Callahan Could Be Next to Go

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Difficult decisions always have consequences.

For Steve Pederson the consequences of his most difficult decision as Nebraska’s Athletic Director caught up with him nearly four years after the fact as Chancellor Harvey Perlman fired Pederson Monday in Lincoln.

In 2003, less than a year after taking the AD job at Nebraska, Pederson fired Frank Solich following a 9-3 season and uttered the phrase that would haunt him through the rest of his tenure: “I refuse to let this program gravitate to mediocrity.”

For anyone who watched the Cornhuskers surrender 40-plus points in four of their past five games, mediocre seemed generous.

Some were picking Nebraska as a dark horse national title contender coming in to the season, others couldn’t see them winning the Big 12 North but the one thing that seemed most important was progress. After Saturday’s 45-14 drubbing at the hands of Oklahoma State many were left wondering if the Huskers could even progress to bowl eligibility.

While those questions might temporarily be blown off in the jet wash of a statewide sigh of relief, they’re far from gone and that still spells bad news for Bill Callahan.

When Callahan was hired in 2004—following an embarrassing search that saw a number of candidates turn down the job—he flipped the culture of Nebraska football, replacing the option with the more modern West Coast Offense.

As the records for consecutive winning seasons and bowl appearances fell in his first 5-6 season, Nebraska fans preached patience. Growing pains were to be expected. Four years later, Callahan’s team is poised to set records. The wrong ones.

The 2007 Blackshirts defense has been historically bad, allowing 40 or more points more times this season than they did in all of the 1970s and ‘80s combined. Nebraska has allowed at least 400 yards of offense in each of its last five games and is on pace to give up more points than any Cornhusker team in history.

Is any of that going to change with the Pederson firing? That doesn’t seem likely. The road from the front office to the field is often a one way street so don’t count on much renewed fire between the lines. But the move by Perlman wasn’t about immediate results, it was about the future.

Exactly what that future will be still remains to be seen. Before the firing was even announced, rumors were swirling that Tom Osborne would be the man to succeed Pederson in the interim as athletic director. Turner Gill, the former Husker great and architect behind a minor MAC uprising at Buffalo, has been bandied about as a possible replacement as head coach. Yet others still hope that with Pederson out of the picture, Nebraska will get a second chance to hire LSU’s Bo Pelini, a fan favorite in 2003.

What we do know is this: Nebraska fans have something that seemed to be snatched away from them as few as 48 hours ago, hope. Will any of that transfer over to Bill Callahan and his staff? Perhaps, but it may not matter.

The thing that scared Nebraska fans the most was that the trio of Perlman, Pederson and Callahan seemed inextricably linked. Each individual’s reputation was staked to the others’.

In the face of growing dissent Nebraska’s chancellor severed those ties on Monday and while Perlman was careful in his comments not to explicitly rule out Callahan’s return, implicitly he said it all. The time for change is now.

A mere four years removed from their last upheaval, it’s fair to question whether or not this is a sign of progress or just another step in the downward spiral of hiring and firing, but Nebraska has one valuable resource on their side should they go looking for only their fifth head coach in the past 47 years: experience.

They’ve been there, and failed, before.

Northern Agression

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

For the past three seasons the Big 12 has looked a lot like its Roman-numeral logo: two singular lines, representing Oklahoma and Texas, and one big ugly ‘X’ representing everyone else. The space between them said it all: two greater than ten and through the first third of the 2007 season there had been little reason to believe anything was different this time around.

Of course, that all changed this past Saturday. Colorado dealt unstoppable Oklahoma their first loss to a team from the great lite North since 2003.

A couple of hours later Kansas State polished off a 41-21 pasting of the Longhorns in Austin, marking the Wildcats first win over Texas since, well, the last time they played.

Couple those two statement games with the fact that this week’s AP poll features three teams from the North for the first time since, again, 2003 and you might have some signs of life from a division that’s recently been left for dead.

