College Football Playoff Round 1

Last week I laid out my ideas on how to fix the BCS. Now I am going to go over the match-ups in my tournament start with the 1st round match-ups.

December 22 1st round games:

• West #8 Northern Illinois at West #1 Alabama, at Bryant-Denny Stadium
• East #7 West Virginia at East #2 Stanford, at Stanford Stadium
• East #6 Southern Miss at East #3 Arkansas, at Reynolds Razorback Stadium
• West #5 Clemson at West #4 Oregon, at Autzen Stadium

Alabama vs. Northern Illinois:
This one is pretty straight forward. With the exception of the LSU game no team has gotten within 16 points of the Crimson Tide.  Alabama has beaten four top 25 team while the only top 25 team Northern Illinois played beat them by 42.

Alabama 49 Northern Illinois 10

Stanford vs. West Virginia:
Stanford is the only one of the top four seeds to be facing a team from one of the big six conference, and I use that term with the Big East loosely. West Virginia played 2 top 25 beating Cincinnati by 3 and losing to LSU by 26. Regardless of their schedule they are a quality team and will give Stanford a run for its money. Stanford's only lose was to Oregon and their key wins were against Washington, USC, and Notre Dame. Overall Stanford will come out victorious but the game will be closer than you would expect from a 2-7 match-up.

Stanford 24 West Virginia 21

Arkansas vs. Southern Miss.:
Arkansas really fly under the radar this, but that was more due to the fact the the top two seeds were from the same division in the SEC. Despite that Arkansas still beat three top 25 teams and used their potent offense to beat everyone else except Alabama and LSU. Southern Miss came on late and despite a lose to UAB was able to finish 11-2 including and upset over undefeated Houston in the CUSA championship game. You would think that their recent experience would give them a chance for the stunner but losing their coach to UNC negates all of that.

Arkansas 41 Southern Miss. 30 

Oregon vs. Clemson:
Overall the best game of the first day of the Bowl Championship Tournament featuring two of the countries most explosive offenses. The biggest factor in this game is the fact that it is in Oregon and Clemson has two travel across the country. Both team get healthy with the two week break but in the end the home field advantage and long travel distance proves two much so Clemson.

Oregon 52 Clemson 42

December 23 1st round games:

• East #8 Louisiana Tech at East #1 Louisiana State, at Tiger Stadium
• West #7 Arkansas State at West #2 Oklahoma State, at Boone Pickens Stadium
• West #6 TCU at West #3 Boise State, at Broncos Stadium
• East #5 Wisconsin at East #4 Kansas State, at Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium

LSU vs. Louisiana Tech:
The most intriguing thing about this game is the fact that both schools are in Louisiana and tickets will be hard to come by. On the field LSU is undefeated and has dominated in every game but one and Tech has 4 losses on the season.

LSU 45 Louisiana Tech 6

Oklahoma State vs. Arkansas State:
Arkansas St is a great story, coming from out of nowhere to win 10 games and getting Hugh Freeze the Ole Miss job. Losing their head coach and the inability to cover Justin Blackmon allows the Pokes to move on to the next round in a romp.

Oklahoma State 35 Arkansas State 13

Boise State vs. TCU:
This is the only match-up of conference teams as well as the only the rematch of the 1st round. Once again the game takes place at Boise and if it is anything like the first game we should be in for a thriller. Both teams are evenly matched but the weather in Boise give the Broncos a small advantage which is all that it take to make sure the Boise's deficiencies in the kicking game don't show up for at least one week.

Boise State 35 TCU 31

Kansas State vs. Wisconsin:
A Midwest match-up taking place at the home of one of the surprising teams in college football this year. Kansas State lost both of their games against top 10 team and only narrowly beat Baylor and Texas. Wisconsin on the other hand only lost games within the last minute so as long as they have at least a one score lead they should be fine. Ultimately the more all around team pulls off the only upset of the 1st round.

Wisconsin 31 Kansas State 20

This sets up the next round of games to be:
December 30 Quarterfinal games:

• West #4 Oregon vs. West #1 Alabama, at the Rose Bowl
• West #3 Boise State vs. West #2 Oklahoma State, at the Fiesta Bowl

December 31 Quarterfinal games:

• East #5 Wisconsin vs. East #1 LSU, at the Outback Bowl
• East #3 Arkansas vs. East #2 Stanford, at the Capital One Bowl

College Football Playoff

Every year around this time everyone from casual fans to coaches discuss the problems with the Bowl Championship Series(BCS) and how they would fix it. Of course I have an idea and here it is:

A 16 team tournament featuring the conference champions from all 11 conferences, yes even the WAC and Sun Belt, plus the top 5 at-large team in the Bowl Championship Tournament rankings. The difference between these ranking and the current BCS standings is the fact that my ranking have no human polls which takes that element out of the rankings.

