Saturday Tailgate: Purdue

In recent years, Week 1 has become the oasis after the long march through the desert that is the offseason. The football is tolerable, because you’ve gone so long without it, but between the generally weak matchups and the sloppy play, it’s hardly good football.

Week 2, on the other hand, is when the actual football starts to pick up. We begin to have standards, after all, and those standards are not met merely by 22 men on a field chasing a ball. The blowouts and objectively bad football that are acceptable in Week 1 slowly become less tolerable. We no longer crave football for the sake of football.

The good news, then, is that Week 2 may well deliver. I ran down the SEC schedule this week in the Bad Gambling Advice column, and there is a bona fide Top 10 matchup on tap when LSU visits Texas tonight. There is, too, another Top 25 matchup when Texas A&M visits Clemson, though that game is probably getting more hype than it deserves (Clemson, after all, is about a 17-point favorite in that game.) There is also a sneaky matchup between Tulane and Auburn, and an actual conference game (albeit what figures to be a terrible one) when Arkansas visits Ole Miss tonight.

AoG Week in Review

Today, Vanderbilt makes the trip to West Lafayette, Indiana, to play the Purdue Boilermakers for the first time since 1942. The last time Vanderbilt visited the state of Indiana, the Commodores damn near came away with a win at Notre Dame, and the Commodores are looking to do one better than that today. Kickoff time is at 11:00 AM on the Big Ten Network. We’ll also note that the BTN Tailgate (basically, the Big Ten version of SEC Nation) is broadcasting live from West Lafayette, and former Vanderbilt head coach Gerry DiNardo is on hand for the festivities.

In advance of the game, Shawn previewed the Purdue offense and I previewed the Purdue defense. Derek Mason gave his weekly press conference (and also released the weekly depth chart, which officially signaled the end of the quarterback battle... we think.) Shawn talked about IPA’s, a Purdue blogger answered our questions, Christian made fun of Purdue’s mascot and the city of Kokomo, Indiana, and we all made our best attempts at predicting the outcome of the game.

And to review last week’s Georgia game, I went through the box score and talked about all the things of interest in it, and DotP talked about the things we learned from the game. Oh yeah, and we answered all your questions.

We also gave our certain-to-be-wrong picks of the week’s games. Around the League noted that Tennessee lost to Georgia State, a Sun Belt team that won two games last season. And, Shawn wrote about the still-undefeated and still-unscored-upon soccer team’s visit to California last weekend.

That’s been our week. How’s your week been?