I wanna watch football

Pretty busy weekend of football. Without getting into too many specifics, let me just cover what sticks out most to me.


1. BYU at Washington

We can call it whatever you want, but lets just use "The call heard round the world" to get going in the right direction. Anyone you talk to will tell you PAC-10 refs are notoriously awful. The conference itself is ludicrous for requiring that its officials officiate all PAC-10 home games when the rest of the nation brings in non-conference officials for inter-league games. That being said, this one a poorly officiated game, punctuated by a necessary yet improper call. It is insane to "enforce" a celebration call against a quarterback who just lead a young team back to a last second score to potentially tie the game against a ranked opponent at home. The crowd was going nuts, the team was going nuts, what was wrong with him getting a little excited. The officials missed calls and made other bad calls all game long; why did they suddenly feel the need to make that one?

Don't get me wrong, I'll take the bittersweetness (I made that up I think) of the victory. I just am surprised that a crew of PAC-10 officials would make that call at a home game against an "inferior" opponent (as the FSN commentators repeatedly alluded to) when we've seen more egregious miscarriages of officiating from them in the past (for evidence, see the Oklahoma/Oregon game from two seasons ago.)

All in all, the game was entertaining (much more so than the semi-snoozer last week against NIU), it was well fought, and despite the obvious choices for my MVP of Max Hall, Dennis Pitta, or Harvey Unga, I'll go with a less obvious one in Scott Johnson, left CB. That dude was on point with every tackle and defended well against the passes in his area all game long. A few things that worried me would include the lack of containment on Jake Locker (Brian Johnson of Utah will have a field day with us if we don't fix that), the multiple dropped passes by Collie (I'm sure he'll be back next week at home againtst UCLA), and the several long yardage first downs we game up after some good stints of steller defense.

Next up:

versus

Kickoff is at 1:30 pm at LES. Game will be televised on Versus

2. Fantasy Football

In all the years I've been playing fantasy football, I've never seen my team under perform and underwhelm as much as they did this weekend. I know that putting stock into Yahoo's predictions shouldn't hold much water, but its a generally close gestimate of what to expect. So when your team under performs by nearly 100 points in a week predicted to score twice that many points, you get a little frustrated. It will be tough this week to not hold a fire sale and bail on my team. I still stand by the fact that I have a good team; they just need to get week one out of the way.

That being said, I'm glad I'm in two other leagues on ESPN; both of which my teams performed as expected or better and I should prevail. Bring on week 2.


3. "Daddy, I wanna watch football."

Bless her heart and the patience she allows me to veg in front of any football game I can, but Melanie's tolerance for football watching will never rival Leah. Tonight we got home after 10 from dessert at the McGee's and I sat down here to evaluate the fantasy football weekend and I hear Leah mumble something after I've just turned the TV off (Leah had turned it on without consent from either of her parents and it was bed time.) Next thing I hear is Melanie asking, "Did you hear what Leah just said?"
"What Leah?" I reply.
"Daddy, I wanna watch football," comes the sweetest little voice.
Can I tell you how many times she jumped up and down celebrating with me during BYU's game yesterday? She's a great little football companion.