That’s 5-4 against the spread with three to play. My $1,000, bet $100 per game, would have done this thus far:
Week 1: $1,000
After Week 2: $890
3: $780
4: $680
5: $780
6: $880
7: Bye
8: $980
9: $870
10: $970
11: $1,070

Week 12 vs WSU: TBD.
Week 13 vs Oregon: TBD.
Bowl game: TBD.

As you say, there are no senior QBs of note in the Pac-10 this year. If that’s what you are looking for, though, it’s a short step to the conclusion that the Ducks — with an upperclassman returning starter who played very well last year — are in the best position of the bunch.

Why it’s funny is that, while others were touting Masoli as a dark horse for Heisman, I, ever pessimistic, was sounding the alarm with what I explicitly referred to as “the Adam Peck theory of football.”

Possibly this was a misattribution.

As I recall it, though, the Peck theory states that teams are most often mismeasured because of overhyping of their flashy skill position players. Look instead at the big men on the OL and DL, though, and you will see the true potential of the team.

I read somewhere that the Ducks, with only 20 career starts among its OL starters, are 118th out of 120 teams in Division I in that category. Ouch. The DL is better off, but must replace probably the best defensive end the school has ever produced in Nick Reed.

So, yes, our runners cannot really run and our catchers cannot catch, but put them behind last year’s OL (the school’s best ever?) and I suspect they do just fine, and the Guard fills up with stories about how talented the new skill guys are.

On the other side of the ball, I mostly agree that the defense has been given inordinate credit for the limited success of the opposing offenses. They stopped BSU mostly because the Broncos suddenly became incompetent. Yes, we are the sort of defense where, if you leave the ball lying on the carpet or throw it at us, we will try to snatch it — but isn’t everyone? (WSU excluded. Sigh.)

The effort and outcome were better against Purdue, and we made things happen that are beyond just the standard expectations for our defensive scheme. The fact remains, though, that we needed a poor decision by an open receiver to avoid the crapshoot of overtime. If he stands still instead of jumping unnecessarily, his feet probably stay in bounds.

I cannot resist being hopeful, even if we turn out to be dreadful this year. I was trained through years of 2-9 seasons to expect always that this will be the breakthrough week, and I sure hope that Saturday’s game against Utah is exactly that.

Ultimately, though, from a strategic perspective, this is looking like the year before the year. Young OL, young defense, still fairly young QB, mostly new receivers, entirely new (and ideally second-string) tailbacks.

When Masoli is a senior and has a veteran line in front of him, watch out.

This should perhaps be a new post, but unlike some fans (younger ones, I think), I don’t really have it in for the Beavers; I just love seeing my guys out there having fun and making history. While I won’t go so far as to say I like the Beavers… well, screw it, I actually do. I like them fine. I certainly would prefer to see them in the Rose Bowl ahead of the Trojans; I don’t really harbor ill will for the 2000 fiasco where they knocked us out of the Rose Bowl so that the Huskies (who we’d beaten and tied with as co-champions) went instead; or for the last couple of years. They’re a good, tough, well-coached football team that keeps Oregon honest. They ought to practice tackling before their bowl, though. You saw this?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDU_jAcmkS8

Regarding Mike Bellotti/Nick Alliotti: I believe that topic merits a new post; I will simply point out that the number of “L”s and “T”s in their names is a constant source of consternation to me.

Regarding the BCS: I think you frame it correctly. There’s no legitimate hope of making fiasco-free sense of which team is the champion in college football. Post to follow. And, if there’s not, then, hell, let’s go back to how it used to be: ironclad bowl matchups between conference champions. I’d love to win a national title, but I’d love every bit as much to win the Rose Bowl.

Also, when you consider how lousy the BCS is, don’t dismiss what is being exhibited in 2008: in pre-BCS days, the one-loss teams matching up in the Rose Bowl (USC & Penn State) would be considered very real candidates for the national title. Oklahoma would have played the ACC champion in the Orange Bowl, and Florida would have probably played the Big East champ or some undefeated team like Utah in the Sugar Bowl. Any one of those four one-loss teams would have had a chance to show the world what they’re capable of in a bowl game, elevating themselves to national champion. Hell, even Texas would have probably been slotted into the Fiesta Bowl against somebody like Ohio State, where they could make a claim on the national title with a win. That’s *more* interest, and *better* TV, and *more* fairness; this year, based on the hunches of sportswriters and computers, we’ve summarily disqualified all but two of the five or six contenders for the national title before the game is played. Just for fun, say USC beats Penn State 51-0 and Oklahoma & Florida is close; for heaven’s sakes, we’re going to (or should) get a split title again, anyway.

