I guess the downside of pushing this back a day is that I blew my lacrosse wad yesterday, so there's none of that today. But there's baseball, oh yes. Specifically another series win, this one over the top-20 Miami Hurricanes.
UVA won on Saturday and Sunday to take the weekend, and needed every single one of its runs in the process. What looked like semi-comfortable three-run leads in the 9th inning turned into roller-coaster rides. It wasn't even all Branden Kline's fault, despite how close he came to blowing two saves in a row. The fielding wasn't all there, either (and neither was it all there in the disastrous first inning on Friday that provided Miami's win margin.) The hitting all weekend was best described as "clutch," which is sometimes a synonym for "you didn't hit shit all day until it really started mattering." Miami's pitching staff is better than halfway decent, of course, so there's that. Sometimes it doesn't have to be awesome, just good enough.
Really, the best part is the disgustingly good games from pitchers not named Danny Hultzen. (Danny had a pretty damn good game for six innings, too, but the problem was that he pitched seven.) Tyler Wilson especially was nasty: 7 2/3 innings, one hit, one walk, eleven strikeouts. Even though Miami's lineup isn't the ACC's best, it's still an ACC lineup and that was one helluva day. Nathan Melendres, normally one of Miami's best hitters, started the weekend off with six straight Ks: a golden sombrero on Friday and two more on Saturday.
Meanwhile, E.J. Encinosa surely must be ruing his occasional confusion of batter and strike zone; all five of UVA's Sunday runs were scored with two outs after Encinosa had retired the first two batters in succession and then hit the third. (UVA's hitters, besides knowing how to bunt and advance runners, also are very good at getting hit by pitches. Yes, that's a talent. They make only the most cursory effort to get out of the way and that often involves ducking their shoulders out of the way when the ball is headed for their foot, or other such tricks. Get on base, man. It don't matter how.)
So here we are with one series left in the season: a trip to Chapel Hill. The standings look very nice. Only one team can catch UVA for the #1 tournament seed: Georgia Tech, and the magic number is one, meaning all it takes for us to clinch is one win or one GT loss. On account of the rules being insane, if for some reason we get swept AND GT sweeps VT, we drop to #3.
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- Tomorrow is the update to the recruiting board, which is gonna be cool since just this past week we got our first blue-chip recruit in Kwontie Moore. With Moore and Mark Hall on board, it gives the staff the luxury of being very choosy about their next LB commit, as both are quality prospects. I estimated three LBs in 2012 and there might be room for four, but linebacker is now well-taken care of. And Moore looks to be a great recruiter for the rest of our 757 targets the way Clifton Richardson was last year.
- The men's tennis team got through the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament without much difficulty, dispatching Sacred Heart and Wake Forest at the Snyder Tennis Center. The next rounds are Thursday, Saturday, Monday, and the championship Tuesday, and despite the awesomeness of the baseball team this is actually UVA's best shot at a national title this year.
- The ACC/Big Ten matchups are out. Yay! And UVA hosts Michigan. Double yay! As it stands now that's actually probably a loss for UVA, but a great matchup nonetheless, and I'm all sorts of happy to finally see a matchup between my two teams. Even happier that it's not, like, a tournament or something where one team has to end its season. One big downside: For the next six months I get to try and correct all the Michigan Sux misconceptions on UVA boards and UVA Sux misconceptions on Michigan boards. It's already started.
Showing posts with label acc/big ten challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label acc/big ten challenge. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
series preview: North Carolina
Flying out of town again on Friday, so this stuff comes at you a day early. Plus I'm getting antsy for more baseball. Final exam break is boring. This weekend's opponent is UNC, and much like in basketball, this is a good chance to stomp the Heels while they're down. Normally an Omaha-caliber team, UNC finds themselves on the bubble for not just the NCAAs, but even the ACC tournament. They are tied at the moment with NC State (whom they beat in an earlier series) for the 8th and final place in Greensboro. The Heels have the tiebreaker, but they also have the tougher row to hoe in the next two weeks - especially this weekend, where they face a team capable of sweeping them if they don't play good baseball.
