Pre-Season Countdown:
3. Florida State Seminoles
One year. That is all it took to make legendary Head Coach Bobby Bowden seem like a distant memory. As terrible and uncalled for the pushing out of the grandfather of the entire damn program, there was no doubting that Bowden had grown stale and change was needed in Tallahasee. Jimbo Fischer provided the change and the 'Noles look ready to be a national force yet again.
The Seminoles will return eighteen starters, not included among those is QB EJ Manuel who saw significant starting time a year standing for an injured Christian Ponder. The offense also boasts possibly the deepest backfield in the country with three quality tailbacks and an outstanding blocker in FB Lonnie Pryor. Replacing Outland finalist Rodney Hudson will not be easy, but the rest of offensive line looks solid, with worthwhile experience at the positions where starters are not going to be back. Manuel looked solid in relief of Ponder last year and there should not be any concern of a fall off throwing the ball as long as the line keeps him upright. There are no real sexy names at WR but the top two recievers from a year ago are back.
The defense was probably the reason Bowden was ushered out a year ago but last year erased that memory completely and established Florida State as a defense to be feared once again. Eight starters on this unit return. DE Brandon Jenkins is back after registering 13.5 sacks last season, leading a pass rush that tied Boise State for the most sacks in the nation last year. Only one starter is back at linebacker but the Seminoles have stockpiled sooooo much talent at this spot over the last two years I'd be shocked to alarge drop off in quality here. The backfield features a great one-two punch at cornerback and Xavier Rhodes is potentially the best CB in the country. There are no significant weaknesses on this side of the ball.
The schedule is the stuff that national title runs are made of. They will play the likely number one team in the country at home in week three when the Sooners travel to Doak-Walker stadium. The second best team in the ACC, Virginia Tech, is not on the regular season schedule.
Prediction: ACC Champions - BCS National Championship Game
The following is not my writing, rather some very interesting detail I found about all the Ohio State controversy that you may not have seen elsewhere.
After the scandal broke, Ohio State announced it was voluntarily "vacating" all 2010 football victories. Yet open the new 2011 Buckeyes football media guide and the games are listed as wins.
As for OSU President Gordon Gee, who receives $1.8 million a year to run a taxpayer-subsidized public university, he joked that he couldn't fire Tressel, but Tressel might fire him. Har har! Seth Wickersham of ESPN The Magazine (Published on Earth: The Planet) details the joke. The leading concern about Ohio State as an institution is that academics kisses the feet of the athletic department. Gee all but made this official.
Gee seemed to stand for the school's integrity when he announced Tressel had resigned and would be fined $250,000. Later, Gee quietly changed Tressel's resignation to a retirement, qualifying him for taxpayer-subsidized state benefits, waived the fine, and awarded Tressel about $50,000 in severance. So when the president of OSU makes a public announcement, he may or may not be telling the truth. That's some example Ohio State is setting.
Defending the program as Tressel departed, Gee wrote, "Ohio State's football team ranked first in academic performance among the nation's top 25 teams." Melinda Church of Gee's office told me he was citing this NCAA Public Recognition Award: under Sport, click "Football FBS," then "Display All." But the award is not for "academic performance." The award is for improvement as measured by the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate -- that is, for raising a previous score. Gee changed academic "progress" to academic "performance." Misrepresenting the content of a cited source is a big sin in academia -- but apparently doesn't bother the president of Ohio State.
I hate Ohio State, and I assume that given my Boise State roots, that most of my readers do as well. Hopefully this can pour more fuel on the fire for you like it did for me.
There is no Marvel Madness post here today, because all first round matchups are up, we'll take a break from those until those all go final. We do have some new winners today: Kang the Conqueror, Dr. Bong, Enchantress, Wizard, Apocalypse, Shuma-Gorath, Sandman, and Xorn are now into the second round.
With a break from posting eight matchups a day, I will finally get a chance to post a long overdue top ten list. As usual, I prefer to focus on all the hateworthy, terrible things in the world. Today will expose some of my biggest pet peeves.
Top Ten Worst Things About Comic Books
And when I say comic books, I mean Marvel comic books, because those other companies don't matter. DC and Superman could have been an easy 1-2 combo, but I decided channel my hatred a bit more and find the flaws in comics I generally love.
10. "Blank Cover" Variant Covers
Do I need to say more? Sure, these are perfectly harmless, but they are getting a little old. They started to show up about a year ago for big issues, usually if there was a mojr event or death to occur. Now the blank cover shows up for almost everything and makes an appearance for virtually every new #1 on the shelves. It is lazy, uncreative, and now completely overused.
9. Making Male Characters Female Characters
This is a very recent trend that has become very, very annoying. The worst part is that Marvel knows that fans hate it and the change never lasts for long. When Thor came back in 2008, Loki came back as a woman. Ghost Rider is now apparently a chick, a few years back we were gifted with a female Wolverine in the form of X-23, and there seem to be about twenty different Spider-Women swinging around there. The trend keeps spreading, in what I assume is an attempt to get women to read comics, but I just can't imagine any girl picking up a comic and saying "I've always liked Wolverine but I just don't relate to him. Wait!! What's this? Wolverine is a girl now? Now this I can relate to." It doesn't work like that because if you have changed the gender, regardless of the intention, you have inherently changed the character and subsequently irritated any fan they current have.
