| | Still holding on to my Cal season tickets for the last three years, I’ve only made it to three Cal Poly football games while I’ve been down here. While this is only Division I-AA/FCS level football, I’ve missed some decent action as Cal Poly is currently ranked #3 in the country at this level. Yesterday was the regular season home finale… and oddly it was a de facto championship game for the Great West conference. Oddly I say because it was between Cal Poly (7-1, 2-0) and UC Davis (5-5, 2-0). That’s right, both teams are 2-0, going into their third conference game, and that’s all there is for the conference. There are actually 5 teams in the conference, these two plus Southern Utah, North Dakota, and South Dakota. However, despite there only being 4 other teams in the conference than yourselves, you only play 3 of them. What a conference… During the game, I kind of had a hard time rooting against UC Davis. Consider it recurring goodwill for beating Stanford a couple years ago. Some of it was also instinctual, given the choice of the blue team or the green team, I kind of wanted to go with the blue team… Davis brought their band too, so while I barely know any Cal Poly music, the Sons of California/Big C/Hail to California trifecta was a bit hard to not follow. Part of it was also stylistic. Starting with the national anthem, the crowd was a little iffy. Nobody sang it down here compared to Berkeley. Now which place is not supposed to be the real American anyway? This iffyness carried on into the first few minutes, where I thought to myself, “You’re cheering wrong…” Cal Poly started on defense, and people were going, clap… clap… defense… clap… clap… That’s not going to do anything. Try making some actual noise… None of this intermittent crap. While some noise eventually did start and recur through the game, people weren’t too good about paying enough attention to start doing it, oh, before the snap was imminent. It’s ok, the visiting team should be able to hear each other in the huddle… Finally stylistically, when it came to rooting for the triple option team, or the team that throws the ball kind of often, I kind of wanted to root for the offense I was used to. Granted, the Davis QB threw two picks, and my brother has been kind of mad at him for losing games due to untimely picks. However, I think I’d take this guy over Nate Longshore any day because he at least gets out of the huddle with more than 4 seconds left on the play clock… But enough about football, because it didn’t really feel like it was football season, let alone championship football season. Saturday in San Luis Obispo, it was 87 degrees, capping a string of a few 80+ degree days. (Global what-now…?) It was so unseasonable warm, I was half expecting people to barbequing and running down water slides. With this weather, you think of baseball instead of football, and events this week seem to provided for the change in weather. On Thursday, I had my final IM softball game of the season. We thought our season ended on a wet night two Monday’s ago, but inexplicably, despite a 1-3 record and -12 run differential, worst in our league, we made the playoffs (In fairness, we played consistently better than the true worst team in the league, we just got shelled in our first game). Of course, our playoff game went about as well as the 4-13 match-up can be expected to go, but hey, it was mid-November softball, on a field so dry at 8:30pm that I tossed a couple of dead duck pitches because the ball was sticking too long to my dry hand… Then of course this week there was Tim Lincecum, the first part-Filipino pitcher (he’s either quarter of half) to win the Cy Young Award, and first San Francisco Giants pitcher to win since Mike McCormack in 1967. The feat, which caused a noticeable increase in the number of Giants hats seen on campus, also caused a flurry of activity on my Facebook NewsFeed. I had logged in, and out of the corner of my I saw the entry, 41 people have changed their profile pictures. I went, “Wow, 41… that’s kind of a lot.” So I click on it, and there are a set of four profile picture updates in a row, three of the four being Lincecum related. 
A few thoughts crossed my mind when I saw these updated profile pictures. First with Gus’ pic, since he’s from in SF and goes to USF, I wondered a) Did he take this pic himself. After looking a the pic some more and looking at the full-sized version, I wondered a couple more things, b) Who are they playing, c) Why is a player guarding the bullpen when there is no one warming up in it, and d) Why is the umpire on his knees (if you look closely, he’s on both knees)? As for the dueling video game covers, I thought, what are the chances that out of 41 updates, that the two of a kind end up lining up back to back? Seeing AJ, who I used to ref football with, and a baseball reference, brought back bad memories of when he hit two home runs off of me when I played his softball team last year, despite the two pitches being about a foot inside and up at his eyes. Definitely not a Lincecum moment for me, that was more of a Barry Zito… Finally, seeing Hubert and the same picture made me think, hey, you’re a grad student now, you don’t have time for video games anymore, right? |
