You’re going to get a lot of advocates for each of the four seasons. Some love the renewal of spring, some appreciate the freedom of summer, others, for some reason, love the cold and snow of the winter. For my money, though, this time of year is the best.
Fall brings with it new sports seasons in football, basketball, hockey, and the end of baseball season. The heat of summer is replaced with milder weather, leaves change, and it feels like you want to try to squeeze every good moment remaining before the winter comes in and steals away the light. The problem with this, of course, is that when you’re a fan of football your weekends tend to be full with watching nearly four-hour contests.
Thus, when the bye week appears on the schedule, it’s no surprise that folks take advantage of the opening, and that’s true for your fellow Tar Heel Bloggers. Yours truly, for instance, headed over to the mountains to look at some leaves, dredge for gemstones, and explore an abandoned mine lit up with black lights at night. It’s worth a trip just to see it all lit up.
Other staff members took advantage to take trips across the country, go see family, catch up with the kids they had forgotten they had, or in the case of our bosses...get married.
Yes, help us congratulate our own Tanya Bondurant and Brandon Anderson who joined together as newlyweds in a ceremony on Sunday. In true Tar Heel fan fashion, they made sure to schedule the wedding for the off week so more people could attend (Editor’s note: I’m fairly sure the wedding was scheduled before the schedule was released, so the bye week timing was a happy coincidence). Here’s hoping for love, strength, and happiness for them both!
And no, I’m not getting a raise for that.
We all made picks before the off week, though, and a funny thing happened to the standings:
Lots of wrong guesses, lots of right guesses, and when you added up the all guesses we have...a very interesting grouping. Five people are at 42-17 and are tied for first, four people are at 37-22 and are tied for last...and that leaves one person at 39-20 just kinda sandwiched in the middle. Far from creating separation, last weekend just made things a lot tighter.
So how do we fix this? Well, we keep picking. For the first time all season, our pessimism over UNC really shows up as a majority of us have Notre Dame set to win this weekend, thus you can expect UNC to win in a rout. We disagree in a few other spots, so hopefully this logjam in both spots will be broken. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the fact that I’m in first place this late in the season.
Buckle up, everyone, the next few weeks are going to be busy.