While Georgia’s 18-0 victory over South Carolina was enjoyable, it is still not the same thing as betting Florida, especially those Spurrier led Gators that kicked our tails year after year.
It should be noted that Georgia rarely racks up shutouts these days; I cannot recall one in recent memory, and I am not sure when we last shutout an SEC foe on the road. I read in the paper that the only other time a Spurrier team was shutout was 193 games ago when his Duke team fell 7-0 to Rutgers. Ouch.
Today’s AP and USA Today Polls have Ohio State remaining in the top spot. Fair enough; that Texas win was a big statement for the Buckeyes. Texas slipped to the eighth spot in both polls; once again seems reasonable.
Is Georgia really a Top 10 program at this point? AP has the Dawgs ranked tenth, while the coaches think UGA is number nine in the country. Maybe by the end of the year, but seems premature at this point.
What about Florida State? After that near disaster against Troy, how can they be ranked ninth (AP) and tenth (USA Today) respectively? Sure they won, but did anyone voting watch the game? Giving the Seminoles credit for overcoming adversity, but they should drop for their poor performance.
Same goes for Tennessee. You do not let Air Force come within a whisker of beating you and still remain a Top 15 team. At least the AP got this one right, dropping Tennessee from eleventh to thirteenth, while the Volunteers remained ranked seventeenth in the USA Today poll.
It is only week number two, but already there should be plenty to debate about the polls. Once the BCS nonsense rolls into town, the real fun begins.
Just realized that I have not made any predictions for this year, and while one game is already in hand, I think it is still fair for me to throw out a couple of picks.
Super Bowl will feature Indianapolis over Carolina. Just don’t remind me in January if I am wrong in September. Happy football!
Things should look a lot different about the ‘Bin today as I continue a whirlwind upgrade effort from Nucleus to WordPress. Why the change? Because I think that WordPress is going to provide us with more options, is very flexible, and it seems to be a fantastic tool for blogging.
A few quick points:
Calvert Games was officially launched September 27, 2001 – back in the day, things around here were pretty barebones, and more or less hit the mark despite the Mickey Mouse look and feel. June 2003 saw a major overhaul of the site – the switch to a php Nuke based site brought about Calvert Games 2.0. August 22, 2004 saw the switch to Nucleus, which facilitated the launch of The Recycle Bin 3.0 (emphasis on blogging), and was my attempt at a simpler, more interesting format.
So here we are – The Recycle Bin 4.0 – not sure where we are going, but I am sure it will be an entertaining ride.
As the Recycle Bin fast approaches its fifth anniversary, I have decided it is time for a face lift. Site may be a bit of a mess shortly, but hopefully everything will be back in order soon.
Another glorious weekend is on the way for SEC football. This is the quickie version, so sit back and enjoy the abbreviated weekly preview.
Mississippi – Missouri
I do not like Mississippi, but I have to go for them for SEC pride. If Ole Miss manages a decent rushing attack, they may be able to pull this one off, but if not, they are going down to a Big 12 team. How bad is that?
(4) Auburn – Mississippi State
Cats and dogs do not mix, and the poor State Bulldogs are going to get the worst part of this mismatch. Auburn by 21.
Vanderbilt – Alabama
Vanderbilt played Michigan well early, but in the end they did not have the talent on offense or enough depth to really challenge the Wolverines. I expect this one to go pretty much the same way. Alabama will Roll, Roll, Roll to victory.
UCF – (7) Florida
While UCF may be a program on the rise, they do not stand a chance in this one. Florida will win going away; close early, but expect the gap to exceed 28 points.
Texas State – Kentucky
The Wildcats are always candidates for the SEC Shame of the Week Award, but Kentucky should be able to manage this one. Then again, Kentucky does suck.
Arizona – (8) LSU
I do not think LSU is a Top 10 team, but they will have this one under wraps fairly early. If not, this one will be a mild upset, but not as major as the guys on ESPN will make it out to be. LSU is not high cotton material. I will be seriously disappointed in a PAC 10 team puts a damper on my predictions.
Utah State – Arkansas
Arkansas will win, and all of hog-nation will think the USC game was an aberration. Something like that. Arkansas is the team I love to hate, but they will represent the SEC well with an easy victory.
Air Force – (11) Tennessee
An interesting match up, but do the Falcons really think they have a chance? Tennessee’s defense is going to be way too fast.
(12) Georgia – South Carolina
Georgia never plays well in Columbia, but the Dawgs have plenty of talent, and more depth than the Gamecocks. I expect this one to be close for the first three quarters, before Georgia pulls away by 10.
I started to make this post another RBT exclusive, but I think I may have already played that one out. Sorry Chris.
My wife’s laptop now has 1,256MB or so RAM, so it should be good to go to actually play a decent game or three. My wife is happy that email and web surfing are noticeably faster, while I have seen a nice improvement with OOTPB 6.5 and 2006. I should know better than to actually try to scrimp on memory. Will not make that mistake on my next purchase.
The next step is to actually take the next step (so to speak) and buy some sort of PC game: Age of Empires, Civilization, or something along those lines. Or I may just realize that I do not know what the hell I am doing with OOTPB 2006, save my money, and figure that one out. Either way, surfing has never been faster.
I guess the “in” thing now is to post on a blog that you’re playing a game and “tease” everyone that you’ll post more later. This is based on a small sample of two sites – The Blog for the Sports Gamer and Dubious Quality. I’ve been on the edge of my seat first thanks to DQ and now thanks to the TBFTSG!
