Point Blank – October 17
What a “Bettor Better Know” – NCAA #7…It’s Bob Dylan Week, and a Twist of Fate keeps Clemson in the running…
We are still two weeks away from The Committee getting down to their task of sorting through the September/October results to produce their first attempt at a Final Four, and this past weekend generated the opportunity to shake things up in a major way. It didn’t quite happen, with the Clemson FG block unit having the fortune of turning their heads to see what would have been a game-winning kick by N.C. State go wide to the right; and Ohio State being just good enough to outlast Wisconsin.
Sometimes that is how Championships get decided, a simple twist of fate in which often the victor did not make a winning play, but instead had to watch a coin float through the air before landing, and that coin just coming up their way. So as we begin a Bob Dylan tribute week, with his being awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature not only a fitting honor for him, but something that can open the doors for others with a cross-over wall being broken down, that became the fitting direction for the Jukebox to take.
But there is a twist this time. Because the music is meant to be a background to help you through the longer reads, there had to be the concession that Dylan’s voice just doesn’t lend itself to that, especially live. What we can do is journey across his creative genius by isolating some terrific covers, the ability of others to bring so much of their own emotion into the words possible because Dylan’s words connect so well across the various spectrums of the human experience. You will sense that as The Jerry Garcia Band brilliantly weaves through “Simple Twist of Fate”, both with voice and instrument, and if you did not know any better you would likely believe that Garcia wrote the song himself. The guitar work and keyboards are sublime; you can’t play that way without feeling what is behind those words. That will be one of the themes across this week – in each performance one would have no idea that the song was written by someone else. That is what truly great art, and truly great artists, create -
A saxophone someplace far off played
As she was walkin’ by the arcade
As the light bust through a beat-up shade where he was wakin’ up,
She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate
Item: Those twists of fate in the playoff hunt* (* - the Clemson offense and defense both failed under pressure on Saturday)
So Clemson remains unbeaten, now with a week off before a showdown at Florida State, and as long as the Tigers don’t lose they play on New Year’s Eve. Yet it came ever so close to being turned upside down. What is memorable about the two close calls that Dabo Swinney’s team has had this season is that in each of them at crunch time it was more a case of the other team failing than their own ability to stand up. That often gets forgotten later.
A few weeks ago the Clemson defense could have closed out a 42-36 win over Louisville by making a stop, the Cardinals starting a drive at their own 25-yard line with 3:14 remaining. Lamar Jackson and the Louisville offense raced down the field, going 66 yards before they were even held to a third-down play, until ultimately James Quick took the wrong direction after catching a passion the final Cardinal play, coming up a yard short of a first down.
On Saturday both the Clemson offense and defense had the game on the line at crunch time, and both failed. N.C. State tied the game on the 71-yard drive with 11:29 to play, and the Tigers had to punt on the ensuing drive, hampered by a pair of penalties. State took over at their own 29-yard line and methodically marched for 14 plays, making the decision to position the ball for a field goal, instead of attempting to reach the end zone, with a first down at the Clemson 12 with 0:50 remaining. You can’t fault Dave Doeren for that, although losing four yards on an awkward attempt to position the ball in the middle of the field did not help. But the short kick was missed, the game went to Overtime, and the Tigers got the win.
Neither the Tiger offense nor defense succeeded with the game on the line, and remember that the defense failed utterly in the second half vs. Louisville. But that is not the way for a coach to spin it if he wants his players to buy in, so naturally Swinney had to find a way to shine the light on the outcome itself as the monument - “There’s something to be said for finding a way to win, and that’s all I can say. It’s not always pretty and you have to win games like that along the way. At the end of the day, you have to love the fight of this team and their ‘never quit’ attitude.” And when you do that, the players can buy in. From DeShaun Watson - “It’s all about faith.”
Of course it isn’t faith that gets other teams to fail, but it is faith that has a team driving hard enough to the final play that puts them in a position to benefit from a failure. There is credit to be given for that.
You will note that I did not mention the name of the N.C. State kicker, and there is a reason for it, also a lesson that the savvy Handicapper/Bettor can learn. When you make your decisions each outcome leads to the evaluation of multiple processes a process – you study the teams, you study the betting markets, and you also study yourself. Doing a post-mortem on your own emotions can be one of the most important aspects in terms of growing not only in this endeavor, but through all of life’s paths, and if you ever feel that way that some folks did in the aftermath of N.C. State/Clemson take a step back, reduce your own power rating, and then make a conscious decision to elevate that rating going forward. I see this type of behavior often in the sports arena, and of course in this political season it is far too common. For someone to be passionate about an issue is a good thing. For someone to be emotional about an issue is not a bad thing. Sometimes that cannot be controlled. But there is no excuse for being stupid. Stupidity is a conscious choice, and it is sad that too many folks choose it.