The old bowl system was inefficient and ambiguous and often denied fans (and teams, for that matter) the opportunity to establish a clear champion, or even a matchup of clearly strongest candidates. It’s worth noting that we routinely now get a matchup of two of at least the top three or four teams. In some years past, each of the four or five best teams would be in separate bowl games against lesser foes. Witness, just to grab a top-of-mind example, the undefeated Penn State juggernaut being matched up against the scrappy but much lower-ranked 9-2 Ducks in the 1995 Rose Bowl. A great matchup for us, but a frustrating showcase for them.

The biggest problem with the BCS is that it carries expectations of being better than that. It was sold to us as the solution to the matchup problem, a reliable mechanism for sorting out the best teams and crowning a clear champion. The old system had no such pretensions, so we had different gripes: it was the wrong sort of system, not an incompetent version of the right one, which is somehow much more disappointing.

The flaws in the BCS system have been canonized at this point. The computer rankings lack common sense, sometimes get distracted by mediocre teams with interesting stats, and can be manipulated. The human rankings are worse, a showcase for the opinions of often partisan sportswriters who pay notoriously poor attention to games beyond their conference and the nationally televised games of the week, and as you point out have an annoying tendency to live back East and not stick around to watch the Pac-10, WAC, and Mountain West games in the late afternoon and evening.

I don’t think there is a great solution to this problem. The addition of a simple plus-one to the current system would likely replicate the problem we have now of too many teams with a reasonable claim to belong. Really, how many teams can make a good case for the top game right now? Florida looks the best, but they lost to an unheralded Ole Miss team. Alabama has lost to no one but Florida, and then just barely in a great game; should they really drop beneath other teams who lost to lesser opponents? Texas has been dominant and would be undefeated but for a very unlikely Michael Crabtree TD with one second on the clock, and besides Texas Tech, especially at that moment, was a worth opponent. USC is a mauling machine, tripping up only once fairly early in the season against a solid bowl team, and their defense is marvelous. Oklahoma, meh, I fucking hate Bob Stoops, but still. Boise State is undefeated, a pretty good argument, but who did they play? And give us five more minutes and we beat them with our fifth-string, true freshman QB running the same three pass plays (the only ones he had mastered so far, reportedly) over and over. Who should play for the national championship, or even a potential plus one? Who knows? We’d need a couple of rounds to play them off, right?

Adding on a playoff bracket at the end is more problematic, though. First there’s a massive scheduling problem. You have to extend the season well into the new year, cutting into players’ downtime and coaches’ recruiting time — although, as a non-hockey sports fan it must be noted, also improving the barren sports landscape of late winter. More importantly, by extending the season and raising the stakes, don’t you do substantially more damage to the battered ideas of NCAA players as student-athletes? They barely have time to get degrees as it is, and many of them don’t. Cut into study time by a few more weeks, stretching football into spring term, and that problem gets even worse.

So yes, I agree with you, if we can’t really fix the clear-national-champion problem, let’s fix the stop-screwing-the-Pac-10 problem. We are not the WAC or Mountain West, some formerly second-rate upstart league trying to sneak into the dance. We are, as you say, consistently in the top two or three leagues in achievements and quality of play. Indeed, one of the problems we have is that there’s no cakewalk to the conference crown: it’s not two real games and a bunch of pushovers, it’s quality opponent after quality opponent, with the annoying effect that we keep knocking each other off and keeping any of us from looking as dominant as we’d like at the national level. USC beats the hell out of their national-caliber out-of-league opponents. They just can’t usually survive Oregon and Oregon State and Stanford and the rest in the same season. Something’s got to give.

