heleanth.....on questioning that Army pick...trust me you're not the first person to think I'm crazy for playing them! There's a lot of "hidden" stuff going on.
Army may be the worst team in Division 1A this year and I realize that so it's kinda hard to make logical reasoning in their favor, but they are a team that is making improvements each and every week and this Army team is eyeballing this game as a good opportunity to possibly get their first win which I don't feel they do, but I do think they easily stay within the 2 touchdowns.
In other words, it's not that I'm really high on this Army team, but rather playing against a Houston team that is in complete dissarray both in physical nature, but even more so psycologically! You mention Houston beating that Rice team. True, but that was vs a very inexperienced Rice team in the first game of the year. I believe Rice only had something like 8 total returning starters from the previous year and they had no time to gel yet which I believe the Rice team is doing very quickly. Also it was with a freshman quarterback that Houston was very high on in Barrick Nealy who went out in the Texas game with a season ending knee injury.
Nealy got injured in that Texas game and now has quarterback Nick Eddy in there who was the starter last season when Houston went 0-11 and ranked towards the bottom of the college ranks offensively. They averaged just 17.3 points per game and ranked 112th overall last season. Mentally this was a blow to Houston who got their only 2 wins in the past 2 years with Nealy as quarterback. In case you're wondering, Eddy does not have any scrambling ability unlike Nealy did plus if you look at his numbers so far this season you'll see that Eddy is completing just 43.9% of his passes!
Houston's team confidence got shot even more last week. After being up 28-6 against UAB, they gave up a whopping 38 unanswered points and ended up losing 51-34. Pretty much the 2nd straight week that they collapsed, as they played TCU tough for most of their game the prio week.
There's also a ton of rumors going around the Houston area about head coach Dana Dimel's job. Some are that he's gone after the season, some are if he doesn't beat Army, he's gone after this week. Seems like the fans would like to see the whole coaching staff gone from the stuff I've read from Houston fans on message boards and sites. Nonetheless it's a major distraction for both him and the players, but I don't feel this group of players have ever responded too much with him anyways and you may see a desparate team with a desparate coach making some desparate mistakes in this one...we'll just have to see.
Both teams have major problems in the turnover category this season just as they did last season, and with the possible raining conditions this could be even more of a factor, but also with the possible rain conditions, it could make the game even more tighter.
That's hitting some of my major keys. Personally, I never thought I'd be playing this current Army team, but I took a deep breath and and made the bet...we'll see how it turns out.
That's about it....HOLD YOUR NOSE and take the Cadets
Good luck in all your plays heleanth as well as bigdad2, JCDunkDogs, Tduji, taoist, TIME TO MAKE $$$ :thumb:
loophole..if you're reading this, I feel like I'm playing one of your patented "bad football games of the week" This one might be the worst of the season, just don't tell me you're on Houston or I'm running kurby kurby
-ndnfan
