First home tailgate of the season is in the books.  Our parking pass situation with Wes was looking a bit tenuous, especially given Craigs upcoming travel plans as well (off to Spain for work today, then off to Iceland for long vacation shortly after that) so we decided to go all in on tailgating in the lot 5 spot.  And it was pretty awesome.  Nice views, get to listen to the band warm up all during the tailgate, and plenty of grass all around us.

We didn’t set up a TV, but I don’t think anyone missed it.  We might just not bother for the rest of the season.  Maybe play it week by week.  For the second week in a row, we had 15 people for the big beer game.  We also once again played it 90 minutes early, instead of 60, which resulted in us being in our seats 10 minutes before kickoff, which was a mostly new and interesting experience.  This time it was Craig who drew the joker, and lost RPS 2-0.  Kinky Craig!

WRT to the game, it was pretty boring quite honestly.  We were about as plain on offense as we could possibly be…took a few deep shots (and the WRs definitely have some penis-fingers, or this game could have been 21-0 in the early 2^nd quarter), made no effort at all to establish any sort of run game.  I think the coaches basically said “lets get some reps for our young QB and WRs, lets keep Jackson clean, and lets just get out of here with a W”.  Which is what they did.  The new seats are pretty awesome.  Brent bought 6 tickets off of stubhub that were “1 section over from us, but same row” for his crew of 6 (Brent, Clara, Maggie, Hoppy, Liam, and Sophia).  As it turns out, my seats are the last ones in section 15 and his were the first ones in section 13, so we were all together for the game, which was awesome.

Katie and Craig, of course, were swanking it up in the box so pam and stork joined us in my seats.  I didn’t actually get any pics of our field view from the seats (at least none that came out well), but they are pretty awesome when action is in the south end…we’re right on the 25, 20ish rows back from the field.  And all our neighbors seemed quite cool, no grumpasuaruses present.  I was a bit too zoomed in (and washed out) in the pic below, but it at least gives a sense of where our seats are:

Recap of our conference mates/season opponents in week 2:

++ACC went a pretty weak 5-3 OOC, with 2 games postponed (cancelled?) due to hurricane Irma.  2-2 against P5 with dook and Clemson getting wins (against Northwestern and #13 Auburn, respectively), while loluva and pitt absorbed losses against Indiana and #4 Penn State.  10 OOC games again this week, but not many of interest.  3 P5 games (BC vss ND, dook vss Baylor, and Pitt vss Oklahoma state), and I expect the ACC to go 1-2.  Probably looking at 7-3 overall, with a loss by at least one of uva vss uconn, syr vss CMich, or unc @ ODU.  ACC is currently 15-7 OOC, and 4-6 vs P5 teams.

++ our season opponents went 5-6 this week (13-10 on the season), and 2-2 for our OOC foes (4-4).  Two of our OOC foes played each other, as WVU whomped ECU by jumping out to a 49-3 halftime lead and coasting to a 56-20 win.  ECU is just a bad, bad football team under new(ish) HC Scottie Montgomery.

This weeks game:

well would you look at that, it’s ECU, the team I was just talking about!  ECU is 0-2 and is currently ranked 129 out of 130 teams in total defense.  They have given up over 600 yards in both games this season (JMU and WVU), despite WVU calling off the dogs in the 2^nd half this week.  Not surprisingly, ECU fired their DC yesterday and promoted Robert Prunty to DC.  Starting with the VT game last year (VT 54, ecu 17) they have lost 11 of 12 games and given up an average of 42.1 points in those 11 losses.  And that’s your “BDG Sneaky Stat of the Week” (shamelessly stolen from TSL).  If the offense is going to “break out” this season, this seems like the game when it should happen.  Of course, we already have the built in excuse of “new DC, no film, things we didn’t expect!” if the offense struggles at all.  VT is a 22 pt favorite.