I made a comment about Maryland’s loss to Boston College without actually reading anything except the score. I had assumed that their last quarterback survived the game. I was wrong. Turns out Caleb Rowe became the 3rd Maryland QB to tear an ACL this year, leaving the Terps without true quarterback. The Terps next turn to “Shawn Petty, a 240-pound linebacker who ran an option attack in high school.”

Clemson plays Maryland on Nov 10th.

Making my memories of that horrible day in October that much worse the latest ESPN Bottom 10 ranks Maryland as #9. Maryland, in case you hadn’t noticed, finished the season at 2-10 — their only other win coming in overtime against JMU.

Per FanBlogs, if I’m reading this correctly, the NCAA has finally changed one of their stupidest rules that Clemson stupidly broke repeatedly.

Offensive Scrimmage Formation (Rules 1-1-1-b-2 and 7-1-3-b) The requirement for having at least seven offensive players on the line of scrimmage has been re-stated to allow no more than four players in the backfield. This is not a rule change but merely a different way of writing the same requirement. It does eliminate the foul for a team having ten players when there are only six on the line of scrimmage. Otherwise, the requirements for scrimmage formations remain the same.

I know that penalty cost us the ’05 game at Georgia Tech as well as the ’06 game against Maryland. Did it cost us the ’08 Maryland game as well? [Edit: I guess not, it was some other stupid penalty.]

Sorry, no picture this time. But I just made it here from Reno, sharing the plane with some guys from the Nevada football team. I think they’re heading to Boise (not sure why they’re going through Oakland because my other choice out of Reno was Boise). But I hope they kick the crap out of Maryland. God I hate Maryland.

My apologies for the conference standings being out-of-date. The reason they’re out-of-date is a matter of me being both lazy and outgoing at the same time. Being as the process requires weekly updating, the outgoing me set up a mostly automated system. That system relies on the CSTV conference standings page, which simply hasn’t been updated lately. Lazy me refuses to manually update the standings, so until CSTV (#1 in college sports, or so they claim) updates their site, I won’t update ours.

But how screwed up are the standings anyway? Every team has at least 1 conference loss, and it is almost hard to believe that any of those one-loss teams (FSU, Maryland, and Virginia) will be able to avoid dropping another league game. FSU still faces GT, BC, Clemson and Maryland. Maryland still has VT, UNC, FSU and BC. Virginia still faces Miami, Wake, Clemson and Virginia Tech. Two of the teams could finish with only 1 league loss, but I’m not willing to bet that any of the three will. That means that practically every team, minus Clemson and NC State, has a pretty decent chance of being able to win their division. That doesn’t say much for the conference this year, nor does it say much for Clemson.

Update: I gave up on CSTV and modified standings process to run off yahoo instead. The standings should be updated. However, as I say that, I still see the old version, which means that at this point I don’t have a clue what’s going on.

I’ve got a gut feeling that UVA will beat Maryland. Why? Because it just doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

Time is not on my side. I’ve spent time the last two days putting word to page about the upcoming Clemson-Maryland game. Obviously, none of those words have actually made it to the blog. So now, to try to actually get something published before the game actually starts, I’ll leave you all with the following.

Living in Northern Virginia, as I do, I have the opportunity to see a lot of Maryland football games being replayed on TV. As such, I have gotten to see large chunks of their victories against both a ranked Cal team and a frequently-badly-beaten Eastern Michigan team.

Maryland undoubtedly deserves credit for winning those games. The fact is they’re 3-1 with a win over a top-25 team while we are top-25 team that’s 3-1 with wins over no one particularly important; makes our season-to-date pale in comparison, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, one is not left with the impression that Maryland is that good a football team. They are perhaps more opportunistic than good. The bad news for UMD and the good for Clemson is that Maryland’s defense, short of forcing turnovers, seems largely incapable of stopping people. Cal had a ton of yards and long drives, as did EMU. The UMD-EMU game would likely have been much different had Maryland not picked off a pass in the end zone early in the game after the Eagles had driven almost the entire length of the field.

Some journalists have suggested that the Tigers may be looking past Maryland to Wake Forest. If that is the case, Saturday will be an extremely long day. The keys to the game are to protect the ball and, most importantly, focus on beating the opponent. If Clemson plays to not lose, they will.

I was just glancing at the odds for ACC teams this week, and one of the lines really surprised me.

Clemson (-11.5) V. Maryland
Duke (-7) V. Virginia
Florida St. (-6) V. Colorado
Miami (-7) V. UNC
Nebraska (-6.5) V. Virginia Tech
South Florida (-8) V. NC State
Wake Forest (-15.5) V. Navy

Yes, Duke, that Duke is favored over Virginia. Ouch.

I’m not sure how I’d bet in our game, but I lean toward the Tigers.