Tag Archives: NCAA

Optipessimism Week 10: UNC – Virginia Tech

Duke fans, you actually might want to read this one.

A disclaimer as we get into it: I’m going to talk very little about the UNC-VT game. Want to know why? Okay, what was the score of the game?

If it took you more than a couple seconds to come up with the answer, VT 24 – UNC 21, well, that’s why. UNC played hard in this game for about the first eight minutes, folded the middle thirty, then decided to make the score respectable toward the end. I just can’t get excited about a team that seems like it has tuned out for the season, just as many Carolina fans have. The score wasn’t nearly as close as it looked, because let’s be honest – if you watched the game, you knew that all the Hokies had to do if they wanted to score was run jailbreak screen passes and send their phenomenal tailback, David Wilson, on stretch plays and wait for UNC to miss seven tackles.

So UNC sits at 6-5 on the season, with wins over most of the “bad” teams on their schedule except NC State (yes, they really do suck) and losses to most of the “good” teams like Virginia Tech, Clemson, and GT. With just one game left in the season – the annual Victory Bell game against Duke – it’s a fairly safe bet to say this has been an underachieving, mediocre edition of Carolina football. But really, who can blame them considering the events of the summer and fall? After all, they’re still going to go to a bowl game….

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Optipessimism Week 9: UNC – Wake Forest

There are many things I don’t understand in this world. How they get peanut butter into Reese’s peanut butter cups. Why Diet Coke, a drink consisting mostly of toxic chemicals and poisonous gas, tastes so amazingly good. How announcers Dan Hawkins and Pam Ward are even hirable, much less employed. But maybe the most vexing part of football I can’t figure out is why the replay system has to take so long.

It doesn’t help that there are two entirely different sets of rules for replay between the pros and college. It doesn’t much matter what system is used, though; the process takes entirely too long. This really wouldn’t bother anyone if the decisions being made were earthshaking, championship-implication close calls at the end of games that could easily be wrong if they weren’t scrutinized 20 times from every angle. It shouldn’t bother anyone when an obviously wrong call gets challenged. But I take issue with a system that results in a referee taking seven minutes to determine something that a casual fan eating Cheez-Its in front of his TV can figure out in five seconds without even squinting. I think I counted 5 or 6 reviews in the Carolina-Wake rout. Not one of them was remotely contentious. Not one took less than 90 seconds. Not one took me, or my intermittently-napping father, more than 9.

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