Hello, my name is Jacob Elwell. I decided to start the Blanchard Bets Blog just for the simple reason I like portraying my thoughts. I have always enjoyed sports dating back to playing youth football. The first super bowl I remember watching vividly was in February of 2008 between the undefeated New England Patriots and the New York Giants. I was at a potluck celebrating our season with my teammates and I remember everyone wanted the Patriots to win, except for me and one other kid. I always appreciated an underdog story and wanted to see New York shock the world. It truly is unfortunate I wasn’t introduced to sports betting at the time, because there would have been a healthy sum placed on the Giants +12. That Super Bowl really sums up the NFL (and why I love football), because anything can happen. I will get more into why I like football the most in some future articles.
My love for football has been there my whole life, however, I recently reunited with my love for the UFC. The first pay-per-view I ever watched was UFC 100 as a 10 year old kid. It was absolutely electric, and the card was loaded with stars at the time. Lesnar vs Mir 2 was the main event, George St. Pierre vs Thiago Alves was the co-main, and the iconic Dan Henderson knockout of Michael Bisping was on the main card as well. On top of that, you had Jon Jones and Jim Miller on the prelims, both on the come up at the time. After that, I really didn’t pay attention to the UFC from 2010-2022, which sucks because the UFC from 2015-2018 was at the top. Conor Mcgregor, Ronda Rousey, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and so many other icons were in their prime years when I wasn’t watching. My cousin actually re-introduced me to it in 2022 right after I graduated college. We watched UFC 278 together, and once I saw Leon Edwards head kick Kamaru Usman into oblivion in the final minute after loosing every round, I was back like I never left. I’ve been following it religiously ever since then.
I wrote for my college newspaper a few years ago, and the passion for writing has not left me. I applied to be the Sports Editor, but that position was taken. They offered me the Opinion Editor position and I, reluctantly, accepted the job. I did like that I could write about essentially whatever I wanted. Obviously there were some restrictions given I was writing for a college paper, but for the most part you could let it loose (our valentines day edition proved this). They said I wrote too much about sports, and I had to incorprate some political pieces into my content, which is not my expertise. This Blog will give me the freedom to write about whatever I want. My favorite article I wrote was right before the 2018 NFL season. The Minnesota Vikings just signed Kirk Cousins in the offseason, by far the biggest free agent acquisition they had made in some time. Coming off of a 13-3 season with now an upgrade at quarterback, everyone felt a little too optimistic about the upcoming season. I had to pump the brakes a bit and suggested we would not make the playoffs. I had my reasons in the article, but it’s just another example of how the NFL is so unpredictable. Feel free to check out some of my past pieces by searching “NDSU Spectrum” online and typing in my name in the search bar.