Pac-12 Championship Game

[Conan]

Ha! Now that I think about it, I believe you are right. I was confusing Santa Rosa and Santa Clara. Now I feel naked and exposed as a So. Calif. native even though I have traveled and visited the bay area extensively. Truthfully, my experience has been on the west side of the bay and rarely the east side of the bay other than Oakland and Berkeley to the north of Santa Clara. I hate to be wrong geographically about anything California, but lesson learned. I stand corrected.

I thank you for taking the time to correct my mistake without fanfare or gratuitous patronization. (Like some who pounce at every opportunity to compensate for being ego-butt-hurt by my noteworthy success at picking winning sides [65%+] ATS year in and year out.) I hope to continue that tradition this year and I hope you will benefit from it yourself. I also welcome your participation anytime you wish to contribute your own knowledge as you have done here when the game writeups happen during football season. I may be as good as anyone you may find but I am a long ways from perfect. Thanks again ajm.

 

[Conan]

Men, guess I'm just old fashioned but I really like what David Shaw has accomplished at Stanford.

Ground and pound on offense, play strong toughass defense and wear the opponent down.

More of the same this season.............

I also like Shaw's ground and pound approach, especially the way he builds and works his OL. As long as Shaw is Stanford's coach, they will routinely turn out one of the best if not the best OL in CFB. Beating Oregon and winning the conference championship without a QB of Andrew Luck's capabilities was purely about game control through maintaining superior field position. The most frequent criticism I'd hear about Stanford was that they won ugly. My opinion of Shaw (in part) is that he is very stubborn and won't alter his game plan or style of offense no matter how badly it was or wasn't working or for how long it failed to produce. His typical offensive play was 2 or 3 yards in a cloud of dust off right tackle ad nauseum if the match-up was the best he believed he could find. He'd work it until it put you to sleep. Then when you finally woke up, Stanford had already walked away with another ugly win.

 

[Conan]

More on this winning ugly idea but for the sake of practicality, a very promising betting strategy. I know that I used it in the pastr with success in spite of Stanford's ominous presence which seems to scare off a lot of bettors. (Last year Conner Halliday became rattled and reverted into his typical pick-six mode (twice in the 3rd quarter) blowing it the way he is known to do.) The idea is simply to fade the Cardinal whenever they play lesser competition, it usually works especially in conference play. For one thing, they are probably laying a ton of points. Secondly, they go into the games with a bulls eye painted on their back. I also suspect that Cardinal players tend to throttle back and take bottom dwellers less seriously than division frontrunners.

WSU will put out its best effort after Stanford returns home from South Bend for a Friday night game on only 6 days rest and @ASU the following week. (They will be expecting a riled up Dun Devil team looking to keep a piece of them in Tempe where they lost the CCG to Stanford still fresh in their minds.) So aside from that "winning ugly" angle, there is a sandwich schedule favoring WSU also in play. That makes two "demotivating" factors at work in a Friday night game. It will be interesting to see if Stanford gets sided by the public with a line that opens at 9 and goes off at 10½ by game time. Or maybe it will be even more interesting than that if there is RLM. After all this is a week-day TV night game -- time for Joe Public to belly up with a bunch of money... just saying.