That said, it is also worth acknowledging that this is the weakest group of Pac-10 teams since the ’80s. The “Pac-1″ is lazy punditspeak for “I can’t be bothered to keep track of anyone but USC,” but there’s a reasonable case for the “Pac-3″ this year. The Oregon schools are very solid, though the only marquee wins were OSU over USC and UO over OSU. Beyond that? Mediocre Cal, Stanford, and Arizona schools. Really lousy ASU and UCLA squads, including in Kevin Craft the worst conference QB since Bobby Brothers. And then the Washington schools, shocking in how far they have fallen. Not since the days of perennial 2-9 Oregon schools has the Pac-10 seen that sort of incompetence. As a rival fan, it’s not funny or satisfying, it’s just pathetic. So, yes, the Pac-10 constantly gets screwed, and it’s wrong, except maybe this season it’s not so bad. Beating ourselves is not the accomplishment it usually would be.

One last note on the Civil War. It was shocking, right? The best offensive performance ever at a school with a long history of explosive offenses, and possibly the best one just last year, but now led by an inexperienced QB and an abnormally weak group of receivers who just weeks ago couldn’t mount a cohesive attack? Huge kudos for their accomplishments, way huger ones for maybe our best-ever offensive line and a fine pair of RBs. And a gutsy effort by a defense that played, what, 80% of our minutes this year? My last note, though, is this: Everyone was shocked that we put up 65 points in a rivalry game against a strong OSU team whose strength was its defense. Agreed, 100%. But the really shocking thing, if you remember, was that we SHOULD HAVE SCORED 72! Remember that play in mopup time when Moevao (I think it was) fumbled and who-dat Duck LB #88 scooped it up and looked downfield and there was nothing but green between him and 72 POINTS IN THE CIVIL WAR! He stutter stepped, and Moevao dove and caught him by a shoestring, but OH MY GOD, ADAM, to even have a chance at 72? Mind boggling.

The old bowl system was inefficient and ambiguous and often denied fans (and teams, for that matter) the opportunity to establish a clear champion, or even a matchup of clearly strongest candidates. It’s worth noting that we routinely now get a matchup of two of at least the top three or four teams. In some years past, each of the four or five best teams would be in separate bowl games against lesser foes. Witness, just to grab a top-of-mind example, the undefeated Penn State juggernaut being matched up against the scrappy but much lower-ranked 9-2 Ducks in the 1995 Rose Bowl. A great matchup for us, but a frustrating showcase for them.

The biggest problem with the BCS is that it carries expectations of being better than that. It was sold to us as the solution to the matchup problem, a reliable mechanism for sorting out the best teams and crowning a clear champion. The old system had no such pretensions, so we had different gripes: it was the wrong sort of system, not an incompetent version of the right one, which is somehow much more disappointing.

The flaws in the BCS system have been canonized at this point. The computer rankings lack common sense, sometimes get distracted by mediocre teams with interesting stats, and can be manipulated. The human rankings are worse, a showcase for the opinions of often partisan sportswriters who pay notoriously poor attention to games beyond their conference and the nationally televised games of the week, and as you point out have an annoying tendency to live back East and not stick around to watch the Pac-10, WAC, and Mountain West games in the late afternoon and evening.

I don’t think there is a great solution to this problem. The addition of a simple plus-one to the current system would likely replicate the problem we have now of too many teams with a reasonable claim to belong. Really, how many teams can make a good case for the top game right now? Florida looks the best, but they lost to an unheralded Ole Miss team. Alabama has lost to no one but Florida, and then just barely in a great game; should they really drop beneath other teams who lost to lesser opponents? Texas has been dominant and would be undefeated but for a very unlikely Michael Crabtree TD with one second on the clock, and besides Texas Tech, especially at that moment, was a worth opponent. USC is a mauling machine, tripping up only once fairly early in the season against a solid bowl team, and their defense is marvelous. Oklahoma, meh, I fucking hate Bob Stoops, but still. Boise State is undefeated, a pretty good argument, but who did they play? And give us five more minutes and we beat them with our fifth-string, true freshman QB running the same three pass plays (the only ones he had mastered so far, reportedly) over and over. Who should play for the national championship, or even a potential plus one? Who knows? We’d need a couple of rounds to play them off, right?

Adding on a playoff bracket at the end is more problematic, though. First there’s a massive scheduling problem. You have to extend the season well into the new year, cutting into players’ downtime and coaches’ recruiting time — although, as a non-hockey sports fan it must be noted, also improving the barren sports landscape of late winter. More importantly, by extending the season and raising the stakes, don’t you do substantially more damage to the battered ideas of NCAA players as student-athletes? They barely have time to get degrees as it is, and many of them don’t. Cut into study time by a few more weeks, stretching football into spring term, and that problem gets even worse.

