One of the things that we have to look forward to on Sundays during the fall is a great day of NFL football.  On Sunday, October 18, 2009, one of those great games was the New York Giants at the New Orleans Saints.  Both teams have started the season on fire.  Saints quaterback Drew Brees is making his fantasy owners happy with the mileage (not yardage) and the Giants start the day at 5-0 and looking strong.

The OmniSports Geek, lives in Raleigh, NC.  Our local Pro teams would include the Carolina Panthers and the Washington Redskins.  So I can understand why WRAL and WRAZ would choose to cover the local teams since that’s where the fan base is.  Today’s Redskins matchup is with the 0-5 Kansas City Chiefs, pitting a winless team against a 2-3 team.  Their two wins were against the 0-5 St. Louis Rams and the 0-5 Tampa Bay Bucs.  Two of their 3 losses are against the 1-3 Carolina Panthers and the 1-4 Detroit Lions.  Needless to say this game is going to be as anemic of a pro-football game as there can be.

But wait, the other game is the 0-5 Tampa Bay Buc’s going up against the 1-3 Carolina Panthers, two of the other most anemic teams in the league.

Okay, I get it.  NC TV should carry the Panthers game because they are the local team and the fan base needs to see the games through thick and thin.  But Washington is further away.  Surely some local exec could make a decision to show the Houston/Cincinnati game or the Pittsburgh/Cleveland game.  There are a ton of Pittsburgh fans here in Raleigh, perhaps more than Redskin fans.Come on, get off these lame games and get us to games that will matter come playoff time and with exciting offenses.

Now I do subscribe to DirecTV and could get Sunday Ticket, but its pretty expensive on our current budget. Ironically DISH network advertises that they give you 100+ free games. These are of course the games the Networks carry, so DISH subscribers in our area are stuck with the lame games too.

So I’m enjoying Lynyrd Skynyrd in concert on HDNet. Maybe the 4pm game will be more attractive.

Full Disclosure: I’m a born and bred Kentuckian. I’ve lived here in the heart of the Atlantic Coast Conference for 10 years. I have no loyalty for any school’s athletics in the ACC. I respect UNC/Chapel Hill and Duke’s basketball program for the success that they have earned. UNC and Duke have had success in non-money sports like Soccer, Lacrosse and Baseball and those programs deserve respect as well.

All opinions expressed herein are of course tainted.

What I can’t fathom is why that people here worry about how the conference is seen as a whole. Growing up in SEC land and spending a lot of time around Big 10, Big 12 and Big East teams and fans, listening to news casts and talk radio hosts in these markets, I don’t ever remember much more than a passing mention about how the conference was fairing against other conferences. But that seems to dominate the fans and local media in in ACC land. Maybe these other conferences are secure in their standings?

What should be important and discussed is one simple question “Is my team going to kick your team’s behind next week?”

What I’ve learned since living here is that the ACC has an ego that pretty much isn’t present in other conferences and its bruised. No one at Florida cared how the ACC teams did this past week. They didn’t care how the SEC teams did as a conference either. Its just “How good is Tennessee and Alabama and will they be in our way to a national championship?” Maybe Florida cared how the Miami-Florida State game fared, but beyond that practically no one in Gainesville could even tell you that the ACC was 5-7 on opening weekend.

This morning while driving in to work, 850 the Buzz (WRBZ 850 AM) and Adam Gold made it to my radio. It was so much fun listening to him complain about the ACC’s embarrassing opening weekend. He suggested (and I saw a similar suggestion in Caulton Tudor’s column in the News & Observer) that the ACC should play conference games on opening weekend. What? That has to be one of the craziest suggestions I’ve ever heard.

Why you ask?

The ACC is struggling with football mediocrity. They opened the season 5-7 and had what seems to be several embarrassing losses. But this suggestion would guarantee that every year they would start out 6-6. Isn’t 50-50 the very definition of mediocrity? You want to bring your self-esteem up by insuring that you can never be better than average?

Well when you loose games to “piddly Division I-AA teams” I guess that should be a concern. But lets look at reality. Using the Jeff Sarigan computer rankings (since it gives us a look at the whole 200+ teams in Division I football), this is how things looked going into this past weekend’s opening games:

*NOTE: I don’t feel like analyzing all the schools. These are the key ones for the Raleigh-Durham market. You shouldn’t really care that Virginia (46th) lost to William and Mary (117th).

*NOTE 2: Actually this may have been the biggest embarrassment for the conference. A 46th rank team shouldn’t get their behinds handed to them by a team ranked 117. Maybe we should care about that game after all?

Based on rankings, the above results were almost perfect except for Florida State loosing to Miami. South Carolina (31st) beat NCSU (60th). In fact, NCSU improved in the rankings to 58th in this weeks ratings. The Tar Heals killed the Citadel which a team some 90 ranks above should do. The AP had UNC in the top 25, though Sarigan has them well out of the top 25 at 52nd. We will see what happens when UNC plays a stronger opponent.

There has been a lot of tears spent on the Duke loss to Richmond. There shouldn’t be. Richmond was the computer favorite coming into the weekend. The difference between Division I-A and I-AA is 15 scholarships. A well coached I-AA team with some talent will best a weak-to-mediocre I-A team with surprising frequency. I like the Duke football coach David Cutcliffe. In time he will build a program that wins more games that it looses; however to look past an opponent because they are in the Championship series when they are ranked above you is a grievous mistake.

