The "Maiden" Post

This is a busy time of the year for sports, probably the best time of the year too. Football is in full swing, the NBA opens this week, and baseball is at least somewhat entertaining with the World Series opening tomorrow. It's great!! As a result I have a miriad of topics to get to and this first blog will be a cluster of those topics.

The NFL
The NFL is seven weeks in and we have some surprises here and there, but as an average fan I only care about 2 things: My Team and Fantasy Football. As for my team, the Indianapolis Colts, they are playing great! My boy Austin Collie (by "My boy" I mean "Guy whom I have never met and might freak out a little bit if I did") has 4 TD's and is tearing it up for a Rookie WR out of BYU. And in a quick text message poll I conducted earlier today the Colts were the runaway favorite as the best team in the league right now. The Saints got 1 vote and the Cowboys got 1 vote as well (from a man who knows literally nothing about the NFL). I was a little surprised by the results of my "very formal" text poll, true I have the Colts as the best team, but I figured more people would lean on the Saints with their ridiculous offense. **As an aside, during this text poll my father got very upset with me when I said, "The old man should have held onto the ball" referring to Brett Favre's fumble that led to a TD for the Steelers and a loss for the Vikes.** Oh and just so everyone is aware, the Seahawks are awful. As for fantasy football, both my teams won over the weekend, moving me to 7-0 in the LOM and 4-3 in my work league. This weeks NFL provided a good pick me up.

College Football
Oh the collapse that was this past weekend in college football. Here is how it went for me. Because there was literally what looked like 2 decent football games in college football last weekend, both in the Mountain West, there wasn't much to look forward to on the national scale. But those 2 games were big around here. I couldn't wait for Air Force to come into SLC and punk the Utes, and I was just giddy about my Cougars taking down the 8th ranked TCU Horned Frogs in front of ESPN's College Gameday. My wife and I had tickets to the BYU vs TCU game, the first game I will have been to in 2 years. We got to the stadium an hour early. Everything looked so great, we even got free brats from someone Kim knows. Now it was just time for the game... and we all know how that went. The Utes escaped an embarassing lose to Air Force in OT, and BYU... well they never showed up for this one and were dismantled at home.
As a BYU fan who witnessed this destruction first hand, I was demoralized. I have since come to realize one thing, that this is what BYU is. I know that a lot of BYU fans don't want to admit this but BYU is what we think they are. They are a a 9-11 win team every year that is very consistent. They beat who they are supposed to beat and they lose to teams that they are supposed to lose to. They are not now and most likely never will be a BCS bound team (this is the most painful realization). Their head coach has football at 5th on his priority list and doesn't believe he needs to gameplan for specific teams. You know what that gets you??? Wins over San Diego St and UNLV and losses to TCU and sometimes Utah. The only comfort that came from this weekend is that Utah looked pathetic against Air Force, so I am fairly confident that BYU will still win that game. Now I have to wait for Nov. 28th until I can feel good about my cougars again.

The NBA
YES!!!!! It is finally here!! We have waited through 4 months of boring offseason news, and what sees like an eternity of preseason NBA garbage. And finally the season kicks off. The Jazz open up tomorrow in Denver, dangerous game should be a good one though. As a Jazz fan here are some of my questions as we open this year: Can we stay healthy? Is Eric Maynor as good as I thought he would be? Are we going to trade Carlos Boozer? Deron Williams will finally make the All-Star team, right? As I have looked at all the pre-season predictions for the NBA, everyone has the Jazz finishing 5th-7th in the west with an early playoff exit like last year. It's hard to blame to predictions since the Jazz didn't make any offseason moves. But I think that the Jazz are going to go out and surprise some people. The aforementioned text poll also asked people how many games the Jazz would win this year, the answered varied but came in at about 55. I don't think that is too far-fetched. This is my thought, if the Deron Williams, Mehmet Okur and Carlos Boozer are healthy then the Jazz win 58 games this year and finish 2nd in the west. Deron Williams is unreal and people will see a healthy Deron Williams dominate the league's pg's this year.

So there it is, the first post on this blog. Respond, comment, suggest or debate as you wish.