5 BOROUGH SPORTS

The first weekend in college football wasn’t too exciting this year, but there were plenty of meaningful and interesting scores to discuss. The biggest game of the weekend was Oregon/LSU and the Tigers ended up taking this one easily. It is scary to say this now, but this put Oregon almost completely out of the picture for the National Championship. The Ducks remaining schedule is fairly easy outside a trip to Stanford, and a one loss Oregon team has little to no shot of making it over a one loss team with a tougher schedule. LSU now propels themselves towards the top of college football, but does Les Miles have more magic up his sleeve this season? Can LSU battle through a very tough schedule with only one loss? For now, I still am not sure.

The next biggest matchup was Boise State and Georgia, and Boise took this one pretty easily. Almost from the start Georgia looked very lackluster, and Boise State beat their secondary time and time again. Boise once again leaps into the center of attention, but for some reason this year they don’t seem to be getting the same kind of backing after that performance. With a remaining schedule as easy as they come, with their only real test against a rebuilding TCU team, it is entirely possible they end up 12-0 again. Only problem is if Georgia keeps playing badly and TCU doesn’t turn it around either, then the Broncos will probably end up on the outside looking in for a BCS National Championship bid. In all honestly this Boise team is not as good as last years team and probably will show that as the season progresses with less convincing performances.

Speaking of TCU they looked bad on defense Friday night against Baylor, and it looks like Gary Patterson is going to have to figure out how to rebuild the defense after dominating the last three seasons.

In other games we saw the defending National Champs get shredded by a 4-8 Utah State team, and escape by a miracle. As I’ve been telling you, Auburn is not going to be good at all this year, and they will prove it again next week when Mississippi State comes to town and rolls. South Carolina also got a scare against ECU, but they used turnovers and a switch back to Stephen Garcia to pull away in the second half. Clearly the Gamecocks are good on offense (not with Connor Shaw) but they should be concerned after yielding 37 points to ECU in the opener.

Notre Dame got a lot of attention for their home loss to USF, but I actually think the Irish will be OK. They shot themselves in the foot in this one with some very untimely turnovers. While they aren’t a BCS team, I think they will respond and still win 8 or 9 games this season.

So now that I’ve shared some thoughts I will go ahead and submit to you my top 25 ballot following week 1. Look for a preview and prediction of next weekends games later this week.

1. Alabama

2. Oklahoma

3. LSU

4. Wisconsin

5. Stanford

6. Nebraska

7. Virginia Tech

8. Florida State

9. Oregon

10. Boise State

11. Texas A&M

12. Oklahoma State

13. Ohio State

14. Arkansas

15. South Carolina

16. Florida

17. Mississippi State

18. West Virginia

19. Notre Dame

20. Michigan State

21. Texas

22. Arizona State

23. Michigan

24. South Florida

25. Hawaii

This entry was posted on September 5, 2011 at 10:37 am and is filed under College Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.