Weekly Weather Report Furman Edition

Well...shit

that was depressing...on the bright side I made Hokie fans out of two other grad students, and they could not stop raving about how much of a beast rogers was. They walked away from the game legitimately impressed with Hokie football so, look at it this way guys despite the score the neutral fan perspective was still good! But for real, lets stop looking at the past and move forward, at least as best as we can and as I mentioned in an earlier thread lets stay positive, because there were some very good things to take from that first game!

This week will see some fall weather patterns begin to break in, and the early outlook is not fun. See this week there is a low pressure system setting up shop right in the blue ridge mountains which is bringing with it some rain and unpleasantness with it. Expect the rain to just sort of setup shop on Saturday and linger all day, but its not all bad folks! You see as the low that's currently been chillin over Blacksburg this week blows out we will have a beautiful Friday to enjoy! so at least there's that!

And unfortunately I dont really have an idea for this week's writeup. I tried to play with an El Nino idea but it wound up turning into about 17-18 paragraphs with an in depth jump into oceanography which I'm not super clear on yet (give me a month or two in 'sconnie) so I kinda jumped off that band wagon. Instead I will do a brief overview of meteorology, but I will give a brief laydown on whats going on at the moment as we have these really cool weather discussions every Friday, basically about something cool going on. This week we discussed this really slow moving trough at 500mb thats going to be bringing about a ton of rain saturday. While this isn't particularly unusual, it does have something pretty cool running with it. See usually when you have a trough a ridge forms in front and behind it to kind of push it along, but for a number of reasons the air flowing is all completely stable. Winds are all moving the same way indicating little to no instability, this is also relevant because it means cold air wont be pulling in early this year. So expect to have a pretty nice bout of fall weather before the winter rolls in! HURRAH GOOD NEWS!

For my future weekly science discussion I'm happy to announce I'm going to take things in another direction, and kind of make this a multi-layered project. Essentially what my grand scheme for this season was to take a breakdown of particular games and classify how weather may have impacted them to really evaluate what the odds of weather impacts are. For instance, I plan on going back and assessing the difficulty in throwing a football in the hurricane game against A&M or a specific pro game I remember watching where Eli Manning really struggled to throw the ball in the Chicago winds in '09 (or whenever he won his first super bowl). I plan on kind of evaluating when the winds begin making it REALLY FREAKING HARD to throw a football in, what kind of rainfall rates you might expect to see a fumble fest in, and how heat might wear down teams over the course of a game, or even how much harder it is to catch a ball in a cold game. Now this is going to be difficult because for instance Isiah Ford is much less likely to drop a ball than saaaaaay Demetri Knowles is, but I plan on comparing like players and seeing the trend on different games. So that is the next step in the grand scheme of things and I'm all ears in suggestions for how to compare things.

This week brings the Furman Paladins to town...a team that I have absolutely no clue about, and after doing some extensive research (looking at their first and only game so far and reading up on the wikipedia page) I...well I still know next to nothing. I basically learned that they seem to have a decent QB, and passing game, and rely on that more than their run game. They also historically have a somewhat relevant program winning an FCS national championship in 1983 and being runners up in 2001...but seriously as far as playing out on the field I have NO CLUE what their system looks like. I guess, expect some drops, hopefully no slippage, as far as a worst case scenario goes this is about as bad as it gets for a heavily favored team weather wise. With the increased precipitation that wont stop all day (coupled with the fact that its not freaking ohio state), I expect the crowd to be less into it. I also fully expect there to be some slips which definitely favors the offenses, but also expect some drop balls by both teams, which in my opinion favors the defense. The one redeeming factor I think that tech has in this game weather wise, is that we will probably control the trenches and be able to force the run game down our opponents throat. The difference this year from the dreaded JMU game, is that I am much more confident in our line than I ever have been as a hokie fan before (I started watching regularly in '06). I do think we'll bully furman around a little bit and still put points on the board. What I worry about as a fan, and in a fan's perspective is the ability of our qbs to make plays in what will be a really rainy day. Because of that I am slightly concerned about the fan outlook during and after the game, as I feel like all QBs will be on a very short leash.

This game worries me not because I think we'll lose (we learned from the JMU debacle) but because I worry what the QBs might come out looking like playing in not so nice weather conditions. Even the pros struggle in these conditions sometimes, and you must game-plan accordingly. As a result I fully expect whoever is at QB to maybe not look particularly sharp for a number of reasons and I really hope the fans dont turn on him as a result

FINAL PREDICTIONS

CLOUDY
Off and on rain all day (bout .1 inches)
High 75
Low 58
Wind 8-10 mph gusts

GO HOKIES!!!!

PS sorry for the lateness, between changing the topic a million times to grading papers this week was a little tricky with the short time between the games. I also know this isnt my best work so sorry guys!