It's Gone to Our Head

It's been a banner week for the Pontiff of Picks. Saturdays have become a Holy Day of Obligation for those wishing to save their immoral, er immortal, souls. We stored up treasures in heaven worth 1,950 cherubim in our last outing, bringing our season-to-date total to plus 3,590, for enertainment purposes only.

Herewith are our pre-Halloween choices. Don't be scared, but we are doubling down this Saturday. If we fail, remember us on All-Saints Day.

Let's put 1,000 supplications each on:

Stanford -7 1/2 over USC (The Trees are perfect against the spread so far)

Northwestern -9 over Indiana (Hapless Hoosiers will be "Persa"cuted by Purple pumas)

Fordham +30 over Army (The Rams will recall Lombardi and the seven blocks of granite as the officers-to-be will lose the ball six times in the rain and snow expected on the Hudson)

Navy +21 1/2 over Notre Dame (The PT 73 runs circles around punchless Binghamtons of South Bend)

And 2,000 on our Lock of the Week:
Over/Under
Arkansas vs. Vanderbilt over 51 1/2 (Vandy routed Mississippi and will score 24 against porous pigs; predicted final Arkansas wins 35-24).

One last note, our World Series pick came to fruition. Recall, we went with St. Louis at 15 to 1 before the playoffs, netting 1,500 horsehides and closing our baseball season at plus 3,900.

New Math

Scholar athletes everywhere were not surpised by the first Bowl Championship Series rankings. Drawing on our differential calculus course work, we discern that the winners of LSU/Alabama and Oklahoma/Oklahoma State games down the road will be the representatives in the championship game.

For our cogitations this weekend, we dusted off our slide rule (remember when engineering students wore them dangling from their belts?) and came up with these quadratic equations.

For entertainment purposes only, let's put 500 second derivatives each on:

Spread:
Stanford -20 over Washington (Luck will clean split valves of Stanford band if Huskies get close)
Kansas State -10 1/2 over Kansas (Purple Cats are best-kept secret in Big 12. Jayhawks won't get 5 first downs)
Oregon -31 over Colorado (Aflacs cover easily over endangered bovine breed)

Over/Under:
Arkansas vs. Mississippi, over 56 1/2 (Hogs QB Tyler Wilson is one tough cookie. He won't crumble and will humble Bonnie Blue Flags, who get two defensive TDs)

Lock of the Week (1,000 cube roots):
Texas Tech vs. Oklahoma, over 70 (Red Raiders will score at least three TDs; Sooner Schooner ponies will be run ragged celebrating OU scores).

Last week, our lock bailed us out,cutting our loss to 150 units, bringing the toal this season to plus 1,640.

Paradise Regained

We were close to infallible last week, gathering 1,950 ex cathedras, including our lock of the week, to bring our poor box total to plus 1,790 for the season. Let's put 500 for plenary indulgences each on four and 1,000 madonnas on our lock of the week. No need for prayer, these are our nonrefundable tickets out of purgatory:

For entertainment purposes only:

Oklahoma -35 1/2 over Kansas (Sooners could score 80)

Rutgers -2 over Navy (Scarlet Knights at home win by a field goal)

Baylor +8 1/2 over Texas A&M (RG III baffles Farmers)

Alabama -28 over Mississippi (Houston Nutt's days as Rebel Yell leader numbered)

LOCK OF THE WEEK: Stanford -21 over Washington State (This is too easy. The Cardinal sin defangs improved Cougars)

Second Saturday in October

It's hard to believe that the college football season is already at the midpoint, but then it's hard to puzzle out anything other than an SEC team will be in the BCS national championship game.

For entertainment purposes only, 500 Texas State Fair corn dogs on each of the following spread picks, 1,000 on over/under lock of the week.

Against the spread:

University of Oklahoma -11 over University of Texas (Athens of the Plains uses artful passing of Jones to philosopher kings Stills and Broyles to keep Western Civilization upright)

Rutgers +7 over Pittsburgh (Scarlet Knights have covered every game this season. The trend continues as home dogs).

Stanford -29 1/2 over Colorado (The Trees at home
rain acorns aplenty on prairie bovines).

Air Force +11 over Notre Dame (too many looks from the best team in Colorado for tunnel-vision defense of lace-curtain Irish).


Over/Under Lock of the Week:

Texas A&M vs. Texas Tech, over 72 (Whoever has the ball last wins).

Our deficit swelled to minus 160 with last week's picks, saved from complete ignominy by our lock of the week.

Boomer, Sooner!

On Growing Old

There’s nothing good about it. We have reached that point where our prolonged adolescence has run up against the cruel logic of years, sixty of them to be exact.

Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be? Not so, Robert Browning. Your Victorian vanity is as unpersuasive as our new millennium variety. If Beelzebub himself were to pop up this instant and offer to return us to, say, age 25 in return for our immortal soul, we would take the old trickerator up on it without blinking, cloven hooves and all.

As a matter of fact, like most of us we always fancied ourselves a handsome devil, not Johnny Angel; a rake, not Casper Milquetoast; a bon vivant, not Cotton Mather; a jaywalker, not Dudley Doright.

As it turns out, these were only noms de guerre in a battle never sought but always fought, not on some romantic foreign plain, but in a mirror house once a gauzy sustainer of self-deception now become a horrible reflector of the real, the wretched grown-upedness of a man who once could dream himself to a dreamless sleep now spoiled by those unrelenting years.

Oh, the years. A special circle of hell is surely reserved for souls once in thrall to the imagined self. It is a place where knees creak with rust and cry out for WD 40, where pillow cases drenched in drool are hot on both sides, where endless, mocking reels spill laughable visions of glory on tarnished silver screens. We’re ready for our close-up.

Yet within our decrepit cocoon, we hide a kernel of the seed corn we once consumed without a glimmer of the years that would pile up. It is but a memory, something once smelt and tasted.

Above was the roar of the coliseum. Beneath was the sweet smell of expectant autumn, an intoxicating blend of cigar smoke and mustard circulating like a promise in the cavernous catacombs. Then out in the daylight, paper visors our shields. On the cover of the program we held was a young man in shoulder pads, a helmet in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other, talking shyly to a blushing cheerleader.

On the walk back through the campus in the fading afternoon, boys in parkas ran to what daylight remained, crashing into shrubs. “I’m open,” each voice cried. We longed to join them but the bus was waiting. “I’m open,” they cried again, more faintly as the evening descended but reverberating through the chill toward the airy heaven, where we suspect they echo still.

Classics Class

How the mighty have fallen. Mourning may become Electra, but humility does not look too good on the infallible. Thus, at the risk of angering the gods further (they flayed us last week), for entertainment purposes only we’ll venture 500 rosy-fingered dawns each on these Olympian contests.

Spread:

Iowa State +9 over Texas (the Cyclones beat the Longhorns outright in Austin last year)

Navy -3 ½ over Air Force (the cruise missiles from the Midshipmen take out Falcon stealth bombers in battle of triple option teams)

Boise State -27 ½ over Nevada (Broncos trample Wolf Pack in payback for last year’s upset)

Stanford -21 ½ over UCLA (Uclans will need more than smarts to conquer Luck and the Trees at Palo Alto)

Over/Under:

Ball State vs. Oklahoma over 61 (Sooners will romp at home, but Cardinals will score at least three touchdowns. This is a lock. 1,000 reeboks on this one)

All hubris aside, we tumbled from plus 640 Prometheans to minus 10 Augean stables on the college football season, going 2 and 3. Our oracle assures us we’re up to the Herculean task of cleaning up.