Football Lives Here

For all NY Giants fans out there, it looks like your team will be making the playoffs this year, thanks to tonight's win against the Redskins. AND, there is a chance that the Giants will be playing the Eagles in the first round; as a newborn Eagles fan (thanks to my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and my later-to-be father-in-law), that would be an exciting game to watch.

OF COURSE, a set of freakish events could transpire tomorrow that would result in the Packers ending up with the final wild card slot that the NY Giants currently hold, and those events would include:

• Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears...unlikely, considering the Bears have the best record in the NFL this season (tied with San Diego).

AND

• Arizona, Detroit, Miami, Minnesota, and San Francisco ALL win their games...if any one of these teams loses, it's the Giants in the playoffs.

AND

• Carolina, Houston, and Tampa Bay ALL lose their games...any one of these teams win, again, the Giants reign.
  

This would result in an INSANE mathematical tie breaker situation in which the Packers win out because of a "strength of victory" record, in part based on the outcomes of the above games (with a Packers win over the Bears, both the Packers and the Giants have an 8-8 season, they didn't play each other so there's no head-to-head match, they would both have a 7-5 conference record and a 1-4 record against common opponents...thus, the "strength of victory" record is the next method of measure for tiebreakers). This is not even discussing the possibility for a TIE in the "strength of victory", which would THEN go to a "strength of schedule" factor...which would ultimately result in John Madden's head exploding.

Until the NFL playoffs begin, college bowl games are where it's at (and for this obsession, I'd like to thank Mr. Cooper). I think I'm averaging watching two bowl games a day (from the ever-amazing Scarlet Knights in the Texas Bowl, to the tenacious Terps of the Univ. of Maryland in the Champs Sports Bowl, to the extremely disapointing Virginia Tech Hokies in tonight's Chick-fil-A Bowl, and beyond!). These ESPN announcers have been getting me all pumped up over the Rose Bowl between Univ. of Michigan and USC being played on New Year's Day (which, thanks to it's history in college football, seems to be getting more attention than the BCS Championship game between Ohio State and Florida).

In closing, let's just take a moment to acknowledge that the Big East currently leads all of the conferences in the highest bowl game win ratio, with a 2-0 bowl record (the only conference left with a 100% win ratio), and is favored to win all three of its remaining bowl games (namely, the bowl games of West Virginia, Louisville, and Cincinnati). Let's go Big East!