Koo’s Corner

By now I am sure you have seen highlights of the USC’s shocking loss at the hands of the Beavers last night. Oregon State has 2 really embarrassing losses at the hands of Stanford and Penn State and were thought the be a pushover for the Trojans.

You can usually turn off a game like sometime in the second quarter, but it was around then you knew this one was going to be a dog fight. USC’s offense came out flat while their defense was getting pushed around. Give a lot of credit to the Beavers and head coach Mike Reilly who didn’t shy away from aggressively attacking on offense rather than trying to hold on to their lead for dear life.

The 4th quarter was great as you were just waiting for the other shoe to trop on USC’s comeback. It never came, and the result was the first unbelievable upset of the year.

The question to ponder now is what looks better on a BCS bowl resume at the end of the year? USC has a great win against Ohio State, but now an embarrassing loss to Oregon State. Meanwhile a program like Ohio State might knotch a couple of mildly impressive wins (Penn State, Wisky, Illinois being candidates), but lack a staple win.

Jim Rome touched on this briefly this morning. Ohio State gets crushed in their biggest games, yet avoid disaster in small games, while also logging solid conference wins. USC is the best big game team in the country but lays eggs to the likes of UCLA, Stanford, and Oregon State.

While Ohio State is now notoriously known for falling in their biggest games, they avoid these huge upsets as their 6 losses have come at the hands of a team who has gone to a BCS bowl game (assuming USC makes on this year).

Moving onto this weekend, its a pretty solid slate of games

Purdue takes on Notre Dame in a game that can put some added heat back on to Charlie Weiss. This game is a pick em, and I think the Boilermakers should come out victorious.

Wisconsin travels to Michigan as a 6 point favorite. Michigan has not looked good at all thus far and will have a very tough time hanging with a much more balanced and experienced Badger team.

Couple of interesting games in the South during the day as Florida State hosts Colorado, who are coming off their big win agaisnt West Virginia. Auburn has to deal with a downtrodden Tennessee team in what should be a low scoring defensive game.

The night slate of games is pretty sexy. Virginia Tech takes on Nebraska in the remember when we were good bowl. Oklahoma looks to flew their muscle agaisnt a ranked TCU team. But the real showstoppers are the night games on ABC and ESPN.

Georgia hosts Alabama in the game of the day and are favored by a TD. If Saban can log a win in Athens, Alabama will officially be back on the national scene. Georgia is looking to move up in the rankings after USC’s debacle as they have a showdown with Florida looming in the coming weeks.

In the Big TEN Illinois is a whopping 15 point underdog to Penn State. A line that is a raising a lot of eyebrows in a game that I believe will be a bit closer than that spread. Whomever wins this game puts themselves in great position to win the Big Ten.

All in all it should be a great weekend.

Below is a link to my latest Bucknuts article looking at week 2.

http://www.bucknuts.com/news/articles/2008/9/5/koos-news-week-2-preview

Really really bland slate of games this week, but a lot of big games in the following weeks, including this one which I am all geared up for.

This has been probably my longest stretch at Bucknuts without an article. I have a couple of things in the works but am pretty focused on a magazine article I am writing for Bucknuts the Magazine focusing on the NFL transition for Ted Ginn, Anthony Gonzales, Antonio Pittman, and Troy Smith.

I actually conducted an interview with 2006 Heisman winner Troy Smith who was gracious enough to give me 20 minutes of his time. Lots of good stuff that I am working into my article (Smith indicates he is the starter in Madden 2009 next year) . I am hoping to speak with the other 3 former Buckeyes as well.

Moving on here are some random thoughts.

-I cannot wait for this weeken’s showdown of #1 Memphis and #2 Tennessee. I heavily advocated that these two teams were undervalued in my pre season rankings article where I predicted Memphis might be headed to a cake walk season in addition to giving abnormally high ranking for Tennessee. I actually picked Tennessee to win it all in our staff predictions article.

“Ben Koo: Call me crazy but I think the Volunteers have the best mix of talent, experience, coaching, and tenacity to bring home the championship.”

Saturday’s game will be a high scoring, hotly contested, fast paced in state showdown pitting the country’s most talented team against the country’s best team suited for tournament play. Should be awesome.

- Kelvin Sampson will be fired. He can’t dance his way out of this. Too much evidence against him + a track record of documented cheating. ESPN.COM had a poll on Sampson’s fate and despite their being 4 different options, all 50 states has 0ver 50% of voters opting to fire Sampson. Incredibly Indiana was one of the states most in favor of letting him go. Indiana is too classy of a institution to tolerate his BS. (Interesting side note, my final school decision came down to osu or IU. Phew! that was a close one)

- Speaking of Indiana basketball, I have to say that watching Eric Gordon has been awesome. Time will tell if the NBA High School rule is a good thing, but I really think its been successful thus far. Seeing guys like Oden, Durant, Conley Jr, Mayo, Gordon, Beasly, Love, and Rose get one year under the belts at the collegiate level before going pro is good thing for all parties involved. NBA teams get a better feel for who they are drafting. NBA fans are more familiar with the leagues newest additions thanks to a year at the collegiate level. College programs are able to catch lightening in a bottle and are capable of making unexpected runs in the tourney.

First off I wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Years. New Year’s day and New Year Eve serves up a total of 12 bowl games, many of which are worth checking out.

Jockeying for 08 position

In particular a lot of highly ranked teams who will be returning a lot of talent next year, will be auditioning for pre season rankings next year.