2011 Final Rankings:
The teams highlighted in yellow are the at-large teams.

Based on the rankings the teams in the 2011 Bowl Championship Tournament are:
LSU, Alabama, Oklahoma St., Stanford, Arkansas, Boise St., Oregon, Kansas St., Wisconsin, Clemson, TCU, Southern Miss., West Virginia, Arkansas St., Northern Illinois, Louisiana Tech
The at-large team come from the SEC(2), Big 12, Pac-12, and Mountain West.

The teams are ranking based on their place in the poll and matched up just how they should be in a 16 team bracket. The 1-16, 4-13, 5-12, and the 8-9 match-ups are in the East bracket while the other four game are in the West. The brackets swap each year and defined by the location of the 2nd and 3rd round games. The East bowl games are Outback, Capital One, and Orange and the West bowl games are Rose, Cotton, and Fiesta. The seventh bowl game is the Sugar bowl which this year is hosting the championship game. They rotate around each year so each bowl gets the championship once every 7 years and a semifinal game every 3-4 years. The 1st round game take place at the home of the highest ranked team which encourages team to play well during the season to get an extra home game.

Here is the bracket with the 1st round match-ups.

December 22 1st round games:

• West #8 Northern Illinois at West #1 Alabama, at Bryant-Denny Stadium
• East #7 West Virginia at East #2 Stanford, at Stanford Stadium
• East #6 Southern Miss at East #3 Arkansas, at Reynolds Razorback Stadium
• West #5 Clemson at West #4 Oregon, at Autzen Stadium

December 23 1st round games:

• East #8 Louisiana Tech at East #1 Louisiana State, at Tiger Stadium
• West #7 Arkansas State at West #2 Oklahoma State, at Boone Pickens Stadium
• West #6 TCU at West #3 Boise State, at Broncos Stadium
• East #5 Wisconsin at East #4 Kansas State, at Bill Snyder Family Football Stadium

A number of intriguing games and over the next couple of day I will be making predictions for all of these games and eventually crowning a BCT champion.

RIM to get ride of Blackberry?

At one point a few years ago the cool phones out there were Blackberries. They were the top choice of business people and many kids wanted them as well. Since then Apple has released it's hugely popular IPhone and Google has developed it's Android OS which is used in tons of the newest phones. These two developments have dropped RIM, Blackberry's maker, market share to around 9% down from 24% last year. There may be a day soon were Blackberries don't exist anymore but will RIM go down with the ship?
Not if they have anything to say about. From this article on MSNBC RIM is looking to become the IBM of the mobile phone world. RIM just announced Blackberry Mobile Fusion which is security software aim at its Blackberry phones as well as IOS and Android phones. Fusion can handle all the apps, password and other software currently being run on all of the phone it supports. It also can wipe the memory of a stolen or lost phone and is set up to keep people from leaving Blackberry Enterprise Servers, which are used by many businesses. Hopefully this software will be a success and give RIM time to revamp it's phone line to compete with Apple and Google because losing a company that has such a great history in phones would defiantly hurt the industry.

Change in Technology Interview

For extra credit my History 341 professor asked us to interview an elderly relative about how history has changed in the last 50 or so years. I decided to interview Mary Meah, who is a longtime family friend and previously served as my brothers and I’s nanny back in the day.

Can you give me a quick rundown of your life and how you ended up in Florida?

I was born and raised in Portsmouth in southern England and grew up during World War II. My son was a soccer coach and he came to America 34 years ago. He coached in Chicago as part of an exchange program. At the end of the program he wanted to come back full time and he did, finishing high school and getting a soccer scholarship at a small college. I came to Florida for the warm weather after living in Colorado for a number of years. I’ve always wanted to come to America ever since I was a child. It started when I would see the American sailors in Portsmouth and that created an ambition to come and live in America.

What is the biggest change in technology for you in the last 50 years?

Definitely in the medical field, it phenomenal the way people live much longer now. Back in England sixty was really old and now many people live into their nineties. The MRIs, heart transplants, and such have been vast technological advancements.

How was the technology different in America than it was in England when you moved here?

• For a start obviously everybody had to have a car and they were much bigger than they were in England. The roads were very different and the freeways blew my mind.

• When I left England approximately half of the people had a telephone in their house while in America everyone had a phone.

• Television was very different, when I left England there were only two channels and they wouldn’t come on till the evening. But they seem to be catching up every time I go back. When I originally came England was 7 to 10 years behind America in technology.

• When I was growing up we didn’t have a fridge until I was 18 and it was so tiny that the only thing in it was a bottle of milk and butter. For food we would just go out buy it and then eat it immediately.

What one piece of technology do you wish you had 50 years ago?

Well I got to say the computer for the knowledge you can get. All we had was the library to get all of our knowledge.

