CFB '23 - Week 7 Recap

• In Spite Of Louisville Disaster, Even Week Results In 2.7% Loss

• 64 Remain As Field Smooths Out Considerably; Multiple WithIn Striking Distance Of Carl

• No. 2 Leishman, No. 6 Clark, No. 9 Sorenson Tumble While McCombs, Hansen, Hutchison Keep Pace

• Woman and Man In Bloxham Family Cede No. 8, No. 9 Positions To Woman and Man In Goss Family (whadda tha chann-ces?!)

Hello, Old Friend?

Asking if one likes Pat McAfee is like asking if one is able to out-pizza the hut. How can one answer a question about a subject that doesn’t mean anything, that’s as hollow as a slogan? You can’t. But you remember the slogan. That’s what makes it a slogan. It is designed to grab your attention. It has the depth of rice paper and it is loaded with salt.

I decided to revisit College GameDay this weekend for the first time in years because it was com-min-to-mah-cittt-tayyy. Well, no. It was coming to the other side of my  state, the side a few hours away that contains an outsized proportion of socioeconomic and political capital, and that is more foreign to me than the entire eastern seaboard. But like many who grew up outside of a major city, I remain a knee-jerk sucker for at least monitoring a national spotlight that shines anywhere nearby.

The show wasn’t as odious as I expected. I expected to have rage provoked, because the Twitterati now either loathes it or thinks it has much-needed pep. Some parts were even entertaining. Herbie holding the ball and the kid kicking it through the uprights on the second try (if they do this every weekend, forgive me). Occasionally, Joel McHale had comedic timing. Sitting on my couch watching in the pre-dawn darkness, old-man-screams-at-change was not fully achieved.

But the whole thing was still …2023. Loud, filled with the white noise of relentless recycled pop music, largely designed, as a random person on X said, “for people who don’t want to have to think.” It was like watching the skeletal remains of a person you once knew, but that skeleton was manipulated by various cults of personality that it bought down at the TikTok store.

Commish, did the culture and the skeleton change over time, or did you change over time?

Stop asking pervasive questions, I’m trying to write an intro, here.

Like a politically homeless person I couldn’t decide which fate — remaining on ESPN or navigating to Fox for Big Noon Kickoff — was less bad. From what I can ascertain, both shows believe they posses self-satisfying amounts of Rizz, which is a fun term to say. See: we don’t hate everything about 2023.

Rizz is in the pantheon of giggly neologisms like “yeet,” except yeet is an amalgam of two words (“yes” and “neat!”) and does not descend directly from another word with which it shares meaning (charisma —> rizz).

One popular GameDay narrative is that it was previously devoid of Rizz, as if its Rizz levels were overdrawn, its Rizz account over-drafted. But now that it’s gotten rid of Maria Taylor, David Pollack, Tom Rinaldi (fine) and replaced them with the Carnival Barker, it is of the mind that it has now turned on the Rizz machine, found the Fountain of Rizz.

Doing what you’ve seen other people do online, but yelling loudly about it, is not Rizz. It is Desmond Howard letting out one forced nervous laugh too many (which I envision one day leading to a psychotic breakdown from the realization of having spent a second career attempting to sell Cheez-Its).

It is the embodiment of an accidental manifesto from McAfee uttered at the 8:28am mark of the telecast: “The internet is the best place on Earth.”

So, the show was mediocre. It did not incite cringe or offense. It incited little joy.

It was just 2023. It was designed for people that don’t want to have to think.

It was also an allegory for the mindset of some Onioners this week, swept away by the tides of variance that crept in Saturday night to Acrisure Stadium.

Follow The Leader Second-Place Man

First off, for the suspiciously large amount of you who have asked so far this year, I am not Zach Bloxham. We already covered this back when he bombed out a few weeks ago. He is a real person. He is my personal attorney and a man with Onions of a variety and girth larger than one would suspect upon first glance. He has held public office. He was the original co-commish, and now he’s washed.

Secondly, I did not influence David Carl’s wagering decision last week. I do not play the game. I do not influence the game’s outcome. Your Commish is just a tour guide through the inanities, frivolities and nuances of a college football - and soon, a college basketball (spoiler alert) - season.

In the frenzied moments after Carl announced he was matching Chad Leishman’s wager of 7,500 on Louisville -7, 27,500 Onions came in on the Cardinals. That amount alone would have constituted enough to make Louisville the most-wagered-on side of any this year, were that mark not beaten by …itself. 9,000 other Onions were posted on Louisville prior to the declaration.

One can certainly criticize Leader Carl’s wagering decision, which again, was Trap City if you haven’t listened to the coverage this past week, and a welcome respite in which trendy road chalk off a big win didn’t win the day.

But I cannot attribute to him the thoughtlessness referenced in the final line of the previous section, as he was not simply following the leader (Leishman) with his pick. He genuinely did not know what Leishman had picked, and remarkably came to the conclusion all on his own. But there was only one influencer in Week 7 with greater puissance and moxie in the moment than Chad Leishman, and it was leader Carl himself.

And so this led to thoughtless chaos, like stock traders attempting to discern meaning from Jerome Powell scratching his left eye instead of his right eye during a press conference where nothing about interest rate hikes was actually revealed.

One could practically hear the chorus of “I’d better keep up!” and “I’d better do what he’s doing” (these are two different things, one relating to amount wagered and one relating to the side wagered on) piping through the Onions PA system. And to that mentality in Week 7 I’d say the same thing I’d say about McAfee’s declaration about the internet.

