On Tuesday, November 2, the initial College Football Playoff rankings of the 2022 season were released, and the Tennessee Volunteers leapfrogged the Georgia Bulldogs, who were atop the Associated Press poll, to become the top-ranked football team in the country.

Then they played Georgia on a soggy Saturday afternoon in Athens.

To be the best, you've got to beat the best, Vols. And you didn't. Final score: Tennessee 13, UGA 27. Honestly, it wasn't really even that close.

Driven in no small part by the chip on Bulldogs fans' shoulders, the game atmosphere was truly great, the best in years. The enthusastic fans were really into the game from long before kickoff, were only made more rabid when the refs stole a safety from Georgia in the second quarter, and somehow managed to get even more energetic when the rain started falling in the third quarter. What a bunch of damn good dawgs!

Reminder to future Walter: This is why you buy season tickets, to go to games like this one. Fantastic.

Thanks to friend James for keeping me company in the rain. I certainly enjoyed myself.

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I haven't dumped on the Miami Dolphins enough this year. Let me start correcting that.

Yesterday before the NFL trade dealine, the Miami Dolphins traded their starting running back, Jay Ajayi, to the Philadelphia Eagles for a 4th round pick. (True story: they wanted to trade their best wide receiver, Jarvis Landry, but they couldn't find a taker willing to pay the asking price, presumably a 3rd round pick.) Ajayi had three 200+ yard games last year and ran for a total of 1,272 yards. For comparison, Jay Cutler passed for only 1,059 in 2016. Given that Cutler no longer has a running back to help him anymore, that number is going to have to get a lot better fast. That doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.

You may have had the misfortune of seeing last Thursday's "game" in which the Dolphins were beaten 40-0. That wasn't because Cutler was out with broken ribs, and it wasn't because Ajayi forgot the playbook. It was because the offensive line played offensively. Who saw that coming? I mean, it's not like the offensive line coach quit two weeks earlier after being caught doing cocaine and models. Oh, wait. Yes, it was exactly like that.

But that was just one game. Otherwise, the Dolphins' offense has been great! Not. The team is last in the league in points scored. It's also last in the league in yards gained. Normally, when a team is bad in all offensive categories, they'll fire the Offensive Coordinator. But the Dolphins can't do that, because the Offensive Coordinator is also the Head Coach. So bye-bye, Ajayi.

Adding insult to insult, the Dolphins were careful to belittle Ajayi on the way out the door. "He has a bad attitude and bad work habits. And, oh yeah, bad knees, too!" Stay classy, Miami! You really fleeced Philadelphia out of that 4th round pick.

There are 9 games left in the season, but at least the team still has Cutler! How the hell am I supposed to cheer for this dumpster fire?

(On a seemingly unrelated note: the initial 2017 NCAA College Football Playoff Rankings were also released yesterday, and the Georgia Bulldogs have jumped the Alabama Crimson Tide for first place. Whoo hoo! If the price I have to pay for a great Bulldogs team is a terrible Miami team, I'm in.)

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I was worried Georgia might have their hands full today. Turns out, not so much.

UGA and MSU entered the game undefeated and ranked 11 and 17, respectively. However, early season rankings don't mean much. UGA squeaked by Notre Dame while MSU had walked over LSU. That made it seem that MSU might be tough competition. The final score, 3-31, proved otherwise.

It's still early in the season, but if Georgia can play as well as they did today against the rest of their SEC schedule, it could be a pretty good year.

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As I mentioned, Georgia won their season opener and the pollsters responded... by dropping us to #2 in the national rankings. In fact, USC leapt from #3 in both polls to #1, overtaking UGA and Ohio State.

The conventional wisdom at work here was that Georgia and Ohio State toyed with easy cupcake Division I-AA (also known as the Division I Football Championship Subdivision) teams, Georgia Southern and Youngstown State respectively, while USC overcame a legitimate contender in Virginia. This makes sense if you don't think about it, and most coaches won't and most sportswriters can't.

Virginia plays in the ACC, which as a football conference has been collapsing under the weight of their own expectations for a few years. The four teams in the ACC that opened their 2008 season against Division I-A (also known as the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision) opponents all lost. The two ACC teams that had the misfortune of opening against SEC schools, NC State and Clemson, both looked like they were playing the game for the first time in lopsided beatings by South Carolina and Alabama, respectively. (Worse, Clemson is expected to be the best team in the conference and was beaten embarassingly by Alabama, an expected also-ran in the SEC.) Last year's Virginia squad struggled to finish 9-4, defeating only three teams (hapless 1-11 Duke, Dave Wannstedt's inexplicably overrated 5-7 Pitt, and the worst 5-7 Miami, Florida team in decades) by more than a single touchdown. Or to put it another way, the team was 18 points away from a 3-10 season and isn't expected to win more than 4 games this season.

