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I wasn’t saying that you not referencing ole miss was a bitch move, rather calling the writer a bitch when he talks about “factual information” without bringing up ole miss. And let’s not kid ourselves with the sec scheduling change. There is exactly one change of significance and that’s going to 9 conference games. Ole Miss can still have a non conference schedule of the citadel, Charlotte, and wake forest. The sec has taken the most bitch made approach to out of conference play as has been routinely discussed here. Get your big dogs a couple marquee wins, play fewer conference games than everyone else to boost the overall records of the conference, schedule fcs games in November so the conference trickles up the rankings when every other conference is taking an extra loss. It’s not surprising or mysterious. They were trying to maximize the perception of the league. The only reason the big ten and big 12 went a different direction was money. The sec is not doing this to be “a leader as a conference in scheduling”. That’s marketing bullshit. They are doing it because there is more money in a 9th conference game and the change to how the cfp looks at scheduling took some of the weight off of the scale for keeping 8 conference games. The pussy coaches will take the easiest path to the playoff. It’s exactly what you’d expect from schools like the Mississippi schools and Indiana. Psu has no excuse. UT, osu, bama, Clemson, etc schedule with stones because they recognize that fans would rather see them compete in marquee games that the whole country is watching even if that means losing that game because that’s more entertaining than seeing them beat a 3rd team by 50 points. It’s an administrative decision that is (or should be) above the coaches head because the coach might not be there by the time those games are played. Hopefully the change to the playoff evaluation of schedules changes the charmin approach to non conference games. UGAs non conference schedule for 2030 had Clemson, Ohio state, and GT. I think they can be forgiven for having NC A&T as the 4th game that year.
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Penn state’s future ooc schedule might be the most egregious given the tier of teams they want to be in. Texas, bama, OU, uga, Ohio state, UM, Clemson all schedule at least one non conference game of some significance each year. Usually it’s a national marquee game. They could find themselves fucked by the strength of schedule metric even when they aren’t at risk of missing the playoffs. Losing out on a bye, or having to play a road game in round 1. I’ll be interested to see what the strength of schedule metric looks like, but they’re absolutely setting themselves up to be on the wrong side of it. They should have a 6 year rotation home-home series with Pitt and wvu where 2/6 years your team is “off”. They should have a marquee game. And then with that 3rd game they can do whatever bullshit fbs team they want.
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IU’s scheduling is super soft. And I get the reasoning behind it if you’re Cignetti. W/L is the only metric used to evaluate a coach at a school like IU. It’s a bitch move, but it makes sense for him. Comparing them to the top end of the sec scheduling without any reference to ole miss is also a bitch move. Because that’s really the comparison team. A fringe playoff team that schedules like an absolute pussy. Ole Miss doesn’t have their ooc fcs team scheduled out past the next 2 seasons, but they’ll be there. So in the next 5 years ole Miss has: 0 P4 teams 2 road games (Charolette & S Alabama) 2 FCS games scheduled but we can safely assume both teams will be at 1 per year. 3 of their 8 future FBS teams had a winning record in 2024
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That’s awesome, and so fucking frustrating. How far was it? Was it a good shot or did he get lucky? My most regular playing partner almost got his first a couple weeks ago on a horrendous shot. 185 yds, hard pull that missed the green left by 15 yards, bounced around in a tree, fell out onto a slope, bounced down to the green and trickled past the hole.
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A couple things, one already mentioned is flexibility. There’s a good chance you’re not rotating your hips enough so that you can use the strength you have. Another thing a lot of people that struggle with power and/or an over the top swing do is they try to fire everything at the same time from the top of the back swing. The application of the strike from the wrists and arms fire to early and rather than a sequential addition of force, all of the force is spent too early leading to weak and inconsistent swings. If you played baseball it would be the equivalent of striding and casting the bat behind you at the same time and then just dragging it through the zone. Or jumping, extending your arm and flicking your wrist all at the same time when shooting a basketball. There is a sequencing to it. Something that helped me learn how to whip the club is turning your driver around and holding it upside down, with your hand at the hosel. Make one handed swings with each hand and hear where the whoosh of the club is the loudest. It should be just after where the ball would be, sort of in front of your lead foot. Make some swings getting the sound in the right spot and then try recreating that feel with the club turned around. Imagine you were trying to pound a railroad spike horizontally into the trunk of a tree at shin height with a sledge hammer. You wouldn’t yank a sledgehammer back and then yank it down. You’d instinctively, because it’s heavy, gradually add force to assist gravity with the movement without ever thinking about it. That’s why guys like Couples and Ernie Els made their power look so effortless. They have a nice smooth summation of force. Also, since you squat and deadlift, do you power clean? Its a great way to train explosive power production.
