I actually watched some college football tonight and both games I watched were pretty good.
I watched the Buckeyes subdue Minnesota on the road by 14 points in a competitive game. The new Ohio State quarterback Stroud and the new feature running back Hightower are both excellent. I see no reason Ohio State won’t be a top five or four team once again as the season rolls along.
The other game I watched was Boise at UCF…which turned out to be an excellent game won by UCF 36-31.
This was a great game as Gus Malzahn’s new team roared back from a 21 point deficit to open the season with a win.
Both of these teams would be nice additions to the new look Big 12 if Bob Bowlsby and the remaining eight teams get serious about getting the league back to twelve teams.
My list for the Big 12 expansion for the four spots would go in this order… 1 BYU, 2 UCF, 3 Cincy, 4a Houston or 4b Boise.
I’d probably prefer Houston becaus if you add Kelvin Sampson’s Cougars to the basketball mix to go along with Kansas and Baylor the Big 12 would still be the best hoops league in the country reaping all that Texas high school basketball talent.
It would be a pretty good football league as well…maybe even better than the current PAC 12 given where USC and UCLA are right now. I have LSU at UCLA this Saturday circled on my kist of games to watch. I want to see how that goes before I make any judgements on UCLA.
Let’s do this hypothetical exercise…if you removed OU and Texas from this season’s Big 12 and replaced them with BYU, UCF, Cincy, and Houston this is how I would seed the top six teams in the league:
1 Iowa State, 2 Cincy, 3 Oklahoma State, 4 UCF, 5 TCU and 6 BYU.
This would be about right for Oklahoma State. If Spencer Sanders grows as a QB this season and doesn’t kill his team with critical turnovers I could even see O State maybe winning this league. This Big 12 could conceivably be the fourth best football conference and would be the best basketball conference in the land.
If I were Kayse Shrum and I had this option…this wouldn’t be horrible given the woes the PAC 12 faces in becoming relevant in football given the landscape.
On Saturday in Norman..I’ll be focused on Nik Bonitto and the Sooners’ defense. I want to see if OU is ready to take another step forward on this side of the football. I want to see how they tackle in space and their overall physicality. I want to see opposing players tackled and dropped at the point of contact. I want to see some nasty because if the Sooners want to beat Alabama and Clemson at some point some serious nasty will be needed in the trenches.
I want to see if these Sooners without Ronnie Perkins and Rhamondre can replace that physicality on both sides of the football. Rhamondre had a very nice pre-season with New England scoring six touchdowns and along with Mac Jones will be two rookies I spend time watching this NFL season.
As far as where I have OU ranked…I have them somewhere in my top six, but I want to see the defensive culture under Alex Grinch continue to evolve before I make some statement claiming the Sooners are a legit national championship caliber team.
As far as Covid goes…I watched two minutes of the Tennessee vs. Bowling Green game. The stadium was packed with very few wearing masks. Yikes. The Tennesee state COVID numbers in the next few weeks will be interesting.
We all love college football, but please be smart in the stadiums.
BOOMER!