Tell me a story about technology in your life?

We didn’t have a telephone when I was growing up. The first phone I had was for my hairdressing business. Most of us just used telephone boxes, which was within 3 or 4 miles of our house. The only people that had telephones were business and the wealthy. Cars and telephone seemed to go hand in hand. My father was extremely nervous about picking up the telephone, he basically wouldn’t. Even when I asked him at my business he wouldn’t pick it up because he was nervous of someone being on the other end of the line. It wasn’t just him, a lot of people felt the same way about phone because most of the time it was bad news that would be passed over the phone. The most important events were transmitted by telegrams and were delivered by a telegram boy, my family would be afraid to get the door because they didn’t want to hear bad news.

SCRIW

This weekend The Hitchhikers attended the first annual South Carolina Robotics Invitational and Workshops. I was able to convince the team to go after all the fun that I had at TNT last month. I volunteered to ref the event to get more experience before next season. After the long drive down Friday night, including a stop at FU to visit Lauren, we were all up before 7 so we could arrive at the venue right around when it opened at 7:30.
After we got to Columbia High School and got all settled in I went to go check out the field and was told by the event organizers that the SC/NC head ref, Terrell, who was coming to SCRIW to head ref was at a Lego League event and wasn't going to be in until the afternoon and until then I would be filling in as head ref. Naturally I accepted and got to train the rest of the refs and scorekeepers. Overall the event went really well and I once again really enjoyed being on the field crew. Even when Terrell arrived just near the end of qualifying he was cool with letting me continue to head ref and was more than happy to help.
Getting to see how another offseason event, besides TNT, is run was interesting especially since I am trying to put together an offseason event in North Carolina. It also showed how spoiled we are at TNT, not that SCRIW was badly run because it wasn't. At SCRIW the AndyMark guys were running the field and the rest of field crew was a bit shorthanded, while at TNT Krunch basically supplies the entire field crew made up of alumni and mentors. It showed me that not only do you need enough teams but you also need volunteers and hopefully North Carolina has them.
As for team 2059, we went 2-4 was seeded 17th and 17 and was not selected for elimination. It wasn't really that disappointing to me because I was working, what I was really disappointed about was the fact that we seemed to have the same problems, with the robot and the team, which we had at North Carolina. Despite having a bunch of new students and 6 months to work on the robot we still aren't up to our potential. Hopefully we can correct these problems and get the team firing on all cylinders by January.

Atomic Bomb Dismantled

Yesterday workers in Amarillo, Texas removed the uranium from the last B53 nuclear bomb. This marks a huge moment for this country because the B53 were the largest nuclear bombs ever created by the United States. The B53 which is the size of a minivan weighed in at around 5 tons and was 600 times more powerful then the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. The size was due to the inaccuracies of older nuclear bomb, newer bombs are smaller but they are also better aimed to reduce collateral damage.

While the nuclear bomb was one of the most deadly technological advances of all time the science behind it cannot be ignored. Before nuclear bombs were created near the end of World War II nuclear reactions were completely unknown to the world. Through the development of nuclear bombs like the B53 we have been able to harness the power of nuclear reactions for electricity which releases less pollution then standard coal-fired power plants.

The dismantling of the bomb is part of the United States larger effort to reduce and possibly eliminate all nuclear weapons throughout the world. The two countries with the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia, built most of them during the arm race that was the Cold War. The rest of the countries that have nuclear weapons recieved the technology from one of the original two countries. The UN has been trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and hopefully the START treaty that the US and Russia signed will lead these countries to reduce their nuclear stockpile as well.
For a list of state with nuclear weapons click this link.

High-Speed Rail

During the late 1800s if you wanted to travel long distances trains were the way to go. Trains helped to shape the United States and make it what it is today. With the invention of air travel, which was much faster, trains fell out of favor and mainly served to transport cargo. The combination of rising gas prices and the recent recession have seen a rebirth of travel by railroad. Amtrak has shown record ridership over the last year and is looking to expand routes.

The other type of rail travel that has been gaining steam is high-speed rail. Basically high-speed rail is just the same as normal passenger rail except that the trains travel an upward of 200 mph compared to 60-80 mph. It has caught on in Europe and Japan because of the proximity of large cities in those two areas. Trying to recreate that success in the United States the Obama administration identified 10 high-speed rail corridors ranging from the California corridor to the Empire corridor. Both my hometown of Tampa and my current city, Raleigh, were featured in potential corridors. Tampa, as part of the Florida corridor, recently had the high-speed rail cancelled because of potential cost overruns. Raleigh, as part of the Southeast corridor, is still working on the rail route from Richmond. While high speed rail is really interesting and I have always been a big train fan, I just don't see the potential reward for the cost unless there is already a route between the two planned locations.