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A few other comments on chipping. As a beginner it absolutely behooves you to get good at chipping. You can really pile up a mountain of lost strokes really quickly around the green with sloppy chipping. Let’s say we hit two good shots on a par 5 and we’re just off the green in 2, thinking birdie. A chunked chip and we’re left with the same chip again, or worse we blade the chip across the green and we’re in a bunker short sided or in some junk we have no chance of getting up and down from. A skulled first chip, a second chip that doesn’t get close to the hole, and now we’re angry because we pissed away a birdie and we 3 putt. So instead of birdie we’re carding a double bogey. The path from 110 to 80 involves eliminating a lot of wasted shots around the green. Two putts after a mediocre chip doesn’t really feel like a lost shot, but it is and they add up. Three putts after a bad chip is a disaster. Knowing you can get in the cup in 1 or 2 strokes from around the green also transfers a lot of confidence and freedom to your 80-150 yard game. reducing the level of stress over a shot from 125 yards allows you to be more committed to the shot. Tense, hesitant swings produce bad results. Some technical notes that I forgot to mention. Since you’re in Texas, I’m assuming a lot of the green surrounds you’ll be playing on are bermuda grass (idk?) It is a completely different playing surface than rye/kbg/fescue. You absolutely have to learn how to read the grain and account for it when chipping off bermuda, whereas it’s not a consideration on other grasses. It’s not hard to learn but you have to take it into account when chipping. When you’re chipping with the grain, the club glides along the grass nicely. When you’re chipping against the grain it will really want to grab your club and make it dig in. A putter is often a good choice there. When practicing chipping, make sure some of your chips are across slopes. Take note of how the slope treats different trajectories. A slope will grab a high lofted shot sooner and harder while a low runner will push through a some of the slope early. You want to take that into account when dealing with side slopes. You can use it to your advantage at times as well. For example if you’re chipping to a hole that’s downhill from you. Chipping directly at the hole can be really difficult because it’s carrying so much speed and the slope wants to add more. But you can sometimes hit a higher lofted shot 45 or even 90 degrees across the fall line and let gravity gently bring it down to the hole. Alternatively, if you need to traverse a slope to a pin that’s on top of a shelf, the lofted shot will be difficult to get close because the slope wants to repel the ball away down the hill as well as kill its momentum. A low runner will drive through a lot of that early break and has a higher margin for error. One of the key ideas to shooting lower scores is taking the worst case scenario out of play. The shot OB off the tee, taking on too much of a forced carry and ending up in the water, not taking your medicine with the short punch back out into the fairway from the trees vs trying to thread the needle towards the green. That applies to chipping as well. It’s generally safer to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible. A bad putt from short grass on hard ground from off the green is going to be a lot better than a bad chip with a high lofted wedge from that same lie. There’s a reason it’s called the Texas wedge. Worst case scenario with the putter there is probably 3 strokes. Worst case scenario with a wedge is that your next shot is significantly harder than the one you started with. Start forming your plan with the thought of getting the ball rolling as quickly as possible and add loft and carry as the shot requires it. On the note of carry, make sure you practice varying the amount of longer grass between you and the green. Most of the time you’re going to be carrying the ball onto the green, but rough can also be used to take speed off the ball. For example, standing on a downslope, chipping to a close pin with the green running away from you, it might not be possible to keep the ball remotely close if you carry it onto the green. There, landing the ball in the rough and letting it just trickle onto the green might be an option. When practicing chipping, you want to feed as many types of shots as possible into your memory bank. The better your vision and imagination is when approaching a chip, the more options you’ll see for how to play a shot. And the only way to develop feel is reps.
