Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Weekend Review....Jeter & College Football

The 2009 College Football season kicked off this weekend. It began with a punch and ended with a fury. Here are some things we learned in week 1 of College Football....
  • Pre-season polls are still as useless as tits on a bull. They are prejudicial, subjective, based off of roughly zero facts in evidence and skew the NCAA landscape for the entire season. Don't believe me? Just ask Missouri, Miami, Michigan and Cincinnati, who were all written off as non-factors before the weekend started. Ask Ohio State and Iowa, who were severely overrated until an Armed Forces School and a Directional school came within a whisker of beating them both.......on their own home turf, no less.
  • LeGarrette Blount is nothing more than a thug and a punk. But then again, we knew that before Thursday Night's "punch heard round the world". This guy is going to be earning millions next season in the NFL while honest, hard working Americans struggle to scrape by. A true testament to the ass backwards society we live in.
  • Oklahoma will struggle against good teams without Sam Bradford. Then again so would Florida without Tebow, Texas without McCoy, Ole Miss without Snead, etc... In other words, quit overreacting as though OU was overrated. BYU is a good team and basically every other school in the country would struggle if their #1 QB went down, too.
  • Florida, Texas, UNC, USC can all beat teams comprised of players who would be second string......in high school. Congrats, boys!
  • Alabama, BYU, Boise State, Oklahoma St. can all beat ranked opponents and should be applauded for scheduling real out of conference games (therefore, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma, Oregon and Georgia deserve the same applause).
  • Rutgers is probably not going to be that sleeper team coming out of the Big East, as all the "experts" had predicted.
  • The Big East gets an automatic berth in a BCS game, while BYU, Boise State and Utah will have to go undefeated just to get consideration. Yup, that seems fair.
  • Miami and FSU may not be all the way back just yet, but they provided us with the game of the weekend and showed the rest of the ACC that they both play offense this year. Here's hoping for a December rematch in the ACC Title game. Though, UNC, Va Tech and Ga Tech might have something to say about it.
  • Missouri was picked to finish 4th in the Big 12 North behind Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado. That seems a bit off now, doesn't it?
  • The SEC East just became a 1-horse race. But the SEC West, now that's going to be fun - Alabama, LSU and Ole Miss are three teams all with a viable shot at Atlanta in December.

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In other weekend news, Derek Jeter went 0-8 in the Yankees Double Header yesterday vs. Tampa Bay. Why is this news? Great question. Glad you asked. This is Jeter's 14th major league season. This was the first time in his career that he went hitless in both games of a double header. That is remarkable. So, that got me doing some research on Jeter. And I'll say it - when Jeter retires, he should go down as the second greatest player in New York Yankees history. That's right. I believe when the dust settles and people truly examine his numbers and take everything into account, he should be regarded higher that Mantle and Dimaggio and Gehrig and Berra and all of them, except Ruth. Consider the following - at some point over the next week or so, he will eclipse Gehrig for the most hits in Yankee history. He already has more hits by a shortstop than any other player in Major League history.

When Jeter steals his next base, he will join a very exclusive list in the 200/300/.300 club. He will join Willie Mays, Paul Molitor and Roberto Alomar as the only four players in history to hit 200 home runs, steal 300 bases and have a career batting average over .300. Babe Ruth can't make that claim, neither can Mantle, Dimaggio, Hank Aaron or even Barry Bonds. And, Jeter will have the highest batting average of the 4 players in the club.

Jeter should finish his career with over 3,000 hits and possibly even 3,500 hits. He won the 1996 Rookie of the Year. He is a 4-time World Series Champion. He is a 10-time All Star. He has won 3 gold gloves as well as the 2000 All Star Game and World Series MVP. The sad thing is, the writers who vote for the season MVP rely so heavily on numbers and not intangibles that Jeter has yet to win an AL MVP. That should change this year. But it appears he is behind teammate Mark Texiera (who was MIA in April) and Joe Mauer (who missed 3 weeks of the season and is playing on a team probably not headed for the post season). Jeter deserves the MVP this year. He deserves his place in Yankee lore.

Sure, Jeter's number will be retired one day and he will be enshrined in both Cooperstown (though, apparently he won't be getting Jim Rice's vote) and Monument Park. But Jeter's rightful place is next to Babe Ruth as one of the two greatest Yankees ever to don the Pinstripes.

1 comment:

  1. As a baseball fan I have to agree Krack. Funny thing is, why is this sport more then any other sport so wrapped up in history? It's like you can't become a legend anymore. Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa all were heros and quickly became goats. Pujols is argueably the greatest player in Cardinal history but if you ask some 70 year old baseball "talking head" they would slap you for not saying Stan the Man or Gibson. Hell, most of them have forgot the likes of the Wizard. Somehow someway if you started your career post 1985, you gave up your right to be considered a legend...

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