The Weekend That Was

As usual, this past weekend was great for a baseball enthusiast and college football nut like me. (It helped that I went 9-2 on my picks in the college game over the weekend.)   And the NFL was not too shabby either.  The extra wild card slot in MLB has added additional drama to the baseball season.  One has to go back a decade and a half to find the last time that the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland A’s were playing meaningful games this time of the year.  You have to go back to November 1998 to find the last time that Florida State, Kansas State, and Notre Dame were all ranked in the top 10 in the country.  And you have to go all the way back to 1974 to find the last time a Cardinals football team started a season 3-0.  What is going on?  Here are four things we learned this past weekend in MLB, four things in NCAA football, and four things in the NFL.

MLB

1. Miguel Cabrera now has a legitimate shot to win the American League Triple Crown, a feat that has not been accomplished since Carl Yastrzemski did it in 1967.  To put that in perspective, there has never been a Triple Crown winner in the post-moon landing era.  (It has not happened in the National League since Joe Medwick of the St. Louis Cardinals did it in 1937.)  Right now, Miggy has 42 HR (tied for first with Josh Hamilton), 131 RBI, and .331 AVG.  I am not sure if he can hang on but you can expect a player of his caliber to be locked in as the Tigers are desperately trying to win the AL Central.
2. R.A. Dickey has a legitimate chance to become the first knuckleball pitcher to win the Cy Young.  Right now, Dickey is in the top two in all three pitching Triple Crown categories (wins, ERA, strikeouts).  Dickey is second in with 19 wins, first with a 2.66 ERA, and second in strikeouts.  His main competition for the award is Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez who has 20 wins but has a slightly higher ERA and slightly fewer Ks and a significantly fewer innings pitched than Dickey.  A couple things that will hurt Dickey in the vote are that he plays on a fourth-place team (which should not hurt him but probably will) and lack of respect for the knuckleball.
3. The more you see the Orioles and A’s play, the more fun they are to watch.  The Orioles are winning on the strength of a bunch of young guys in the lineup and a slew of anonymous pitchers.  And if it goes into extra innings, they are money, winning 16 in a row this season.  The A’s have some young arms but their lineup is made up of mostly castaways and has beens, at least by baseball standards.  Raise your hand if you can name five everyday starters for Oakland without looking at a box score.  (If you raised your hand, I’m calling foul on that one.)
4. The Brewers are going to make the second wild card in the NL very interesting.  They are a hot team with some experience and they have been getting timely pitching, which never hurts this time of the year.

NCAA Football

1. I have said all along you can never count out a Bill Snyder-coached team.  Snyder’s Kansas State Wildcats marched into Norman, Oklahoma and gave a good Sooner team their first loss of the season.  K-State QB Collin Klein has positioned himself as the front runner for the Heisman (cause that changes weekly these days) and if you base it on nicknames alone, he is the hands down winner.  Optimus Klein, as he has become known, has put Manhattan, Kansas back on the map and has propelled them onto the national scene.  (What else would you expect from the leader of the Autobots?)
2. Wow, Florida State is really good.  I mean, really, really good.  It has been a few minutes since they have been a factor on the national scene, or even in the ACC for that matter.  Once the ACC expanded to 12 teams and created a conference championship game, it was expected that nearly every year, the Seminoles would be playing for that trophy.  (Miami was even placed in the opposite division in hopes that the two would square off more often than not.  So much for best laid plans.)  Once the Noles went down by 14 to Clemson in the second half, I think most were eager to see how Jimbo Fisher’s team would respond.  Were they going to fold like recent FSU teams may have or were they going to fight back?  They fought back, outscoring Clemson 35-9 the rest of the way.  Jimbo, I think the Noles are back.
3. What has happened to the Big 10?  I thought those guys knew how to play some football.  The two best teams thus far seem to be Northwestern and Minnesota.  With traditional powers Ohio State and Penn State ineligible to win the conference, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nebraska, and Michigan State looked poised to be the top dogs in the conference.  Then Michigan gets pummeled by Bama and loses over the weekend to Notre Dame; Wisconsin gets a taste of their own medicine against Oregon State; Nebraska gets stretched out by UCLA; and Michigan State gets dominated by Notre Dame.  Iowa has been terrible, losing this past weekend to Central Michigan and Illinois is even worse than that, losing a home game to Louisiana Tech by a score of 52-24.  Perhaps the biggest Big 10 game this week will be Indiana vs. Northwestern; not Wisconsin vs. Nebraska.
4. The SEC has some teams that aren’t very good, other than my beloved Wildcats.  Arkansas had QB Tyler Wilson back against Rutgers but lost their third in a row.  Auburn played a great game against LSU but could not win, causing the War Eagles to lose three games before the first of October for the first time in the history of the storied program.  And honestly, they could have lost to Louisiana-Monroe and been 0-4.  Vanderbilt, welcome back.  I'm not sure if you got a good look at the semi that rolled over you but it had Georgia tags.  And my beloved UK Wildcats, playing without starting QB Maxwell Smith, kept it close for a quarter (better than they could say the previous four seasons) before getting chomped by the Gators. 

