College Football Play of the Week: Wrong Way, Dude

Andre Parker of the Kent State Golden Flashes thought he had something going after recovering a muffed punt against Towson, but it turns out he was running the wrong way:

In the words of the commentators, "holy moley."

Week 1 in College Football: Hope for New Programs, and The Crushing Weight of Reality

Okay, so before each one of my weekly college football recaps I'm going to include a bunch of links like I did with my intro article:

First we've got all the scores from last week; and here they are in a more visual format.

Here are the rankings as they stand, and here are the two best weekly college football summary columns out there, both from blogging network SB Nation: The Alphabetical and The Numerical.

With that in mind, I'm going to have some brief recaps from last week, organized by category.

Games That Went As Expected:

-  The highlight game of the week was defending national champion Alabama's convincing 41-14 win against Michigan. Despite Michigan's high billing, Alabama rolled to a 31-0 lead and looked in complete control the entire game. This performance was enough for Alabama to regain the #1 national ranking they held at the end of last season; Michigan dropped to #19.

- Many Division I (FBS) teams choose to begin their season against a 'cupcake' opponent from Division II (FCS). The higher division team gets an easy win, and the lower division team gets a nice payout. Most of these games go as expected, and this week Kent State, Utah, New Mexico State, Utah State, Arizona State, Temple, East Carolina, North Carolina, Air Force, Virginia, New Mexico, Florida State, Oklahoma State, South Florida, Western Kentucky, Missouri, Louisiana-Lafayette, Mississippi State, Texas Tech, and Fresno State (20 teams total) all handled their FCS opponents easily. Highlight scores include North Carolina's 62-0 win over Elon and Oklahoma State's jaw-dropping 84-0 win over Savannah State, who has to play Florida state next week. That has to be demoralizing.

- Heisman favorite QB Matt Barkley looked sharp in #1 USC's 49-10 win over Hawaii. USC is coming off of a 2-year probationary period and is looking to challenge for the national championship this season.

Close Calls or Unexpected Blowouts:
- Some FBS schools had more trouble than expected against their FCS opponents or allowed more points than they would have liked. Central Michigan, Florida Atlantic, Maryland, Wisconsin, Wake Forest, Arkansas, Ole Miss, Kansas, and Indiana (9 teams total) all were at least somewhat disappointed in the box scores, and there were a few very close games: Maryland sneaked past William & Mary 7-6, while a ranked Wisconsin team needed a stop on the last drive to close out a 26-21 win over Northern Iowa.

- Stanford, who experienced a heyday recently under quarterback Andrew Luck, found themselves struggling after his departure in an unconvincing 20-17 win over San Jose State.

- The tenure of coach Mike Leach at Washington State did not start well, as the school commonly known as Wazzu was rolled 30-6 by Brigham Young. Leach's version of the famed Air Raid offense failed to score a touchdown.

- In a game perplexingly held in Dublin, Ireland, Notre Dame handily beat their Naval Academy rivals 50-10. I doubt the game was enough to convince the actual Irish to start watching American football.

- ACC Coastal division favorites Virginia Tech needed a last-minute drive and an overtime period to beat Georgia Tech 20-17. Virginia Tech, traditionally a defensive powerhouse, struggled on offense; they will have time to work on this over their next few games, which are against a fairly easy non-conference slate. Despite the loss, Georgia Tech looked competent on defense and now has four consecutive home games in which to try and build some momentum.

Upsets:

- As happens every year, a few FBS programs received the humiliation of losing to their FCS cupcake opponent. Middle Tennessee, Idaho, Pittsburgh, and Memphis (4 teams total) all lost to Division II teams, with Idaho and Pittsburgh losing convincingly.

- The picture at the top of the page (courtesy of ESPN) is from the FBS debut of the Texas State bobcats, who in their first game, and despite being 34-point underdogs, upset Houston 30-13. Their Division I tenure could not have started any better.

Mars Update - August 29

Your daily picture from Mars, courtesy of the Curiosity rover:

You can find the full size image here, and the frequently updated NASA image gallery here.

Get ready for football with some links

The college football season starts tomorrow, and I am a little bit excited. Here are some of the college football-related websites I regularly visit, and recommend for anyone trying to get into or catch up on the sport:

SB Nation, which among other things hosts a blog for nearly every FBS (Division I) college football team.