Ohio State and Clemson many have merely survived on Saturday but the Tide Rolled, and understanding how it is happening with 2016 Alabama is something to not take for granted.
Item: Lane Kiffin’s offensive schemes are getting interesting
Sub-Item: Alabama’s Defense and Special Teams have scored more TDs than the South Carolina and Stanford offenses
There was no mystery to Alabama/Tennessee, nor to much of anything that Crimson Tide have done outside of falling behind early at Ole Miss, another instance in which Nick Saban’s defense struggled to match the pace of a well-run spread offense. What is making this year’s bunch intriguing is the amount of upside all the way around.
This is the best group of WRs Saban has had since coming to Tusacaloosa, although he does not have his best passing QB in Jalen Hurts. But Hurts does bring a mobility previous Crimson Tide signal callers had, and while there were some uneven moments early on offense as Kiffin drew up the designs around the skill sits, the last two weeks were interesting as hell.
Although Tennessee has been depleted by injuries on that side of the ball, the Volunteers still have some athletes and playmakers. So does Arkansas. Yet in back-to-back road games against those defenses Alabama generated 44 first downs and 1,111 yards on only 127 snaps, an 8.7 per play average. As impressive as the stats were the eye test made it even better, with so many of those yards coming easily from the designs. Kiffin has installed a batch of formations that include pre-snap shifts, and they have led to a lot of easy opportunities for gifted athletes. They should only get better with time.
As for gifted athletes, the Alabama run of scoring at least one special teams or defensive touchdown in a game is now up to nine. Their have been 11 such scores this season, and for perspective it means that the Crimson Tide defense and special teams have more TDs than the offenses of South Carolina and Stanford.
Item: Virginia Tech’s Defense was on the field for 98 snaps (and the Hokies have to play on Thursday night)
A big theme as most teams move past the halfway point in the season will be fatigue, especially on the defensive side of the ball. Given the pace of the modern sport there is a toll that will be taken, especially as injuries also begin to pile up. There is a good case study coming up on Thursday, when Virginia Tech faces Miami after each team goes through a quick turnaround.
The Hokies defense become the focus, after being on the field for 98 plays at Syracuse on Saturday, after not having faced more than 69 snaps in any previous game. That load caused a quality unit to wear down in the game, allowing a pair of Orange TD drives to turn a 17-17 deadlock into a 31-17 defeat. Syracuse might have scored again if it was needed, picking up three first downs on a final drive while running out the clock.
Here is one way that Tech HC Justin Fuente referred that toll – “It seemed like [Syracuse players] were always falling forward the entire game, which is not usually how we play. We usually tend to push people backward. It seemed like they were almost always falling forward for an extra yard.”
There was an even better take from Aaron McFarling in the Roanoke Times –In the end, Tech’s defenders looked sloppy and exhausted, reverting to the kind of poor tackling that we saw too often last season.
How much does that carry over into the Hokies preparation for Thursday night? It becomes a prime task for reading between the lines as the week goes on.
And there is also the matter of looking at which teams can exploit tired defenses as the season progresses…
Item: Might Leonard Fournette’s return not mean much of anything to the LSU Power Rating
Sub-Item: How good is Derrius Guice
How much fun is this – I rate Fournette as the best RB in the country, someone that will not win a Heisman because of injury, yet is better than a handful of RBs that have won the award. And I also rate Fournette as being of nearly zero ATS value. Others apparently have a different rating, with LSU getting a trickle of play in the early Monday trading when it was announced that Fournette is upgraded to probable for this week’s game vs. Ole Miss, -6 now beginning to show. But it does lead to a genuine question – could Fournette have possibly played any better the last two weeks than Derrius Guice?
Guice is a superb talent, and made his presence felt as a freshman in 2015 – he only got 51 carries, but they went for 436 yards and three TDs, a nifty 8.5 per attempt. This season it has been 62 carries for 564 yards, a rather spectacular 9.1 per attempt. As the lead back the last two games while Fournette has been sidelined it was 33-325 and five TDs. Could Fournette possibly have done any better?