But in a season where the unthinkable has become almost unremarkable, it might be a bit early to declare that the North is back. If you’re penciling in favorites in any conference you’d be best advised to write lightly, but we do know this: the Big 12 race is officially wide open and that’s probably the best thing to happen to the conference in at least four years.

The fall of the Big 12 from unanimous national respect to talk radio ridicule is pretty easy to trace. It all began sometime late on the night of December 6, 2003. On that date Kansas State threw the last great punch from the North beating an Oklahoma team that had spent the entire season atop the AP poll 35-7 in the 2003 Big 12 Championship Game.

Including that game, the Big 12 crown had swung back and forth between the two divisions on a yearly basis. The conference was competitive, an unquestioned heavyweight on the national scene. In its first 10 years of existence the Big 12 saw one of its members play in six national title games. In 2000, five Big 12 teams started the season ranked in the preseason Top 25 and the conference finished with four in the top 12 after it was all said and done.

Since that championship game in 2003, however, the conference may as well have been a match race. Only Oklahoma and Texas can claim conference crowns over that span and no team outside of the Red River rivals has reached the AP Top 5 in more than five years. New Mexico, Troy, Montana State, Southern Mississippi, Marshall and Northern Iowa can all claim wins over favored Big 12 teams since that last title for Kansas State.

The also-rans from the South share in some of that blame, but the public perception of the conference has been undeniably linked to the fall of its northernmost members.

The North reached it’s nadir in 2005 when no team climbed higher than #22 in the polls and Colorado won the division with a 5-3 record before losing by 67-points to Texas in the conference championship game.

Until Kevin Eberhart kicked his game-winning field goal on Saturday, completing Colorado’s 17-point comeback, that was still the reputation of the North; a division full of middling teams who played for the right to be trounced by the South.

Now, however, college football fans across the country have to at least entertain the notion that football is in fact played north of Norman. While the winner of this Saturday’s Red River Rivalry game is still likely the favorite to take home the conference crown, for the rest of this week all we know is that the South’s best has been beaten by the North.

Determining who exactly is the best in the North is a bit more difficult.

Statistically speaking, Kansas is the most complete team in the Big 12 with the third-ranked offense and defense in the country but Saturday’s Sunflower State showdown will be their first game of the season against a team with a pulse. Meanwhile Missouri has put up their usual gaudy numbers, including a win over Illinois that looks better each week, but September has never been the Tigers problem. It’s October and November that haunt the columns in Columbia, and we’ll learn a lot more about the Tigers too when they open conference play at home against traditional bellwether Nebraska.

With apologies to Iowa State, that leaves the only three programs to win conference titles out of the North: Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas State.

After last week, both the Buffs and Wildcats look better off in year two of their regime changes than Nebraska does in year four under Bill Callahan. While the Cornhuskers have been exposed defensively, Colorado and Kansas State both boast Top 15 defenses and each has faced a tougher schedule than either Oklahoma or Kansas, the two Big 12 schools topping them in total yards allowed.

Of course some of those ratings are sure to plunge as conference play picks up. It’s never been more difficult to stop teams from scoring in the Big 12 as it has been this year. Half of the conference ranks among the top 30 teams in the country in terms of passing yards per game and seven teams possess top 30 scoring offenses.

And that’s where this conference race will be decided. Which team is the best without the ball?

For the time being, the Big 12 lost a legitimate national title contender last week but the conference could be on its way back to something much more valuable. National respect.

Compelling Reasons to Root

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

There were 1,506 Division 1 Bowl Subdivision college football games played last year—sorry the NCAA requires I use that name--and, at best, your team was involved in less than one-percent of them. If the school you follow was lucky enough to get a full slate of 14 games they contributed approximately 0.93% to the greater sum of games in 2006 which begs the question: what were you doing with all that downtime on fall Saturdays?

Let’s assume that the average college football fan truly follows only one team but watches more than that one game in which he or she is personally invested per week. While under this assumption we’ll also ignore the nasty notion that there are actually people who a) root earnestly for more than one team or b) only watch their team play and spend the rest of that time completing meaningful tasks and gaining favor with their immediate family and friends. That’s not us.

