Ballers, Gamers and Scoundrels

Worthless. That’s what I think of preseason polls.

Oh, I know they’re fun for fans and they invoke a heavy dose of chest puffing among players. But they don’t mean squat. And if you don’t know that by now, well, you’ve been in a coma since early fall when Appalachian State thumped then No. 5 Michigan in Ann Arbor to ignite the most curious ( and entertaining, may I please add) college football season perhaps the in the history of the sport.

Now a conference no one outside of the players blood relatives has even heard on - the Atlantic Sun (doesn’t that sound like a casino? - has transformed the college basketball preseason polls into filthy rags. Gardner Webb and Mercer, the Bulldogs and Bears, lack-of-respectively, embarrassed some guys wearing big-time unis last week and rendered their vanquished to the ranks of the unranked. Kentucky and USC, Nos 22 and 18 in early polls, will probably climb back into the rankings before long - although one could argue that they’re right where they belong right now: out of the top 20 and starting at a long season of attempted redemption.

If you look at college footballs’ preseason rankings and four teams that were in the top ten -No. 1 USC, Texas, Michigan and Louisville - are ghosts (at worst) or understudies (at best) in the current rankings. Quite simply, none of them were nearly as good as their preseason hype. And since then teams that were nowhere to be found in the top 20 - No. 2 Oregon, undefeated Kansas, Missouri, Clemson, South Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, UConn (who knew they played football there?!) - have made 2007 a season to remember.

College basketball’s prognosticators obviously learned nothing. The preseason rankings are filled with unis - name schools whose biggest strength lies in the letters across the players chests. Nary a surprise among them. Neither Gardner Webb nor Mercer cracked the Top 25, and perhaps they shouldn’t. In college hoops, at least, those wins will count for something in March, should the two teams continue to play well and notch perhaps another couple of quality wins and do well in AS (Atlantic Sun). That’s when the venerable suits comprising the NCAA basketball committee locks itself in a room with a ton of very expensive shrimp and decides which teams receive invitations to the not-so-elite field of  65 teams that will have the opportunity to compete for the national title.

USC and Kentucky are the kinds of teams that typically qualify just by showing up for every regular season game with clean unis.  Not so GWebb and Mercer. But they’ve already opened some eyes.

The problem with the college football preseason poll is that it provides teams with an unfair advantage given the few spots in prestigious - read: phat payoff - postseason bowls. It’s like spotting the New England Patriots a touchdown every Sunday. Most seasons, those early notches prevent less-prominent teams with great records from breaking into the bowls of golf. This season is an aberration (though I hope not). LSU v Oregon (or even Kansas) in the title game will be refreshing.

Kill the preseason polls and allow the season to exist at least for a few weeks before releasing the first rankings. At least, by then, they won’t simply rank.

Okay, this is officially the best college football season ever. At this point, the national champion is almost moot. We could be looking at Kansas State v South Florida for the title and, well, it will be alright.

Today, on a Saturday with few games of an real national interest, Kentucky QB Andre Woodson - this year’s Vince Young, and my favorite player this season - orchestrated another stunning upset my leading the once woebegon-Wildcats to a 43-37 victory over No. 1 LSU. The win snapped LSU’s 13-game win streak and further threw the national title race into Twilight Zone.

Woodson (are the Jets watching???) hit Steve Jackson for a 7-yard TD to take a six-point lead in the third OT. Then after the Wildcats failed on the two-point conversion (required starting with the 3OT), vaunted LSU could not get 10 yards in four downs and were done.

Woodson was 21-for38 with 249 yards and 3 TDs. He was poised and powerful His arm zipped passes into places Chad Pennington couldn’t reach on ‘roids.

Kentucky is one of many Cinderellas in this Grimm’s of a season - the best college football season ever.

Okay, the 2007 college football season is officially in the Twilight Zone. Tonight, Stanford, my alma mater and a school whose football team likely possesses the most lopsided ratio of brains to football skills of any team on the planet, beat arch rival and No. 2 (or No. 1) ranked USC 24-23 at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

The victory snapped the Trojans’ 35-game winning streak at home, dating back to 2001 when, yes, the Cardinal last beat the Trojans. Stanford was a 40-point underdog. Yeah, forty. ( Unbelievable.

