Well I’m back. But, as you can see by the scores, I didn’t win last week. Matt got lucky and won (well, technically contest winner Christina Alexander won, but contest winners don’t count in this competition otherwise she’d win every week), and is now ahead of me in the overall standings.

Because the Canadian won, we’re picking the McGill at Concordia game – also known as the Shrine Bowl. I didn’t know anyone but Ricky Williams played football in Canada, so I had to put a lot of research into this one.

First there’s McGill, which is not Medill (although head coach John Lavine with offensive coordinator Michele Bitoun and defensive coordinator Richard Roth would be something). I wanted to find out about the school, so I started researching. McGill is located in Montreal and has almost 33,000 students, including almost 20,000 undergraduates. It was founded way back in 1821. OK, it’s just a normal school.

So I decided to check out McGill’s athletics Web site to see what kind of scouting report I could get. There was a picture of a rugby player on the front page – bad sign. I eventually found real football. It turns out McGill is hapless. The Redmen are 0-6 with home losses to Montreal and Acadia.

But then there’s the Concordia University. Concordia is also in Montreal (so this rivalry is USC-UCLA, got it!). It’s a fairly new school, as it was formed in 1974 by combining Loyola and Sir George Williams. It has more than 25,000 undergraduates, so it’s big.

The football team looks decent. The Stingers are 3-2 but are coming off a loss to Sherbrooke. The statistics part of the football part of their Web site doesn’t work, so I can’t tell you how they’re winning, but they are.

So on paper this is a no-brainer in favor of the Stingers (D-Mo and contest winner Tim obviously didn’t see that paper … or they found out that the Concordia quarterback got hurt and didn’t tell me).

And if this week isn’t exciting enough, the schools face off next week at McGill! Go Canada!

Gameday editor Abe Rakov is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].