Hogan Made Wrestling

It's really sad that McCain decided he had to jump on board with the Rove/GOP machine and their tired election strategy. He could have picked Ridge or Lieberman and ran a campaign on a platform of tough national security and more moderate social policies, instead of this fundamentalist, race-baiting mess that Steve Schmidt has crafted.

Big 12 football is so much fun to watch.

5 TD passes in the TT-Kansas game, 2 incompletions.

Texas Tech vs. Kansas is exactly what you would expect it to be (in a good way), 14-14 still in the 1st quarter.

The McCain campaign's talking head in Virginia is now claiming the Republicans have a great chance to make a comeback and pull out a win there in the senate race. Because apparently that 30 point lead Mark Warner has is just going to evaporate itself over the next 2 weeks.

I want someone to attempt to justify the claim that Bill Ayers is a terrorist but people who bomb abortion clinics are not.

538's daily polling update is like a killing field for Obama. Their model now favors him to win over McCain 96.3%-3.7%, with a 54% chance he wins in a 375+EV landslide.

RCP Electoral Count 306 157 Obama +149 No, Marvin. John Kerry has 6 point lead in Ohio on 10/22/04 But hey, we know how THAT turned out. CNN is only giving Obama a 4 point lead today in Ohio. Except this election is not coming down to "who wins Ohio?". It's coming down to "Can McCain sweep 8 states, all of which Obama is leading, some by double digits?".

The polls are tightening? Only in Matt Drudge-land where the only poll that matters is whatever one shows the gap between Obama and McCain as the smallest. Since 538 hasn't updated today, I'll use RCP's incomplete list: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/20...olls/index.html There are 35 polls in there, only 5 of which show leads for McCain (and a +5 in Georgia is most definitely not a good result for him). Among the 30 polls where Obama is ahead, the only ones that could be considered either "good" or at least "not bad" for McCain are the following: +1 National +4 National +4 National +5 National +5 Florida And for any McCain supporters wanting to hang their hats on that IBD/TIPP poll that shows Obama at +1, Nate Silver eviscerated that poll today over at 538 by examining the poll's subcategories. Apparently McCain is beating Obama by 50 points among voters aged 19-24 .

Forget Applewhite, if he does that he might even surpass Vince Young.

I guess I am going to a bar unless ESPN gets a ton of complaints and reverses course, or at least puts the game on the Deuce instead of one of those other shitty regional games.

Good lord, kill me now.

Except almost every poll they've posted recently has been in Obama's favour. That's because almost every poll has been in Obama's favor. But for a specific example, RCP does not include R2K's tracking poll, ostensibly because there were "already too many tracking polls" when it started publishing (quite a while ago). Now, at the time it was the poll showing the largest margin for Obama. Now, not more than a few weeks ago IBD/PPPT starts publishing a tracking poll, whose debut boasts relatively good numbers for McCain given what all the others are showing. RCP immediately added this tracking poll to their site, blatantly contradicting their claimed reason for not including R2K's.

It's the single best site on the internet dealing with the election in general and polls in particular. Nate Silver's beatdowns of Matt Drudge (cherry-picking poll numbers), RealClearPolitics (choosing which polls to include and exclude without giving any justification to their methodology, and frequently doing it in a way that is obviously biased in McCain's favor), idiots that believe in the Bradley effect, and pundits who think Obama's ground game amounts to college kids organizing college kids (Michael Barone, and others) keeps me visiting constantly. I am very interested to see how well their model does in terms of predicting the actual outcome in the election. If it nails it or at least comes really close, I think 538.com might become the new standard for polling analysis (as opposed to lazy sites like electoral-vote.com and the aforementioned RCP).

To which I would reply it is perfectly fine to buy a car based on factors like style, but then don't bitch about the price of gas afterwards (not saying you do).

It seems to me that the candidate who has actually implemented the most socialist policy so far is the one who has imposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies and redistributed that money to Alaska's rank and file. Talk about "spreading the wealth around".

What's funny is that perusing some of the other sites online I go to with college football discussion, most of the bitching about the first BCS standings is coming from fans of teams that have already gotten punked out this season (Ohio State, Florida, USC, Georgia) and need help to move up. Memo to any such fans (and I'm not referring to anyone here): the BCS is not screwing your team, they screwed themselves by either getting blown out by a good team, or losing to a mediocre/bad one. On the flip side, I haven't noticed much complaining from Penn State fans (or Oklahoma St. and Texas Tech fans for that matter), presumably because they know they just need to keep winning and let the season play itself out, and if their team does its job chances are pretty good that they will find themselves in the championship game. As far as any sort of "pecking order" goes in terms of which losers could backdoor their way into the title game, it's probably something along the following lines: 1. 1-loss SEC champion 2. USC 3. Oklahoma 4. 2-loss SEC champion 5. Ohio State This is of course assuming all sorts of wacky shit happens over the next month-and-a-half (which is obviously possible).