So in that spirit, here is a Recycle Bin teaser. I’ve been playing two games for a couple of years. They are easily the games of the past two years at least. Well, one hasn’t quite been out for two years. I’ll post more about them later!
Wait, I guess I’ve already talked about these games. A lot. Oh well…
How about this. I’ve been eating a meal. It comes on a round plate. I use a fork and knife. It’s the tastiest meal I’ve eaten since yesterday. More later!
Now that is a teaser.
I love me some NFL football. How can you not be happy that football is back again? How can you not love Heinz Ward? What an awesome catch (Steelers 14, Dolphins 0 as I write this post).
My three sons. Has a nice ring to it. I feel really blessed today knowing that Tonya’s doctor said that baby is nice and healthy. And the little guy is a boy! Happy days.
Yesterday I order a 1GB memory stick for my laptop, which means I am now one step closer to being a PC gamer. I am not sure I ever would have considered myself this close to being a PC gamer, other than the occasional text based PC sports sim (i.e. OOTPB and FM), but here I am with enough memory to actually consider some sort of PC gaming. Now what to play?
As much as I think I would actually enjoy WoW, I do not think that will happen anytime soon because I have a hard time with the whole $9.99/month to play subscription thing. So I am looking more towards AoE or maybe the Civilization thing. Then again I could always just focus on Final Fantasy for the PS2 and be done with it. Tough choices all around.
If you want to read an article about baseball text-gaming in the 1980s, check out this ESPN Page 2 article. No wait, the author only discusses 1980s baseball sims. Somebody should write to him and let him know that we’ve progressed since the 1990s. No mention of Baseball Mogul, PureSim, and (of course) Out of the Park Baseball means that the writer is probably in his 50s and never used the internet before. Or at best is clueless.
Is Dynasty League Baseball still being updated these days? Or, a more appropriate question, why is it being updated these days?
The big surprise is that ESPN didn’t figure out how to insert a shout out to Madden 2007 in the article. That contract must have run out.
I tought the whole street racing thing had run its course, but it looks like EA disagreed. So says Need for Speed (NFS) Carbon, which is really the third iteration of the Underground series. I see no reason for EA to release a third version in the series other than EA knowing that everything Need for Speed sells (i.e. cash cow).
Seriously, I figured by now everyone would have done the street racing until they were ready to puke, and move on to more interesting aspects of the NFS series. I assumed the car pimping thing was played out by now. Silly me. Never under estimate the EA marketing machine.
I never played the Midnight club series, but I spent plenty of time with NFS Underground, and just enough with Underground to know that I was done pimping.
Traditional NFS with exotic sports cars, and great multi-stage tracks is what NFS is all about. Not illegal street racing, pimp daddy stuff. The only thing that will save this thing has to be the graphics, which look impressive, but I still have to wonder why EA would not go after the broader NFS audience. Pimping has to have limited market potential compared to something like NFS Hot Pursuit 2, which is really one of the high points in the NFS series.
Yet another sign that I must be moving further outside of anyone’s target audience for fun. I hope the gaming companies remember that as games get more expensive, my demographic actually has disposable cash spend on nonessential items, such as video games. No pimping for me, but give me a new NFS with some sort of Hot Pursuit mode – and of course some pretty graphics – then call me happy.
Here are the lessons learned so far from our transition to Out of the Park Baseball 2006 (in no particular order of importance):
(1) Make sure to confirm that every owner has installed the game and your league file correctly. This will take some time, but many owners will probably overestimate how easy it is to install OOTPB 2006.
(2) Upload the full league file through the game AND make it available on your website. Some owners will have no problem loading the league file through the game. Others may be behind firewalls (or whatever) that won’t let OOTPB 2006 connect with an FTP site.
(3) Turn off waivers when importing your OOTP 6.5 league. The OOTPB 2006 AI will make a number of roster moves when importing a league. Turning off waivers stops the AI from putting players on the waiver wire that the human owners probably don’t want to happen. The AI will still make silly moves like releasing players the human owner still wants on his team, but those are easier to fix.
(4) Make quick start games often. I made quick start games for every major change that was made when I imported our league. We did a league contraction, so every time I made a structure change, I created a quick start game.
(5) Get to know the Anderson Utilities. I used the AU65History utility to import the individual player histories that were lost during the league conversion. I haven’t fully explored all of the neat utilities that are available.
(6) Think about when you want to run your draft. OOTPB 2006 executes the draft differently. Players are “revealed” 30 days prior to the draft. We decided to move our draft to March 1st instead of June so that we could do the draft before the season started and not suffer any delays.
(7) Get FaceTool and use it. In the pantheon of OOTP utilities, FaceTool joins BOSI as one of the greatest pieces of text-gaming add-on goodness ever written. I almost spent $375 to buy Facegen to do what FaceTool does much better. It not only creates color coordinated uniforms and player pictures for each team, it will update pictures to refelect trades when players move from team to team.
That’s the list for now. We will do a team import/export test on Friday.
This is probably more for Chris, because I am not sure who else reads my crap, but just in case, I figured I would ask. Where is a decent source of PC gaming reviews? I am looking for a site or two where I can find well written reviews that target RPG and RTS games. I have not been a PC gamer for years, and I doubt I will be again anytime soon. With that said, I have this jones thing going for AoE right now, so I may as well do some reading to see what is out there popular, cult favorites, or something off the well-worn path.