Ugly Game of the Week: Week 8

Submitted by stubob on

This week is "All Games Get Thrown in a Hat." Do I go with potential rout Alabama versus Tennessee? Or Zook-fest Northwestern versus Purdue? Or Overrated-alert Penn State versus Northwestern? ACC implosion Maryland versus FSU? MACular bird-fight Temple Owls versus Bowling Green Falcons? But no to all of that, I'm going with Bad Pun Game of the Week: Rutgers versus Louisville.

But first, last week's Blowout-tacular. Since I had 5 games "sous surveillance" (pretentious French way of saying "on watch" that I just made up), we'll deal with them in aggregate. So last week is Good Team versus Bad Team.

First off, Good Team outscored Bad Team 259-51. That pretty much sums up the weekend for Bad Team. In a little more detail, Good Team outgained Bad Team 2874-950 and out-rushed them 1621-590. Good Team had 133 first downs to Bad Team's 52. Bad Team was 14 of 67 on third down. I couldn't bring myself to do the punting stats, but I imagine they punted around the Earth. So, the takeaway is that when the top 5 play conference cupcakes, bad things will happen. This should not be news.

This week is Rutgers versus Louisville. Louisville is 2-4, and the polite thing to say is they have a stingy defense, at 16th nationally giving up 17.7 PPG. The not polite thing is to say they suck at offense, ranked 111th and scoring 16.3 PPG. They've got a win over Kentucky 24-17, and three straight losses to Marshall, UNC and Cinci, and haven't scored three touchdowns in any of those three games.  Rutgers is 5-1 but not so fast my friend. They went to double OT against Syracuse, and beat Navy by a point last week. They lost to UNC 24-22, so head-to-head I think Louisville has the advantage. Since this game is the Cardinals versus the Scarlet Knights, I'm giving it the slogan "Scarlet Fever: Catch It!"