Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

It may not mean as much to the rest of you all, but this weekend will be a homecoming of sorts for me, as it will be my first tailgate back in College Park.  I can’t wait (and thanks to the crappy kickoff time I really don’t have to).  Anyway, when I look at the Terps schedule I like to break it down into sections and set mental goals for each part.  Not that anyone on the actual team cares what I think, but obviously the first 4 games of this season make up a nice “section”.  We opened with Navy, Morgan State, WVU, and FIU.  These are our non-conference games.  In the summer, I thought 2-2 was a very possible outcome (and it could be), but now that we have the Navy win under our belt, 3-1 is well within reach.  This would mean, that moving forward, Maryland would only have to scrap together 3 ACC wins to be bowl eligible.  And let’s face it, based on the Out of Conference play of the ACC, 3 is not unrealistic!

But in comes FIU.  You can’t spell “If” with FIU, or is it the other way around?  But IF the Terps can take care of business this Saturday, the memories of 2009 will be put to bed, and a whole new attitude will take over College Park.  But FIU isn’t looking to roll over for anyone.  As I wrote earlier in the week, they had Texas A & M on the ropes and lost to Rutgers by less than a TD.  The Terps are going to have to be careful.  Treat this like a Conference game and we should be able to prevail.  Treat it like Morgan State 2.0 and well….let’s not think about that.

One thing we do need to think about however is the weather.  We are getting to the part of the year where we don’t need to worry about baking in the bleachers anymore.  But we aren’t there yet.  Normally on September 25th the high in College Park is 75 F and the low is 53 F.  The records for this day are 97 F (1970) which really would be baking, and 35 F (1963).  I wouldn’t want to see either of those numbers come Saturday.  The actual forecast for this day is a high between 81-84 depending on who  you listen to, and a low of between 56-67.  That’s a pretty wide range for the low.  The chance of rain, right now obviously because that is subject to change is 20%.  Because of the 20% I think there will be some cloud cover, which leads me to think the low will be closer to 67 than 56.  As of right now I’m calling for a high of 83 F and a low of 63 F.  Some clouds, a decent but not brisk wind. 

Because it is an early start, we need to look at the sunrise (Tailgating starts 6 am you know!).  The first hour of tailgating will be in the dark as the sun won’t be up until 6:57 am.  It sets at 6:59 pm so guess what, we are just about at the time of year where there is more night time, than day.  The moon will be beatiful.  Assuming no clouds obscure it, you should see a 100% full moon (though not the harvest moon) that will rise at 7:45 pm.  It will also be around briefly in the morning as it sets 9:08 am. 

So there you have it.  Maybe bring a light jacket for the morning, but otherwise should be a nice day.  If anything still a tad too hot.  Let’s just hope the Terps can make it uncomfortable for FIU.

Extra Droppings:

Someone tell me why Shaun Hill can’t play QB in the NFL?  Whenever an analysis, columnist, or announcer talks about him, they always put him down.  All he did in SF was win. Then he had a couple bad games and was gone.  He certainly gave Detroit a chance against Philly, with whom they shouldn’t have even been close to, and his Calvin Johnson TD that was called back was brilliant.  Where is the love?  I think may be it’s the name.  If he was named Travis Gunner, he’d probably be viewed as among the elites.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Maryland Terps Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.