Yes, I said "sweep" - but I also said UNC would have to play poorly for that to happen. UVA is at a disadvantage right off the bat: it'll have been well over a week since they saw any live pitching in a game. UNC had their finals break a couple weeks ago and are on a nice seven game winning streak - eight if they beat Charleston tonight. A series against Wake Forest such as they had last week is really good for what ails ya.
UNC is still a good baseball team, so if a UVA sweep is in the offing, don't expect this streak of double-digit runs to continue. UNC has quality pitching, especially from Friday starter Matt Harvey, who promises to be excellent competition for Danny Hultzen. Harvey's numbers aren't quite as eye-popping as Hultzen's, but they're still brilliant, especially for college pitchers: a 2.68 ERA, .212 opponents' BA, 80 Ks. Like Hultzen, he's gone the distance once this season.
Second starter Patrick Johnson has been throwing on Sundays lately, likely in an effort to match up against a team's worst starter, and he's no slouch either (3.62 ERA), though somewhat more hittable than your usual second starter (.280 opponents' BA) and prone to the occasional disaster when opponents string those hits together. NC State did just that and lit him up to the tune of six runs in the fourth. The Heels have been tag-teaming the third (Saturday for them) starter's job, with either Chris Munnelly or Colin Bates starting and the other first out of the bullpen. Neither is fearsome.
As for the bats, UNC has 'em, but they lack two things: a bottom third of the order, and that one really nasty, fearsome hitter that you never want to see in the on-deck circle. Dustin Ackley not only left town early, he was the second pick in the MLB draft, behind Stephen Strasburg. He left Carolina without a true masher in the middle of the lineup, so their lineup looks a lot like a poor man's UVA. It's a good set of hitters, but the highest batting average on the team would rank 7th at UVA (that belongs to Dillon Hazlett, hitting .352, but he takes so few walks his OBP is only fifth on the team.) And they're exceedingly low on power. Their 33 home runs are the second-fewest in the conference, ahead of only the anemic Terrapins, and only one player has more than five.
In general I expect a low-scoring series: Carolina's strength is their pitching and they have a capable bullpen. Their hitting ought to be good enough to take one game, two if we show up on Friday and the batspeed hasn't caught back up to the fastballs yet. But if Hultzen is really zoned in on Friday, and if the crafty but hittable Patrick Johnson suddenly starts giving up hits all in a row on Sunday....well, NC State has Duke this weekend and the pressure is on UNC to steal one or they'll be seriously behind the 8-ball going into the regular season's final weekend.
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Quickly:
- Ken Clausen is a Tewaaraton Trophy finalist. No defenseman has ever won the males' trophy, and I doubt it'll happen this year; it'd probably take a UVA national title plus Duke falling short of the final four for the voters to turn their heads away from Ned Crotty's 51 assists.
- The ACC/Big Ten Challenge opponent is Minnesota, so yay for my prognostication. I suppose I'd have been smart to check out which other Big Ten teams had been on the road last year. So we probably lose that game. The annoying thing after all is that there are eleven Big Ten teams, and this is, I think, the 12th year of the event, and this'll be the fourth matchup against Minnesota. No imagination, man. But we get the first-day matchup in which UVA is the only show of the day, so that means a national TV audience.
Yes, I said "sweep" - but I also said UNC would have to play poorly for that to happen. UVA is at a disadvantage right off the bat: it'll have been well over a week since they saw any live pitching in a game. UNC had their finals break a couple weeks ago and are on a nice seven game winning streak - eight if they beat Charleston tonight. A series against Wake Forest such as they had last week is really good for what ails ya.
