The Gambling Man

I didn't have fun researching and playing last week, and fun is sine qua non for the gambling man. By Thursdays I have predicted the Las Vegas lines. Yesterday I didn't and had decided to write that I was going to fold 'em. Then I saw the top 25 lines. I'm baaack.

Dime on #7 Michigan State getting 19 points in 'Umbus versus #5 Ohio State.

Clemson -4.5- #13 Woke Forest. Nickel on Woke.

Nickel on #12 Oklahoma spotting Iowa State 3.5 in Norman.

I'm not playing Virginia at #20 Pitt -14.5 but that's too much.

This is head coach Pat Narduzzi's seventh season at Pitt and it will almost certainly be his best season. Theare 8-2. In three of the six previous seasons Pat's Pitt won eight games, his high-water mark. It's probable that Pitt will win ten games out of thirteen or fourteen, which includes the presumed ACC championship game and the predicted Cheez-it Bowl. For 2022 Pitt will attempt to build on this apparent break-out season with the addition of 21st best recruiting class in the country.

The future's so bright we gotta wear shades. No. 2021 was a harmonic conversion of the the COVID-ravaged 2020 season and the scheduling gods. The first part of this harmony was the return of, I think it's eleven, players granted an extra year because of the COVID. Among those returnees record-setting quarterback Kenny Pickett was obviously the key. Those "special seniors" as well as the regular seniors will depart now. Twenty-first ranked freshman cannot be expected to fill those special shoes.

The second part of the harmony in 2021 was: no Notre Dame, no PSU, a shockingly poor Clemson team, an almost equally shocking North Carolina team, and the remaining three most treacherous opponents at home. Pitt had one challenging road game, Tennessee, which it won. They still managed to get upset by one of those three homies and disgustedly by Western Michigan. Next season opens with West Virginia visiting Heinz Field and Tennessee the week after. We then have a return date with Western Michigan in Kalamazoo. That's the first three and there's a better's chance they all could be L's. Let's be optimistic and say we go 2-1. After a cupcake win against Rhode Island makes us 3-1 we hit the road for successive games at Louisville, at Miami, and at North Carolina. Reasonably could lose all three of those, too. But, continuing our optimism, let's say we win two. Our record is now 5-2. We conclude with Duke, Georgia Tech, Syracuse, and Virginia Tech at home and at Virginia in the final game of the season. 8-4 is optimistic but within the standard deviation of reason. 5 and 7 would be pessimistic but also within reason. A bowl game in the first scenario and we might reasonably finish 9-4. That would be amazingly good in a major rebuilding year.

Beyond 2022 the horizon, at present, is dark. After their Pat-best 2021 recruiting class Pitt currently has the...56th-rated class in the land for 2022. The early signing period is almost upon us, there's another in 2022 and there's always the summer season when Narduzzi has traditionally done some heavy-lifting. Throw a couple transfers into that mix, too. The incoming freshman class for 2023 may be higher ranked than 56th when all is said and done  but it is not possible for a class to suddenly jump, say 25 places to equal 2021's 21st-ranked edition. 2022 is an extremely disappointing recruiting class for Narduzzi and his coaches. By 2023 the 2021 class will be making its impact felt but it will be all on that class. There will be little to no contribution from the abysmal 2022 class. And then we're at 2024, the 2021 class will be mature, the 2022 class will start to drag down the roster and Heather Lyke will have a decision to make for 2024 is the last year of Narduzzi's contract. It's highly likely of course that Heather will make the decision ahead of the contract expiration. It is rare, but not unheard of (see Walt Harris), for a coach to enter his final season in limbo. That messes with recruiting however, which is why it's rare. Imo, as you probably intuit, Pat Narduzzi does not deserve a contract extension. In 2024 he will have been at Pitt for ten years. We need a change. I think Heather will think we need a change after ten years also, but I trust her completely on this. 

If Heather Lyke makes a change, and she's a go-big A.D., she made a serious run at Dan Hurley for basketball, who chose UConn instead, and her back-up, Jeff Capel, looked at the time to be more inspired first-choice than back-up, but Jeff has not worked out so far; if she makes a change go-big Heather will be greatly aided by Chris Bickell, the generous Pitt alum who endowed the football head coaching position with $20M. In the past when Pitt has been successful in hiring a head football coach they have gone for a big head coach at a smaller school--Johnny Majors from Iowa State, Jackie Sherrill from Washington State, Mike Gottfried from Kansas--rather than go the assistant route, Harris, Narduzzi, Foge Fazio, Paul Hackett. I don't envision, even with Mr. Bickell's godsend Pitt ever going big-big like USC, LSU, Alabama, A&M (to whom we lost Jackie Sherrill). We're content with 7-5, 8-4, occasionally nine or ten win seasons, and are forgiving of even 5-7. We're a modest school that has never punched its weight as a university. We're something like the 35th-most richly endowed university in the world, but our academic rank in the U.S. is around where our 2022 football recruiting class is, about 56th. Like the residents of Lake Woebegone "above average" is where Pitt values itself in sports and as a university, despite our fabulous endowment. The premium in the next football hire should be on the best recruiter, that's the unique, in Pitt's recent history, combination that Gottfried had. I'd take an assistant who is an ace recruiter over a good-at-small head any day of the week and twice on Sunday's.

