Well, San Francisco's over and so is college football.  A few thoughts about each.

First, San Francisco:

Glad to see Canadians Dan Korbel and Jonathan Steinberg string together a few impressive performances.  The brass ring tantalized, but ultimately eluded them, but they still managed a very respectable 16th place in the Blue Ribbon pairs and a top 10 finish in the National Open Swiss event.  (They jumped from 20th to 9th on Sunday.  I was looking to see if anyone else finished in the top 10 who started from further back in the pack and lo and behold Austinites Mildred Breed, Tobi and David Sokolow came roaring back from 40th (last qualifier) to pip them for 8th place.  Fred Gitelman's squad (Lynch) also managed a decent salvage effort, rising from 37th to take 10th spot.)

I was really happy to see Cayne win the Reisinger.  Those guys practice so much and make themselves so accessible, I think a win was long overdue.  Congratulations to Jimmy Cayne, Michael Seamon, Alfredo Versace, Lorenzo Lauria, Fulvio Fantoni, Claudio Nunes and Charlie Weed (team manager).

I was disappointed that they only had final round coverage and only of 1 table of the Reisinger on BBO.  The ACBL is really squandering a great opportunity by not taking Vugraph more seriously.  BBO shows Vugraph (often of pretty rinky-dink events) from Turkey, from China, from Australia, from Scandinavia, from Indonesia, from South America, from Canada, from you name it, but the ACBL can't be bothered to take the broadcast of its premier events seriously.  It's pretty disgraceful. 

On the other hand, watching the final round coverage was pretty excruciating at times.  It's clear that most of these guys play too much IMPs and not enough BAM.  Hand after hand of mistake after mistake (a few tough decisions, but mostly bad bridge) got pretty painful to watch.  It felt like I was watching a CNTC qualifier rather than a Reisinger finals.  My favorite instance of this was on Board 8 when a guy had AQ of trumps and a Diamond loser in one hand and stiff J of trumps and two Club losers in dummy (actually not exactly, but equivalent) and knew the Kx of trumps was behind the Ace and managed to lose 2 tricks. The commentary left a lot to be desired, too. (Sorry, I can't get the link to the Board to work, the file is on BBO here where it says 2007 Reisinger Segment Final 2 of 2.)

On to college football:

I can't remember a season with more upsets.  That may sound exciting, but what it means is that at the end of the year nobody's really worthy of playing for a national championship. 

All 3 of my favorite teams ended the 'regular season' with a whimper.  I got stuck with a rare loserfecta, if you will.

Tennessee lost the SEC Championship Game to LSU 21-14 when quarterback Erik Ainge imploded in the 4th quarter.  The guy reminds me of former Longhorn Chris Simms, who never met an interception he didn't like.

Texas lost to Texas A&M 38-30 when our offense didn't show up.  They needed to put a couple of drives together to at least give our defense a chance to rest for a few minutes and it never happened.  A team that played so bad this year that their coach quit after the game dominated the time of possession and held the ball for over 40 minutes against the Longhorns.  Ridiculous.  Quarterback Colt McCoy played better last year as a freshman.

Oregon lost to the Beavers of Oregon State in overtime.  I transferred to Oregon because Animal House was filmed there.  Well, actually I was young and in love at the time, but I agreed to go because Animal House was filmed there.  At the time their football program was pretty much a joke, but the year after I left they went to the Rose Bowl for the first time in forever.  I think the Ducks were ranked as high as 2nd this year, with a realistic shot at a return to the Rose Bowl but this loss dropped them out of the rankings.