More Football

Man, but the Saints-Buccaneers football game was ugly. I know a lot of the fans are complaining about the officiating, but I’ve always tried to avoid doing that. I will point out though that you can’t commit the penalties they did at the times and places they did and expect to win. Twelve men on a punt? We gave up 4 first downs on penalties.

I think Fournette should have been ejected or penalized for his part in the fight, The head office can still fine him, and they should. It likely wouldn’t have started without him throwing two punches. And Evans needs to be fined for shoving the camera operator on his way off the field. There was absolutely no call for that. Dude was just doing his job.

We gave up five turnovers, and two of them led directly to the Buc’s touchdowns. I don’t know if Olave was blowing his routes or if Winston was making bad throws, maybe because of his injured back. I just hope they figure it out before we play Carolina.

Monday didn’t get any better. I got an email at 0745, a text at 0945, and a phone call at 1015, all from USAA. “Did you make or authorize these charges?” Sigh. No. No, I did not. New card on the way quickly and I’m not out any money—it was all little test charges before they went for the big score—but it’s still a PITA to deal with. You don’t realize how many places you’ve saved card numbers until you start having to change them.

And then came the call from my daughter that my car had died for her. She’d been borrowing mine because her transmission is acting up. Never a dull moment. It ended up being a bad battery connection. $24 later, it had a new positive terminal and it’s running just fine.

The Michigan-Maryland game was something else. I got a little nervous a couple of times. I was really disappointed that we couldn’t maintain our first-half shutout run, but Maryland I think is an underrated team. It kind of feels like Michigan went in expecting to roll over an unranked team and then got surprised that they’re way better than anyone thought they were. Maryland’s short game was phenomenal, and Michigan took far too long to get a good rhythm established.

Blake Corum is a stud, and I fully expect him to declare for the draft this year. JJ McCarthy looked pretty good as long as he wasn’t throwing long. Maryland’s Billy Edwards did an admirable job filling in for Tagovailoa. I chuckled at the look on Edwards’ face on his first snap though. He was staring at a beefy Michigan defensive line in the red zone in The Big House, and he looked terrified. Welcome to college football, kid.

I really hated the defensive letdown on Maryland’s last drive. There’s no excuse to let off the gas against a team that’s better than we expected them to be. But a win is a win. On to Iowa.

Mostly a football post this week. I don’t know that it’s going to be that way throughout the fall, but sometimes I’ve found myself scrambling for what to write about, so you’re getting probably more football than you might like. I should work on that.

I generated the image above using SocialBu, a suite of AI tools that I discovered via Reddit. I’ve seen some amazing AI-generated images here and there but I haven’t yet spent the time to get good at creating them. Right now, it’s akin to magic for me. The prompt I used for this one was “a midwestern US fall day along a river.” I tried a few prompts for football and saw mostly soccer images. When I tried to specify “American gridiron football,” the results were…sketchy. I’ve played around with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion briefly, and I’ll probably do a post about those after we get back from Ohio. Midjourney did give me a really interesting image for Keith Vincent in Ghost.

Writing

I broke 41k words on Ghost this week. Grandson is staying with his dad for the early part of the week since he’s going to Ohio with us next weekend, so I might have a more productive week of writing than normal. We’re traveling Thursday and for the first time in ten years, I won’t be the primary driver. I might actually be able to write on the road!

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