team; and even sending in plays (via Mrs. Poolman’s telepathic link.)
• Very important – controlling the game atmosphere in our family room during televised games. No extraneous conversation. No distractions. And when things are going our way in a close game, NOBODY MOVES! You don’t want to break the mojo.
• We decorate the fireplace mantel in our family (TV) room with Gator flags, stuffed alligators and other memorabilia in late August and leave the “shrine” up until Christmas, when Mrs.  Poolman replaces it with Christmas stuff. Of course, it all goes back up in time for the bowl game.
• At the end of the third quarter of every game, even when we are watching at home, we stand up, join arm-in-arm, and sing “We are the boys of old Florida.” Some of our non-Gator fan friends think this is a little strange, especially when they see it for the first time.

It’s nice to know we’re appreciated. I wonder if we’ll get an invitation to the President’s Box.