Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which sits back and lets the pieces fall into place this weekend.
West Virginia did its part last night with a sufficient victory against USF — not your father’s USF, I must say — and when everyone wakes up Sunday morning the picutre, just two weekends into the Big East season, might have some color.
Cincinnati is at Louisville tonight in a game I’ll be keeping an eye on on ESPN. Is Cincinnati the second horse in the race? Is Loisville the darkhorse? Is the Bearcats’ OL no longer a turnstyle? Is the Cardinals’ offense legit? Then tomorrow you have Pitt at Syracuse. Will the Panthers leave the dome a .500 club or at 2-4 with a loss in the Big East opener? Can the Orange — the Orange! — possibly start 5-1? And then what might be if WVU and Syracuse are both 5-1 on ESPN2 next week? Ben Schwartzwalder would be proud!
Things just might take shape, at least preliminarily, in a hurry. And for WVU’s concern, there is no better defense in the Big East. This year, without a truly frightening offense that might force the Mountaineers to engage in a shootout, that looks like the ultimate weapon. To that, the Mountaineers absolutely saw this coming.
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, watch what you say.
Karl said:
Very interesting results in the Big East this week. Who saw Syracuse winning a road game at South Florida? And Louisville beating Memphis 56-0? I know Memphis is terrible, but considering how the past few seasons went, Louisville scoring 56 on or shutting out anyone is news. For the league’s sake, it’s great to see these two programs playing competitive football again.
Indeed and I think Syracuse’s was more shocking. Yeah, 56 points is a lot — and for a first-year coach, no less — and Louisville hasn’t been confused with a juggernaut on either side of the ball in the past few seasons, but the Cardinals had actually played a very decent schedule, including at Arkansas State. Syracuse’s schedule was very weak and a game on the road at USF, a team it’d never beaten and rarely been competitive with, seemed like a sure loss. Defense and running did the trick, so much so that Bill Stewart was in his office at 6:30 a.m. Thursday going over the Syracuse-USF game one last time to take from it whatever he could. Speaks a lot about what’s going on, I think.
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