UNC is still a good baseball team, so if a UVA sweep is in the offing, don't expect this streak of double-digit runs to continue. UNC has quality pitching, especially from Friday starter Matt Harvey, who promises to be excellent competition for Danny Hultzen. Harvey's numbers aren't quite as eye-popping as Hultzen's, but they're still brilliant, especially for college pitchers: a 2.68 ERA, .212 opponents' BA, 80 Ks. Like Hultzen, he's gone the distance once this season.
Second starter Patrick Johnson has been throwing on Sundays lately, likely in an effort to match up against a team's worst starter, and he's no slouch either (3.62 ERA), though somewhat more hittable than your usual second starter (.280 opponents' BA) and prone to the occasional disaster when opponents string those hits together. NC State did just that and lit him up to the tune of six runs in the fourth. The Heels have been tag-teaming the third (Saturday for them) starter's job, with either Chris Munnelly or Colin Bates starting and the other first out of the bullpen. Neither is fearsome.
As for the bats, UNC has 'em, but they lack two things: a bottom third of the order, and that one really nasty, fearsome hitter that you never want to see in the on-deck circle. Dustin Ackley not only left town early, he was the second pick in the MLB draft, behind Stephen Strasburg. He left Carolina without a true masher in the middle of the lineup, so their lineup looks a lot like a poor man's UVA. It's a good set of hitters, but the highest batting average on the team would rank 7th at UVA (that belongs to Dillon Hazlett, hitting .352, but he takes so few walks his OBP is only fifth on the team.) And they're exceedingly low on power. Their 33 home runs are the second-fewest in the conference, ahead of only the anemic Terrapins, and only one player has more than five.
In general I expect a low-scoring series: Carolina's strength is their pitching and they have a capable bullpen. Their hitting ought to be good enough to take one game, two if we show up on Friday and the batspeed hasn't caught back up to the fastballs yet. But if Hultzen is really zoned in on Friday, and if the crafty but hittable Patrick Johnson suddenly starts giving up hits all in a row on Sunday....well, NC State has Duke this weekend and the pressure is on UNC to steal one or they'll be seriously behind the 8-ball going into the regular season's final weekend.
***********************************************
Quickly:
- Ken Clausen is a Tewaaraton Trophy finalist. No defenseman has ever won the males' trophy, and I doubt it'll happen this year; it'd probably take a UVA national title plus Duke falling short of the final four for the voters to turn their heads away from Ned Crotty's 51 assists.
- The ACC/Big Ten Challenge opponent is Minnesota, so yay for my prognostication. I suppose I'd have been smart to check out which other Big Ten teams had been on the road last year. So we probably lose that game. The annoying thing after all is that there are eleven Big Ten teams, and this is, I think, the 12th year of the event, and this'll be the fourth matchup against Minnesota. No imagination, man. But we get the first-day matchup in which UVA is the only show of the day, so that means a national TV audience.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
some minor annoyances
A few quick things today that fall into the "argh" category:
The USC game this fall will happen at ten flipping thirty in the evening. At least it's a Saturday night, but seriously - we'll be watching football at one o'clock in the morning, assuming we haven't given up on what looks like another 40-point blowout by that time. One in the morning, every football fan is either asleep or drunk and getting drunker, so this is not a recipe for awesomeness. It is a recipe for jetlagged Cavaliers.
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Half the ACC/Big Ten Challenge matchups are out - not officially, but through a leaky hole somewhere - and here's what we know:
Michigan State at Duke
Purdue at Virginia Tech
Ohio State at Florida State
North Carolina at Illinois
NC State at Wisconsin
Indiana at Boston College
That leaves six possibilities for our opponent: Iowa, Penn State, Northwestern, Michigan, Minnesota, or none at all. Now here's the annoying part, following a little deduction:
- I don't see us playing Minnesota. They're a tournament team and we're not close, and that makes for lousy TV. So eliminate the Gophers.