For the loud and proud college football cognoscenti one game a week is like a salad and a cup of water at a tailgate—possibly tasty but far short of satiating. No, the football fan I know starts watching the first Thursday of the season and doesn’t stop until a champion is crowned in January which means that the theoretical fan is spending the vast majority of the season watching games as a neutral observer.

Of course there are domino-effect games where one outcome changes conference or national standings and some people may even have a (hushed tones here) “financial interest” in certain contests, but excepting those you’re still left with a barrelful of games every Saturday where you simply have to pick a side.

So how do you do it? I’ve spent a lifetime figuring this out and there are a couple of methods that are infinitely more compelling than simply reverting to our nationwide Davidian Complex and rooting for the underdog. While we’re at it, we might as well take a look at some of the schools that qualify heading into 2007:

“The Basketball Schools” – KENTUCKY

All-time Winning Percentage: .501

Basketball National Titles/Football National Titles: 7/0

Arch Rivals: Adolph Rupp, Thoroughbreds

Compelling Reason to Root: There’s something about a hoops powerhouse on the gridiron that tugs at the heartstrings and Kentucky, in the football mad SEC, is the easiest to get behind. Bear Bryant still owns more wins at UK than any other coach in their history but he bolted after the 1953 season when he received a watch for his achievements (first SEC title, National Coach of the Year) and Adolph Rupp received a new car. In the decades to follow Rick Pitino, Rex Chapman and Ron Mercer helped bury the football program but this year there is some reason to be optimistic.

Quarterback Andre Woodson led the SEC in total yards and passing yards per game last year, running back Rafael Little chalked up 1,982 all-purpose yards in 2006 and first-team All-SEC WR Keenan Burton returns. They're all seniors and they represent one of the most talented collections of skill position players in the country but they’ll still likely be in a season long battle with Vanderbilt to stay out of the SEC East cellar. Nevertheless, with some serious upset potential, the Wildcats will be much more of a factor in the conference race than previous years.

Further Rooting (BB Titles/FB Titles): Kansas (2/0), Duke (3/0), Indiana (5/0), UNC (4/0)

“The New Kid on the Block” – SOUTH FLORIDA

All-time Winning Percentage: .623

Years in 1A Existence: 6

Arch Rivals: traditional powers that recruit Florida (i.e. everyone)

Compelling Reason to Root: Boise State became the ultimate NKOTB last year by winning the Fiesta Bowl in their 11^th year on the big stage but they’re officially a mid-major power now. Crashing the college football elite is the longest of long shots for a new program but USF looks like the next sleeper school with a chance to at least dent the armor.

Head Coach Jim Leavitt has been at USF from the beginning, repeatedly turning down offers to move up the ladder so if he believes in the Bulls, why shouldn’t we? Sophomore QB Matt Grothe is back after leading the team in rushing and passing in 2006 and one of Phil Steele’s 254 power rankings has USF going undefeated in 2007. With Auburn, North Carolina, West Virginia and Louisville on the schedule—those last three are at home—I have them achieving slightly less but the Bulls could be a factor in the Big East for the foreseeable future.

Further Rooting (Years in 1A Existence): UConn (7), UAB (11), Troy (3)

“Mad Offensive Genius” – TEXAS TECH

All-time Winning Percentage: .507

Passing Yards per Game in 2006: 369.5

Arch Rivals: full-house backfields, INTs

Compelling Reason to Root: Now that the option offense is nearly dead the most compelling reason to watch the amateurs over the pros is to see some crazy coach fling the ball all over the field. There’s a certain appeal to watching a team—playing primarily at night—whose primary goal is to score as many points as possible and hope that’s enough.

