A Short Lived Celebration for the Spartans
Typically, this time of year, my wife and I are still camping. We often find a local bar to watch the Michigan State football game at, or we bring the TV outside and we watch it at our campsite. I have several fond memories of watching early season Spartan games while doing some Fall camping. It's a magical time of year.
For a number of reasons, we aren't doing any more camping this year, so @mrsbozz had the great idea of pulling our main TV outside and trying to capture the same feel of camping while at home. Thus, on Saturday afternoon I found myself sitting on our deck watching the Michigan State Spartans take on The Richmond Spiders.
There was a bit of difficulty watching the game as I couldn't determine a good place to put the TV. If we put it on the end of the deck, we would need to run an extension cord for power and as the game progressed, we would be looking directly in to the sun.
On the other hand. Where we ended up putting it on the east side of the deck, we had to deal with the sun reflecting off the window above the TV and the TV itself. It was fine early in the game when there was cloud cover, but after the clouds went away, I struggled to see what was going on.
Ideally, we would have put it on the North side of the deck, but that is where the steps are to get down to the lawn and I am sure Jovi wouldn't have appreciated that. Plus, I was grilling some items and I needed to be able to easily access that area to get to my grill.
It was a good idea, but ultimately, I think we need to pay to get our deck covered when we can come up with the funds. It would solve a lot of problems that we currently have with that space.
This post isn't really about my deck though. This post is about the fact that we are now two weeks into college football and the Spartans aren't looking too shabby so far.
Sure, these are what you might call cupcake games, but the team has some pieces that I think it is worth getting excited about. The new quarterback seems to be settling in, and we have some run and pass options that just might give us a chance in the Big 10.
Honestly, I think the real star so far has been the defense. They have been doing great the past two games. Last week they had a good showing against the Chippewas from Central Michigan, and this week they held Richmond scoreless for pretty much all of the game.
I know the final score was 45 to 14, but to be fair, the first seven of those 14 points didn't come until the fourth quarter when MSU had pulled most of their starters and a ball was fumbled by one of the back up players and ran back for a touchdown.
Likewise, the second touchdown by Richmond also happened well after the game was already decided. It would have been nice to get the shutout, but I am not complaining about a 45 to 14 win.
What I am complaining about is the drama that is suddenly surrounding the program and how that might impact their season. We got word yesterday that head coach Mel Tucker has been removed or suspended pending an investigation into some sexual assault allegations. This is a really bad look for a school that is still reeling from the Larry Nassar scandal.
I am sure there are going to be a lot of snide comments and questions from fans of other teams that don't have the best interest of the Spartans at heart. That's fine.
Let them run their mouth. I think we all know no program is perfect, at least Michigan State is stepping up to take care of it.
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
This is pretty common in early season games. I always think about the "slaughter rule" that existed for kids sports when this happens. I was on teams where we would totally let off the gas if we got too far ahead so that we don't make the other team feel bad by getting destroyed. I'm sure that isn't the motivation in college football though, they were likely just trying to prevent injury to their stars and getting some experience in for the 2nd squad.
Yeah, you are probably right. They still have that to some degree. In high school football they have a running clock in the second half if the score gets to bad. Softball has a run rule. If a team is up by so many runs by a certain inning, they just call the game.
that running clock rule didn't exist when I was in high school, which was a long time ago. We would just run out the clock ourselves on the field and the team that was getting destroyed would do the same. We didn't want to allow points against us because that would affect our yearly stats, but we would start to take it easy and put in our lessor players.
Might be a Michigan thing. I don't know if they still do it. It's been a good thirty years since I was in high school!
same here. I would imagine a lot has changed in the past 3 decades
sweet deck by the way and I feel your pain as far as the glare is concerned. With all the technology that we have this day I am surprised their isn't a technical solution to this.
Well, I know one solution would be to get a cover put on the deck, but last time I talked to my buddy about it he figured it would cost about $20K USD to do that! Thank you!