NFL

1. The Saints aren't marching in this year...to the playoffs, that is.  After an ugly offseason where several key players and coaches were suspended (the players have since been reinstated) and the team received a black eye across the league for the infamous bounty scandal, the beginning of the season has not been much better.  The Saints were sitting pretty yesterday with a 24-6 lead on the lowly Chiefs before unraveling and losing for the third straight week 27-24 in overtime.  With head coach Sean Payton out for the entire season and interim coach Joe Vitt out a few more weeks (Can someone please explain to me how the players can be reinstated but the coaches still have to sit out?), the season may be getting long in New Orleans; especially considering that they are already three games back of a stout Atlanta Falcons team.
2. While many teams have been Jekyll and Hyde the first three weeks of the season, a couple have been able to separate themselves from the pack.  While everyone was busy anointing the San Francisco 49ers as the class of the NFL after two weeks, after week 3 the Niners won't have home field advantage over the Minnesota Vikings if it comes to that.  While the jury is still out on how could the Vikes can be this year, they are off to a great start and look to be much better than projected in the preseason.  The Cardinals of Arizona are off to their first 3-0 start since 1974 when they were the Cardinals of St. Louis.  This year's teams is being led by a strong defense that has allowed only 40 points in the first three games.  The aforementioned Falcons seem to be the class of the NFC thus far and the Houston Texans appear to be their counterpart in the AFC (yes, you read that correctly).
3. Playing a game every Thursday night in the NFL does not make sense to me; especially when you let a team play on Thursday one week and give them the Monday night game the following week as is the case with Green Bay this week.  It seems to me that team almost gains a second bye week.  And how about the Ravens playing a Sunday night game and then following that up with a Thursday game.  That's a pretty quick turnaround.  I'm all for doing that on Thanksgiving and later in the year but every week just seems a tad ridiculous.  Now the NFL week runs from Thursday to Monday.  Plus, several people don't even get the NFL Network, including me.  Not a big fan of this move.
4. You might as well get over the fact that replacement officials are doing the games right now.  While the NFL did lock the officials out, they have no incentive to settle the dispute.  Fans are still filling the seats, ratings are still through the roof, no games have been decided by a bad call yet, and most importantly, the players aren't giving the officials their full support.  If the players are truly tired of having replacement officials, they would threaten to not play until the issue is resolved.  But they don't have that in them.  As for the berating, belittling, and bullying of officials by players and coaches, I think they need to concentrate on things they can control instead of acting like fools.  Chasing down officials or grabbing them as they run off the field has never been acceptable.  I have seen professional NFL refs make many terrible calls but I have never seen them brow-beaten the way these guys are getting it.  I say job well done to the official last night who flagged John Harbaugh for relentlessly arguing (he claims he was trying to call a timeout) in a crucial point in the game.  And by the way, that field goal was good.  I guess the refs got one right.