The Virginia whoopin’ and Miami beating Fla. State are the two real black marks on the weekend. Everything else happened as it should. The one game the ACC should want back is the Wake Forest / Baylor game. Wake Forest was ranked significantly higher (30th vs. 82nd) than Baylor and lost to a surprisingly good Baylor team. Amazingly Baylor jumped to 27th in this weeks ratings and Wake Forest improved as well, rising to 21st in the Sagrigan rankings.

Gold went on to say that the Miami-FSU game saved the weekend for the ACC. I don’t think so. There is no doubt that it was a fantastic game; an instant classic. But the ranked FSU team lost to an un-ranked team at home. How can this be anything other than an embarrassment in Tallahassee and at the ACC offices over in Greensboro? Great game or not a conference striving to be seen as a strong conference can’t have their stars loosing.

Why is the ACC a great basketball conference? Because Duke and UNC kick everyone elses behinds and those two stars get to shine. The SEC is strong because Florida, Alabama and LSU dominate the rest of the conference. Sure Georgia and Ole Miss throw in the “tough games” to help out in schedule strength. But at the end of the day, the Kentucky’s and South Carolina’s are there to be win’s in the other team’s record books. BTW: Kentucky (47th) killed their opening day opponent, the other Miami(OH)(126th) 42-0 I’m just sayin’.

My advice to those pimpin’ the ACC as a whole: Stop. Spend time trying to make your school better and let the conference take care of itself. Once the teams do their job the rest will fall in line.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Leave a comment below!

I didn’t actually twitter much during the game.  I’m a sports geek and I was pretty focused on the game.  I think I tweeted 2 or 3 times.  I follow around 240 people and boy were they chatty during the game.  400 tweets and I would guess 70% of them were Superbowl Related.

There were Pro-Steeler’s peeps (the majority), some Cardinals peeps, and a few peeps who didn’t give a rats bum.

Well most people see geeks and nerds.  Nerds wear pocket protectors, big thick glasses and have Spock Ears and a collection of Star Wars toys.  Geek is about loving something perhaps too passionately.  Generally we like our Star Wars, our computers, or our cell phones and many techies are geeks.  But you can be geek about other things.  Will our Knitting geek’s raise your hand and be counted, for instance!

Two weekends ago a lot of testosterone got together in Phoenix and Pittsburgh with participants coming from New York and Maryland and charted a two week flurry of media hype and attention.  Observers from all over arrived in the Valley of the Sun and Steeltown to take part in these two events which really other than making a lot of money for some people had the single effect of polarizing the country in a rift more serious than any political election.

For the mean, nasty, bruising Pittsburgh Steelers football team would head to Tampa, Florida to meet the unlikely underdog, the Arizona Cardinals a team with a lot of talent and no respect.  The old Underdog cartoon had a mild mannered beagle who had a drug addiction, but when he was high, he was unstoppable to a heroic level.   Much like that beagle, the Cardinals are a quiet mild mannered team that you can’t help but like.  They don’t offend anyone.

This is the Super Bowl.  Super Bowl XLIII to be precise (thats 43 for the non-math and sport-geeks reading this).  Forty-two times before two teams of oversized, over-muscled, armor laden warriors have met on a battlefield to war for three hours and at the end have one victor stand tall.

The Steelers have been to this event more times than people can remember and have come out the victors five times.  For the Cardinals, this is their first trip to the show and Sunday’s game should be a show with their high flying offense against a lot of pain and anguish coming their way from the boys from Western Pennsylvania.

But this isn’t about the 100 or so players or even the 75,000 spectators that will pack the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.  This is much bigger.  Even those Nerds who normally don’t care about sports will be come a sports geek for the day, turning their 60′ plasma TV’s off of the Sci-Fi channel for NBC’s coverage of the game.  Gigapeeps will watch this one event around the world.  It is probably the biggest event on the planet.

But why as this become such a big event, after all its a bunch of brutes pushing themselves around?  Well a good part of it has to be our natural human instinct for conflict and combat.  We are natural warriors and even the most passive person will find a little warrior bubbling up in their soul no matter how hard you put it back.  Maybe you don’t care for the combat, but you will generally cheer for one of the teams.

As I boarded my flight back to Raleigh, the Captain had his Cardinal’s Conference Championship Cap hanging up for the 180 or so passengers to revere.  Needless to say the 5 Steelers fans flying to Tampa for the game had to get their shots in.

Its also about money and its something that money geeks pay very close attention to.  This year, the ads for the game are going for $30 million per 30 second spot, thats a megabuck a second for watching someone hawk their wares.  The economy sucks?  Well there are some people this isn’t a problem for as NBC will no doubtably sell out its inventory of ads for the game.  Of course that money will go to NBC, the NFL, the teams, the players and the rest of the league and their players and staffs, so when its divided out, it should still be a good economic stimulus package.  Perhaps the US Government should consider this model?

Anyway, this geek and his absolutely non-geek wife or the anti-geek (I hate to break it to her, she’s a sports and couponing geek) will be hanging out with some photo geeks around a really high tech audio/video geek’s dream setup to watch those 30 second commercials and a little ass-kicking.

So down a beer, eat some chips, pick a side (this Cowboy’s fan will be cheering for his #2 in their quest for #6, sorry redbird lovers….) and take part in this spectacle that is “Geek to the Core”.