Good Day Grover Pickers,
Professional Pro Football begins this week, while Professional Amateur Football enters week 2 (week 3, but since ’Zero’ is technically a whole number, an integer, a real number and a rational number, we don’t count it and stick with Week 2, duh).
WARNING: The NCAA is Looking Into…
According to ESPN, the NCAA is concerned about, “the lack of guardrails for the online prediction markets that are challenging betting industry norms.”
This story involves:
- football
- the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
- state gambling regulators
- Robinhood, the online trading company that is NEVER involved in controversy
- derivatives
- lawsuits
- ‘market integrity safeguards’
I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s probably nothing. I don’t even remember the 2008 economic crash, or the GameStop bubble, and I’ve never watched the movie ‘The Big Short’ three times, and I have full faith in our federal regulators and the NCAA based on history and willful ignorance.
Iowa v Iowa State
The Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk Trophy is on the line again! The Hawkeyes lead the all-time series 47-24, but Iowa State won last season.
Why is this game meaningful? Have you considered how valuable corn is to you, an American consumer?
Top Uses of Corn
- Food
- Feed (food for making food)
- Fuel (automobile food)
- Oil, for cooking food
- Cornstarch, for making high fructose corn syrup, which is a helpful, but terrible, food-like-substance.
- Bioplastics, to make containers to carry food and fill up the green trash bins
- Vitamins, to fill in the gaps in our food intake
- Toilet Paper– cornstarch increases softness for post food intake processing
- Tires– adds pliability and grip
- Fireworks– used as a binder
- Bonus #11 Corn Purpose: those of you who attended/root for Georgia will be excited to learn that corn derivatives are used to make crayons!
Ole Miss v Kentucky
Welcome Back, SEC Football. This is a Jefferson – Pilot Memorial Trophy game. This game is like if two of your neighbors who you don’t know well get into a fight in a garage over the state of a borrowed weed-wacker. You’re curious, but not so interested that you would walk four houses down the street to check on the status of the weed-wacker.
Kansas v Missouri
This modern rivalry between these two states features years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, murders, guerrilla warfare, political killings, and the ransacking of Lawrence, Kansas followed. Also, the Civil War.
The rivalry begins with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
Now, it is just a football rivalry.
I hope.
For fun, here are all 4 AI generated maps from the prompt “A map that shows a simple outline of the state of Kansas and the state of Missouri. There is an arrow pointing to the border that connects the two states. There is text that says “Location of Start of Kansas vs. Missouri Rivalry.”
Oklahoma State v Oregon
You go to Oregon, you expect to catch trout, steelhead, salmon, bass and maybe the odd sturgeon.
This week they get mullet!
USF at Florida
A ‘Must Win’ for the Gators.
UNC at Charlotte
This game will be played in a 15,000 seat on-campus stadium in Charlotte. Tickets are as low as $104 each! Other than the 49ers’ inaugural game in 2013, getting the Tar Heels on campus is the biggest football game in school history.
The 49ers have improved the roster since The Commissioner last wrote that they were using random librarians they ‘borrowed’ from the J. Murrey Atkins Library to fill out the roster.
Charlotte now features several librarians they got in the transfer portal including a kicker, a running back, and edge, and a QB from the Davis Library in Chapel Hill.
My point is that you may be better off reading a book than watching all four quarters of this game.
Michigan at Oklahoma
In the end, whatever happens, the field will be covered in college football blue blood. Somehow, these epic programs have met exactly one time, in 1975. Oklahoma won 14-6.
The two schools have combined to win 1,962 games, spend 1,832 weeks ranked, win 17 National Championships and 95 Conference Championships.
I hope they can do better than 14-6 this time. That sounds boring.
Bucs v Falcons
Bucs fans are excited! Falcons fans are excited!
Why?
These are the two losingest franchises in NFL history, save for the Arizona Cardinals.
Something bad is going to happen.
Something bad always happens to these franchises, two Lombardi trophies not withstanding (the Commissioner does not recognize the Brady trophy with the Bucs in his personal, and therefore official, record book, because I don’t want to. He also counts the Falcons as a Super Bowl winner because that comeback, nominally participated in by Brady, was fixed and a hoax, which, because I say it, makes it true).
Dolphins v Colts
A decent matchup for the Dolphins, a team using 4 defensive backs they found on the State Department Waiver Wire after the DOGE cuts earlier this year. The Colts counter with Daniel Jones, the quarterback equivalent of ‘Fraud and Waste’.
The Dolphins are still the fastest team in the NFL, but appear to be running a race to nowhere and certainly not the playoffs.
Raiders v Patriots
Is this game the future of pro football? It includes budding stars:
- Raiders rookie running back Ashton Jeanty in his NFL debut that will end in failure if he does not rush/receive for over 91.5 yards according to gamblers.
- Raiders tight end Brock Bowers who some are already labeling as “The Next Jason Witten”.
- Raiders defensive player of the year candidate Max Crosby, who is already famous, but not so famous that you give him too much credit for being good.
- Patriots rooking running sensation TreVeyon Henderson who is the ‘surprise’ breakout player that everyone already knows about.
- Patriot’s short-armed first round draft pick Will Campbell, who, it will be mentioned all season, played at Alabama, has short arms, and is ‘nasty’.
- Patriot’s newest handsome quarterback, Drake Maye, who, it will be mentioned multiple times, was much better than his supporting cast last season and now will explode into glory with Mike Vrabel as his head coach.
- Raiders part-owner and former Patriot grifter and the most celebrated player in franchise history, Tom Brady, not exactly returning to Foxboro with the team because he is he a Fox broadcaster who will be watching, but not spying, on other teams on Sunday.
- Raiders head coach and former Patriot head coach, Pete Carroll, returning to Foxboro as the world’s oldest ‘hot young coach’. Carroll is like the weather. His real age is 74 (next week on his birthday). But his ‘Real Feel” age is 41, so he counts as ‘The Future’.
If the NFL really had a sense of humor, they would schedule this game in December and make it snow (the NFL can control weather when it wants to).
Steelers v Jets – Rodgers Bowl
Aaron Rodgers had a quiet summer. He got married. He fled the Jets. He joined the most stable franchise in football, the Steelers. He’ll turn 42 by season’s end. He still throws gorgeous passes that are rarely, almost never, intercepted and rarely, almost never, beyond the line of scrimmage.
New Jets QB Justin Fields, however, left the most stable franchise in football, the Pittsburgh Steelers, to join a team, the New York Jets, that is historically less stable than the last six months at the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Education and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, COMBINED!
How bad will it be for Fields? The New York media is already publishing stories about how impressed the team is with Missouri rookie Brady Cook plus Tyrod Taylor is the backup. Fields is going to get exactly the season he signed up for.
In Pittsburgh, expect the Steelers to sign retired wide receiver, and Aaron Rodgers’ football binky, Randall Cobb, any minute. When that happens, that’s your sign the Steelers season is done.
Panthers v Jags
The reason you watch a game like Panthers v Jags is so, when those rare moments present, your full being will feel, nay, absorb, the mighty joy of a Sunday Night Football banger such as ….
Ravens v Bills
They’ve had all summer to prepare for this game. Winner gets Mahomes in the AFC title game. Loser remains one of the three best teams in the world.
When we say “We’ve missed football.”, Ravens v Bills on Sunday Night is what we are talking about.
Happy Picking,
The Commissioner
The Grover Picks 