I bring this up because I expect the LSU energy to remain strong into the weeks ahead, and the best way to take advantage of tiring defenses is with a punishing ground game, including the depth to have a fresh and explosive RB on the field at all times. It is not a matchup feature this week, with Mississippi having had a bye prior to facing Arkansas and not subject to fatigue, but it will be something to watch in November, especially as the Tigers themselves get a bye next week to get recharged.
The sideshow of Ed Orgeron trying to coach his way into the permanent HC job remains interesting. There were several Tigers held out of the first half vs. Southern Miss for what was called “breaking team rules”, and starting CB Kevin Toliver did not play a snap on defense the entire game, only seeing action on special teams. What were the rules that Toliver and others broke? From Orgeron - “You got to practice hard to play.”
You gotta love Big Ed.
Item: Trying to come to terms with the Northwestern offense
Pat Fitzgerald’s Wildcats are allowed to win by 14 at Michigan State; since the Spartans are down this season that should not be a shock to anyone’s football consciousness. But they aren’t allowed to score 54 points and snap the ball 83 times. No team had ever reached 50 against the Spartans since Mark Dantonio took over, and it was certainly not going to be an offense that managed to lose 9-7 at home to Illinois State a month ago, and ranked #107 in the nation in yards per game through four September outings.
Yet the Wildcats went out and scored 36.5 more points than their market expectations at kickoff, using the closing Side/Total to estimate the projection. So there was some kind of magic, right? Especially given that tempo at East Lansing, and since it came after a bye week there quickly came notions that tweaks had been made. But after digging deeply there was nothing to see. How excited was Fitzgerald to send his offense out there? The Wildcats won the coin toss, and chose to defer.
When asked to detail what changes had been made, the HC called it more about working harder than tweaking anything - "We weren't very good (before). I have zero answers other than that we didn't coach well enough and didn't play well enough, but we have stayed the course and kept grinding. Good things usually happen when you respond."
So where can we go with grading the Northwestern offense? How about turning the focus to the other side of the ball from Saturday…
Item: Michigan State is getting shredded in the second half of games
In most seasons if Dantonio’s Spartans were giving up 24.4 points per game after their first five lined outings (I pay little head to their win over Furman), that would seem a little high – the Spartans have not given up more than that many per-game for a full season since a 26.3 in 2009, with nothing more than 22.3 since. But here’s the catch – that 2016 point allowance is for the Second Half only, and does not count the field goal allowed in losing at Indiana in overtime.
What the hell happened? That is where the digging must go, because on the surface it was not expected – it was the offense that seemed to face the uphill battle in 2016. Hence a whole lot of reading between the lines is on tap for the days ahead. I’ll start with Dantonio, who spoke the way that a HC would be expected to under the circumstances -
“All I can say is it's disappointing in our locker room. We need to get back at it, come out Sunday, tomorrow, and figure it out. There's no easy fix. … We're going to dig deep. We have competitors in there, and if we don't, and somebody is not competing, then we're not going to play that guy.”
Co-DC Mike Tressel goes directly to the point of what the problems are, the lack of competitiveness Dantontio brought up, though Tressell also comes up short of a “why” - “I'll tell you this, I'm used to seeing in the previous nine years when the first person gets there, even if he's just hanging on, the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth guys that are there just like bam bam bam bam; and I'm not seeing that right now. It's usually not just the initial guy that's there, it's the next five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 hats that make you look like a good football team. So we need to do a better job of that.”
Finding that answer is not just for the coaches, but the handicapper as well, since the MSU season is only halfway through. But it is rather unusual that when crunching the Big 10 statistics, one sees similarities between the Spartan defense and that of Purdue…
Item: What now for Purdue
I can understand the firing of Darrell Hazell; at 9-33 the results obviously weren’t there, and this season the effort hasn’t been either. Through three Big 10 games the Boilermakers have been out-rushed 1,076-287, and that can certainly happen with a weak team in a physical conference. But here’s the rub – the three opponents that did that to them were Maryland, Illinois and Iowa, none of them having overpowering ground games.
The problem now is that things may go from bad to even worse, with organization and energy likely to be a problem. It will be WRs coach Gerard Parker taking over as HC, which may seem like an unusual move, but that is because OC Terry Malone and co-DC Ross Els are in their first season with the program. None of these guys are going to be in the running for the full-time HC gig, which means that as they coach out the final half of the campaign they have to be thinking about where their next job is going to be. And all the while they have to try to command the attention of the players, who will be reading on a daily basis about the potential candidates that they might be playing under come spring practice 2017.
The problem is that effort was already missing – you could see it in the way the Boilermakers just weren’t competing hard at the line of scrimmage. So what happens when underclassmen are being told to work harder by guys that are now in the role of merely being substitute teachers? I don’t know how this season ends up being anything but a continuation of the flat play we have seen from the team to this point.
