Notre Dame Gets Routed
September 16, 2006 – 10:41 pmI guess all those whispers about Notre Dame being overrated really were true. Notre Dame got destroyed by Michigan at home today by a score of 47-21. And it was worse than the score indicates.
This was that classic combination of Michigan’s offensive and defensive units whipping Notre Dame’s defensive and offensive units, respectively. And neither matchup was that close. When Chad Henne wasn’t finding Mario Manningham on his way to the endzone, Mike Hart was running over or through Michigan defenders. When Prescott Burgess wasn’t intercepting a Brady Quinn pass, LaMarr Woodley was wreaking havoc in the backfield. It was a pretty thorough domination.
Texas took care of business and whipped Rice 52-7. Next week we have Iowa State, the week after we have Sam Houston State, and then we get to Oklahoma. A couple of more tuneups for the big one.
Alright, I’m going to try to predict the AP’s top 25 that should come out some time tomorrow.
- Ohio State
- Auburn
- USC
- West Virginia
- Michigan
- Florida
- Texas
- Georgia
- Louisville
- Virginia Tech
- LSU
- Notre Dame
- Iowa
- Oregon
- TCU
- Cal
- Arizona State
- Boston College
- Penn State
- Oklahoma
- Tennessee
- Florida State
- Nebraska
- Miami (FL)
- Clemson
3 Responses to “Notre Dame Gets Routed”
Thanks for giving us (Rice) a pity touchdown. The massive loss to Texas is made acceptable by two things: 1) Texas is in the top 10 and Rice is in the bottom 25, so what do you expect; 2) Rice put up a good showing against UofH (31-30, UofH) and UCLA (26-16 UCLA). The scores of the UofH and UCLA games were much better than I could have hoped for. Rice has a new coach and a new athletic director that seem to be turning the team around a little bit. I have hope that we might actually have a winning season in a couple years.
As for the ranking of Florida and Tennessee, I would agree with Tennessee’s ranking being near the bottom of the top 25, but Florida should not be in the top 10. They only managed to beat Tennessee by one, and while both teams put up a good fight, Florida’s Chris Leak needs a lot of work if he’s going to lead a Top 10 team. On the whole, I think that the teams were pretty well matched. Both sides made some dumb mistakes, but had Tennessee avoided a couple of key penalties they would have won the game. Anyway, it looks like Florida managed to get the #5 spot, which isn’t surprising, but they certainly don’t deserve it.
By Adam on Sep 17, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Oh, and Tennessee only dropped from #13 to #15, which is nice. Also, I just checked, and the ESPN Bottom 10 list for this week hasn’t been posted, but I have no doubt that Rice will be on it.
By Adam on Sep 17, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Yeah, I probably punished Tennessee too much for losing to a highly-ranked Florida team. But, losing at home is always worse than losing on the road, and I guess that’s why I moved Florida up a bunch and Tennessee down a bunch.
I see the real AP poll has Florida #5 and Michigan #6, and I just don’t see that. Granted, I watched hardly none of the Florida/Tennessee game, but it would be hard to convince me that Florida is a better team right now than Michigan is.
And as for Rice, I have heard several times that they are much improved from the last few seasons, and I can see that a bit, as much as one can see that in a 52-7 defeat. Against Texas, it’s mostly a matter of speed. We could execute poorly across all three phases of the game and still win by double digits just because we have the speed to make up for our errors against a team like Rice. Against Ohio State, that’s another story.
By jjk on Sep 18, 2006 at 9:20 am