There were myriad subplots to this name - not the least of which was the bit of trash-talking by Stanford rookie coach Jim Harbaugh, which began almost before the new Cardinal coach had gotten a key to his new office. He told reporters he’d herd that USC coach Pete Carroll would leave following the 2007 season. (Carroll denied it saying Harbaugh had not checked with him about career moves.” ) Then at media day, Harbaugh said with a sarcastic tone: “There is no question in my mind that USC is the best team in the country and may be the best team in the history of college football.”

Harbaugh didn’t back down from his comments in the days leading up to the contest that was to be no-contest. But in a sly twist he also said: “We bow to no man. We bow to no program here at Stanford University.”

Coach arm-wrestling makes for good copy. But this is real: The Cardinal’s starting QB was out of the game after suffering a seizure last Sunday while watching former teammate - and now Buffalo Bills rookie QB p- Trent Edwards beat the New York Jets. (I am not making this up.) That left starting duties to sophomore Tavita Pritchard. The last time Pritchard started a game he was in high-school. In college, he’d thrown a total of four passes.

Pritchard

Tonight, his numbers (11-for-30, 147 yards, 1 TD, 1 INT) weren’t particularly impressive. But this was: Trailing 23-16, the Cardinal had fourth and-ten on the USC 10-yard-line with :50 left. Pritchard had just throw two successive incomplete passes and. At the snap he back-peddled to avoid a USC assault, lofted the ball towards the left corner of the end zone and hit WR Mark Bradford (whose father passed away last week) for the game-winner. Add the extra point, and you had the biggest upset in Pac-10 football history. Some even called it the biggest upset in college football history. Unbelievable.

Mark Bradford

Lest you wonder whether Pritchard was just an out-of-nowhere wonder, consider this: His uncle, and the man who tutored him as a child for hours at a time? Jack (“The Throwin’ Samoan”) Thompson, the former All-America QB at Washington State. Ya gotta love it, especially during this wacky season

The only downside of this is that if Florida upsets LSU tonight, Cal could be No. 1. Ugh.

Nephew Tavita (top) and Uncle Jack

Enough with the Bill O’Reilly-Sylvia’s flap! Who cares what he thinks about a) anything - even when he is trying to be complimentary about us; and b) a restaurant?! A restaurant where even the owners weren’t all that put out by what O’Reilly said. Why should they be? They received millions in free pub over the last week.

The FOX Talk-show host’s comments do not have one iota of an impact on me, you or anyone else in America. However, the blatantly racist remarks made by a Rutgers professor this week not only besmirch the image of a university on the rise but are a slap in the face of every non-white athlete at the school. In an article published in the New York Times, English professor William Dowling, one of those nutty professors who believes the rise of athletics at a university automatically  means the decline of intellectual elitism and, well, the fall of civilization as they want it to be, said: “If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine. But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity”

Now, here’s where it gets good: “If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school.”

This is someone who is responsible for educating our youth? God help us - or more specifically, our youth.

Not only are Dowling’s comments racist, they’re stupid and WRONG. In May, the NCAA Academic Progress Rate report, a calculation of graduation rates at institutions, ranked the Rutgers football program seventh in the nation among Division I-A schools. Ahead of them were only Stanford (Go Cardinal! Sorry, alum-bug pinched me), Navy, Duke, Rice, Boston College and Air Force.

It doesn’t quite sound like the young men who have elevated the Scarlet Knights to national prominence over the last two seasons are having any trouble reading their cereal boxes.

It took long enough for someone to speak out about this madness. On Thursday, Rutgers president Richard McCormick (Has this guy had a YEAR or what?!) called the comments “inaccurate and inhumane.” In a statement issued by the university, McCormick acknowledged the racist tone of the comment. “It also has a racist implication that has no place whatsoever in our civil discourse,” he said.

Like O’Reilly, Dowling said his comments were taken out of context. (I agree with O’Reilly, frankly; but Dowling is delusional) He said he was merely answering a question related to minorities. he said: “If someone has a way to answer that question without mentioning race, I would like to hear it.”

No word yet on whether Dowling will be allowed to continue infecting, uh, teaching young minds.

In the 1960s, was actually arrested protesting in support of the civil-rights movement. Sorry, professors, your freedom fighter cared has been revoked.

So there is life at the Associated Press. The venerable newswire actually made news last night by announcing that any college football team in the nation was eligible for ranking in its 71-year-old poll. Duh. Isn’t it supposed to be the top 25 college teams in the nation?

Well, at least now it is. The move was spurred, of course, by Appalachian State, who represented U’dogs everywhere with its inspiring victory over Michigan last Saturday in what was the biggest upset in college football history. (If ya’ll have a better one, holla.)