USC, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, and Missouri all play tomorrow and will be looking to carry some momentum into 2007. I am absolutely amazed at many how great programs will be returning a talented and expereinced quarterback for possible 2008 National Championship runs. Below is a list of top 07 teams who will have their signal caller back next year.

- Georgia (Matt Strafford)

- Missouri (Chase Daniels)

- Ohio State (Todd Boeckman)

- Florida (Tim Tebow)

- Kansas (Todd Reesing)

- Illinois ( Juice Williams)

- West Virginia (Pat White)

- Texas ( Colt Mccoy)

Teams like USF, Indiana, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, and Cal also bring some talent back at QB but are darkhorses to make some noise on the national scene in 2008

Big 12 in 2008

The Big 12 has long been a two team conference with Oklahoma and Texas dominating the conference since Nebraska’s demise. This year, people expected more of the same but were surprised with the emergence of Missouri and Kansas. These four programs will be strong again next year in addition to programs like Kansas State, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, and Colorado making progress as well. Despite the media’s infatuation with the SEC, look for the Big 12 to be the stronger conference next year.

Oklahoma sends home shoplifting DT

The list of bonehead incidents involving college football players grew again today as Sooner starting DT DeMarcus Granger was sent home from bowl game preparation for stealing a jacket for Burlington Coat Factory. I sympathize with the Sooner fan base and the young man as this is a very emberassing incident that will draw ire of fans for years to come, espicially in the wake of the Rhett Bomar scandal. I am curious what the jacket looked like.

“Mr. Granger removed an anti-theft device from a jacket and then concealed the jacket in a bag. He exited the store walking past the cash registers without paying for the jacket,” Mike Horn, a spokesman for the Tempe Police Department, said in a statement.

Granger admitted committing the offense and was booked into the Tempe City Jail on one count of shoplifting, Horn said. He later bonded out of jail.”

Ten Plays that Got The Buckeyes to New Orleans Article

For the second year in a row the Buckeyes made the BCS Championship game. Below is a link to my article highlighting the ten plays that were most instrumental in allowing them to get back to the championship game.

http://www.bucknuts.com/news/story.php?article=2601

FOX and BCS sucks for viewers

This is the second year that FOX has the rights for the BCS bowls (minus the Rose Bowl). I am growing very weary of Fox lately. They acquired the MLB post season rights from NBC about a decade ago and butchered coverage of that event. The dropoff from Bob Costas to Joe Buck is huge.

Fox, who doesn’t broadcast one regular season college game, plug the upcoming bowl games through out their NFL coverage. Unfortunately millions of NFL viewers are subjected to half ass NFL announcers and analysts converse about the upcoming bowl games when it’s absolutely clear they have no knowledge of the games. No mention of players, coaches, thing to watch for, but rather recycled garbage that misses the mark completely.

The most disappointing element of this is that ABC/ESPN have a full fledged team of guys specializing in college. While some of them are entertaining imbeciles (Mark May and Lou Holtz), others like Chris Fowler, Brent Mustberger, Mike Tirico, Rece Davis, Lee Corso, etc are highly knowledgable and articulate about the college football landscape. Its a shame for fans that such an inferior entity cover these great games.

Tomorrow is turkey day and I can’t wait. 4 day weekend! Here are some random thoughts I have on tomorrow’s games and some other items.

-The gods have smiled upon ESPN. They are broadcasting the only college game tomorrow with 6th ranked Arizona State taking on 11th ranked USC. The NFL game going concurrently is what should be a snoozer between the Colts and Falcons. Keep in mind this game is on the NFL Network only meaning most of American won’t even have a chance to watch Peyton Manning light up the Falcons defense. A couple blogs ago I wrote about how the cable companies are really hurting themselves by not having channels like the NFL network compared to DirectTV. This is the perfect example. To help build buzz for what should be one of the more watched games of the year on ESPN, ESPN.COM has ran with this story all day as it’s main feature.

- On Sunday I commented that although the NFL slate of games for Thanksgiving was pretty lackluster, I was at least thankful that I no longer had to watch Joey Harrington on Thanksgiving. At the time I didn’t know there was a third game with Harrinton’s Falcons taking on the Colts. Still I was safe as Harrington had been so bad, he had been benched for maybe the 15th time in his career or so. I spoke to early as it was announced yesterday that Harrington will start vs. the Colts tomorrow. Maybe next year?

- There is a lot of talk about who will win the NFL MVP. The three front runners are Tom Brady, Terrel Owens, and Randy Moss. Don’t involve yourself in arguing with anyone over this. Brady has it and barring injury will run away with this one. A receiver would only get this award over his QB, if he had a massive share of the TD’s and catches and the quarterback threw a lot of picks to dampen his case. This is not the case with Brady and while Owens is having a great season, one that will likely be rewarded with a lot of NFC awards, he has no shot in overtaking Brady.

- I recently engaged some friends about what’s more entertaining between NFL and College. I used to be an NFL guy, but my love for my alma mater and how intense this 2007 college season has been has put me fully behind college. For many it boils down to the fact that NFL is the pro league with names they recognize. Very understandable. However if you look at the quality of games, intriguing story lines, and the pure passion behind the team’s you have to give the nod to college. Just take a look at the NFL’s slate of games this weekend and tell me what sticks out as being a can’t miss. On the college side there is a nice assortment of intriguing games with 4 games having top 25 team’s facing off in addition to some great rivalry games. With more college games being broadcasted than NFL, and a MUCH wider distribution of the ESPN Gameplan package compared to NFL Sunday Ticket, I think college football is in great position to grow their fan base at a faster rate than the NFL