My response is a big fat NOPE.

If the client isn't happy with the speed of back linking, then it's time for an education session in which you stand up as the expert they hired you to be and explain exactly why it's a bad, bad idea.

• Brokered links are often not contextual, which means they're not actually all that helpful.
• They tend to come from low quality sites, which means they're not actually all that helpful.

And that's just if you don't get caught. Getting away with black hat tactics is an intense, highly skilled, full-time endeavor. It's not a quick and easy way to anything. So even if you are willing to go there, given your inexperience with shady link building tactics, it's still a wretchedly bad idea since you've got no idea how to not get caught.

Best thing to do is to build a content and outreach campaign that builds links in an above-board manner that no one can take issue with. Believe it or not, that's actually probably easier than anything that link buying would steer you into.

Too many people are going to gloss over the "In general" part of what Gary is saying.

Things not addressed in that thread:

• If a URL isn't performing for you but has a few good backlinks, you're probably still better off to 301 the page to better content to it lend additional strength.
• The value of consistency across the site; wildly uneven content can undermine your brand.
• Consolidating information to provide a single authoritative page rather than multiple thin and weak pages.
• The pointlessness of keeping non-performing pages when you don't have the resources to maintain them.

What if instead of creating a new page every time Team A has a match with Team B, you reused the same URL, updating the content to reflect the new match? (You could even build additional content by listing the results of previous matches on that page.) Not only would you then be avoiding the duplicate title tag issue, you'd also be building a long-term presence for that recurring matchup on a single URL.

We'd find the landing page in organic landing page reports as something like:
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage?s=bing|display|20150826
instead of 
http://www.blablahsitewhatever.com/landingpage

It's clearly not an organic hit since it came through a paid channel, and yet gets classified as organic. (We got around it by building a custom report for organic landing pages that specifically filters out landing pages with those extra parameters.) So from this we know it's entirely possible for traffic to be misattributed as organic when it's clearly not. But unless you can clearly see it in the URL like that, it's really hard to suss out.

How exactly did you do the no-index? Robots.txt? Meta robots tag? Manual removal via Google Webmaster Console?

Beyond that, I have seen some paid traffic misattributed as organic before, which we caught because the organic landing page had campaign parameters attached specific to paid Bing campaigns.

"which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title"

This is incorrect. The keywords are still in your meta title. Google isn't going to ignore them for crawling/indexing purposes based on what it chooses to display. They're still in your code, still getting crawled, still totally counting.

That said, if Google thinks your title is irrelevant, doesn't match the search query well enough, etc., it will display something it deems more appropriate given the page content and searcher's query. Take it as Google's hint that your titles may need some improvement.

I agree with seowoody that you should include your branding in your title line. I'm less crazy about John's suggested title tag. I used to work for an agency that specialized in lawyers of various stripes, and I know how the competitiveness really pushes hard into the gray there, the niche is so badly overoptimized, but it just looks spammy when the second kw just repeats 2 of 3 words from the first kw... and as you've discovered, Google may replace it anyway. I would use keywords but write it for the client, like "Estate Planning Attorney in Mt. View - Duree Law".

FWIW, Google indexes title tags way beyond what it displays, possibly up to 164 characters. I've always considered that a valuable bit of intel to consider. (The post I linked to is ancient by SEO standards but I'd imagine it's still relevant, some nice work from Hugo Guzman.)