App State is a Division I-AA school (I refused to get into the new Subprime, or Subdivision terminology), a notch below Division I-A where all the college football behemoths reside - or so it’s supposed to go. Division I-AA programs are supposed to comprise the dregs of the college football crop, players who either didn’t fit the Division I-A mold (i.e. they were smaller or slower than the Div. I-A box) or couldn’t make the grades that would allow them to be eligible for the top schools.

Well, the differentiation gap has shrunk in recent years as Division I-AA programs began to attract better coaches and upgrade facilities. They began attracting better local athletes, too, guys who’ve come to know that in this digital age talent will be found no matter where it matriculates.

The kids from Boone, NC arrived in Ann Arbor believing they belonged on the same field as the boys in maze and blue, believing that they were the right team at the right time.

Then they went out and proved it.

Now, as I stated on SNY’s “Daily News Live” on Wednesday, they indeed belong in the rankings, too.

Here’s RSJ’s Today College Football Top 25:

1. LSU

2. Florida

3. USC

4. OU

5. West Virginia

6. Wisconsin

7. Texas

8. Cal

9. Ohio State

10. Georgia

11. UCLA

12. Auburn

13. Penn State

14. Rutgers

15. Georgia Tech

16. Arkansas

17. Boise State

18. Appalachian State

19. Virginia Tech

20. Nebraska

21. TCU

22. Hawaii

23. Texas A&M

24. Boston College

25. Cincinnati

College Football’s Most Deserving Champion

I soooo hate being right. Whew. Okay. Got that out of my system. Now: Good for Chris Leak. Great for Chris Leak. This kid did all the right things - even in the midst of some stupid Gators fans - and was rewarded for it. After Florida’s 41-14 stomping of a lethargic and out-everythinged Ohio State team, Leak (25-for-36, 212 yards, 1TD) should be celebrated throughout college football. Earlier this season he was booed in his own stadium. Some losers were calling for Tim Tebow. This was Leak’s 37th career start as a Gator, With this win, He’s 35-12.

Chris, take your national championship and your MVP and tell those losers to kiss your Gator tail. They’ll be longing for you in due time.

So, who’s college football’s top 12? Here’s mine (tell me yours):

1. Florida

2. USC

3. LSU

4. Boise State

5. Oklahoma

6. Louisville

7. Wisconsin

8. Ohio State

9. Auburn

10. Michigan

11. West Virginia

12. Rutgers

PS: Dear College Presidents: This system is stupid. No national title game should be played so longer after the regualr season. Just create a national playoff and quit being, well, stupid.

• 
• Gamer: Chris Leak
• Scoundrel: Jim Tressel

ABC blew it. Following the biggest upset of the college football season - UCLA’s 13-9 defeat of #2 USC - the network first interviewed the losing head coach (Celebrity/Coach Pete Carroll), then seemingly could not get a close-up camera to UCLA coach Karl Dorrell. ABC sideline reporter Lisa Salters interviewed Dorrell but we barely saw him. He was shown from a couple of distant camera views but never the kind of close-up Carroll got.

My wife, who knows more about TV than I do, told me not to make anything big of the mis-step, saying the upset was so stunning the network just may have had its cameras in the wrong place. But the Conspiracy Guy in me still wondered: What’s up with that???

Dorrell was 6-5 going into the game, and on the proverbial hot seat. Not only did he save his own job. But just maybe he orchestrated college football’s “Doug Williams moment.” Williams’s courageous and dominating performance in leading Washington’s triumph in Super Bowl XXII forever erased any doubts about the ability of black QBs to win on pro football’s grandest stage. Now, with so many openings in college football and so few non-white head coaches - just 5 of 119 - maybe the fourth-year UCLA coach showed that non-white men can coach this game, too, and win when it matters most.

One man whose phone should definitely ring this week: UCLA defensive coordinator DeWayne Walker , who coached under Carroll with the New England Patriots and at USC. His plan was brilliantly conceived and executed. (Props to Carroll for giving Walker credit on national TV.) USC scored 66 points on the Bruins alst seasomn. But this time around, UCLA stymied the Trojans at every turn. USC was held to a paltry 55 yards rushing and failed to score at least 20 points for the first time since the 2001 Las Vegas Bowl. That a 63-game string snapped.

If Walker isn’t snapped up soon, there should be an investigation.

Are you guys listening in Miami, Alabama and elsewhere - like my alma mater, Stanford! - there are openings?

Gamer: Karl Dorrell.

