What a weekend we just got through. The Twins survived a wild series that could ultimately cost the Detroit Tigers the American League Central title, the Vikings rolled to their third straight exhibition victory and then declared Matt Cassel their starting quarterback for the season opener next week, and the Blue Angels flew a spectacular show over the Duluth International Airport.
What do you mean, bad weather? Oh, I was out of town, suffering with my J-Hawks team at the state Senior Men’s Over-35 tournament, so I missed both Saturday and Sunday at the Air Show. But I saw the Blue Angels at their best, by luck.
My wife, Joan, and I were disappointed that the Navy’s slick Seals parachuting team was unable to perform because of strong winds out at Heritage Hockey Arena last Thursday, so we went on to do a couple things. We headed up over the hill to make a couple of stops, and when we got out of the car at Menard’s, I heard a jet plane and looked up to see a solitary Blue Angels F-18 circling overhead.
I suggested Joan jump back in the car and we drove up close to where we might park at the air show, driving up on top of the big grassy hill just south of the air strip. We had gotten lucky in similar fashion the last time the Blue Angels came to town, and this time, sure enough, they were all up there. We watched, mesmerized, for about two hours as the four Blue Angels ran through what had to be pretty much their full repertoire as a dress rehearsal for Saturday and Sunday. It’s hard to match the thrill of seeing a jet fighter fly over, and impossible to beat the sight of four of them, in a diamond formation, flying low and then zooming upward, suddenly separating like a starburst in four different directions.
As you’re wondering how they’ll ever find each other, suddenly they criss-cross above the airport, flying low, from the north and south, and then from the east and west. I shot only about 1,000 photos. Thank heaven for digital cameras. It was a grey, overcast day, and I thought how much I wanted to see them flying with a blue sky for background on Saturday and/or Sunday, but I’d have to settle for seeing them fly aganst the somber grey.
Then it was off to Hamburg, in Southwestern Minnesota, where my J-Hawks lost a tough 7-4 game -- leading 2-0, and 4-2, before seeing a 4-4 tie blow up on us in the last inning. On Sunday, we again led 2-0, but saw the lead crumble and we ultimately lost 6-2 because of a couple of untimely errors. Personally, the thrill of that game for me was to watch my older son, Jack, who usually is our third baseman, take the mound and pitch a complete game. He walked a few, but only gave up one or two earned runs, and he struck out 10 with a baffling knuckleball that had players lunging, swinging and missing by a foot. It made the whole tournament worthwhile, from a personal point of view.
Saturday’s game was played under blue skies and bright sunshine, at about 90 degrees and with humidity at about 91. Sunday, we played at Norwood, and it was about 76 degrees and perfect. Returning to Duluth, I learned that the Blue Angels didn’t even fly Saturday, because of low ceiling. And they flew an abbreviated routine on Sunday, again under low cloud cover. What a shame.
Then I realized how lucky Joan and I were to have ventured up to that grassy hill by the airport where we got what amounted to the best Blue Angels show of the weekend as almost a private viewing.
The Vikings overran Kansas City 30-12, and new coach Mike Zimmer declared that Matt Cassel would be the starting quarterback. That was the right move, for several reasons. Cassel has run the offense efficiently, but my only concern is that he only threw two touchdown passes and settled for several field goals. Getting into the end zone has been a recurring Vikings problem. Rookie Teddy Bridgewater, meanwhile, came in for only the fourth quarter and threw two touchdown passes to turn a close defensive game into a blowout. That gives Bridgewater four touchdown passes, with no interceptions, in limited play over three games. Cassel’s quarterback rating is an impressive 103.3, and Bridgewater’s is a stunning 117.3, which would have been second in the NFL to Philadelphia’s Nick Foles (119.2) last season.
Still, you start the veteran and bring Bridgewater along patiently. If you need to get into the end zone, however, I believe Teddy Bridgewater has the determination, the confidence and the ability to score touchdowns. But if the season has a shaky start, it’s a lot better to evolve from veteran to rookie than to  yank the rookie and send in a possibly disgruntled veteran.
The Twins? Critics whined that they gave up a franchise record 60 hits in the four game series with Detroit, but the Twins -- the last-place Twins -- got 57 hits against the pennant-contending Tigers. The Twins also gave up 31 runs in the four games, but they scored an amazing 42 runs themselves. Impressive. The question is, is your glass half-empty or half-full?

College Playoff System Should Bowl ‘Em Over

There’s still a lot of summertime left, and what we hope will be a long and colorful autumn leading into a milder (please!) winter, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a long look ahead, to about January 12 in Arlington, Texas. It will be there that the first college football playoff championship will be conducted.

The NCAA and college football’s favored five conferences are making a valiant attempt to put behind all of us the conjecture and complaining that annually follows the highly subjective ratings of college football teams that have left the top two teams playing for the national title.

This year, an esteemed committee of 13 judges will choose the top four teams in the land, and pair them up for January 1 semifinals, with No. 1 playing No. 4 in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, and No. 2 facing No. 3 in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

The committee? Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin athletic director; Pat Haden, Southern Cal AD; Jeff Long, committee chairman and Arkansas AD; Oliver Luck, West Virginia AD; Dan Radakovich, Clemson AD; Tom Osborne, former Nebraska coach and AD; Mike Tranghese, former Big East commissioner; Tyrone Willingham, former coach at Stanford, Notre Dame, and Washington; Mike Gould, former superintendent at Air Force Academy; Tom Jernstedt, former executive vice president of the NCAA; Archie Manning, former Mississippi and New Orleans Saints quarterback, and father of a couple current NFL quarterbacks; Steve Wieberg, former USA Today college football writer; and Condoleeza Rice, former U.S Secretary of State, and Stanford provost. As long as we can keep the esteemed Ms. Rice focused, and not have her suggest sending Alabama to Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction, I think that’s a very impressive committee, although I think ESPN should place hidden cameras and microphones in their meeting quarters.