EDSBS (Every Day Should Be Saturday), a quirky blog run by SB Nation contributor Spencer Hall.

An in-depth preview and statistical breakdown of every FBS team, courtesy of SB Nation blog
Football Study Hall.

Dr. Saturday, a news and special interest-focused blog on Yahoo! Sports.

Smart Football, which goes deep into football strategy and the origins of famous offensive and defensive schemes. (The proprietor is out of town on his honeymoon and will return in September. In the meantime, check out the archives.)

And of course ESPN.com, which is my preferred source for schedules, box scores, rankings, etc.

If you actually want to watch some football online, you can do so at Watch ESPN, provided you get your Internet from one of the sponsored ISPs.

Football's back! (Technically): Impressions from the Hall of Fame Game

Yes, I did in fact watch the Hall of fame Game (which I teased two weeks ago) on Sunday. The HoF Game is technically the first game of the NFL preseason, and is played at a high school stadium next door to the pro football Hall of Fame in Canton Ohio. Yes, in a stadium 1/3 the size of the smallest NFL stadium, football got off to a glorious, awkward start. Here are my impressions from the game:

- I can't reiterate enough how puny the stadium was, considering it was technically housing an NFL game. They couldn't bus people a hour away to, say, Cleveland Stadium? The Browns are technically an NFL team, right? (Apologies to any actual Browns fans. I've been told you exist.) Maybe this way for the best, as the stadium could at least try to look somewhat full this way.

- The referees were replacements, as the regular crew of NFL refs is on strike. The situation was referred to as a 'Lockout' by the broadcasters, maybe in an attempt to call back to last year's NFL lockout which caused the cancellation of the 2011 HoF game and threatened to compromise the season. Where was I going with this?

- Oh yeah, the refs were terrible. They called the coin toss wrong. They spent several minutes figuring out how to deal with an extra point kick. They were extremely lax in calling penalties, probably out of fear they would get more calls wrong. They were frequently corrected and almost openly mocked by players. Roger Goodell, CEO of the NFL, needs to just pay the refs what they want - these new guys are intolerable.

- I know it's the start of the preseason, and the brief early part of the game in which all the starters are in is not supposed to be representative of these teams' actual capabilities, but I have to say that the Saints looked good and the Cardinals really bad. Starting Cardinals QB Kevin Kolb's first pass attempt was intercepted, his second and third were incomplete, and on his fourth pass (caught for four yards) he went down with a rib injury. The Cardinals then brought in John Skelton, who is supposed to be losing the QB battle to become the starter to Kolb and...well he wasn't good either, but at least not terrible. Basically all the Cardinals have is  WR Larry Fitzgerald, a couple decent other offensive skill players, and not much else. Who else is even noteworthy on the team, besides I guess Patrick Peterson? Time will tell.

- The Saints backups successfully prevented the Cardinals backups from scoring any touchdowns, and the Saints eventually 'won' 17-10, not that the concept really applies during the preseason. More importantly, the Saints also 'won' in the sense that they looked much better overall. Drew Brees is still the class of the NFC South at Quarterback. I don't have much to say to the Cardinals at this point except 'good luck.'

There will be more preseason NFL action on Thursday. Until then, the wait for football is over, and the wait for football with stakes won't be too much longer. See you soon.

(Image taken from ESPN.com.)

More information about Curiosity

Above is another picture taken by the Curiosity rover from the surface of Mars. We should start getting even high-quality, color pictures in the next few days.

If you want to know more about Curiosity, I've linked a few more videos:

A video about the complex landing process Curiosity went through early this morning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV6w_ju9kMo&feature=related

A stop-motion video of the descent, taken from a fisheye lens camera:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I

Touchdown! NASA lands a car-sized rover on Mars

This is a picture taken by a car-sized robot - the Curiosity Rover - NASA successfully landed this morning. You are looking at the surface of Mars. You want to talk about gymnastics? NASA stuck the landing from 154,000,000 miles away.

Watch a recording of the control room feed here - skip to 7:20 for the touchdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=763cuUnlbEI&feature=my_liked_videos&list=LLsPfB7sjkp673OvPTJHZyZw

Follow Curiosity on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity

I'll be posting more pictures and information as NASA makes it available.