Crazy Mike Leach—the Cody, Wyo. native who coached in Finland and earned a J.D. from Pepperdine—isn’t the first coach to take this approach, but over the past decade nobody’s been more successful without achieving big-time success. Tech is the only team in the history of the Big 12 to have a winning record in each year of the league’s existence, but they still ride in the pickup bed of Texas football behind the Aggies and Longhorns. Graham Harrell is this year’s statistical beneficiary of Leach’s Air Raid offense yet even with a returning QB the Red Raiders are a long shot to overtake the rest of the Big 12 South. However, they’ll never be boring.

Further Rooting (PYPG ’06): Hawaii (441.3), New Mexico St. (399.3), UTEP (312.8)

“The True Student Athletes” – STANFORD

All-time Winning Percentage: .563

America’s Best Colleges Ranking 2007: #4

Arch Rivals: low SAT scores, Calculus III

Compelling Reason to Root: Is there an easier group to get behind than the academic heavyweights trapped in big football conferences? While their opponents are racking up P.E. credits these guys not only have to go to class, they want to. It’s the last link we have left to an era where Harvard and Yale competed on a national level.

Of the schools that qualify, Stanford might be the most appealing for 2007 thanks almost entirely to the spunky Jim Harbaugh. In his short seven months as head coach of the Cardinal Harbaugh has already butted heads with two big time programs, citing an internal leak when he claimed Pete Carroll was leaving USC after this season and calling into question the academic integrity of his alma mater Michigan. There’s no way Stanford faces Michigan in this year’s Rose Bowl and USC will likely win their match-up with the Cardinal by 50-points but seeing some of that attitude, on the field or off, should make Stanford at least interesting again.

Further Rooting (ABC Ranking ’07): Vanderbilt (#18), Northwestern (#14), Rice (#17)

This is really just a sampling of the options available to a football fan on a week to week basis. We haven’t even touched on such favorites as the Past Power/Pitiful Present (Ole Miss), Ugly Ducklings (Oregon) or College Team/Pro Town (Boston College), but that’s okay. Fall camp is finally starting and we’ve got about 16 Saturdays and 1500 games to sort it all out.

Remember, you can only follow one team year round but on any given Saturday, anyone is game.

A Field Day

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

There’s a man in New York named Giacomo Barbaro. Guess who he had in the past two Kentucky Derbies?

Hint: it wasn’t Steppenwolfer or Afleet Alex.

Those were my horses and I missed by about ten lengths. But it is that easy to find a Derby winner. All you need is to be born with the first name of the second biggest long shot ever and the surname of the most dominant winner in 60 years.

Or, if you like being humbled, you can actually try to handicap this thing. Remember, these horses are young. The crowd is bigger, the field more cluttered.

Nobody is quite sure if these horses know exactly what’s going on yet. It’s sort of like trying to pick the MVP of the Rookie-Sophomore game during the NBA’s All-Star weekend. For every Carmelo Anthony, there’s a Wally Szczerbiak.

If you’re a devoted punter and like hurting that good, maybe the process is worth all the Mellencamp-misery. If you’re not, you might be better served by the approach that probably trumped your serious analysis in your NCAA Tournament pool: totally baseless, unfounded picks based on subjective preference.

So let’s take a look at a few of the horses, paying specific attention to things that will have no bearing on the race itself but might help you make the tough choices with just a few minutes to post:

Sedgefield (50-1) – Sort of like a college freshman at their first kegger. Sedgefield represents the first Derby entry for his owner, trainer and jockey. I suspect they’ll all remember it as much cooler than it actually was.

Zanjero (30-1) – The only horse in the field to be directly connected to, and indirectly threatened by, Ice Cube. Zanjero is owned by the son of Verne Winchell, founder of Winchell’s Donuts. In his song “Down for Whatever,” Ice Cube famously claimed to have “the potentials to blow up a Winchell’s.” If you like donuts, rap, or Office Space this is your horse.

Storm in May (30-1) – This horse, like Dick Vitale, is blind in one eye but nowhere near as loud or annoying. While it won’t win, could there be a better a recommendation?

Imawildandcrazyguy (50-1) – When naming a race horse you only get 18 characters and this horse used all of them just to reference an SNL skit that will be remembered far longer than the horse itself.