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Texas wasn’t even number 1 when Penn state turned down the cotton bowl. #1 Ohio state hadn’t lost to Michigan yet, Texas hadn’t beaten Arky. So the choice (that Paterno claimed he let the players make) was to play the 2nd place team winner of UT-Arky in Dallas or the winner of the big 8 in Miami which would most likely be #6 mizzou. Ohio state couldn’t play in the rose bowl that year because at that time the big ten didn’t let teams play in the rose bowl 2 years in a row. So it was pretty much assumed at that point they’d beat Michigan and be national champions. Penn state would have thought they were playing for 2nd place at best so they said they picked the better location. Either way it was a bitch move to not play the best team they could, which would have been the winner of UT-Arky. It was a bitch move for paterno to let his players pick what looked like the easier game. And it was their bitchassedness that cost them a shot at the national championship, not Nixon.
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It feels so fucking wrong to me that were suddenly pointing out that teams are lucky to avoid Indiana and Illinois.
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I played a handicapped 4-man best ball yesterday where your team’s score was your best 2 of 4 net. We were -9 at the turn, they were -6. We collapsed for most of the back nine and fell back a few strokes before getting it back to -9 on 18. They were the group behind us and came into 18 at -12. Two bogeys or less and they win, a bogey and a double and we push. They made an absolute mess of the hole. First guy is in for a bogey. Two 3-putts and a 4-putt later they take +4 on the hole and we’re collecting the cash.
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The one thing your practice plan is missing is pitching & chipping. For chipping, I think the lowest hanging fruit can be gained in your back yard. Take 10 balls and set up 2 targets 5 & 10 yards away. Could be little chipping nets, hula hoops, hand towels, anything. Chip 10 balls to the close target, 10 to the far target, 5 & 5, 2-2-2-2-2, alternate. Keep track of how many hit your target and work on improving. Vary the target distances. You’re trying to develop feel for distance control. For beginners for form, I usually tell people to use the lowercase y setup. Take the wrists completely out of the chip, and rock your shoulders like it’s a putt. Keep 70% of your weight on your front foot. For the yard game use a fairly high lofted wedge, 52-56 degrees to get the feel of popping the ball up out of the rough. the other type of chipping practice you should do is onto a practice green. You want to develop 2 basic chips, a higher lofted one that stops shorter and a lower one the runs out more. The easiest way imo to do this is to have 2 wedges and develop the feel of each shot. I like a 54-56 for the lofted shot and an 8 iron for the bump and run. Some people, like Faldo, suggest always trying to carry the ball 2 yards onto the green and varying the club for how much rollout you need. I prefer my method because what the fuck does Nick Faldo know about golf. A good exercise is to take the highest lofted wedge you’ll chip with, a club for a bump and run, and something in the middle. 8i, pw, 56 for example. Go to the practice green and work through different types of holes. Long/short, uphill/downhill. Work on feeling how easy/hard it is to get to different pins. Chip 10 balls with each club to each hole. Again your trying to develop feel for how far to carry the ball and how much it’s going to roll out. For example, it’s pretty difficult to hit a long uphill chip with a high lofted shot. Because the ball is coming down more directly into the upslope, it will stop very quickly. So you have to carry that shot almost the whole way to the hole, which significantly increases error dispersion. Think how much more difficult it is to toss a ball into a bucket that’s 5’ in front of you vs 50’ away. Same thing as with the yard game, hit 10 to each hole type with each club. Keep track of how many you can get inside 3’. That’s your goal with a chip, give yourself an easy putt. You’ll start to get a good feel for what type of chip you need for a given situation. After that work through your clubs to the same hole for 9 (or 15 or whatever you feel like) balls changing the club for each shot. You’re starting with blocked practice to refine the technique, then moving to more variable practice to develop feel. The next game is par 2. Work your way around the practice green to 9 hole locations varying the types and lengths of shots. After your chip, putt out until you hole it. Keep track of your score and see how much better you get at this game over a couple months. Even better if you occasionally have someone to compete with at a game of par 2 with a round of drinks or something in the line to add a little pressure. I’ll type up my approach to putting practice later. Working on chipping and putting at the practice green with my headphones in listening to music is one of my favorite ways to relax on a summer evening.