8. The Savage Land
I don't if I have a lot of detail that I can add here. I wouldn't say that there is anything conceptually wrong with the Savage Land, clearly some people really like the idea, because they keep getting stories and have for 50 years now. I guess I just think if I'm going to read a comic placed in the modern world, I'd rather not have it be placed in a prehistoric jungle with dinosaurs and a lame Tarzan wannabe. I also hate that whenever anything big happens in the Savage Land, heroes just jump on a plane and take care of it in like half an hour (it's in Antarctica), but if anything happens in San Fransisco it takes like eight hours to fly out and help the X-Men.
7. The Sentry
I can't put into words how glad I am that this character is, at least for now, dead and gone. The character is essentially a Superman knockoff but creator Paul Jenkins decided to give him an interesting twist: The Sentry is schitzophrenic. He is also so incredibly powerful that he ruins every story he is in. Until he died in Siege, Marvel literally came up with reasons to write him out of virtually every crossover that happened, because he was made so unbeatable that a story with him in it would lack drama. My biggest problem with the character is not that though, it is how freaking confusing he is. The Sentry was in the comics from 2005 until 2010, along with one mini-series when he was created. During that time, his origin story was changed 4 times. FOUR TIMES!!! And he only even had two mini series based around him. Every time he was the focus of a story, they would explain a new idea about how his powers worked, what his connection to the void was, or how he actually got his powers. I understand things change in comics a lot, but most characters are also recreated and written by several authors. The Sentry was written by two. authors. ever. Brian Michael Bendis and Paul Jenkins changed his story multiple times each in under 5 years.
6. The Universe According to Brian Bendis
Let me get one thing straight, I don't hate Bendis, I hate how much Joe Quesada (Marvel's Editor-in-Chief) loves Bendis. Since about 2004, Bendis has been given the reigns to direct all of Marvel continuity however he wants. Bendis is a very talented writer, however, events are not his specialty. Secret Invasion, Secret War, Avengers: Disassembled, Siege, and House of M have been his brainchilds and almost all of them have dissapointed fans greatly. He has written virtually all Avengers stories since 2005, and has finished virtually none of them. Avengers under his direction, has been used as a "set up the next big thing" book, stories that run one or two issues to set up a bigger story somewhere else, and then drop it without a proper ending. Bendis is an incredible talent writing books that are just good stories that don't need to be tied to events. Daredevil, Alias, Scarlett, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Powers are all great reads, but team book and event stories always fall flat.
5. Jeph Loeb
This guy just sucks. He is known for some great work with the X-Men in the past, mostly creating Cable and Onslaught. In this decade he has ruined a lot of good things. Greg Pak spent two years bring the Hulk back to popularity with the outstanding Planet Hulk story, culminating in a great story in World War Hulk that established the Hulk as big player again. Jeph Loeb picked up the reigns from there, relaunched the series, focused solely on his new Red Hulk character, and at one point even went ten consecutive issues without so much as a Green Hulk sighting. He then actually managed to destroy the Ultimate universe almost completely. He started by annihilating the outstanding legacy Mark Millar had started with the Ultimates I & II by writing the Ultimates III, a story so bad, I gave up after 3 issues. Then he wrote a very, very good story in Ultimatum that sacrificed the entire universe to put out five good issues. He killed off Dr. Strange, Cyclops, Magneto, Scarlet Witch, Dr. Doom, Wolverine, Thor, and the Wasp in five issues. Ultimate comics have never really recovered, X-Men has put out 5 issues in three years since, and the Fantastic Four have never had a series again.
4. Daken
I believe I adequetely summarized my feelings on this character when he appeared in the Marvel Madness tournament, and honestly, I don't care to write about him twice.
3. One More Day
This story is the most upset I have ever been over a story in my time reading comics. Essentially the story is that Aunt May is about to die, Peter Parker is distraught with grief, and Mephisto offers to save her life if, and only if, he and Mary Jane agree to let him alter time so that their marriage never happened and never will happen. They did. The aren't married now, they have a breakup story that appears to definitively close the book on any future chances of that changing. Additionally, when the changes happened, every single person save MJ in the entire universe forgot Spidey's secret identity, and Harry Osborn was alive and sane again for seemingly no reason at all. The story was apparently forced onto writer Michael J. Stryzenski by Joe Quesada because Quesada so whole-heartedly believed that Spidey stories had been subpar only because being married held his stories back and this was his evil plan to make them fun again. The story, by the way, was boring as hell.
2. The Re-Launch
I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate the constant re-launches that all comic books seem do over and over and over again. Since I have been reading comics, it seems Spider-Man is the only character that hasn't had his book re-launched. It never means anything, except that the classic numbering will go away until the cumulative number of issues between all runs hit a number divided by fifty. Thor and Hulk hit 600 a few years back, Thor is currently on issue five, Hulk is still on the classic numbering, but will be relaunched this fall. Fantastic Four/Future Foundation is now at issue seven. Iron Man is back to his classic number for the first time in six years, Chost Rider just had number one again and so did Daredevil, just about a year after hitting 500. It will never end, and maybe I should let it go, but dammit I want my issue of Daredevil to say #506 in the corner.
1. The 1990's
It is so hard to put all of the failure of this decade into words. I think it can be accurately summed by three things.
1. The Clone Saga
2. Heroes Reborn
3. Full long boxes at your local comic shop that contain only one single issue X-Men.
vs.
vs. 
vs. 
vs. 