Cowtown Cat (20-1) – Jockey Fernando Jara is probably the second most famous Panamanian in New York behind Mariano Rivera. Thus far in 2007, Jara has deserved every penny of his $5 million in earnings, while Rivera’s $10.5 million represents a million dollars for every point on his ERA. We call that an overlay.

Street Sense (4-1) – Perhaps the most talented horse in the field, Street Sense might have the most seasoned jockey as well. According to KentuckyDerby.com, Calvin Borel started riding in match races when he was 10. That puts betting on the Little League World Series in a whole new light.

Hard Spun (15-1) – Trainer Larry Jones, at 180 lbs. and 50 years old, like to ride his horses which is sort of like seeing those old Notre Dame videos where Knute Rockne is wearing football pants and taking part in practice. Just doesn’t happen anymore.

Liquidity (30-1) – The horse is owned by J. Paul Reddam, who holds a PhD in Philosophy from USC. So that’s what you do with a Philosophy degree.

Teuflesberg (30-1) – The horse’s name means Devil’s Mountain in German. I can’t imagine many things much more frightening than hearing those two words spoken in German. Be afraid.

Bwana Bull (50-1) – The second straight linguistic challenge. Bwana, a Swahili word, means sir or lord in English. Not so intimidating is it?

Nobiz Like Showbiz (8-1) – Elizabeth Valando owns the horse. Her husband was Tommy Valando, producer of Fiddler on the Roof and a number of other Broadway hits. Oddly enough, Tommy did not produce Annie Get Your Gun which gave us the song that inspired the horse’s name. I sense resentment out of the owner’s box.

Tiago (15-1) – Peter Frampton, that’s all I can say. Jerry Ross, the man who co-founded A&M Records and owns Tiago, is the reason you can’t escape “Baby I Love Your Way.” Support that if you can.

Stormello (30-1) – The best silks of the group. It’s like the jockey has been rendered in boxy 8-bit graphics for a Nintendo game. You think uniforms don’t matter? Just try the color method next March.

Great Hunter (15-1) – I have no proof to support this, but I’ll just assume that the horse’s name is a nod to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, a Kentucky native.

Will any of this help you come Saturday? Probably not, but this race is so hard to predict that I’m not sure all the past performances, speed figures or bloodlines in the world would either. That’s why it’s exciting.

As for me and my potential trifecta? Let's just say you can call me Mr. Street Sense Great Hunter Storm in May for the rest of the week.

Do You Do the Derby?

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

So you watched 11 hours of draft coverage last Saturday, scribbling fantasy sleeper notes on a Styrofoam take-out container for a draft that you’ll spend more time researching than the Dolphins did for the real thing.

You believed in Golden State long before those gold shirts were ever printed and Dallas was on the ropes.

You can even name at least one team still alive in the NHL playoffs.

By all accounts, you are a fanatic in the best sense of the word. But if you want to be considered a true sports fan, you have to answer one question:

Do you do the Derby?

That’s the barometer. One of those questions that can instantly forge or make you forego friendship with a complete stranger. In terms of the second tier sporting events—i.e. not the Super Bowl, World Series, NCAA Tournament, Masters, BCS title game, NBA or Stanley Cup Finals—there isn’t an easier event to follow than the Run for the Roses.

Being a sports fan is a particularly tricky existence. While we view ourselves as devoted, passionate individuals, those on the outside might think we’re a bit foolish. All those weekends “wasted”, the foul moods, the $90 jerseys.

Watching the Kentucky Derby has none of those things. For less than $15 and two hours of your time, you can have everything you could possibly need to know.

Unless you’re going to Churchill Downs, you can get into just about any track in America for less than $3. The form goes for five bucks. For less than the price of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon ($3.00), you can pin your hopes to the hide of one of the finest pieces of horseflesh in the world ($2.00). There might not be a better example of the Derby’s superiority over those other fringe events than that.

