sam ponder – Page 8 – Cole's Gameday Blog

Week 9 2013: College Gameday review!

Posted on October 26, 2013 by gamedaycole

As great as it was to be on vacation for the last two Saturdays, and as terrible as it is to have to go back to “working for a living”, it is also pretty great to be back to another lazy Saturday complete with a full dose of College Gameday. This week’s edition came to you live (and in the dark) from Eugene, Oregon for the big matchup between the Oregon Ducks and the UCLA Bruins.

I may have mentioned this before, but I can’t reiterate enough how cool I think it is when they do College Gameday on the west coast. It is cold and dark, and the fans there are absolutely rabid. As Chris Fowler told us at the beginning of today’s show, the bars closed at 2AM and the gates for Gameday opened at 3AM. Does that have any influence on the huge crowd which had gathered for such an early show? We will let you decide.

The biggest question of the day was whether or not Oregon could avoid the Gameday 2013 curse. Every team which Gameday visited this year has lost, with the exception of NDSU (Clemson won in week 1, but lost in week 8, so count that however you want). The other note of interest was finding out that Urban Meyer is the only coach to have 3 20 game win streaks in his career.

The crowd was big today, and had tons of signs, but the competition was not strong. As far as I’m concerned, the winner was undisputed.

Sam Ponder: Week 9 — Week 9: Sign of the week

We got a small bit of Sam Ponder this morning. She has been conspicuously absent and/or scaled back recently. Our crack team of investigators are working on finding out why Sam Ponder and Cowboy Troy have both been marginalized. She looked better this week than previous weeks. Jennifer liked the outfit. She said the boots needed to be taller, and the jeans should be another color, but the sweater was a great color.

Sam Ponder’s main contribution to the show today was an interview with Oregon head coach Mark Helfrich. Coach interviews are generic, and this was pretty generic. The highlight was Helfrich talking about their athletic facilities, and how even though it is sleek and sexy and all that, the main thing is that it helps with efficiency since they can house all of their training and everything under one roof.

Tom Rinaldi did a nice piece on Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury. If you didn’t know, he looks like Ryan Gosling. He is young and sexy and fashionable and stuff. His players love his energy. In this writer’s opinion, he is the most interesting man in college football. He gave a fashion critique of the Gameday crew. He said Kirk Herbstreit has a conservative look and could be an insurance salesman. Desmond is flashy and has style, but his color schemes are stuck in the early 90s. David Pollack looks like a classic case of “former fat guy trying to fit into skinny clothes”. Chris Fowler is right down the middle as you would expect.

After this segment, Tom Rinaldi decided to show up Chris Fowler with his own hundred dollar question. Kliff Kingsbury is the 3rd youngest coach in FBS. Which two schools have a head coach younger than him? If you guessed the obvious choices of Toledo and Western Michigan, you would be right.

We got another segment about the Sprint Football Championship. Apparently there is an 8 team league which plays football with a weight limit of 172 lbs. Army and Navy are the two powerhouses, and are playing today. This is apparently a really big deal in the military academies. It was cool to see these small guys playing high speed football along with their training.

Gene W. did a piece on Marcus Mariota. The only thing I remember about it is that Mariota is pretty good at football.

The final special piece of the week was on Stanford’s backup center Conor McFadden. He passed up a chance to go to an ivy league school to walk on at Stanford. He realized he needed to do something to stand out and have a shot at playing, so after arriving at Stanford, he memorized the playbook in 3 days. He apparently has somewhat of a photographic memory. Since college football doesn’t allow teams to photograph formations and print them out for analysis in-game like the NFL, McFadden now watches from the sidelines and draws each formation on a white board for the players and coaches to break down. Legend has it that several of Stanfords huge wins over the recent years have come in part to things Conor pointed out to the team. This kid might have a future in coaching.

But its about time to get down to the business at hand. This week’s picks included guest Ashton Eaton; world record holder in the decathlon and Olympic gold medalist. He seemed like a nice guy with some decent picks, and the picks had absolutely no football reasoning behind them. Every expert who gave a pick this week picked Oregon over UCLA, including Billy the Cat. Lee Corso went with his favorite mascot and chose Oregon before exiting the stage and hopping on the back of a motorcycle to make his exit from Gameday. Enjoy your evening of football.

