Running the Table

You know - it's hard to win 8 games in a row of anything. The odds are 256-1 that you are able to call a coin flip 8 times in a row. But, if I want to get my first flag football IM Champion t-shirt, I'm going to have to. Happily, we have had better than 50-50 odds in our first 4 games, so maybe I'm not using up all of my luck. I think that we'll have pretty good odds in our first game, but after that, we're looking at coin flips. So, I figure that we'll have a 1 in 8 chance in taking home the hardware.

My co-rec flag team, 13th Tribe, managed to win our division by going 4-0, and more or less creaming the opposition. We've outscored the opposition 99-24, and have let two games end with us having the ball deep in enemy territory. Tonight was our toughest game, against the other team that's going to make playoffs from our division. We won 13-9, letting the clock run out from their 6" line, instead of running up the score. Oh yeah. And we played with only 3 guys and 3 girls on the field, instead of the 4 guys and 4 girls that they had on the field at all times, and the 7 or so subs that they kept bringing in. We're pretty good.

Tonight, we won by making some big plays when we had to. We picked them 3 times (including one by yours truly, in a stunning upset - I don't get to catch the ball much), and played smart on offense. The trick to winning in flag football is to find good players to have on your team. And I've learned this trick well. Freddy has been pretty much awesome all year, catching deep balls, making tough catches for me, as well as playing standout D. My guy Aaron had a pretty amazing game tonight. He had a Pick-6, as well another pick which set us up with a short field for our other TD, which he also caught. I mean, let's put it this way. Lil' Mecozzi is my 3rd option on offense. But where we do better than other teams is with our girls. In particular, Lauren and Sherri have been making catches and playing good D for us. But all of the girls have been rock-solid, and everyone can catch.

Playoffs will be interesting. We have a bye week next week, so we'll have at least 9 days before we have our next game. Hopefully, we'll be able to get a practice in this week, and be sharp next week when playoffs start up. Maybe with a little practice, I can make those 8-1 odds go down to 7-1.

-Chairman

Stomach Punches

I think that I'm a bad person. As we've covered, generally, I root for the away team to win in some sort of "stomach punch" fashion that makes all of the home team's fans walk home in stunned silence, wondering if there is a sports God.

The exception is if I can have a more immediate effect. I was off watching the end of the game at the bar with a ton of Bears fans. So, normally, I would have been rooting for Rackers to shank the kick because you would have had all these Arizona fans walking home with victory snatched from them. But, since I had all of the Bears fans around me, I was rooting for the kick to hit, just so I could watch people go from elated to depressed in the span of 2 seconds. It's quite fun, actually.

Unfortunately, if there is a sports God, he seems to be going against me for now. Rackers missed the kick, and I had to watch Bears fans celebrate.

Flash forward to last night. Same story. Cards fans watching Game 7. Normally, I'd be rooting for something like Beltran getting a single, and driving in a run, only to have the would-be game-tying run thrown out at the plate, sending all of Shea home unhappy. But, since I had all of these idiot Cards fans around me, I was rooting for the anti-climactic loss. Something like Beltran getting a single to drive in 2, and have a tied game with runners on 1st and 3rd. Followed by a passed ball, or better yet, a balk. Unfortunately for me, he's caught looking at a so-so curveball.

Oh well.

I suppose that there are only so many Steve Bartman moments, where not only do the home fans get stunned, but you also get to watch the faces of a bunch of fans right around you turn into disgust.


-Chairman

Just Another Dropout

One thing I'm sick of is these damned kids dropping out of school. First, it was guys like Shaquille O'Neal, who dropped out of LSU after his junior year. And now, our very own U. of I. has it's latest dropout saga, in the form of Jawed Karim. All I know is that it's sad how these kids drop out of school.

But more to the point of this post is that I think that it's interesting how much of what you can achieve is the environment around you, and how you choose to embrace it. Some places just constantly get it right - Stanford, Cal, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. These folks just manage to consistently do amazing things.

I have a hypothesis. They have smarter people than we do at Illinois. I'm not saying that we don't have individuals who are of the same caliber of those that are out at the elite institutions. And I'm not saying that out at Yale, you don't get douchebags. Unfortunately, we carry quite a bit of chaff, so that I would venture to say that the general populace out here is closer to what you would get at Western Illinois, than say out at MIT. And oddly enough, even Yale's douchebags seem to have some over-the-top appeal to them.

You look at student publications, and you just see the difference. Here at the U. of I., we claim that we're a top public university. And maybe we are. But when you look at things like the Daily Illini, The Orange and Blue Observer, and The Booze News, you just wonder how it compares to what you may get, say, out at Yale. And don't get me wrong, I think that it's quaint that the Observer raffled off an AK-47 a couple spring ago. But things like the Rumpus only happen when you get a bunch of talented people working together seamlessly. Things like The Booze News happen when you get monkeys, safety scissors, and crayons working together seamlessly with GemClear.

