Our weekly recap of the buys and sells of the college football world rolls on into week 12. What are the trends at this point, inquisitive buyer?
-Bullish on the narrative teams. As always toward the end of the year, the bowls have started to drool over the prospective teams for their showcase. The established narratives of the season-Notre Dame’s return to glory being the easiest and most prominent one, for example-will push a lot of the buys and sells this week. Wonder what those are? Well, they’re whatever ESPN is pitching on Gameday mixed with a cursory understanding of whose fanbases travel and buy booze against whose fans don’t. (Hello, BYU fans, and yes, we know you don’t want a drink, and yes, we know, not even coffee! Thank God that South Park made the ridicule of Mormonism our last accepted national public predjudice. )
-The long-awaited rise of-gasp-trends! With college football, the establishment of trends is so hard to get a read on thanks to the relatively small sample size and the peppering of program schedules with ample cupcake filler games. By this point in the season, though, the Mcguffin teams of the early season have shed their skins and either tanked or settled into complacent medicocrity. Conversely, teams making a deadleg intro to the season have recovered, most notably Miami, where Kyle Wright is settling into the role of efficient resident tall white qb quite nicely.
-The unlikeliness of late season gaffes. If you’re a playoffnik like ourselves, it’s nice to think that Texas or USC will drop one in the remaining few weeks of the season. It won’t happen, though, especially for Texas, whose defense is getting more and more satanic as the end of the season approaches. Oklahoma set a deceptive standard for late collapses in the past few years; most teams won’t do that once they get rolling, barring catastrophic injury to multiple key players or having someone named “Jason White” as your qb.
So with the sound of nails being driven into many a team’s coffin, we present our buys, sells, and holds.
Sound effects would indicate here to HOLD HOLD HOLD on teams like UGA and Ohio State!!!
ORSON’S BUYS
Miami. The defense propped them up before Kyle Wright had his sealegs. Now Wright’s working the totally bankable play-action ‘Cane offense in tandem with the rabid ‘D, who may not have a single star but, as Bruce Feldman pointed out in his column on Monday, are on track for what may be their most dominant season ever. We may be disappointed in their lack of Da ‘U’ flair-no recent Trick Daddy sightings, no weapons possession charges or reports of players smuggling kilos in Sebastian the Ibis’s uniform-but playing the best football of any team on the East Coast almost makes up for the lack of shennanigans in Coral Gables. Should Texas fall, they’d make the best straight up match for USC in a title game.
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