And some of you (except Robbie McCombs, in an unnecessarily epic fade that sent him to second place) paid the price for it.

So fitting is it that the consequence of paying the price is a far more even field. One week transpired and we went from “the contest is over” to a squadron of seven fighters plus two Gosses well within a seven-week striking distance of the leader.

Which leads us, at the (merciful, for several of you) end of this email, back to the beginning. A photo of Jeff Brohm in a dunce-cap-cum-1920s-leather-helmet.

That photo is purely negative rizz. You know what else is negative rizz?

Here’s Louisville’s second half drive chart, which was punctuated at the end by Narduzzi with a ten-point lead refusing to run out the clock, and instead extending the lead to 17 with a 31-yard touchdown pass on fourth down (peak douche-ism with some rizz sprinkled in).

• Turnover on Downs
• Punt (three-and-out)
• Interception Returned For A Touchdown
• Interception
• Missed Field Goal
• Turnover on Downs
• Turnover on Downs
• Turnover on Downs

This is the nadir of rizz.

So is following the leader less than half of the way through the competition, no matter how far ahead they are.

Week 7 Vital Signs

Onions In Circulation Going In To The Week: 178,096

Onions In Circulation Coming Out Of The Week: 174,188

Total Wagered By All Onioners: 135,262 (75.9%)

Average Wagered Per Onioner: 1,803

Average Individual Wager Size: 820

• Total Collective Onioner Win or (Loss): (3,686) (2.7%)
• Average Win or (Loss) Per Onioner: (49)

Games With Highest Handle:

• Louisville -7 @ Pittsburgh (42,470) (83% on Louisville)
• Everything Else Was Remarkably Even

Biggest Win or (Loss) Either Way For Onioners: Louisville-Pittsburgh (28,739)

Obituaries

We entered the week with 78 of you and left with 64 still standing.

Only three of you missed the submission deadline this week.

Deadline Deadbeats:

• Ben “What Does The (Fawkes) Say” - Evidently nothing, as he did not submit. Was it something I said in the conference corridors this past week at the Venetian?
• Jaxson “With an X” Tilby - Your relation, Jarrick, couldn’t stop submitting even after he DQ’d himself. You still had 340 Onions and couldn’t be bothered. What’s going on in the Tilby household?
• Kyle “Embarass-mussen” - Losing all but five Onions last week on a mistaken Red River gambit would make you so embarrassed that you couldn’t even submit the following week.

And Now, The Dearly Departed

• Joe “He Keim, He Saw” Keimig - He came, he saw, and he shit himself when somehow both of the teams he backed lost their covers simultaneously.
• Chris “Smooth As Chris-tal” Burke - Memphis and New Orleans are two smooth towns with smooth sounds. Nothin’ smoother than Irish-exiting on a Friday night on a home dog that many found attractive.
• Raymond “Oh, Whoa, No!” Owono - This is what Raymond uttered when he saw Garrett Shrader run to the sideline, vomit from food poisoning, and sub out for backup QB Carlos Del Rio-Wilson.
• Albert “No Quest-Chens, Please” Chen - Albert is one of the only likable members of the Hollywood Elite - but he is still Big Time. A notorious recluse, he is frequently seen hurrying past a press line at a premiere event or waving off paps at a red carpet gala. One hopes he doesn’t take the same tack when HQ comes calling for an interview to discuss why in God’s name he put his life on the line backing either side in Texas A&M-Tennessee.
• Dillon “Reflektor” Omond - We re-discovered Arcade Fire this past month, and this was such a deep album. Also, Dillon appears to be as obvious as the word in question, a giant headlamp shining the bat signal logo of BYU into the night sky, a personification he fulfilled once again (and for all) this past week. The Cougars got rocked by the way.
• Ryan “RyanAir” Hastings - RyanAir is notorious for being cheap and having bad customer service. Enter BYU +3, a seeming bargain against a team that lost to Colorado, and who let their customers very, very down this weekend.
• Randall “Pettit Bourgeoisie” - Randall looked up above himself in the standings and envied the upper-middle class balances of the 3, 4 and 5,000’s and their apparently righteous ways, not to mention those of the aristocratic David Carl. And then Pat Narduzzi mugged him and now he’s a peasant waiting for College Basketball Onions to start.
• Erik “The Simp” Simper - When you made the Louisville play, the nickname just wrote itself automatically here in MailChimp. It was too obvious.
• “Sixth-String” Banjo Clark - I am devastated to report that his Christian name isn’t Banjo. But not only is six(th)-string maybe a type of banjo (?), it’s also the type of offense that Louisville had on the field Saturday night.
• Kyle “Sword and Shields” - This nickname was picked out in the moments that we mistakenly believed he lost on USC. Trojans use swords and shields and all sorts of things. And you might be saying, “Commish, Kyle lost on Air Force, not USC. What are you even talking about?” And to that I say… Oh.
• Peyton “Your (Feller) Man” - The person who actually lost on USC was Peyton. But it could have been any of your fellow contestants out there losing after they chose, voluntarily, to back the Swiss-cheese-defense team on the road against Audric Estime. A totally relatable, understandable pick. Definitely a side worthy of you going all-in on.

Full Leaderboard Headed Into Week 8

Leaderboard