I think that’s an excellent step toward fairness, but I think the committee should go one more step, which would be to eliminate the conjecture on which conference is the best and declare, publicly or privately, that only one team per conference can make the “final” foursome.

The reason the system has been so flawed in recent years is that the Southeast Conference, which might be said to be the traditionally strongest conference in the country, has gone beyond reason in commanding more attention than it deserves. No less than ESPN itself has linked with the SEC in an alliance to promote the conference, and its never-ending stream of analysts on ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN U, and all the other stablemates that do a great job of keeping us plastered with sports news, never hesitate to scoff at any suggestion that any other conference might even be on the radar.

Years ago, it was always my contention that the SEC was the best, what with Alabama, Louisiana State, Auburn, Mississippi, and all those other Deep South powerhouse programs battling. In those years, the Big Ten was filled with pride that it might be the best, and the Big Eights, with Oklahoma and Texas, had a challenge, too. The Pac 10 was a step behind, it seemed, although its best teams always were impressive.

But as the world has turned, Alabama and Auburn have stayed atop the SEC, and ESPN keeps churning out millions of words of accolades to try to convince us the SEC is superior. Meanwhile, the Pac 12 has risen abruptly. No longer does it consist of Southern California, and UCLA and not much else. Now Oregon has been one of the nation’s top two or three teams for about six years, and Stanford consistently turns out teams that might claim to be the best team in California even if you include the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Raiders.

This upcoming season also finds Southern Cal and a resurgent UCLA, plus Washington, Oregon State, Arizona State, and a couple others for good measure moving up to contend for Pac-12 laurels and make almost every week challenging for national powers Oregon and Stanford. That array of powers makes me believe that the Pac-12 is the strongest conference, top to bottom, in college football. So often a conference is measured by its strongest teams, and while ESPN is certain to rave about and praise Alabama and the rest of the SEC every week -- if not every night -- and the Pac-12 might as well be playing in Taiwan because their West Coast time zone prevents them from getting anywhere near the deserved attention from the Eastern Time Zone’s ESPN folks, I believe you could rank them any way you want.

It was interesting when Texas A & M and Missouri -- neither of which was a super power at the time -- moved into the SEC and quite promptly rose to the top. Either they have strengthened the SEC’s depth of balance, or the SEC wasn’t as potent as we were led to believe and a one-man show like Johnny Manziel and a Cinderella team like Missouri could become powers.

If you want to take the top two as a measurement of league strength, choose Alabama and LSU or Alabama and Auburn, or any two SEC teams you’d like, and I believe the tandem of Oregon and Stanford would have the edge, Oregon with its quick-tempo offense and Stanford with its suffocating defense. More important, from third place down, the SEC doesn’t approach the Pac-12’s depth of power.

After the Pac-12 and the SEC, I think the Big Ten will have to improve to be considered at the same level as the Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast Conference. Michigan has scattered into disarray, but has loads of talent, and Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa and Penn State can make the Big Ten very competitive. But not at those levels.

We know that ESPN’s staff and football writers across the U.S. would vote to let two SEC teams into the semifinals, but that would be totally unfair. The top SEC team, the top Pac-12 team, the top Big 12 team, the top ACC team and the top Big Ten team all deserve a chance at the big prize. Let’s say the champion of all five conferences happen to go undefeated...Then who gets left out? Which conference gets slighted? And who is there to duct tape the ESPN babbling that another SEC team with one loss is more deserving than an undefeated team from another conference? And, what happens if Notre Dame has a sensational season and deserves to crowd into the championship picture?

The biggest problem with ESPN’s blatantly biased coverage of the SEC and then the rest of college football is that football writers watch ESPN just as much as football fans do. The difference is that they then go out like disciples and spread the word. They also vote on the ratings, which is why it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that more SEC teams will wind up in the top 10 than any other conference. That’s not fair, and particularly now it’s not fair when there will be a playoff that will start with the top four ranked teams.

I’ve been an impressed follower of the Oregon Ducks for five or six years now, and I believe that two or three of the last five Oregon teams would have been worthy national champions. This, however, could be the team that the Ducks finally crack the facade of SEC invincibility. A fellow named Marcus Mariotta is back at quarterback for Oregon, and I think he is the most exciting player in college football, and, in my opinion, the best quarterback. I thought he was better than Johnny Football two years ago, and he was outstanding last year too, despite being slowed by injuries.

This season, make an attempt to watch teams from all over the country. We want to focus in on the Gophers, and see if Jerry Kill can live up to his reputation of turning down and out programs into contenders within four years. With Mitch Leidner in command at quarterback, and improvement throughout the lineup, the Gophers could prove to be Golden once again.

However, starting off against Eastern Illinois this Thursday night, then Middle Tennessee, Texas Christian and San Jose State should open the door for the Gophers to start 4-0. The rest of the schedule shows the Big Ten opener at Michigan, home against Northwestern and Purdue, at Illinois, home against Iowa and Ohio State, then finishing on the road at Nebraska and Wisconsin. Gopher boosters will tell you that the Gophers were 8-5 last year and deserving of a bowl trip, where they lost to a mediocre Syracuse team. But we know they were 4-4 in the Big Ten.

We don’t hear the Twins or Vikings boast about their overall records by including exhibition games, so until the Gophers strengthen their nonconference schedule, just tell us how they’re doing in the Big Ten, please. If they go 4-4 again, it will be pretty good, because the schedule this year will make it a challenge to go 3-5.

Fortunately, up here in the Northland, we have UMD as a legitimate Division II powerhouse, and St. Scholastica as an onrushing Division III contender, and we can watch the D-I politics from a safe distance.