Je Suis Paris Trash Talk
It is a little hard to get too excited about this weekend’s games with all of what is going on across the pond in Paris. My daughter had been scheduled to be in Paris yesterday and for the weekend until a last minute change in one of her classes left her still in England. You cannot imagine how relieved we were that she was not there. But there are friends of this blog that do live in Paris and/or have significant family there, and our thoughts go out to them.
With that said, we’ll take a brief look at the sporting festivities this weekend, even if the realities of the world have brutally reminded us that games are just that. In fact, there was a rather large soccer match in Paris between France and Germany that got that reminder up close and personal yesterday.
In the college ranks, by far the biggest matchup is in the Big-12 where Oklahoma travels to Baylor. The Bears are a home favorite by 3, but Oklahoma is more than capable of pulling off a win. Baylor was once in the top four in rankings, but now is not. If they want a spot in the playoff, the push starts today. The Ducks are at the Tree in the Pac-12 in another make or break game. The Ducks are having a really down year for them, but they are getting healthier and they can really wound the standings by felling the Tree tonight. I look for an upset here, though will be rooting for the Trees. Alabama is a Mississippi State, where the Bulldogs are tough, but there is no reason to believe the Tide won’t keep rolling.
In the NFL, the game of the week is obviously the Lions at the Pack on the Tundra. Naw, just kidding, the Kittehs haven’t won on the Pack’s home turf in 24 years, and they are not going to start now. The real game of the week is the Cards at Seattle, which is the Sunday Night game on NBC. Unlike last year, the Cards are pretty healthy for their trip to the Northwest. But so are the Squawks, and both teams are coming off a bye week. I am going to go with Seattle here simply because they are at home, if it was in Phoenix, the edge would go the other direction. The other big game is the Patriots at the Gents. Eli has always been Good Eli against Bel, Brady and the boys, and the Giants as a whole sure don’t fear them. But New York’s defense is not what it once was and Brady is on a mission. Take the Pats here, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
The Brazilian Grand Prix is this weekend. Practice has been fairly predictable, and qualifying has not gone off yet, so no grid to report. But the racing is almost always good at Autódromo José Carlos Pace in Interlagos. Personally, I am hoping for a big race from Felipe Massa in his home country. And Massa usually does race well at Interlagos.
Lastly, the second Democratic debate is, for some idiotic reason, Saturday night. Are the Dems trying to be irrelevant, or just stupid? One thing is sure, the Paris attacks will loom large over the affair. Hard to see how this doesn’t favor Clinton, as Bernie and O’Malley have nowhere near the chops to hang with her on this kind of subject. Sanders, distressingly, still has little to no meaningful foreign policy in his stump speeches. That was always going to catch up to him sooner or later, methinks it is sooner now.
The music today is the French national anthem. La Marseillaise is a gorgeous anthem. I had not heard it in many years, and had forgotten how beautiful it is. I usually hear national anthems from other nations in relation to Formula One, but there have been no winners from France in a while.