Has sense left the 'Ouse? Kansas State -1.5- #11 Baylor. In my judgment it makes no sense to make an unranked (but 7-3) team a favorite, even at home, against the #11 team. But that line is too close. No play.

#24 Utah -3 #3 Oregon. ????? No play.

Outside the top 25 I'm tempted to take Rutgers getting 17 at PSU. Rutgers is 5-5, PSU 6-4. Greg Schiano is a fine coach as is James Franklin when he's not tilted. As I sat down to write this post I was thinking, something is very wrong at PSU, I don't know if it's James wanting away, James realizing he's not going to get away, he seems to be having a mid-life, mid-career crisis. I just don't know where the guy's head is, and consequently the collective head of his team. Too, the Michigan loss last week brought some structural flaws with this team into sharper view: They don't have a run game, and I hadn't noticed that to be perfectly candid; Second, their run defense blows; Third, James continues to make 4th-and-dumb calls--the fake field goal from hell; Finally, I was forcefully impressed that James Franklin wants one kind of quarterback, just one, the dual-threat. He didn't have that when he first got to State College, he had Christian Hackenberg as a prized leftover from the fleeting Bill O'Brien years. Hackenberg was a five-star pro-style QB and, the future. James just about got him killed in the 2015 season, so woeful was the PSU O-line. Trace McSorley was more James' style and when Hackenberg decided to get an NFL life insurance annuity after the 2015 season McSorley was James' guy. Now James almost got McSorley whacked too! but McSorley was James' kind of QB. He could run James' offense. Sean Clifford is a McSorley clone, and Iowa almost killed McSorley and won the game. All to say: 1) James acknowledged he was unprepared to lose McSorley. 2) James acknowledged he was unprepared for Pitt's star wars offense when Matt Canada was OC. 3) James acknowledged he was unprepared for the Temple loss (27-10) in 2015. 4) James has been unprepared a lot. 5) Rutgers has a tough defense. McSorley is going to get tagged. Rutgers can't score--like Illinoise couldn't score in the Dystopia Bowl, which PSU lost. I'm talking myself into taking Rutgers getting 17 but I ain't there yet.

I thought about this earlier, also: What if Rutgers wins? PSU and James Franklin are like two scorpions in a bottle right now. Just last year PSU and James signed a new six-year contract! Before this whole season went sideways James held the leverage, he was headed to SC and they'd take care of his $4M buyout. PSU would be rid of an excellent but demanding and distracted coach and his salary. Now that the season has gone sideways the two scorpions are back at equal power, a recalibration that neither scorpion may prefer. I am convinced that James has cost himself the SC and LSU jobs. What are the two scorpions going to do now? In James' view 11 wins a year with losses to two of Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State, the occasional Big Ten title--those are as far as PSU can go today, given, from James' perspective, PSU is not keeping up with the Jones' in the B1G East, where his aforementioned tormentors reside. To win a national championship, or even get into the CFP PSU needs to do more: they need to pay James more (he was the highest paid coach in the entire B1G until the Mel Tucker contract (following post), they need an upgrade in facilities Check. They just approved a $40M+ renovation of the football building, they need to pay assistants more, I don't know, the cheerleaders need to be prettier.  I'm disappointed in James, I thought he knew his football, or at least PSU football history better. PSU won national championships in 1982 and 1986, they finished undefeated in 1994 playing in the same B1G division James now butts his head against.. James was only 10 and 14-years old for the national championships, but he was 22 and Deez Nutz in 1994. So as I was saying, I thought he might be interested enough to look up the team's records since maybe he had been born. It should go without saying that the facilities, the coach's pay, the assistants' pay, are significantly better in real dollars in 2021 than in the early and mid-'80's, and mid-90's and the schedule in 1994 was identical in the conference to what James frustrates himself on. In reality, James Franklin has a warped perception of his plight. Demonstrably, PSU can win national championships, win the B1G, go undefuckingfeated. It is not PSU holding James back, it is James' brain farts and distorted reality that is holding PSU back. Frowny face on James. Franklin is scared.There's a new university prez and new A.D. coming in at PSU. James has a new pitbull agency representing him. PSU and the fan base are put off by James. He has just coached himself out of two elite jobs. It's his fault, not the university's, not the A.D.'s and James will have no leg to stand on when he meets whoever the new prez and A.D. are. If Rutgers wins tomorrow, PSU won't fire Franklin. The two are stuck together in misery. I don't see how this is going to end well, if it ends at all unless James' spectacular 2022 recruiting class bails him out, but, back to first principles, I'm not comfortable playing Rutgers getting 17...I just got comfortable. Nickel on Rutgers.

I'm tempted to play Mizzou (5-5) getting 8.5 at home against Florida (5-5). But I can resist temptation... Actually, I cannot pass on this. Nickel on Mizzou.