Meanwhile, Youngstown State has won 4 national titles in Division I-AA competition, second only to the 6 won by... Georgia Southern. While these two programs haven't played at their peak in recent years, they're proud programs with a better history of winning than Virginia. (Virigina has never even won an outright ACC Championship, merely sharing the title twice with two other teams, including Duke, in the past 55 years.).

After Appalachian State University, a three time Division I-AA Champion, rocked the football world by defeating Michigan in last season's opening weekend, should we really be insulting these championship caliber "second tier" schools by considering them as "cupcake" opponents for Division I-A programs?

Oh, but what do I know? I'm neither a coach or a sportwriter. I just watch a lot of football.

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Yes, I know that I should have posted yesterday in order to maintain my "every 3 days" posting rule, but I omitted the post on purpose so that I could prepare for today's post, the early kickoff to my Annual Batman and Football Month!

Today was the kickoff for the 2009 University of Georgia Bulldogs, who start the season ranked #1 in both the coaches and sportswriters national polls for the first time in school history. It was also the first game for Loran's Best, newly baptized as Uga VII, the latest in a distinguished line of Georgia mascots.

Uga VII was introduced to the fans exactly 10 minutes before kickoff of today's season opener against Georgia Southern. And he remained pretty much the focus of the fans and the cameras for the remainder of the game. Even a brief appearance by Georgia Southern's live eagle mascot, Freedom, couldn't steal Uga VII's spotlight.

Like all season openers, the presentation had it's rough spots. The boosters failed to properly support the Georgia "G" flag that the player's typically run through following pre-game introductions (as seen on recent ESPN promotions), and as a result the flag tore in two long before the players ever reached it. The GSU Band apparently got lost on the way to the game, failing to arrive until mere minutes before their scheduled halftime performance. [Update 09/02/08: From my source in Statesboro: "It pains me to say that I have to correct the information I gave you a bit.  YES, the bus was broke down for an hour and a half and that was the main reason they were late... however, the mother fuckers did get lost. I found that out last night. So you guys guessed correctly. Still, the MAIN reason was the flat."] Even the grounds crew needs some extra practice this year. Note the drop shadow error on the "B" in the endzone "Bulldogs" below.

Despite the snags and the the melting heat of the early afternoon sun, we beat GSU 45-21. It was a foregone conclusion that we would win easily, and we did. As a result, Uga VII started his reign as mascot with a 1-0 record. That's the sort of tradition that I can get behind.

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Last night, in the game between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers, it was challenged whether there were too many men on the field for Chicago. After several minutes, referee Larry Nemmers came back to say that there weren't. Of course, by that time, John Madden had twice proven that there were 12 men visibly on the field, not 11. Why did it take the officials so long to count TO THE WRONG NUMBER?

Later, when packers coach Mike McCarthy challenged the spot of the ball on an apparent Bears' first down, after several minutes of staring at tape, Nemmers placed the ball about a foot backwards. This is not at all the full yard or more difference in the spot of the ball that the replay had shown. Though spotting the ball has always been a largely arbitrary action, why, when you have ample time to look at it, do you get it so wrong? To add insult to injury, the Packers lost a timeout over the "failed" challenge of the spot of the ball (because the re-spot following the replay review resulted in a first down anyway) despite the fact that the replay proved that the coach was correct in challenging and should not have resulted in a Bears first down.

Note, please, that when Nemmers placed the ball about a foot backwards, he was well aware that the Bears would still have the necessary yardage for a first down. He had just brought out the chains to measure the gain before the challenge. After moving the ball, he ordered the chains on the field and measured again. Since he had just measured, knowing full well the location of the first down marker, this second measurement was only for dramatic purposes as he revealed that the Bears still had a first down.

Two failed instant replay calls in favor of the Bears while playing a game in Green Bay? Unheard of!

After several years of provisional implementation, so-called "instant" replay was made a permanent part of the NFL game earlier this year. That's a travesty. It's one thing to get a call wrong on the field. Officials are human and prone to making mistakes. It's another thing altogether to stop a game and extend its length by minutes in order to get a call wrong while staring at a recording of a play. That's just inhumane and inexcusable.

Maybe Larry Nemmers, who has been an official in the NFL since 1985 and a referee since 1991 has just gotten so old that he can't see well anymore. But I suspect that it's more than that. Every year, the NFL delegates that their best (i.e. "fewest blown calls") officiating staff be on the field for the Super Bowl. Despite being a referee for 16 years, Nemmers has never been on the field at the end of January. By the way, before joining the NFL's part-time officiating staff, Nemmers was a high school principal in Elgin, Illinois, a suburb of -- guess where? -- Chicago! (The Chicago Bears, loser of last year's Super Bowl, came into the game with a 1-4 record, desperately needing a win to stay alive in the divisional rankings. They got it, thanks in no small part to you, Larry!)

Bah!

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