Turkey Day and Football

Well, I'm back at Pitt, after what felt like an all too short Thanksgiving Recess. Sure, everyone else got to leave Tuesday right after classes and not come back until a few hours ago. I've remained quite reticent, however, about my misfortune. I was stuck here until Wednesday morning, and then I had to wait for someone (and her sisters) to come home from school before we could leave for my lovely little hometown.

But of course, I'm only joking. It did feel weird, though, roaming the streets of Oakland at 11:00 and running into absolutely no one. It was like a ghost town (spooky). I had a lovely time with my cousins on Thanksgiving, and then with the other side of my family on Friday (the one with practically no cousins to speak of). Then I had to be back here for Pitt's football game against Louisville Saturday afternoon, which they lost, by the way.

Pitt thus finishes the football season at 6-6. I'm sure my high school would've liked to have finished this season with as good a record as that. And yet, as good as 6-6 is, it isn't good. I mean, it's only winning half of the games. Sure, we won four in a row early in the season, outscoring out opponents 169-27, but those wins were against teams like Toledo and the Citadel. Our most impressive win (if you could even call it that) was against Virginia in Week 1.

Some would call the loss to Michigan State a fluke, and maybe it was. I don't think anyone, though, thought Rutgers would be as good as they were. South Florida was underestimated, and you can chalk up the double-overtime loss to Connecticut as bad luck at the very end. West Virginia and Louisville were almost considered unbeatable from the very start, although Pitt put up a good fight in both games... at least in the first half (don't even get me started on that).

And so now we're here, ranked sixth out of the eight teams in the Big East conference, and though there are a couple games next week, it's mathematically impossible for our position to change as a result of them. So what does that mean?

Well, as one of my fellow trumpeters started singing as Louisville started to run away with last night's game, "I'll be home for Christmas." Some people say we're still bowl-eligible, but that's really not the case. A page on ESPN.com devoted to bowl possibilities shows that the Big East has six bowl tie-ins, but it also says that if the Navy is eligible, they would receive an invitation to the Meineke Car Care Bowl instead of the #6 team from the Big East. And guess what? That's exactly what happened, and they will be playing the #5 team from the ACC on 30 December. So for us, getting a bowl bid at this point would be a miracle... and totally undeserved.

Amidst the speculation that has pretty much ended was that we might go to the International Bowl in Toronto on 06 January 2007, the only college bowl to be played outside of the United States. Even as recently as Tuesday, people were projecting that Pitt would play Western Michigan there as the #5 team. I guess he thought that Cincinnati would lose, and that Pitt's pathetic second-half against WVU would somehow compel them to do better against Louisville. In both cases, he thought wrong.

So, that's about it from the college sports front. It's amazing that I'm actually following this stuff, given how confusing I find sports, but when it directly ties into your plans for Winter Break, I guess you'd be foolish not to.

In semi-related news, only two weeks until finals. My, where has the time gone? My last paper of the term is due Wednesday, so that's always exciting. Of course, it means I won't get much sleep Tuesday, but what else is new? And some presentation that apparently our parents have known about since June is due on Thursday. Good thing it's on the papers we've been writing. But I can't wait until I finally have my own computer next term so that I can caffeinate at the keyboard (beverages aren't allowed in the computer labs). It'll make working until 03:00 that much easier...

Random tangent: I hope you noticed in my last post that I went on a random tangent at the end. I think that's something I'd like to continue. After all, this blog isn't called Randomness for nothing!