I don't know. I think that I get depressed when I see how much potential is squandered becaue of the environment. And then I get really depressed when I realize that I'm surrounded by people who are ostensibly in the 90th percentile, or higher, of the world at large. Is it bad that much of my immediate world makes me visibly cringe?

So what about the rest of the world? The rest of the world that is happy to attend some community college classes? The rest of the world that never has an education past the 9th grade? Or 4th grade? Or at all? I don't claim to know. But I will say that it's interesting that Jawed Karim didn't make his fortune until after he left for northern Cali.

-Chairman

Moment of Silence

...

Happy trails, Buck O'Neil. He was a solid Negro league baseball player, the first black coach in the majors, and a phenomenal ambassador of the game. It's a little sad that he hasn't been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, for what he's done for the history of the game, though not as a player.

I didn't have the chance to visit him and the Negro Leagues museum out in Kansas City before he passed away. I plan on rectifying that mistake soon (as well as getting to the bottom of the Gates vs. KC Masterpiece vs. Arthur Bryant's barbecue debate).

-Chairman

Karma

Well. TMQ would say that the football gods exacted revenge on us for trying to show up Michigan St. by trying to plant the flag on the S. Remember what I said last week? Just the opposite, this week. Having your stomach punched with a last second field goal at homecoming makes things rough. Oh well. Karma.

Juice still has a ton of potential. Looked soild with intermediate and deep ball (even had a couple drops, including a huge one to Cumberland that would have sealed the game). Again, the only critique is accuracy and touch in close. And our D has some bright spots, but needs more overall speed.

Oh well. This weekend, we have a bunch of folks here in town. Curran's staying here, but the list of cameo appearances includes the old volleyball crew featuring JohnnyO, Paddie, Sully, and even Crazy Carl who was the sponsor of my only visit to the Champaign County Jail. A Homecoming loss won't change our intentions for tonight.

Anyway, a little more work before everything starts off.

-Chairman

Juiced

There are few things that I enjoy watching more than a road team going in, and sending everyone in the stadium home upset. Ideally, it's on some sort of shaky call by a ref, some sort of (to borrow from Bill Simmons) "stomach punch" fashion, or a last second play. It's even more fun when the team going on the road is your team.

Illini 23. Michigan St. 20.

I was chatting with Rookie earlier in the week, and we decided that the Illini had a shot, if we didn't give away the game and actually made Michigan St. win the game. We talked about how fragile Drew Stanton's psyche is, and how if we could stop the run, Stanton probably couldn't win the game, after giving it away last week to Notre Dame. So, if we could run the ball, and keep our defense off of the field, and then force them to pass, then we'd have a shot.

Of course, neither of us really thought that we were going to win.

Suckers.

We ran the ball well. 252 yards well. Pierre Thomas went for 110. Juice kept the ball enough to make 103 yards (which is probably understated since in college, yards lost when you're sacked count against you). If we can control games by running - we just may make a run at that bowl game (though the Syracuse loss really makes it difficult). I can see us beating Indiana. Their coach has a brain tumor. And as previously discussed, Northwestern's coach died. And we should beat Ohio. They're not any good. So hypothetically, we're at 5 wins. We don't know how good Purdue or Penn St. really are. Maybe we can get one of those for a 6th win.

Regardless, our next great hope played a very nice game. Isiah "Juice" Williams went 9 for 16,
122 yards in the air, a TD and a pick 6. What was great was that he bounced back immediately after the pick 6 and led a drive that ended up with an Illini TD (on a sweet halfback option play). I like how poised he looks in the pocket. He's got the huge arm, that's a little scatter-shot right now. And so far, his touch is a little bit off (he only seems to have one setting - cannon). But, I like how he's not jittery in the pocket, looks to make the pass first, and has the run as a good option when everything breaks down.

One thing that's interesting for me is that when I watch football on TV, I can usually tell from the QB's footwork and release whether or not the pass will be accurate. One thing that I noted was that on a few passes, I thought that Juice was about to have a very nice completion (good movement in the pocket, set his feet well, and had a nice release), only to watch the ball sail (albeit very, very quickly) by the receiver. I don't know if that's good or bad - 18 year old QB's with pocket presence are good. But it's hard to teach accuracy. Hopefully, it's just a matter of experience.

I have a suspicion that we'll show some more good things this year. And next year may actually get us to a bowl game. But things could be awfully interesting in 2009. Maybe I'll just hang out here for an extra year to see if I'm right on that guess.

-Chairman