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I don’t disagree with most of that. I expected Fleming to be better than he was. His best game was 2 catches for 60 yards and 0 tds against Kent state in a game that ended 56-0. He finished the season with 14 catches for 176 yards and 1 TD. His last 7 games he had 1 catch for 5 yards. There was a reason he was getting g passed on Ohio states depth chart by true freshman. Of PSU’s top 6 players in receiving yards, only 2 were WRs. The year before that the “big” addition at WR was Dante Cephas who had 1 good season in the mac and then went 22/246/2 at Penn state in ‘23 and then 15/124/0 at k-state in ‘24. The WR position has been a disaster the last 2-3 seasons. There’s been no Chris Godwin or even Jahan Dotson. Parker Washington leaving early to be a sixth round pick. Keandre Lambert-Smith transferring to auburn. The terrible evaluations of the transfer portal WRs. The drying up of what was a decent string of WRs is real. But the problems all fall on Franklin. Not the least of which was his hire of Yurcich at OC, who was a fucking disaster and surely contributed to KLS and Washington leaving.
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I don’t think Kotelnicki is the problem with the offense. In fact I think he excelled at getting the 3 best players the ball in effective ways. Maybe outsmarted himself at the goal line at the end of the Ohio state game. The problems with the Penn state offense last year were, in this order: 1. The WR group. Unbelievably bad 2. Franklin - he coached Allar to play scared early and it shows 3. Allar - he shows flashes but also shows a lot of meh. One of my friends that’s really high on him is a Pitt grad and thinks he’s hands down a legit nfl qb. I’ve told him that as of right now I think he’s closer to Hackenberg that a legit nfl qb. Allar is still really hard to evaluate based on results because the WRs were so bad last year. They could not get open. At times he still struggles with the short-intermediate chain movers. Some of that is on the WRs but it’s also on him. Not a single WR caught a pass in the notre dame game. Leading receivers were TE 6/75 yds, rb 2/33, te 2/21, te 1/7, rb 1/6. That’s unbelievable. He’s done some of his best work after he’s put them behind the 8 ball and had no choice but to play aggressive like the 2nd halves against usc and Oregon after throwing interceptions. I think the whole season comes down to how good the WRs are. All 3 of the wr at the top of the depth chart are transfers. Pro football focus gave them an honorable mention in their list of top 10 wr groups heading into the season. We’ll see about that. If they are good enough, can Allar do enough? The run game will be elite. If Singleton and Allen put up the same numbers they did last season they will finish their careers as 1 & 2 all time rushing leaders at Penn state. The oline is solid. Dinkins is good, I think Luke Reynolds will be the better TE. The defense should be elite again. Little question at LB but I think they’ll be fine. I think psu probably beats Oregon at home. I don’t know how anyone can expect psu to to beat osu @ osu until they do it. They don’t play Oregon. They should beat UM. So the big ten probably comes down to that game and you have to assume osu wins that game. They rematch in the big ten championship game and osu wins again. Psu wins a couple playoffs games against inferior teams and then has to play either Texas or osu in the semifinal. Even if you think psu is the better team on paper, it comes down to the head to head, in Columbus. And until Franklin wins it, you have to assume he fucks it up.
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You answered all of your questions with your first sentence.
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Volcanic eruptions in the cascade range, earthquakes on the San Andreas or cascadia faults are 100% going to happen. That isn’t remotely in doubt. Predicting when, so that people can be prepared, is just a matter of probability. The volcanoes are a little harder to predict, and even more difficult to predict if it will be a VEI 3 or VEI 6. The subduction zone is still active, so the volcanos aren’t going to stop erupting, but I think that poses much less of the threat than the earthquakes. Especially since there will likely be weeks if not months of warning signs that an eruption is eminent. Your dismissiveness of the “big one” earthquake in California is absurd. There is zero doubt that a large earthquake will happen on both the northern and southern portions of the San Andreas fault zone. The plate is moving. The middle section slips, the north and south sections are locked. They will snap. Same with the Cascadia subduction zone. The plates haven’t stopped moving. The fault produces fairly regular massive earthquakes. They are documented in Japanese tsunami records, Native American folk lore, and geologic surveys. The fault produces earthquakes that are 1-3,000+ times stronger than what would be considered a “big” earthquake in California. Every 250 years or so that fault produces a 8-9+ earthquake, regularly for the last 10,000+ years. The last major earthquake was in 1700. This is the longest its gone without an 8+ earthquake in the last 5000 years. There will almost certainly be a 8+ earthquake on that fault in the next 100 years, it’s already past due. It could very well be 9+. That would be catastrophic.
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