You can feel it in the air.
It may be 92 in Ashburn today and supposed to be 98 tomorrow, but after this week, the highs don’t even get to 80. Overnight it’s in the 50s. After 4 PM today, all the NFL rosters are down to 53. Any college or pro game going forward counts. Exhibitions are over.
It’s football season. Forget all that Christmas propaganda about December being the most wonderful time of the year.
It’s now.
The euphoria of the moment has led me to wonder “how could I make something this good even better?” The answer, of course, is to have the proper tools to – as celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse used to say – “take it up a notch.”
So I’ve built a few things into the website this football season and BAM…you now have those tools.
The first is for college fans. No. 1 question I always ask myself every Saturday is who is playing, where, and on what channel. I always refer to a site called “The College Football Schedule by ESPN” for answers. It lists every game from Game 1 to the last bowl game, tells you where, what time and what network it is on if televised. It even tells you the cost of tickets and the point spread if available.
It breaks them into weeks so if in the 6th week of the season from Sept. 29 until Oct. 5 and you are being dragged to your wife’s second cousin’s wedding and need to know what channel a certain game is on, this will give you the answer. And if you forget the link for this, look up at the menu bar on this site, click on the dropdown arrow for “databases” and one of the choices is “College FB on TV.” It will take you there.
Another tool involves stats and trivia. How many times have you gotten into a discussion/argument on social media over the details of a game played long ago and you need your memory refreshed? Well, the answers you seek are probably on a site called “sports-reference.com”, which is a massive database of just about every major college or professional sport. It has rosters, coaches, game by game results, stats, etc. for every season going back to when your grandfather was in high school. You just enter the name of the person or team you’re seeking at the top and it does the rest.
If you go back to the dropdown for “Databases” you will see it divided by sports such as college football, major league baseball, etc. Off to the side are options for local teams to save you the time of typing in “Virginia Tech” or “Virginia” but once you get to the site, you can simply type in any school you want. So if you live in Virginia but yearn for details and history of South Dakota State, this is still the place to go.
A third tool is a quick place to go see current statistics to see if the team you’re watching is any good. There is a heading called “standings” on the site, and it has a dropdown for various places of interest. Wondering where your team is in the ACC race? Click on ACC standings. Wondering where a team is ranked? There’s a link for both the Writers and Coaches poll. The ACC Standings page also has links to team schedules, media guides and league statistics.
So now that you’ve accumulated this mountain of trivial minutiae, what’s next? Gambling, of course. I’m not a serious gambler, but no weekend is complete without at least one friend texting to ask if I want to bet a dollar or two on a game. Your friends are probably honest, but mine try to snooker me, so I don’t agree to any friendly wager until I’ve seen the point spreads. You’ll notice now in the menu header there is a section called “Odds” and it has a drop down for college football and for the pros. Now when a friend wants to bet on a game straight up without giving any points, you can quickly see what betting experts think as to that being fair or not and react accordingly.
The fifth and last source of information is probably one of the most useful sites I’ve come across if you’re a Virginia Tech fan. It’s called the “Hokiesports Stat Database”, and it is the brainchild of Damian Salas, the living, breathing keeper of all things Virginia Tech sports. It’s listed as the last item under the “Databases” menu heading.
As the name suggests, you can go here and search for any stat imaginable, so if you’re wondering when the last time a lefthanded punter threw a touchdown pass, this is where you’d find it. But its real value is the main page of “stats.hokiesports.com.” On the left is a list of all Virginia Tech sports events for the week with the date and location. Once the game has started, you can click anywhere on that line and you’ll get live stats. Once the game is over, it moves to the right column where you can get all the details of the game just completed.
During football season, the access to the schedule and live stats is nice. But when you get to the spring when multiple events are going on at the same time, being able to keep up with the stats of all these games while possibly watching a live stream somewhere takes your following of those sports from good to great. The main advantages of being a media person covering an event is you get to see it with your own eyes, then have immediate access to all stats and can interview players after it’s over. This gives you as a fan – if you’re also watching streaming coverage – access to all that as well.
You just don’t have to write a story when the game is over. 😊
WOW! This is GREAT! Thank You!
Perhaps this will be helpful the next time you make a friendly wager with an old friend and say “I think it’s a tossup” when you KNOW the team you want is a 9-point favorite… 🙂