Monday Morning Hangover - Week 1

Welcome to this season’s inaugural edition of Monday Morning Hangover, The Barney Show’s weekend football wrap up. Last week, we had some technical difficulties (i.e. my laptop wouldn’t turn on) that prevented us from getting into the first weekend of college football. This week’s results didn’t change my opinion as to what I wanted to do last weekend. In fact, they bolstered them. Going forward, we’ll have a Barney Show exclusive: NCAA Awfulness Index. We’ll be tracking week by week, which conference is the most awful: The Big Ten, ACC or Big East. We’ll be using the Bill Walton scale of awfulness with terrible being the best, horrible in between and awful as the conference in the history of Western Civilization. So who’s the most awful after two weeks?

Terrible: The Big Ten. In the first two weeks, Michigan has lost to Utah at home, Ohio St and Michigan got scares at home from MAC teams and Illinois got whacked by Missouri. That is terrible from a conference that considers itself to be good. Anyway, the entire season will be decided next week. If Ohio State can beat USC in the Coliseum, then the Big Ten is permanently off the Awful Index and they will be justified in getting blown out by an SEC team in the National Championship. If they get beaten badly, the Big Ten should start thinking about going I-AA.

Horrible: The Big East. West Virginia, thanks for coming out. I could see this one coming and was even going to write in last weeks Hangover that “I’m looking forward to seeing East Carolina-WVa. I have a feeling that East Carolina will take them.” Since I couldn’t use my laptop last weekend, I could be lying. But I’m not right very often, so I need to take credit when I can.

Awful: ACC. When your conference’s best performance is losing 26-3 or whatever Miami lost to Florida by, you have problems. Within the first 90 seconds of the Alabama-Clemson game, I said, “Alabama is going to beat their asses tonight.” And I was proven right. Virginia Tech lost to East Carolina earlier in the day. So when you’re top 2 teams get beaten (and more importantly, outplayed) on neutral fields by unranked teams, you official are awful. Also, Maryland lost to Middle Tennesse State. In fact, based on East Carolina’s wins, I’d rank Conference USA over both the Big East and ACC.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, we’ll go on to the NFL games this weekend. Oh, right. I didn’t see any NFL action this week because I was working. But based on the limited amount I’ve seen, here are some thoughts.

Brett Favre throwing jump balls in the end zone for touchdowns. They’re trying to give me a heart attack this season. If the Jets have to live and die by Brett’s decisions in the red zone this year, it just might have a nervous breakdown.

I also approve of the no kicker policy. I advocated for this after Mike Nugent missed a 23 yarder to tie a pre-season game. I actually wrote this, but never put it up on the Barney Show because I never got past the AFC East in my NFL Preview. “I’m not looking forward to anything involving the kicker at all. I think they should institute a team wide policy of either punting or going for it on fourth down.” So this is the second instance of me being right that I’m asking you to believe. I might be pushing it.

I’m glad I used a keeper pick on Tom Brady. I enjoy getting a text at 1:22 during week 1 saying my fantasy season is over. Speaking of fantasy, he might have not even been starting since I didn’t actually look at my roster since the draft on Monday. I’m glad I entered a fantasy football league when FF is blocked at work. I’ll be very active on the trade wire.

On the good side, however, this does give the J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets a better chance of winning their division. So there is that.

If Chad Ocho Cinco changed his name for nothing, I’m going to be very pissed. Half the reason I picked him was so I could look at my roster every week and at least laugh at something. For the record, I think this is one of the most entertaining things an athlete has ever done. The Bengals are already a joke. They might as well make it official.

If you’re asking, “Barney, why didn’t you just work on Saturday during a shitty slate of college games so you could work on Sunday” that would be a very good question. The answer to that is two pronged. First, there was a tropical storm passing through on Saturday which made transportation a bit of a problem. Second, I got pretty drunk Friday night, though not nearly as bad as Stan Man. He had one of the all-time great ideas when he decided, “You know what, this walk back to my apartment isn’t fun enough. Punching random cars as I walk by would spice things up.” Of course, like the third one he hit had a group of four Mexicans in it, so we nearly got our asses beat. Stan Man was a shrewd negotiator though. When one of us tried to explain that he was really drunk, Stan Man fell right on his face and came up bleeding. It was almost like that story in Training Day where the guy puts peanut butter in his ass and eats it right in front of the judge. Except those were real cuts. Me and Stan Man should not be allowed to go out together, ever.

In summary, the highlight of the weekend was watching the Ohio-Ohio St game and seeing that they had a quarterback named Boo Jackson. I was hoping he was Bo’s illegitimate child, but alas, it was not to be. Now I’m just confused if he actually knows how close his name is to a legend and if this factored into someone giving them that nickname. We shall never know.