- I don't see us playing Iowa. Iowa is a beatable team, but they've been told they're going on the road. We hosted a game last year, and while it's not out of the question for teams to play two home games in a row, the Challenge incorporates Rule 2(b). (Remember being dealt Northwestern on ESPNUVA - and beating them by 40 in a game nobody cared about - the year after being the regular season ACC champs?) So eliminate the Hawkeyes.
- I don't see us playing Penn State. We played them last year and while rematches aren't out of the question either, they're rare. So eliminate the Nittany Lions.
That leaves three possibilities: Northwestern again, probably on ESPNUVA again; Michigan; or no game at all. No game at all would suck, but typically the last-place ACC team (Miami) gets dealt that card. Still: Rule 2(b).
Or we could play Michigan, and I don't know how I feel about that with my split loyalties, but I do know how the run-up to the game will go: it'll piss me off. I occasionally end up defending the ACC to some of the snobbier Big Ten fans and the Big Ten to some of the snobbier ACC fans because there are elements of both that think the other is the shittiest sack of shit conference outside of the MAC. Both Michigan and UVA are facing heavy rebuilding years (which would make for intriguing TV and a good reason why I think this is the most likely matchup) and therefore I'll have the pleasure of watching both sets of fans badmouth the other team as an easily winnable game. This annoys me.
If it is Michigan, it'll mark the first time in my split fandom that the two schools have played each other in something I care about enough to drop what I'm doing and watch (there were a pair of softball games earlier this year and I think there was a women's basketball tournament game a few years back) and I still have no idea how I'd approach this. I've long suspected my rooting interest would simply lie with whoever needs the win more, but there's always the chance I go with whichever team's fans spent less effort proclaiming the winnability of the game. Take that, fellow brothers in arms!
You see now why I didn't attend a Big Ten school.
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Lastly, there are two articles; one is this article from Ratcliffe at the CDP on - well, the story of the week. It's worth a read, because it revolves mostly around the words of Pete Gillen, whose frankness in interviews is always refreshing. There's a lot to be learned, though there's a real sense of irony here since Gillen's firing was brought about in some part because he no longer had control of his team.
I don't have a link for the second article, as it's behind a paywall. furrer4heisman, better known as the mastermind behind the excellent Gobbler Country, passed it along. It's based on some of the same Gillen quotes, though it picks and chooses rather selectively in order to make a point. Since it's a paywall article, I won't reproduce the whole thing here, but the point can be summed up in these two paragraphs:
Therein lies the annoyance. The point could certainly have been made without that suggestion and without selectively quoting Gillen, whose words, as you can tell in the Ratcliffe article, were not meant to convey a purposeful lack of complete oversight of college athletes; rather, its impossibility.
I'd like to think I'm not so naive that I'm just now learning how the vultures in the media have a thousand different ways of circling a story. I've seen it before; still, it never ceases to amaze. Pete Gillen, as far as I can tell, is about as honest a man as they come, but the openness of his words doesn't prevent their being used to make two almost completely opposite points.
I leave you with this as a parting thought for today:
The USC game this fall will happen at ten flipping thirty in the evening. At least it's a Saturday night, but seriously - we'll be watching football at one o'clock in the morning, assuming we haven't given up on what looks like another 40-point blowout by that time. One in the morning, every football fan is either asleep or drunk and getting drunker, so this is not a recipe for awesomeness. It is a recipe for jetlagged Cavaliers.
*****************************************
Half the ACC/Big Ten Challenge matchups are out - not officially, but through a leaky hole somewhere - and here's what we know:
Michigan State at Duke
Purdue at Virginia Tech
Ohio State at Florida State
North Carolina at Illinois
NC State at Wisconsin
Indiana at Boston College
That leaves six possibilities for our opponent: Iowa, Penn State, Northwestern, Michigan, Minnesota, or none at all. Now here's the annoying part, following a little deduction:
- I don't see us playing Minnesota. They're a tournament team and we're not close, and that makes for lousy TV. So eliminate the Gophers.
