My son is playing an organized sport for the first time. He’s in an Under 8 soccer league. He’s 6, and like most six-year old kids can be easily distracted by a blade of grass just as the action is coming his way. It turns out, this makes me kind of crazy on the sideline when he’s out there. I do my best to stifle the urge to yell at him to pay attention or just get into the action. I just fear turning into that parent constantly berating and yelling at his kid all game long.

So I figure the better thing would be to practice with him a little bit. Make him more comfortable with things and be encouraging. We show up for practices and games maybe 10-15 minutes early and do some stuff. Maybe it helps, maybe not. What it did do is catch the coach’s attention and now I find myself as the substitute coach this weekend. That will teach me.

That puts me on a slight DVR delay.

There are 125 teams (I think) in Division 1-A. There is always a rough guess of where teams fall on that list.

Duke is not sure of what team they are, but there is a better idea based on what they have done after 3 games. The guess is they are in the lower half of all the 1-A teams. Not in the 90s or 100s, but somewhere around 65-85.

No one is quite sure of Pitt either. With blowing out a bottom-20 team and being blown out by a top-10 team, there is still lots of room. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d put Pitt anywhere from 42-72. I look at this game as a gauge on whether Pitt is in the upper-half of D-1 or lower.