I don't have a problem with conference championship games, it's with the artificial partitioning of the conference and not matching up the two best teams I take issue with. It's going to be really lame if 12-0 Texas plays 9-3 Kansas for the Big 12 title instead of 11-1 Oklahoma. For another example, consider MFer's hypothetical Big 10 (11) + Notre Dame conference with divisional breakdowns that make the East absurdly stronger (usually) than the West.

On a different note, since it's been all about the Big 12 lately, this seems to be as good a time as any for me to mention how fucking stupid an idea "divisions" are in these conferences. OK, if you want to run a conference championship game by all means do so, but for the love of god just pick the best two teams in the conference to play in it. This ridiculous division setup gives us situations like what we have now, where the 4 best teams in the Big 12 are in the South, and the North's "champion" is going to be some jobber like Kansas or Missouri that is either going to get run over by a team from the South, or will pull an upset and take the Big 12 right out of the national title picture. Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting if the potential was there for a Texas-Oklahoma rematch for a spot in the championship game? Plus you completely remove the possibility of stuff happening like Oklahoma not "winning their division" but back-dooring their way into the title game by sitting at home while everyone around them loses. Obviously this is mostly a Big 12 problem right now (in the SEC the top teams are reasonably evenly distributed over both divisions, at least this year), but it's still something that really should not even be allowed to occur (and even though I'm sure no one cares, it's the same way in the MAC, where the 4 best teams in the conference are all arguably in the West division).

Oh for fuck sake, you have got to be kidding. I just know we are getting the shitty UCLA/Cal out here on the west coast. Maybe ESPN will realize what a stupid scenario that is and either make it a national game, or at least available on da muthaship for the rest of us. If I get UCLA/Cal, Michigan/Michigan St, and VT/FSU on Saturday, I am going to be livid.

I'm going to predict right now that the right-wing noise machine (Limbaugh/Beck/Hannity/etc) will soon be rolling with the smear allegations and rumors against Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, the muslim soldier that Powell brought up today in the following commentary: Don't be surprised at all this week if you hear about how this guy was a terrorist sympathizer or some such nonsense. Also, I suspect that Barack Obama won't go near this story, so that he doesn't have to deal with comments along the lines of "We have 'Joe the Plumber', they have 'Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan', who do you want America?" from the Republican talking heads.

I would imagine so (if I had to guess at a line off the top of my head, I would guess that OSU will be favored by 2.5 points), and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Penn State lost in a hard-fought game. But getting that Michigan game out of the way has to give PSU a huge emotional and mental boost.

Agree with all of this. I honestly thought today was Penn State's best chance to lose (and for half the game it looked like that could very well happen), not because Michigan is any good, but just because Penn State is the Big 10 JTTS and always lose to Michigan, even when they have the better team. Now that they are past the psychological barrier of beating Michigan, I think they will romp to an undefeated season, even though next week's game may be close. As for Alabama, they look like a good team that is playing a bit over their heads right now, and living on borrowed time. Whether it's LSU or the SEC championship game, someone is going to take them down.

To add to Iggy's (correct) answer, I think this year's Penn State team will suffer less from the stigma of Ohio State's two championship game losses because they play exciting, offensive football and are recognized for it. I think they would be in more danger of getting discounted if they played traditional smash-mouth, "boring" Big 10 football. Also, they are killing their opponents offensively, not escaping with uninspiring wins that could easily have gone the other way.

This is true, but on the other hand one thing I like about college football is that in between the action we can hypothesize and argue over this kind of stuff, which at least has some substance behind it (as opposed to say, the week between NFL games, where it's all just tabloid talk about TO, Ocho Cinco, Romo/Simpson, etc.). As far as the question itself, I think that a lot would have to happen for Texas/Oklahoma to be the championship game. Let's assume for the moment that Texas is one of the participants. For Oklahoma to make it, the following things (at least) need to happen: 1. Penn State loses 2. the SEC champion finishes with more than one loss The following things probably need to happen: 3. USC loses 4. Utah loses Even though I think Oklahoma is better than USC (and have a much better loss on their resume), I'd imagine USC would finish ranked ahead of them due to being conference champions and desire of the voters to avoid a rematch in the championship game. Utah could squeeze into the championship game if they are the only serious unbeaten left (besides Texas). If these 4 events took place, it would then come down to whether or not the voters care so much about the rematch aspect and the fact that Oklahoma is not a conference champion that they would vote for an obviously inferior team over them.