For the past four years I have yet to spend an entire New Year's Eve with my wife.  Last year was the first time we got to see the ball drop together, as she made it in about a minute before midnight.  This year is rare.  Neither of us have to work after six tonight, which means we will be spending the evening together.  I'm pretty excited by that, it's got me in a good mood, and because of that, I figured I would post some picks.  Hopefully these will help people out in their decision making today.

College Football

Air

I'm mailing these picks in this week, for the simple reason that my browser crashed right as I got to the final game, and I have no time to type these picks up again.  To sum it all up, these are going by the best percentages of the system, with a few personal opinions thrown in (Big 12 sucks, ACC sucks, Big Ten sucks except against the Big 12, SEC and Pac-10 are good, Big East is entertaining and better than the ACC, and I hate betting against Dan LeFevour.)

Central Michigan +7.5
Arizona State +2.5
Boston College -3.5
Houston +4
Oregon State -5
UConn

The bowls are tough to predict. It seems that no matter what type of system you have to predict games in the regular season, it all falls apart during the bowl season. There are several reasons for this. Coaches leave a program before the bowl game (West Virginia.) New coaches take over teams with little time to prepare for the bowl, often focusing on the recruiting class (Michigan.) Players get suspended (Florida State). Players play harder with the NFL in sight. (JaMarcus Russell last season.) Teams are disappointed by getting shafted in the bowl selection process, and therefore don

I want to point out a few glaring errors with the current ranking system:

1.  LSU is ranked #7 behind Virginia Tech.  Both have two losses.  I'd imagine if they played each other, LSU would beat the crap out of Virginia Tech.  Unfortunately, there is no way to prove this.  Oh, wait...

2.  Kansas is ranked 5th, despite the fact that they have yet to beat a winning team.  Oh wait, they beat Texas A&M, who are 7-5.  That's justification.

3.  Ohio State and Georgia are done, and will probably benefit from Missouri playing

Just a quick follow up to the intro on the weekday picks.  I was thinking about how likely it would be for West Virginia to make it to the National title game.  I think Kansas goes down this weekend to the first real team they've played, but like I said, I don't think Missouri makes it past the Big 12 title game.  West Virginia has UConn and Pittsburgh, so they have an easy path to the top if Missouri and Kansas get knocked off.  That brings up two other thoughts:

1.  What if LSU loses?  They don't exactly have a cakewalk.  They play Arkansas

The Oregon loss really put the college football picture in turmoil this past weekend.  You could say that it is exciting to see all of those Big 12 teams battling it out in an attempt to play LSU in the National title game.  Personally I'd rather have Ohio State back.  At least they were deserving.

What's that?  Deserving?  How can I call an undefeated Kansas team undeserving of a spot in the National title game?  Well, to this point their best opponent, and actually their only opponent with a winning record, has been Oklahoma State.  At

I was going to write about college football, which would be fitting since this is a college football post.  However, something happened tonight between my initial thought for an intro, and this moment.  For some reason I was entering data for all 119 teams all this time, which took anywhere from 1-2 hours of time.  Tonight I sat here thinking "Why not try to import the data with a web search?"  I did, it worked, and suddenly the 1-2 hours turned in to 5-10 minutes.

To celebrate this new revelation of time saving, I am going to just get right to the picks.&

Last week was a pretty bad week for this new system, considering thus far that the system has fared pretty well.  This week I am doing something different with the weekday picks.  I'm not going to post every game and explain how strong the pick is, I'm just going to post the games with strong picks.  I do this on Saturday, so why post weaker picks on Tuesday-Friday?  Here are the picks: 

Akron +9:  The underdog covers this game type 69% of the time.

Eastern Michigan +13:  Same game type as Akron.

Hawaii/Nevada:  No spread until

Some notes from Saturday before getting to the weekday system picks:

-I'm glad that Boston College lost.  It's nice to have a deserving team at #2.

-Although I'd like to see Ohio State get crushed by LSU, I'd much rather see an Oregon/LSU National title game.

-Speaking of Oregon, the Pac-10 is once again under-rated.  They've got more good teams than the Big 10, Big East, and ACC combined.

-I'm just saying that Ohio State's toughest opponent remaining is the same Michigan team that got killed by Oregon earlier in the year.

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I am an Ohio State fan.

At least that is the team I will be cheering for during the remainder of the season.  This isn't a bandwagon selection.  This is because I simply want to see Ohio State make it to the National title game.

Now if you've read anything I wrote on Ohio State this year, you would find this curious.  Let me fill you in on the other items on my college football wish list:

-I want Boston College to lose a game.

-I want LSU to win their remaining games.

-I want Ohio State and LSU to meet up in the National title game.