So yes, I agree with you, if we can’t really fix the clear-national-champion problem, let’s fix the stop-screwing-the-Pac-10 problem. We are not the WAC or Mountain West, some formerly second-rate upstart league trying to sneak into the dance. We are, as you say, consistently in the top two or three leagues in achievements and quality of play. Indeed, one of the problems we have is that there’s no cakewalk to the conference crown: it’s not two real games and a bunch of pushovers, it’s quality opponent after quality opponent, with the annoying effect that we keep knocking each other off and keeping any of us from looking as dominant as we’d like at the national level. USC beats the hell out of their national-caliber out-of-league opponents. They just can’t usually survive Oregon and Oregon State and Stanford and the rest in the same season. Something’s got to give.

That said, it is also worth acknowledging that this is the weakest group of Pac-10 teams since the ’80s. The “Pac-1″ is lazy punditspeak for “I can’t be bothered to keep track of anyone but USC,” but there’s a reasonable case for the “Pac-3″ this year. The Oregon schools are very solid, though the only marquee wins were OSU over USC and UO over OSU. Beyond that? Mediocre Cal, Stanford, and Arizona schools. Really lousy ASU and UCLA squads, including in Kevin Craft the worst conference QB since Bobby Brothers. And then the Washington schools, shocking in how far they have fallen. Not since the days of perennial 2-9 Oregon schools has the Pac-10 seen that sort of incompetence. As a rival fan, it’s not funny or satisfying, it’s just pathetic. So, yes, the Pac-10 constantly gets screwed, and it’s wrong, except maybe this season it’s not so bad. Beating ourselves is not the accomplishment it usually would be.

One last note on the Civil War. It was shocking, right? The best offensive performance ever at a school with a long history of explosive offenses, and possibly the best one just last year, but now led by an inexperienced QB and an abnormally weak group of receivers who just weeks ago couldn’t mount a cohesive attack? Huge kudos for their accomplishments, way huger ones for maybe our best-ever offensive line and a fine pair of RBs. And a gutsy effort by a defense that played, what, 80% of our minutes this year? My last note, though, is this: Everyone was shocked that we put up 65 points in a rivalry game against a strong OSU team whose strength was its defense. Agreed, 100%. But the really shocking thing, if you remember, was that we SHOULD HAVE SCORED 72! Remember that play in mopup time when Moevao (I think it was) fumbled and who-dat Duck LB #88 scooped it up and looked downfield and there was nothing but green between him and 72 POINTS IN THE CIVIL WAR! He stutter stepped, and Moevao dove and caught him by a shoestring, but OH MY GOD, ADAM, to even have a chance at 72? Mind boggling.

59% ROI in about 14 weeks. Not bad.

1. Up here in Seattle, the late-season collapse of the Ducks is dismissed as a regular old late-season choke. The sheer volume and intensity of injuries to Oregon’s offense is poorly understood, probably because that’s not really part of the narrative people up here want. Also, it’s probably hard for a UW fan to comprehend that at the point our offense ran roughshod over them we were already missing several major pieces.

2. If I think much about it, Dixon’s non-invite to New York bothers me, so I don’t really think about it.

3. I am hopeful. Some of my hope is based on my faith in the Pac 10 this year, and the notion that South Florida hasn’t run into anything like us, even if we’re badly wounded. A much larger share of my hope centers on the idea that never in the history of college football has a team lost a new starting quarterback in the opening quarter of three successive games, not to mention had the second string guy play damaged after just 10 minutes and never see the third-string guy because he’s out for the year. (It’s hard to even construct a sentence that captures all of this. You try.)

We have witnessed an apocalyptic turn of events; whatever Chip Kelly has worked up in each of the last three weeks has had to be scratched just minutes into the game, and the entire team has had to adjust on the fly to the new guy. If we assume–fairly, I think–that our starting quarterback on Dec. 31 can practice and play, I expect we’ll be all right. I thought our fifth-string QB against OSU did a magnificent job under the circumstances.

week 12: With Dixon out, Brink and Booty are now the only remaining “veteran” senior QBs. Both win and cover. I win $200. Overall total $1490. Net: +$490.

week 13: Booty vs. UCLA, TBD.