- I don't see us playing Iowa. Iowa is a beatable team, but they've been told they're going on the road. We hosted a game last year, and while it's not out of the question for teams to play two home games in a row, the Challenge incorporates Rule 2(b). (Remember being dealt Northwestern on ESPNUVA - and beating them by 40 in a game nobody cared about - the year after being the regular season ACC champs?) So eliminate the Hawkeyes.
- I don't see us playing Penn State. We played them last year and while rematches aren't out of the question either, they're rare. So eliminate the Nittany Lions.
That leaves three possibilities: Northwestern again, probably on ESPNUVA again; Michigan; or no game at all. No game at all would suck, but typically the last-place ACC team (Miami) gets dealt that card. Still: Rule 2(b).
Or we could play Michigan, and I don't know how I feel about that with my split loyalties, but I do know how the run-up to the game will go: it'll piss me off. I occasionally end up defending the ACC to some of the snobbier Big Ten fans and the Big Ten to some of the snobbier ACC fans because there are elements of both that think the other is the shittiest sack of shit conference outside of the MAC. Both Michigan and UVA are facing heavy rebuilding years (which would make for intriguing TV and a good reason why I think this is the most likely matchup) and therefore I'll have the pleasure of watching both sets of fans badmouth the other team as an easily winnable game. This annoys me.
If it is Michigan, it'll mark the first time in my split fandom that the two schools have played each other in something I care about enough to drop what I'm doing and watch (there were a pair of softball games earlier this year and I think there was a women's basketball tournament game a few years back) and I still have no idea how I'd approach this. I've long suspected my rooting interest would simply lie with whoever needs the win more, but there's always the chance I go with whichever team's fans spent less effort proclaiming the winnability of the game. Take that, fellow brothers in arms!
You see now why I didn't attend a Big Ten school.
*****************************************
Lastly, there are two articles; one is this article from Ratcliffe at the CDP on - well, the story of the week. It's worth a read, because it revolves mostly around the words of Pete Gillen, whose frankness in interviews is always refreshing. There's a lot to be learned, though there's a real sense of irony here since Gillen's firing was brought about in some part because he no longer had control of his team.
I don't have a link for the second article, as it's behind a paywall. furrer4heisman, better known as the mastermind behind the excellent Gobbler Country, passed it along. It's based on some of the same Gillen quotes, though it picks and chooses rather selectively in order to make a point. Since it's a paywall article, I won't reproduce the whole thing here, but the point can be summed up in these two paragraphs:
Pete Gillen's explanation - very likely shared by many coaches and administrators - that "young kids at that age think they're invincible" and that "when you're a star athlete ... you think you're king," is more than a little unsatisfying. Why do colleges put up with this behavior? Why are these kids still on campus? ....In other words, the approach to discipline at colleges is patchwork at best: heavy-handed in some instances and willfully ignorant in others, and often in the wrong instances in both cases. That's the article in a nutshell, and the point is well worth noting, not least because it's directed at academia in general and not UVA specifically. (Though I could have done without the snide suggestions about the type of discipline - or lack thereof - that Dom Starsia laid on George Huguely for his previous misdeeds.)
.... It's been quite a while since American colleges and universities decided that they were no longer going to be acting in loco parentis. But most administrators still have trouble determining what their role is supposed to be. I remember as a freshman being told by a residential adviser that as long as your drink was in a closed cup, no one in a position of authority would demand to know the contents. But if, God forbid, someone found a hot plate or other "unauthorized appliance" in your dorm room, there would be serious trouble.
Therein lies the annoyance. The point could certainly have been made without that suggestion and without selectively quoting Gillen, whose words, as you can tell in the Ratcliffe article, were not meant to convey a purposeful lack of complete oversight of college athletes; rather, its impossibility.