Corso picks the Ducks (courtesy of College Gameday twitter)

Week 6 2013: College Gameday review!

Posted on October 5, 2013 by gamedaycole

It may be late, and it may be brief, but don’t worry, the weekly College Gameday review is here. Today’s edition of Colege Gameday was broadcasting live from Evanston, Illinois for the big matchup between Ohio State and Northwestern. This is the first time Gameday has been at Northwestern since 1995, so it is a rare occasion that Northwestern is good at football, and even rarer for Gameday to make an appearance.

The first thing we noticed this morning, and if you are as obsessed with Gameday as we are maybe you noticed too, was that noted country rapping sensation Cowboy Troy’s rap solo was cut from this morning’s Gameday intro. What’s up with that? How am I supposed to get jacked up without a black guy in a cowboy hat rapping football lyrics at me?

Anyways, we got an early dose of Samantha Ponder, and I can’t help but notice her role has been reduced in recent weeks. I wonder what the deal is with that. The people demand more Samantha Ponder and Cowboy Troy. Mrs. Ponder’s outfit this week was better than last week’s but still questionable. The jacket was not well received by those polled this morning (Jennifer).

Tom Rinaldi had an early piece this morning. One was about all of the geniuses attending Northwestern who also play football. It is pretty impressive, but even more impressive was how incredibly moving Tom Rinaldi makes it to watch someone sharpen a pencil by hand up close in slow motion while soft-talking. We didn’t get any beatnik poetry from him so that makes me sad. I NEED INSPIRATION!!!

We got a great dose of TODD MCSHAY LOOKIN’ AT THE TAPE!!! He was hanging out with Urban Meyer and Braxton Miller in the film room talking about mechanics. Todd McShay is impressed with both his natural athleticism (which netted him the Big 10 Offensive Player of the Year last year) as well as his improved mechanics. I wish just once we’d get a piece where Todd McShay sits with an athlete to look at the tape, and then rip the kid a new one about sloppy mechanics or a lack of effort. I like to imagine that is what he is like leading up to the NFL draft where he is locked in a dark room ranting and raving 22 hours a day about mechanics, effort, heart and intangibles.

We had a return from QB Guru George Whitfield again. At least this week we got to see more training film with him and Braxton Miller where they were having Miller throw a football while sitting in a chair against a defender with a broom or something. The unusual training footage is pretty interesting. The generic positive assessment of Whitfield about his paying clients? Not so much.

The most exciting piece today was a callback to last week’s piece about the history of Gameday signs. Last week they talked about how the first guy to bring a sign to Gameday was some unknown guy with a sign nobody could read. Well believe it or not, they dug up this guy named Bob Merced and had him recreate the sign and flew his ass out to Gameday this morning which was really cool.

Speaking of signs, here is the sign of the day!

So let’s review. No Cowboy Troy. Less Samantha Ponder. No Bald Man on Campus. No David Pollack using the internet. No Tom Rinaldi beatnik poetry. Sign creativity was lacking aside from the one pictured above. It was all-in-all a pretty mediocre episode. Who could possibly save it as a guest celebrity picker? How about the ORIGINAL football picker, one Mr. Brent Musberger. He was so excited to be there at Gameday being a Northwestern alum. I haven’t confirmed this, but I am fairly confident he was going no-pants behind the desk, and was all too happy to share his picks for who was going to win, who was going to cover the spread, and which totals to bet. Of course, ESPN, Brent Musberger, and Cole’s Gameday blog in no way endorse any form of gambling. As Colin Cowherd would say, “this isn’t for making money; that’s called a job”. Anyways, the guys picked a ton of games today, which excited me. Brent and Herbie couldn’t pick the big game tonight since they are calling it, but I have a feeling which way Brent was leaning. Billy the Cat picked Ohio State over Northwestern, and Lee Corso went with the Buckeyes too! Either way, Corso and our cat will be tied going into next week, when we will hopefully see more exciting picks to determine who can pick the headgear game better between the two of them. Goodnight folks.

Week 5 2013: College Gameday review!

Posted on September 28, 2013 by gamedaycole

Well here we are again folks. Another edition of College Gameday is in the books. Today’s edition was broadcasting live from Athens, Ga for the matchup between #6 LSU and #9 Georgia. Last week’s edition was going to be hard to top after visiting Fargo, ND but Athens has a reputation as one of the rowdiest of locations for Gameday. It was made clear up front that Georgia does not have good luck with Gameday is in town: they are 3-12 all time with Gameday on-site. Could they turn this thing around put up a win? I guess we will find out.

