NFL & College Football “Bad Beats” of the Week

(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

BAD BEATS: WHY WE LOST AND WHAT WE LEARNED

When I use a term like "bad beats" I am doing it very liberally. As anyone who has been around sports for a number of years knows, a bad beat is something rather specific, and it isn't fun. There is no feeling like snatching defeat right out of the jaws of victory.

For editorial purposes, however, let's operate on the assumption that EVERY loss is a bad beat, and that we're not satisfied unless we win them all. So, again for editorial purposes, we wine about it.

I'll be perfectly honest with you though - I didn't lose very much NFL betting this week. Of the games I bet on, all of them won except for the Dolphins, who laid down against the Falcons. That's 11 out of 12, and that is not going to happen often.

But hey, I'm greedy, so let's complain a little about my hometown team.

Really, what is to complain about except for the fact that they turned the ball over four times, when all of last year they only coughed it up 14 times. Of course you're not going to win anything when you play like that. It isn't like that game was a gut-wrencher either. The score could've been much worse. Jason Elam's leg ain't what it used to be. Instead of twelve points, it could have been a four-touchdown game, and Miami got lucky in that regard.

I think we'll see something better out of Miami before long. The Wildcat offense gained five yards in four plays, and it looked like Pat White had a real case of the first-game jitters. He overthrew one wide-open receiver, Ted Ginn, by a mile on one play that could have been a touchdown. It seems Miami did not want to show very much of the package with White in the pre-season, and that is one of the perils of being "practice-only." You miss testing in these game situations until mistakes can really hurt you.

By the way, it raised a few eyebrows that White was named the #2 quarterback for the game, while Chad Henne was the #3, to be used only in emergency. That's because he had be active in order to run the Wildcat package. I think that if this single-wing variation stays around (and I think it will) you're going to see a rule change that would allow all three QB's to be available, and the #3 could be inserted without any hardship incurred. Wildcat specialists are going to make it so.

Okay, enough of that, let's get back to crying about something.

We'll have to go to the college ranks, where after an opening week that had a few speed bumps, we (we being BusinessSpeak for "I") managed to do pretty well in Week 2. The four-star play with Kansas won easily, and Houston scored a big upset over Oklahoma State.

One game that really bothered me, though, was the Stanford-Wake Forest matchup. Usually if a west coast team is playing an early game on the east coast and they are going to drag ass, they do it early and stay flat. Stanford, however, took some precautions against that, switching their schedule around so they were on east coast time and flying in a day earlier than usual. It looked like it was all working, as the Cardinal, getting three points, was up 17-3 at the half.

In the second half, though, it looked like their defense was standing still at times, and they just to be doing that a couple of times on fourth down. Giving up 311 yards in one half of football is unacceptable, and Andrew Luck did nothing to stop the bleeding, Even so, the whole thing could have been saved, at least for the push. Teams always seem to be playing for a field goal. They run a play to put the ball in the middle of the field. They take no chances. Why the hell does a quarterback (in this case, Riley Skinner) have to sneak it in with two seconds to go? Could they not have figured out a safer way to win the game?

What did we learn? That after blowing a golden opportunity, the Cardinal may have a long, hard slog to get to a bowl game, and that Wake Forest appears to be a second-half team, gaining 231 more yards than in the first half over their two games.

We could possibly expand the meaning of "bad beat" to a game where you've already lost by halftime, right? That would be the case in the South Carolina-Georgia clash, where I went under 38 points and though I had every reason to expect that since these teams had struggling offenses and hadn't scored that much against each other since 1997 that I would be in the ballgame.

I was out of the ballgame pretty quick.

I change the channel when I know I've lost a game. Why would I continue to watch and punish myself? I don't know what my record is for changing the channel the earliest, but this game was a contender. In addressing the television, I was doing plays on words using the South Carolina nickname. Thirty-one points in the first QUARTER, then officially over for me with 12:36 left in the first half. Goodbye.

You know what, though? That one I might do all over again.

You can sense that I'm relatively calm right now. If we continue to do this column you are eventually going to see me getting irrational, because you can't possibly get through a season without some games that make you do that. Yes, I have kicked a TV in once - years ago, when Washington blew a win and a cover against Notre Dame in the final moments. Some of the older bettors know exactly which game I'm talking about. I have improved, though; in the Boise State-Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl a couple of seasons ago I had every reason to punch through the walls, but I stayed under control.

I stayed under control because....well, because there are medications for such things.

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