Poor Scarlett. At least now we know all Rutgers debates can cease. Great season Scarlet Knights, but after being exposed by Cincy (especially QB Mike Teel, who threw 4 INTs) the words “Rutgers” and “national,” “title,” and “game” are hereby banned from being used in the same sentence.

One other thing we now know: the Big East is a damn good football conference

We also now know Troy Smith is the undisputed Heisman Trophy winner. Anyone else invited to NYC for the coronation is simply coming to spectate.

And we know Arkansas is the Rutgers of the Heartland - a year away from gaining the respect needed to reach the title game. Too bad because America will love Hog QB Casey Dick.

We know the winner of next week’s scrum between USC and Notre Dame is likely to get the second invite to the title game - no matter what Florida does. The Gators, despite saturday’s thumpin’ over an overmatched opponent, have simply not been impressive enough this season, despite their 9-1 record. Perhaps impressive wins over Florida State and Arkansas can overcome what’s in voters hearts. But not likely.

A side note from an Okie: Sooner QB Paul Thompson deserves some kind of award. OU was supposed to be Sooner dead after starting QB Brett Romar was suspended just before the start of the season for accepting money for an off-campus gig he never showed up for, an NCAA violation. Thompson, a senior, had been unimpressive in two seasons, completing only 19 passes. This season he’s been the glue that’s lead the Sooners to the most impressive 9-2 season on the books. He’s converted 61 percent of his passes and thrown for nearly 2000 yards with 15 TDs with only 6 INTs. Save for a botched replay official’s call at Oregon in Week 3, the Sooners would likely be among the one-loss teams scratching for a piece of the national title. And that’s with losing star RB Adrian Peterson two weeks ago for the season. Thompson has been a poised leader and kept the Oklahoma heat from perhaps boiling head coach Bob Stoops.

AP

Only Florida survived Shakedown Day, and only by a fingernail.

Seems every underdog in America was inspired by Rutgers’s scintillating upset of then No.3 Louisville Thursday night in what was, from this seat in the press box, the best college football game this season. Two days later, Georgia, Kansas State and Arizona thumped - to borrow a word from our lame-duck prez - a trio of national title wannbes on perhaps the most exciting Saturday of the year.

No. 4 Texas, No. 5 Auburn and No. 8 Cal (as a Stanford alum, the Bears loss truly broke my heart) were eliminated from all national-title chatter after being stunned by the aforementioned troika/ Only the outstretched finger of No. 6 Florida’s Jarvis Moss, a 6-6 defensive end, saved the Gators from joining the losers’ fraternity. Moss soared and blocked a last-second field goal attempt to prevent ACC-rival South Carolina from eliminating the Gators’s title hopes. Florida survived 17-16.

So what does it do to the rankings? Here’s the Pass the Word Now Ten!:

1. Ohio State

2. Michigan

3. Florida (shakily, at best)

4. Arkansas (Big ups to my friend E. Lynn, a Hog-head to his core)

5. USC (see No. 3)

6. Rutgers (No. 1 defense in nation and, like it or not, undefeated is undefeated)

7. Notre Dame (Has C. Weiss stopped whining?)

8. West Virginia (Rutgers spoilers-in-waiting)

9. LSU (They just keep winning)

10. Boise State (see No. 6)

Are there “better” teams that would likely beat teams like Rutgers on most given Saturdays?

Yes. But no matter. The rankings are based on win or go home, not on paper matchups.

Should Rutgers run the table and both Florida (tough upcoming games against Florida State and the SEC championship) and USC (Cal, Notre Dame and UCLA still on the docket) lose, do they deserve to play in the title game?

Absolutely. I don’t buy the argument that Rutgers’s sorry history should affect this team. Past successes or failures have no true bearing on rankings or national title qualifications. They only seem to matter to humans who allow their biases against the uniform to impact their feelings about how a team should be ranked. That Rutgers may have been the worse program in the nation five years ago has no bearing on what they are now. If anything, that they’ve come so far should have a positive net effect on how/where they should be rated.

Bottom line: They’ll not likely run the table. But if they do and Florida and USC lose, how can they not be given a chance to achieve the impossible dream?

RSJ Note: The newest BCS rankings came out tonight and your blogmeister wasn’t far off. The BCS also has Rutgers ranked at No. 6. But its 4-5-6 is USC, Florida and Notre Dame. This is shaping up as oneof the most intruguing college football seasons in recent memory. Too bad the lack of a playoff is really making the sport look so dumb.