I'd like to think I'm not so naive that I'm just now learning how the vultures in the media have a thousand different ways of circling a story. I've seen it before; still, it never ceases to amaze. Pete Gillen, as far as I can tell, is about as honest a man as they come, but the openness of his words doesn't prevent their being used to make two almost completely opposite points.
I leave you with this as a parting thought for today:
Four St. Bonaventure basketball players were fined $250 each on Monday after they pleaded guilty to one charge of disorderly conduct in connection to an on-campus fight in which two men were stabbed.A decision on the amount of irony in this simple paragraph when juxtaposed with the nature of the coverage of the Love murder is an exercise I leave to the reader. In the words of our own intrepid James Michael Scott: smh.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
we're going places
And according to Sitemeter, some of those places are ones like Belgium, Germany, and Mexico. I have not been to any of those places and I am jealous of my own blog. But those are not the places the title means. No, the title is there to assure you, the reader, that I have a Plan and am not just vomiting words onto my keyboard all the time.
July 28, I will commence the official FOV season countdown. This is not quite as dramatic as it sounds. July 28 is simply the day on which the first ACC team preview will appear. There will be team previews of every ACC team and each non-conference team appearing on our schedule. An ACC breakdown follows. Then I'll preview our offense and defense on successive days, and it will lead up to the regular feature of a game preview on August 28. And in between I'll vomit words onto my keyboard as appropriate.
Speaking of game previews, you can expect these every Thursday before a Saturday game. This is a hobby and moneymaking time is set aside before 4 PM each weekday - therefore I rarely post in the middle of the day, and Thursday previews give you all day Friday.
And why you ask do you have to wait all the way til like four days before the season starts to hear about our team? Cause I kind of like to know who's actually gonna be playing, that's why. I'd sure love to assume we have a drop-back passer for the season only to have Groh announce that Riko Smalls will be under center for USC.
(Digression: I hope it is not Scott Deke just so I don't have to hear Mark Tirico say "Scott Deek" 100 times. The linebacker's name is Copper, not Cooper, OK, Mark? Somebody slip that man a media guide. Anyone who watched last year's Maryland games knows what I'm talking about.)
So without further ado, here's your content for the day:
First up, more fluff from the Daily Progress: a catch-up article with Ryan Pettinella, who is looking to play in Italy and probably make a career out of it. (Charlottesville, in case you were wondering, is a fantastic lovely town but it is not a place where Things Happen, so the CDP is rather adept and prolific at churning out these excellent what-they-doing-now sort of articles. That's why you get these so much.)
On YouTube there is a nice and long (though of typical YouTube visual quality) highlight video of our last win over Tech. I have very fond memories of this, as it was my last game at Scott as a student.
The Orlando Sentinel has an article, inspired by Heather Dinich's ranking of ACC stadiums, which in turn was inspired by ESPN's national ranking of stadiums, that does the same thing. Seems ranking the stadiums is the thing to do. (I will avoid doing this for the simple reason that I've only been to two ACC stadiums.) So instead, here is somebody else's view of Scott Stadium:
Mon., Dec. 1:
Wisconsin @ Virginia Tech, 7 PM, ESPN
Tue., Dec. 2:
Ohio State @ Miami, 7 PM, ESPN
Iowa @ Boston College, 7 PM, ESPNU
Clemson @ Illinois, 7:30 PM, ESPN2
Duke @ Purdue, 9 PM, ESPN
Virginia @ Minnesota, 9:30 PM, ESPN2
Wed., Dec. 3:
Indiana @ Wake Forest, 7:15 PM, ESPN
Penn State @ Georgia Tech, 7:30 PM, ESPN2
Michigan @ Maryland, 7:30 PM, ESPNU
North Carolina @ Michigan State (at Ford Field), 9:15 PM, ESPN
Florida State @ Northwestern, 9:30 PM, ESPN2
Opinion: This could have been much worse. Though we're on ESPN2 competing with Duke for viewers, we are not 1) competing with UNC/MSU at a big-ass football stadium for viewers and 2) not relegated to ESPNU. And we're on the first day for once (not counting the day of one game only) instead of the second day when nobody cares because it's long been decided that once again the Big Ten loses the Challenge. Given that we're not widely considered a threat to make much of a postseason splash again this year, I think the schedulers did alright by us.
