Thanksgiving Thoughts

It has been a long Thanksgiving break for me, with so many sports stories swirling around and so little time to work on my end-of-semester papers. Sigh. But I have decided on this Monday morning to at least provide some cursory comments on the events of the last week.

-College Football obviously needs a playoff system. Everyone agrees on it now right? We all know that USC and Michigan should have a chance to play each other for the chance to play Ohio St. What I haven't heard anyone talk about is how/why it is going to happen. Cases have been made about how the bowls can host the games and money still goes in. No one can ignore college basketball's success with March Madness. I want to know who is holding this up.

-Davidson basketball confounds fans. After getting trounced by Duke at Cameron, no two Davidson fans has the same feeling from this game. I have heard that we were killed inside, and that we held our own. We played together for most of the game, and yet we had no chemistry. What I do know is that Jason Richards needs some help. We really have no adequate back-up at the point and there are many teams in the SoCon that are going to give us ballhandling fits. We will only emerge into a conference contender if we can effectively get into our half-court offense.

-With their offensive line not as good as it could be, the Carolina Panthers are fading back into the rest of the pack. The Panthers have been streaky all season as they have demolished good teams and been beaten by lesser teams. The common denominator for this season, however, is that Jake Delhomme is nothing special. The Panthers have shown that they have some great elements with Smith, Johnson, Williams, Peppers, Lucas...but they cannot rely on Jake anymore. In the Panthers' five losses, three of them came as direct results of late-game Delhomme turnovers. The only times that Weinke has gotten any substantial playing time in the last few years, he has led the Panthers to late-game victory drives. If Parcells can do it with Romo, why can't we do it with Weinke?

-For all of last week, Post and Courier beat writer David Caraviello wrote tomes on the character and insight of Bobby Cremins. After finding fault with his big inside presence Josh Jackson, Cremmins sat the forward so he could think about his attitude. According to Caraviello, Cremmins doesn't worry all that much about schemes and plays, rather he spends his energy worrying about the character of his team. At the outset, I think it is great that these CofC players realize that they won't play if they don't get their head in the game, but somehow all of Charleston is trying to convince themselves that Cremmins really does know what he's doing out there. They are trying to forget how he always only played 6 players throughout the season and how his players never really seemed to do more than what seemed natural for them. Apparently, it's all about brawn, speed and athleticism without a plan. Somehow I don't think that even Cremmins is going to get this bunch back into the SoCon title game.