Point Blank – September 4
The 2015 Preface –“ Just Win Your Next Bet”…On Box Scores: Why in the hell would anyone mess up a good thing…The “Eyes of Texas” are just too damn young…
Today the opening focus shifts from specific advice to something a little more general , but it is something that will likely be repeated at the beginning of each football season. Passions become energized and patience becomes tested as the first full menu hits the board, and it is at the time in which many of you are the most excited that a tranquil message becomes appropriate. Learn to slow down and take a deep breath now, and you will be much better off while pacing yourself through the marathon ahead.
I get asked often the question of what goals are set for each football season, and the fact that the questions get phrased the way they do is the purpose behind this opening. Season goals are an unnecessary distraction. Trying to set certain financial standards, or for win percentages, is counter productive. You waste time setting the goals in the first place, and then they become a hindrance throughout the season ahead. There will be plenty of other distractions because of the nature of this endeavor; you do not need to add to the list.
There is only one goal that you should ever have – “Win Your Next Bet” . That is all. If you begin putting your focus on taking the next step forward, without thinking beyond that, the immediate boards will come into a much more clear context. You will need that clarity, to both sort through the confusion that sport brings on its own, and what the betting markets multiply through their unique behaviors.
If you take it one bet at a time, and put all your focus into making sure that bet brings an advantage, you may be surprised at how the path to success unfolds. While football is the timing of this discourse for natural reasons, perhaps the best thought process is of a baseball player stepping into the batters box. If you develop a mastery of the strike zone first, instead of thinking more about putting each pitch in play, making quality contact becomes so much easier. Your financial bottom line in the season ahead, and in the seasons to come, will benefit more from not swinging at bad pitches, than the good contact you do make when one is right down the middle. When laying 11-10, a loser avoided means more to the bottom line than a winner being picked.
You do not have to play every day, but you are allowed to. For many of you it is not a full focus towards winning, but also instead the recreational value that comes from having action on a game that you will be watching. Now for the twist – while many “sharps” will try to steer you away from doing that, for rather obvious reasons, if you enjoy it, do it. But learn money management. If you normally bet $100 per game, learn to play $20 on a Monday night game that you plan to watch, but do not feel you have a great advantage in. You will be surprised over time how much the rooting interest remains high, despite the financial risk being lowered, and once you settle into that rhythm you have made a major step on the way to winning.
The Weekend Threads
Naturally a visit to Point Blank each day should be a part of your overall processes, but time does not allow for a fresh column seven days a week, although that is still the plan during the NCAA tourney and the NBA playoffs next spring. So as has been the case through the summer, Friday’s will be the “Weekend Edition”, with the post-column thread a good place to bring ideas into play throughout the Saturday/Sunday flow.
The exchanges of information have been terrific this summer, and will get even better now that football is here. For those of you that are new this season, if you take a moment to sort through the Thursday thread you will find a lot of extremely useful information. That is what the Friday/Weekend threads will be about, as everyone battles their way through their own various handicapping processes.
There will be some Good/Bad in terms of flow. The Good is that when time allows, there will be answers to all discussion questions, and some particular winners, and long-term winning notions, can be uncovered there. There were some great ideas brought in by the readers over the MLB summer, and recently some WNBA as well. The Bad is that “Who do you like in the XXX/ZZZ game” is not a discussion. So if those get asked, but not answered, you will understand why.
There is also Good/Bad in terms of timing. I will be at the desk up to kickoff on Saturdays and Sundays, but once the games begin the flow changes – with all of the In-Running opportunities, and the usual careful charting of games, there will not be many times that I can get into the forum while games are in progress. When there are stand alones, like Monday night games, it will be a different matter, just not on the busy Saturday/Sunday cards. But you can still bring some of your best questions in and they will get answered later, and many of you will be able to answer each other’s questions. The goal is to improve the bottom line of everyone that comes to Point Blank each day, and it has become a team effort.
About Last Night…
There was plenty to discern across the Thursday NCAA results, and some of those takes will find their way into Monday’s recap column. Naturally thoughts go to how Vanderbilt will score on an SEC defense, and how Arizona is going to stop Pac 12 offenses (UTSA already had 328 yards by halftime; does Scooby Wright really mean that much?). Unfortunately, one of the developments in play for the opening of the college season was how the games are going to be tracked – the demise of the ESPN scoreboard.
For years, ESPN had been to go-to for my tracking of college games. One click brought you to a well-designed page that listed the scoring plays, team stats and individual player stats in an easy to read format. One more click from that page took you to the play-by-play, also in a simple and easy to read layout. But the entire website underwent a transformation since the end of last football season, and while some things were done well, the current version of the individual game scoreboards/box scores is a disaster.
Want the individual player stats? Separate page. Want the team stats? Separate page. Want the scoring plays? Separate page. Want the play-by-play? An awful design forces you to click on each drive separately, instead of a continuous flow. Want to specifically isolate the first quarter? Can’t do it (http://espn.go.com/college-football/playbyplay?gameId=400756882). They literally took what was the best laid out page in the industry, and may have turned it into the worst. That leaves a search to find the best current option, and there were no major winners on Thursday; Yahoo perhaps with a slight lead, but there were navigational glitches on that scoreboard page that also caused problems. Something good was lost when the ESPN scoreboards were re-designed, and you have to wonder just what in the hell they were thinking with this new version.
As the Saturday box scores come in, hopefully the one coming out of South Bend will meet the expectations…
In the Sights…
Few major teams are positioned to get out of the gate as well as #198 Notre Dame, with Brian Kelly working with one of the most experienced rosters in the nation; a defense that is far better than the injury/suspension statistics of 2014 can show; and an OL that has a chance to be one of the nation’s best. Buoyed by that confidence-boosting bowl win over LSU that helped to settle in Malik Zaire at QB, the Irish have the talent, savvy and balance on both sides of the ball to be in the National Championship, and are especially prepared to exploit a young opponent. Texas is just such an opponent, and with the markets being fair in their projections (plenty of -9 available right now), the setting in South Bend works.
Charlie Strong is doing the right thing in terms of rebuilding the Longhorn program – weed out the guys that do not fit his disciplined style, get his own recruits in play as early as possible, and eventually there will be payoffs. Just not yet. This is one of the youngest depth charts I have ever seen for a program of this level, with seven freshmen and five sophomores starting on Saturday, and 12 more underclassmen on the two-deep. And it is not as though the veterans bring a legacy that can be built upon – in getting out-classed by 62 points vs. TCU and Arkansas to close out last season, there was an alarming lack of confidence coming from both sides of the ball.
Yet the lay price is fair. Because the 2015 Notre Dame offense will not run a lot of high risk plays, there the comfort that the Fighting Irish will not make mistakes to put the Longhorns in the game. Turn it into a methodical grinder and they do not have to play all that well to win by 10 or 14; yet should they play well, and the young Texas players show that they are indeed not ready for prime time, it can break open.
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