CFB '23 - Week 12 Preview
Giving the people what they need while on a devious blend of Fig Newtons and prescription painkillers
A Short Note While On The Mend
Some Home Cooking In A Palouse Courtroom
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ESPN Has Clear Target For Gameday At Pac-2 School, Instead Goes As Far Away As Possible Within Contiguous 48 States To Highlight Sun Belt
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Few Tight Games This Week Portends Something Insane
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It’s Bertolina, Olsen and Everyone Else With Three Weeks Left
The Nobody Wants Us Bowl
Ever since Leigh Corso mumbled these fateful words on air in reference to Oregon State and Washington State playing each other in Week 4, and ever since, subsequently, the men whose job it is to bluster with the shallow ego of mechanical confidence manufactured further controversy for the folks at home, there has existed a dissonance between the two Leftover Schools and the Worldwide Leader.
They acknowledge each other through a third prism, never confronting each other directly, never making eye contact. They meander around the college football landscape with the telekinetic awareness and avoidance of the kind used by high school students who used to be friends, but who are still in the same larger group of 10 to 12 kids, staying on opposite sides of their amoebas at all times.
In spite of ESPN’s best efforts to make it about ESPN, Corso’s quip became a vessel through which to experience people’s genuine anger over the dissolution of the power conference framework as we know it, and the establishment of clear winners and clear losers. Some would argue it’s the vessel through which to experience people’s anger over ESPN’s role (or that of a zealous president-professor duo) in dissolving the Pac-12.
One of the Losers is hosting what is undoubtedly the biggest game of the college football weekend, in terms of CFP implications, in terms of Pac-12 championship implications, and in terms of the ratings of the two teams involved. It is their final home game as a Pac-12 school (I don’t care it they use the brand next year for a two-team conference) and it comes on the week in which a judge ruled that it and the other Loser, Washington State, control the assets of the Pac-12 conference — though few can account precisely for those assets’ value.
It will be many years before this school hosts another game with this level of national implications, and every story line you could possibly want is in play.
The arbiters of what we’re supposed to give our time and attention to in college football don’t seem to see the same appeal.
In a reactionary move by the commish, there was a brief flirtation this week with the idea of making every “game” on the card some variation on a Washington-Oregon State prop bet.
In lieu of such foolishness, I hope those of you with a few moments this Saturday afternoon tune into the game in Corvallis.
The national implications are only gravy. It deserves to be feted as the end of an era.
Week 12 Card
Don’t get rhinoplasty if you can help it.
