the national championship gone wrong

"The question is, do you have the stones to sink a putt when it counts?"
-Dr. Cox, Scrubs

As most of you are aware by now, Monday night proved to be something out of the ordinary. For the first time in several years, a one loss team is the national champion in college football. Then again, the rest of the bowl season was pretty messed up as well: A team that loses one game all year by three points is relegated to the Rose Bowl and then smashed to pieces by a team that just lost to UCLA(ha), a team from Idaho goes undefeated and then beats Oklahoma in the most thrilling bowl game of this century, a Navy team blows a last second lead to Boston College as the kicker from BC(playing in his first year of football ever) nails the longest field goal of his young football career to give the Eagles the win, a subpar Notre Dame team is crushed by LSU and leaves the Rutgers fans wondering why they weren't part of the BCS, and then there was the national championship. I watched the game over mark's house with several other people. From what I could see, it was about a 50/50 split as to who people were rooting for. When Ted Ginn ran back the initial kickoff, all I could think was 'Good, this is the way it's supposed to be.' Beyond that though, Ohio State did nothing right. They were outrun and outmuscled by Florida and the Gator defense did something that almost nobody did to Troy Smith all year: pressure him. Seriously, Smith panicked like the kid in the neighborhood game and was even outran by a defensive lineman. All in all, I was surprised by the outcome(as I was rooting for the Buckeyes). The Big Ten and mid-major colleges were definitely the big losers in this bowl season. Actually, I believe that Penn State(what?) was the only Big 10 team to even win its bowl game(Wisconsin might have won, I'm not sure). PSU looked impressive against Tennesse and Morelli didn't look completely lost out there for once. The Big East looked really impressive(with good wins from Louisville, West Virginia, and yes, Rutgers in the Alamo bowl or whatever god forsaken bowl they were stuck with) and that was good to see because the legitimacy of the Big East was in question after the departure of several schools to the ACC a few years back.

As far as my life goes, I've continued to read Cramer's Sane Investing and he makes a comparison that I knew existed before and that is between stocks and gambling. In the second chapter of his book, he says that as much as nobody wants to admit it, stock trading is like gambling, and I couldn't agree more. I would back this up by saying that in poker as in stocks you need many different tools to be a winning player. If you are focused on playing way too tight and everyone around you is playing tight, you're missing out on free money to steal! Just like in the world of stocks, if you refuse to sell when the stock begins to plummet in the hope that it will rebound, you just may have missed an oppurtunity to make big money. The many comparisons between the two is probably one of the reasons that I find a life in the economic and financial field so appealing. Running a hedge fund is really a fancy way of gambling with other people's money.

In other news, I got a letter Monday from poetry.com saying that I was a semi-finalist in their poetry contest and that as a semi-finalist I would be published in an upcoming book called Immortal Verses. Don't look for it at your neighborhood Border's(because I doubt it's for sale to the public), but still very cool none the less to have a piece of your work published.

That's all for now. I truthfully just felt like writing about college football and jumped off into a little tangent with stocks and poker, but that's okay. Here's a poem to close things off.

We Wear the Mask
By: Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile'
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!



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