Football Friday quotes

About Oxford, Mississippi, the home of Ole Miss, which has produced 3 Miss Americas: "It's town that smells of bourbon and Chanel No.5".

About the Virginia/Virginia Tech rivalry:
Former Ohio State quarterback and football analyst Kirk Herbstreit said in 2004 that he "never realized how much those people hate each other." He went on to say "when I was down in Blacksburg, I said some nice things about Al Groh and it was like I had turned my back on them."[

Virginia-Virginia Tech was one of six in-state rivalries that ESPN writer Bomani Jones attempted to explain by writing:

“ Every state has a flagship campus, typically called the University of Your State, whose student body and alumni feel they are entitled to, well, pretty much whatever they want within state lines. That same state probably has another school -- usually denoted by the words State, Tech, or A&M -- that gets treated by the former like some Bonaduce-headed stepchild. These rivalries are usually pretty intense -- and can get pretty ugly. ”
— Bomani Jones

Finally, Westlake starts the playoffs with San Antonio Ronald Reagan High School, the Rattlers. The game is at 1 PM CST at the Hays High School Stadium in Buda, Texas. If we won that, we'd play Corpus Christi Carroll High or San Antonio O'Connor High.

Noel leaving us, VT v. GT tonight

As of this morning, there were Tropical Storm Warnings issued for Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, but these have been allowed to expire (along with the Watch for those counties plus Palm Beach). Noel made landfall in Nassau today as a strong Tropical Storm, and may intensify just a tad before transforming into an extratropical storm, but in all likelihood will not reach hurricane status.

In a few minutes I'm going to head to the Virginia Tech/Georgia Tech game at Bobby Dodd Stadium. Although Virginia is tied for the lead in the ACC Coastal Division (with Virginia Tech), a VT loss would really help us and give us a cushion so that we could lose to either Miami or Wake Forest and if we were to beach Virginia Tech (at home in Charlottesville), we'd still win the division. Yikes. My stomach is in knots already. Then on Saturday at Noon on Lincoln Financial (Channel 10 in Atlanta), we play a newly ranked Wake Forest team (the defending ACC champs).

Finally, Halloween last night was a blast. Drank a bunch of wine and handed out $50 worth of candy...at times there were lines forming at our door and others. People seem to know to come to our neighborhood for trick-or-treating, and because of that I think the neighbors really get into decorating for Halloween...I mean it looks like Christmas except with orange lights and blow-up Frankensteins instead of snowmen.

Finally the new drought monitor came out, and for Georgia it was virtually unchanged (we're still in the worst drought). Apparently the governor came to some agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers that would slow the flow of water out of Lake Lanier (read here. We shall see. The Virginia/North Carolina drought however looks much better after they got a LOT of rain last week (when we got about an inch).