For starters, the crowd was incredibly loud today. They bring serious entusiasm in the SEC when Gameday is in town (possibly enthusiasm brought in bottles). Early on, there were some technical difficulties. I don’t know how to describe it other than it sounded like David Pollack’s mic was being broadcast from the moon, streaming via broadcast.com in 1998 on dialup. Anyways, after we got that sorted out college football hall of famer Herschel Walker joined David Pollack on the stairs outside of a building for an interview. Hopefully this is going to be a new regular feature entitled “OVERLY CASUAL FOOTBALL INTERVIEWS WITH DAVID POLLACK!!!!” Pollack removed his suit jacket and they sat down to very casually discuss Georgia football.

We were then treated to another segment of “QB Guru George Whitfield Talking About QBs”. You couldn’t hear him over the rowdy crowd for the first half of this segment. In the second half he talked about Aaron Murray’s mechanics. Pretty impressive stuff that we haven’t heard for four weeks prior to this. At all.

There was a distinct lack of Samantha Ponder for the first hour or so of today’s show. When she finally showed up, we weren’t sure exactly what she was wearing or why she was wearing it. It appeared to be a nice pair of riding pants sans boots, which looked very strange. Jennifer questioned the choice of these pants, the shoes, and said the jacket made her look boxy. You can be the judge.

Speaking of Sam Ponder, she interviewed Georgia coach Mark Richt. The biggest takeaway of this interview was that Richt’s wife is one of the water girls on the team. Today’s piece from Gene W. was about Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze. Apparently he was portrayed as a complete goober in the movie Blind Side, and he even auditioned for his own part but failed because he couldn’t get his one line right. The funniest part of this was when he told us that if things aren’t working at halftime he likes making changes, including making his offensive coordinator change clothes completely at halftime to turn around the mojo.

Perhaps the high point of today’s show was Tom Rinaldi’s piece about Gameday signs. Apparently the first Gameday sign was on location back in 1994, and nobody knows who the guy was or what his sign said because it was blurry. Since then, things have exploded and as you know, signs are everywhere. This was a really cool segment about the history of Gameday, and I wish they would do more history segments about Gameday. The best part was afterwards when Rinaldi showed up wearing jorts, in reference to a recent sign about Jeff Driskel going for it on “4th and jort”. Classic.

Speaking of Gameday signs, today was a pretty poor effort by the Georgia crowd. I don’t know if they lack the writing skills or what, but today’s sign could barely be made out, and it reads “Mettenberger? More like Mettenbooger”. Come on Georgia, you can do better.

A few more highlights from today’s show include Paul Finebaum declaring that Lane Kiffin is the Miley Cyrus of college football: no talent, but we can’t stop watching. He said “maybe next year they will hire an adult to coach the team”, echoing my sentiment that Lane Kiffin has accomplished absolutely nothing in his career, yet continues to get promoted to better and better jobs. Also, Paul Finebaum loves the SEC and wants you to get off his lawn.

We also had a historical moment today. Chris Fowler’s hundred dollar question was FINALLY won. I hope you remember where you were, so you can tell your children about the time that Kirk Herbstreit won the Chris Fowler hundred dollar bill. Today’s question? What college has the most NFL starting QBs today? Of course the answer is NC State. Russell Wilson, Mike Glennon, and Phillip Rivers. Well done Herbie.

But let’s get down to the business at hand, which is the picks. Today’s guest celebrities (yes multiple) were Willie Robertson (from Duck Dynasty) and Bubba Watson (from golf). They were a fun group today, with lots of jawing back and forth. Robertson seemed to know very little about football for someone so southern and with such a questionable beard. Watson seemed pretty knowledgeable. Billy the Cat went with Georgia over LSU, bringing his record to 2-3 for the year.

Would Corso go with Georgia for the second time this year? Or would he go with the visiting team in LSU? His headgear picks were 2-2 going into this week, and he put on the Tiger head, going with LSU. He happened to put it on backwards, which was both hilarious, and foreshadowed the LSU loss. Billy the Cat and Lee Corso are tied at 2-3 on headgear picks this year. Boy, what a race! Enjoy your evening folks.