July 28, I will commence the official FOV season countdown. This is not quite as dramatic as it sounds. July 28 is simply the day on which the first ACC team preview will appear. There will be team previews of every ACC team and each non-conference team appearing on our schedule. An ACC breakdown follows. Then I'll preview our offense and defense on successive days, and it will lead up to the regular feature of a game preview on August 28. And in between I'll vomit words onto my keyboard as appropriate.
Speaking of game previews, you can expect these every Thursday before a Saturday game. This is a hobby and moneymaking time is set aside before 4 PM each weekday - therefore I rarely post in the middle of the day, and Thursday previews give you all day Friday.
And why you ask do you have to wait all the way til like four days before the season starts to hear about our team? Cause I kind of like to know who's actually gonna be playing, that's why. I'd sure love to assume we have a drop-back passer for the season only to have Groh announce that Riko Smalls will be under center for USC.
(Digression: I hope it is not Scott Deke just so I don't have to hear Mark Tirico say "Scott Deek" 100 times. The linebacker's name is Copper, not Cooper, OK, Mark? Somebody slip that man a media guide. Anyone who watched last year's Maryland games knows what I'm talking about.)
So without further ado, here's your content for the day:
First up, more fluff from the Daily Progress: a catch-up article with Ryan Pettinella, who is looking to play in Italy and probably make a career out of it. (Charlottesville, in case you were wondering, is a fantastic lovely town but it is not a place where Things Happen, so the CDP is rather adept and prolific at churning out these excellent what-they-doing-now sort of articles. That's why you get these so much.)
On YouTube there is a nice and long (though of typical YouTube visual quality) highlight video of our last win over Tech. I have very fond memories of this, as it was my last game at Scott as a student.
The Orlando Sentinel has an article, inspired by Heather Dinich's ranking of ACC stadiums, which in turn was inspired by ESPN's national ranking of stadiums, that does the same thing. Seems ranking the stadiums is the thing to do. (I will avoid doing this for the simple reason that I've only been to two ACC stadiums.) So instead, here is somebody else's view of Scott Stadium:
Sorry, North Carolina fans, but this is the most picturesque place in the conference to spend a Saturday afternoon. The architecture is beautiful, the hill is unique and the surroundings gorgeous.I saved probably the most interesting for last. The dates and times for the ACC Wipes The Floor With The Big Ten Challenge:
Mon., Dec. 1:
Wisconsin @ Virginia Tech, 7 PM, ESPN
Tue., Dec. 2:
Ohio State @ Miami, 7 PM, ESPN
Iowa @ Boston College, 7 PM, ESPNU
Clemson @ Illinois, 7:30 PM, ESPN2
Duke @ Purdue, 9 PM, ESPN
Virginia @ Minnesota, 9:30 PM, ESPN2
Wed., Dec. 3:
Indiana @ Wake Forest, 7:15 PM, ESPN
Penn State @ Georgia Tech, 7:30 PM, ESPN2
Michigan @ Maryland, 7:30 PM, ESPNU
North Carolina @ Michigan State (at Ford Field), 9:15 PM, ESPN
Florida State @ Northwestern, 9:30 PM, ESPN2
Opinion: This could have been much worse. Though we're on ESPN2 competing with Duke for viewers, we are not 1) competing with UNC/MSU at a big-ass football stadium for viewers and 2) not relegated to ESPNU. And we're on the first day for once (not counting the day of one game only) instead of the second day when nobody cares because it's long been decided that once again the Big Ten loses the Challenge. Given that we're not widely considered a threat to make much of a postseason splash again this year, I think the schedulers did alright by us.
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