At 4-1 the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets are in the midst of a fine season so far and bettors are well aware of this. Anytime a team can play two top flight schools and grab easy point spread covers, and the public will not soon forget this fact. If you recall the opening weekend of the 2006 college football season, the Chan Gailey led group gave the overrated Irish of Notre Dame all they could handle, in a hard fought 14-10 loss.
Since they have had a nondescript victory over Samford, wins over Troy and a lousy Virginia team and then last week a stunning domination on the road at Blacksburg, Virginia against the Hokies of Virginia Tech. This weekend America's favorite online sportsbook, www.sportsbook.com, has the Atlanta based school listed as a 13.5 favorite over the visiting Maryland Terrapins, with the over/under total in the 40.5-41 range.
Off the two nationally televised appearances the perception in America is that Georgia Tech and their talented duo of receiver Calvin Johnson and quarterback Reggie Ball cannot be stopped by the beneath the radar Terrapins, but I'm not so sure about that. Maybe I should rephrase that and suggest that they will not completely stop them, but they could control them, by forcing them to work their way down the field rather them give up the long ball.
Georgia Tech was pumped last weekend as they were looking to avenge the previous season's debacle at the hands of the Hokies. They blocked a punt, returned an interception for a touchdown, and played almost flawless ball. You can be sure that the student body put the players on a pedestal this past week and there were one or two parties, thrown for the players.
Next week GT travels to Clemson, SC for a huge battle with the talented Tigers. Maryland has played on the road in a hostile environment this year, when they played West Virginia at Morgantown. Their coach Ralph ?the Fridge? Freigen was an outstanding offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech before taking the job at Maryland.
Any time you are considering taking a dog on the road against a solid team in a conference game you had better have an experienced quarterback. The top quarterback for the club is Sam Hollenbach (5th year senior) and he has completed 58.1 percent of his passes for 661 yards with four touchdowns and three interceptions.
Maryland has a superb running back duo in Lance Ball and Keon Lattimore. They form a tremendous backfield duo. Ball has racked up 276 yards and five touchdowns, while Lattimore has contributed 255 yards and one score while averaging 5.2 ypc. Racking up first downs keeps Johnson on the bench and that is a very good thing.
When you're scanning the line changes at Sportsbook consider the visitors as a live play!
Bob Acton
Sports Betting
A common perception of the requirement 'continual improvement' contained within the ISO9001 Standard (8.5.1) is that in some way it relates to an improvement of product or service. Some more serious thought might reveal this to be a misinterpretation, as the document is not a product or service specification, but a system for controlling the quality of the product or service through the output. Title - ' ISO9001:2000 Quality management systems - Requirements'. So, in so far as the Standard relates to the organisations' output, it defines a control and assurance system that should provide a measure of conformance for the outgoing product. The improvement requirement refers to the manner in which this control is affected.
Herein lies the real problem with the ISO9000 series, as it has little to do with management in the normally accepted definition of that word, and certainly nothing to do with business management, which is about efficiency, effectiveness and costs. Pressured into an ISO9000 regime by (in the UK) a government sponsored initiative intended to improve the nation's international image for quality, organisations large and small adopted the standard and registration in the belief that this alone would enhance their status in the market place. At the beginning this was true, but when competitors were similarly equipped with their registered status certificate, and none of them demonstrably better than the other, buyers returned to their original practice of buying against criteria that did not include ISO9000 registration. Clearly the Continuing Improvement aspect of the document was either a myth, wasn't being implemented, or didn't relate to what the customer wanted.
It seems obvious that if a product or service has achieved an acceptable standard of 'quality' (whatever that might mean to the purchaser), any further improvement that is to be seen by the purchaser will be in the areas of cost and availability. These are not features that concern the ISO9000 fraternity; however, they do impact on the customer's perception of that product or service. Logically, they also impact on the task of Sales and Marketing people who have the responsibility of persuading potential customers of the uniqueness and superiority of their product. Here we find the Standard at its weakest and Continuing Improvement a sham.
If an organisation were to adopt a different approach to the management of the business, to the management of Quality if you prefer, and that approach directly addressed the cost of generating and delivering the organisations product or service, THAT would result in improvement, and probably continual improvement.
Why would this be dissimilar to the laboriously developed ISO9000 management system? For the simple reason that every top management team understands one language - money. A rationally constituted cost measurement scheme would include 'error free' cost estimates, plus actual measurement of costs incurred due to a failure to achieve the error free working. We call this the cost of non-conformance, or perhaps more suitably 'Transaction Costs'. If executive managers could be persuaded to abandon ISO9000 theory in favour of the collection of honest cost data such as this, business would - overnight, become more profitable because of the actions they would take - or have taken for them - to rectify the clear overspend found by this approach.
Generally this will not happen. Not due to any difficulty or inability to collect this data, but an inbuilt belief by virtually everyone not familiar with Eastern Cultures that error & failure is an inevitable consequence of human endeavour.
In the meantime, managers and their acolytes continue to hang onto the support strap ISO9000, firm in the belief that a documented system and its certificate will - as with the Wizard of Oz - be an adequate substitute for objective thought.
Both Bob Acton & Ed Bones are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Bob Acton has sinced written about articles on various topics from self improvement and motivation, Recreation and Sports and Baseball. Bob is an experienced sports writer and handicapper, who has written for the sports industry for over 10 years. His years of writing for Sports Scene, sports consulting on 33 Made for Television and Major Motion Pictures and his work as an instructor at P. Bob Acton's top article generates over 18100 views. to your Favourites.
Ed Bones has sinced written about articles on various topics from Education, Education and Recipes. Meon Consulting, founded by Ed Bones, was formed to assist clients with managing their businesses in a manner compliant with ISO9001/14001. Ed had earlier held a number of senior posts with Hi-Tech companies in the UK, Europe and the USA. He has written a. Ed Bones's top article generates over 6600 views. to your Favourites.