That stadium looks pretty cool, reminds me of a Qwest field the way they have an "eagle tail" in the endzone.
I'm not sure if you're referring to UH or ALA, but Alabama in 2007 was not very good. They lost, at home, to Univ of Louisana-Monroe. They had one big win against Tennessee, but other than that, they didn't have any really good wins.
http://espn.go.com/college-football/team/schedule/_/id/333/year/2007/alabama-crimson-tide Each of their losses was by 7 points or less. They weren't as bad as their record indicated IMO. ULM is a real wtf moment, but that team had a lot of NFL talent on it (Javier Arenas, Antoine Caldwell, Kareem Jackson lulz, JPW, Rolando McClain) and the following year they put together a 12-2 season with 11 returning starters. A pretty talented squad, but I guess they were just young. Either way, for a freshman like to Keenum to go into Bryant-Denny and almost pull out a W is impressive. I knew he was going to be a good one after that game. If only LJ Castile had held on in the endzone
Nothing exciting but it's whatever Short story or rather blog post on UH's Special Teams: [rquoter]In the spirit of the old adage that there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies and statistics -- I'm going to examine some key stats that college coaches crave. I'm talking about a few detail-oriented numbers that some position coaches really pay attention to, which I'm hoping to spotlight several times here during the course of the offseason. Today, I'm beginning with a special-teams stat: average field position. This one is courtesy of Houston special-teams coordinator/assistant head coach Tony Levine, who came to UH after having coached special teams with the Carolina Panthers. "The No. 1 goal for special teams is to win the battle of field position," Levine said. "We take every time we received the ball after a [punt or kick] and average that yard line and then take every place where the opposing team starts their drives and see if we're plus or minus." In terms of the math portion of the field position bookkeeping, Levine jots down 60 points if his team starts a drive on the opponent's 40. "If we run a kickoff back for a touchdown, I write that down as a 100," he said. The one exception to the formula is in the instance of turnovers. I honestly was skeptical how accurate a gauge you'd get of a team's special-teams production from these figures, because it seems like it would be easily skewed by what your team's offense or defense does, whether they run off a long drive that ends up in a punt or have three miserable offensive plays on which you go backward thanks to sacks or penalties. Also, the NCAA does keep tabs on things such as punt return average, punt return yardage defense and kickoff return yardage defense. But Levine pointed out how those also can be skewed. "They kick off to you and you can catch the ball at the 20, run it 15 yards and you'd be in the bottom fourth of the country in kickoff return yardage, but you still have the ball at the 35," Levine said, adding that the team's goal is to be beyond the 29 on kickoff returns. A prime example of how misleading those numbers can be was UH's 2009 season, when the Cougars ran an NCAA record five kickoffs back for touchdowns. Speedster Tyron Carrier returned four of those kickoffs. Despite Carrier, UH was only 35th in the country in return average at 23.21 yards. "We started to see a lot of squib kicks and pooch kicks and different schemes," Levine said, "so our upbacks and ends are picking up the ball and running for 10 yards." Of course there are plenty of in-game situations in which that field position barometer is directly affected by what the offense and defense do. "It's a double-edged sword," Levine conceded. "It may not be the punt team's fault that the offense went three-and-out. It is a little bit of a catch-22. I can see it both ways. But ultimately, special teams is about field position, regardless of what the offense and defense do." But Levine, whose special-teams units in three seasons at UH have produced 16 blocked kicks, seven kickoff returns for touchdowns and six forced turnovers, points out field position can be a fairly accurate predictor of success. "When I was at Louisville, we had two consecutive years where if we won the field position, we won the game and if we lost field position, we also lost those games," he said. "It was 100 percent accurate." In 2009, Houston beat Mississippi State on the road 31-24. "We won the battle of field position," Levine said. "Our average starting point was the 35.7. Theirs was the 29.9. That's pretty significant. It may not seem like it, but it really is. You're talking about maybe 24 plays over the course of a game." Later that season, Houston had a 9-6 lead to start the third quarter at Tulane. The Cougars returned to the 40 to start the second half and scored a touchdown eight plays later. Then they tackled the Green Wave return man at the Tulane 12 on the ensuing kickoff. Five plays later, they blocked a punt to give the UH offense the ball at the Tulane 6-yard line. Twenty-seven seconds later, the Cougars scored again and, just like that, a close game turned into a 22-6 game. "I told our guys the following Monday, that there is no better example of how big of an impact special teams can make in a game," Levine said.[/rquoter]
Early top 25: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/columns/story?columnist=schlabach_mark&id=6465272 1. OU 2. Bama 3. FSU 4. O 5. LSU 6. OkSt 7. BSU 8. Stan 9. Gag'ms 10. MSU
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=6471380 Finally , the Pac 10 gets the exposure it was looking for with this mega deal.
when's the shoe gonna drop on tosu? this is becoming a joke. smaller schools get hammered for relatively minor infractions and teams like ohio state who are obviously running blatantly dirty programs get "investigated" for years on end and end up receiving a slap on the wrist. the ncaa is such a sham.
