College Football Week 10: Bad Advice, Bold Prediction, and Something Else

(The Jackets' defense is excited. Why? We're into BABPSE Week 10, of course.)

Call it Jersey-gate 2009.

Actually, please don't. Do not, under any circumstances, even think about using that term.

Anyway, for those who only have so much mental RAM and choose to occupy it with unimportant issues like the economy, getting a swine flu vaccine, walking your dog, or Jon and Kate Gosselin or whatever, Georgia Tech will not be wearing their home whites this weekend.

Actually, they're technically road whites—white is traditionally the color reserved for the road team in college football—but Paul Johnson's boys prefer them at home.

Trouble is, they have to get permission from the road team to wear them, and Wake said no. It seems the Deacs don't like wearing their black home unis when traveling to "warmer" climates, because their players will get hotter than a Texas Tuesday. Or something. 

Projected temperature at game-time in Atlanta: 67 degrees. Projected temperature at same time in Winston-Salem: 62 degrees. You be the judge.

Bad advice

Really more advice for Wake than Tech: Protect Riley Skinner. And I don't mean just from the pass rush.

Concussions are a scary, scary thing, especially for quarterbacks, who get hit so often.

There are horror stories of former NFL lifers whose memory loss got so bad, they'd leave their house to go to the store, only to forget where they were headed on the way.

Concussions are dangerous, no other way to stretch it, and getting one makes it easier to get two, makes it easier to get three, etc.

Tech will come just as hard after Skinner as it does any other opponent, and while the Jackets don't have much of a reputation for playing dirty, they rush the passer quite well.

If Skinner starts to show the effects of his concussion courtesy of last weekend, Jim Grobe needs to get him out.

This concern, I assure you, is not born of some personal desire to see Georgia Tech with a better shot to win—I think Tech handles Wake even if Skinner plays.

This is all about the health of a young man. You only get one body, and you only get one brain. Both should be treated as such.

Bold prediction

Scott Blair's gonna have himself a day Saturday.

Why?

Because I'm out of other bold predictions.

But seriously, the passing game, Jonathan Dwyer, the defense, even the punt game, I've thrown a lot of stuff out there, and this time I'm going with Blair.

He hasn't had a whole lot to do recently—two field goal tries in Tech's last five games—but he sort of won his job back with a two-for-two performance at Virginia (I say 'sort of,' because kicker is a 'sort of' honorary position in Tech's touchdown-hungry offense).

So I'm predicting a big day for the kid from Calhoun, Ga. If nothing else, he'll be hard-pressed to kick eight extra points like last weekend. But then kickers rarely have control over that sort of thing, I guess.

Something else

Keeping it brief but, I think, quite interesting:

Wake Forest is the only team Paul Johnson has ever faced more than once and not beaten.

Don't get too excited yet, though. He's 0-2 against the Demon Deacons.

Finally, a prediction

Skinner definitely adds a variable Tech probably didn't want, although he is going to have to react in literally almost all the right ways for the Demon Deacons to win this one.

Something in my gut tells me to go with Tech's defense here, and the offense is a unit possessed right now. Possessed by what, I don't know, Pythagoras maybe.

Whatever it is, Tech's been taking numbers and squaring them until they got really high and gaining that many yards lately.

Running as well under the belief that the Yellow Jackets are not frauds, and that they deserve their place at the top of the ACC pyramid, this is not a game they lose.

So they won't.

Prediction: Georgia Tech 35, Wake Forest 21. Poor Scott Blair.