Item: On Grading Arizona
It has certainly been a disappointing season at Arizona, where the Wildcats are just about out of the bowl picture already. But now there is a badly needed bye week to get healthy and make some corrections, and the players know they have to listen to Rich Rodriguez – his buyout would be around $7 million, and the University isn’t going to go for that. The issue is in establishing a proper grade for what has happened so far because unlike what has taken place at Purdue the Arizona effort has not been awful; it is the decimation by injury that make the stats so fragile.
Rodriguez used two QBs in that 48-14 loss to USC, 17-year old true freshman Khalil Tate, who is clearly not ready to play at this level, and then lefty Matt Morin. You wouldn’t have noticed Morin on the depth chart earlier in the season; he is the third-string TE, but holds for FG and PAT attempts. He was simply the best remaining option. And that is just at QB; there have been four different starting RBs this season, with a couple of WRs moved to the position to add depth.
When the Wildcats come back from their bye they may have Anu Solomon and Brandon Dawkins both back at QB, and talented RB Nick Wilson will have a chance to get to full health. That will solve some of the problems, while also creating conflicts with statistical data-bases, perhaps offering an opportunity to get ahead of the markets somewhere. But there is also a caution from Rodriguez himself from Saturday’s post-game that was rather blunt - “We’re 2-5. We’ve had some adversity. I think a lot of problems we can fix in the next year or two in recruiting, and some of them we’ll try to fix in the short term.”
That last bit is rather awkward. While it is understandable that Rodriguez feels the need to buy time with the alumni by pointing towards the future, even though getting fired is so unlikely because of the cost associated, should a coach ever tell his current players that the team’s problems are going to be solved by future recruits?
Item: Re-visiting the Arkansas State Defense
Time for a little follow-up here, which also goes to show how digging into the fine print across the entire board can lead to edges that others in the marketplace will miss. Last Monday one of the feature topics was on a rather improbable series of end-game defensive stands by Arkansas State. Having entered the game at 0-4, and trailing Georgia Southern in the fourth quarter, they easily could have lost their will after five turnovers from their own offense put them behind 26-17 in the fourth quarter. Yet they rose up and held the heavily-favored Eagles to a shocking -15 yards on their final 10 offensive plays. That held the door open for the offense to come back and win it.
That put State under the microscope this past week vs. South Alabama and the defense was flat-out superb, holding the Jaguars to seven points, 14 first downs and 255 yards, coming up with six sacks. The Red Wolves scored a TD themselves on a fumble return. At this stage they may only be 2-4 but it is a 2-0 in the Sun Belt, and the effort show by that defense indicates there is some heart on the roster. Now there is a bye week to build off of that momentum, which makes them an interesting item the rest of the way.
Now time to turn the Monday focus to the MLB Diamonds…
Item: The ALCS crosses the border
It isn’t easy finding a path for Game #3 tonight. I believe that Trevor Bauer is vulnerable, not just because of having to work his way through that bizarre injury (10 stitches o his pitching hand), but the fact that he was already struggling down the stretch – in seven starts since September 1st it has been a 6.33 ERA, with eight HRs allowed across 42.2 innings. But the markets are not offering any bargain, the usual problem of an 0-2 team going home drawing some activity, and there is also the issue that while Bauer may indeed struggle, that Cleveland bullpen has been so damn good.
Andrew Miller has struck out 10 of the 12 batters he has faced through two games, and having had Sunday off may once again be ticketed for multiple innings. In 7.2 playoff innings Miller has 17 strikeouts vs. only four hits allowed. From Jim Gibbons – “To be honest with you, if he’s on there’s not a lot you can do with him.” Meanwhile Cody Allen has yet to allow a run through five playoff appearances, with twice as many strikeouts as hits allowed.
So I don’t want to be laying this high of a price if the game is close late, and the First Half line is far too high for any consideration, which leaves it all up to In-Running for now. And Eric Strasser, author of “Betting Baseball for Profit” and better known as Palmtree around these parts, concurs -
I haven't done anything with the AL Game #3 on Monday. It's very hard to figure out what's going on with the Blue Jays. They overwhelmed Texas with their offense blowing games open early, and after a five-day layoff they've been completely shut down by Kluber and Tomlin. I just don't know what to make of it. I assume they will be more comfortable at home and more aggressive, but even if they are can they solve the Indians bullpen? It'll be + 0 for me on the game
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