Eating strawberries and cream and watching tennis on grass? Stodgy and synthetically sophisticated. Drinking minty bourbon and betting the horses? Reckless. The American Revolution and Dream all rolled into one. Vegas would kill to provide that much residual coolness and bang for your buck into one package.

But the Derby isn’t just easy on the wallet, it’s also painfully easy to follow. You can’t miss it. First Saturday in May, been that way for 133 years. You can count on it like you count on Thanksgiving with the added benefit that it is always more exciting than the Lions.

Following the horses is difficult 46 weeks out of the year. The Derby prep races get their 60 seconds on SportsCenter and, if you’re lucky, your local paper will run some results from the local track, and that’s pretty much it but that’s fine. For the next six weeks, or as long as there is a Triple Crown contender, horse racing is a national story.

No sporting event requires less work for a fan than this and that’s the reason you’ve seen Kid Rock on Millionaire’s Row before. It takes wit and savvy to try to handicap the Derby, but it takes next to nothing to enjoy it.

A Derby horse’s entire racing history can be found for free on-line, but even that’s asking for extra credit. You can just watch the hour leading up to the race, hear each entry dissected ad nauseum and feel totally prepared before the call to post. (This includes the added benefit of catching all the pre-race pomp and circumstance and getting to see a bunch of Kentucky bluebloods in hats cry at the singing of My Old Kentucky Home. Can’t beat that.)

And if all that’s not enough, there’s always the expectation that history will be made. Nobody watches baseball’s opening day with the expectation that we’ll see a Triple Crown winner this year, but that’s always that hope after the Kentucky Derby. Did you see the first home run of Barry Bond’s career or the start of Cal Ripken’s streak? If you did, did it seem historical at the time?

The Derby always holds that promise. History might start at 4:30 pm on Saturday. It’s the only sure thing in horse racing.

If you want to be considered a true Renaissance man of sport, it takes more than just following the MLS and the Indianapolis 500. Those are long, important, painful steps. But don’t forget the easiest one of them all.

You don’t need to have an opinion on Hard Spun’s final workout—boon or bane—you just need to be watching come Saturday.

It will only take the most exciting two minutes in sports.

March Without the Madness

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

A little over two years ago this month, I was officially smarter than 98-percent of the country. The symmetrical code of my NCAA Tournament bracket was only three games away from being broken and I was going to bank $10,000.

This year? I’m not even filling one out.

Back in March of 2005 I had used my superior basketball savvy to divine the following: Wisconsin-Milwaukee was most certainly a Sweet 16 team, Syracuse never really stood a chance against those scrappy sapsuckers from Vermont and Louisville was going to beat North Carolina in the championship game.

Throw in Illinois and I had correctly tabbed three of the Final Four. I was acing the sports fan’s standardized test.

And then Louisville lost. It was over. There were at least 47,568 people who knew more about basketball than me that year.

In 2006, the number grew. Some guy who mistook George Mason for George Washington won ESPN’s Tournament Challenge but I was less surprised by that than I would have been to hear that some seedings savant, a poor man’s Joe Lunardi, had come out on top.

If you call yourself a sports fan, you’ve been beaten in your pool by someone using the jersey, mascot or color method. Their bewitching techniques belittle the hours you’ve spent following the sport, watching games, reading articles. All your “work” can be undone in less than two hours because someone absolutely loves that Brad Paisley went to Belmont.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m not running in the rat race this year, I’m holding my own tournament on my terms and you can too.

I suspect it won’t be easy. It will be extraordinarily difficult to abstain from an event that will dominate the collective consciousness and sports coverage in this country for the next three weeks. But it might be worth a try.

Imagine your own personal morality play being acted out before your very eyes. There are some advantages:

--When Southern Illinois inevitably loses in the first round under the “upwardly mobile mid-major exception” (See: #5 Nevada ’06, #4 Dayton ’03, and #6 Tulsa ’85), you don’t need to worry whether or not you saw it coming. I will personally delight in the fate of my team’s biggest rival, but maybe you, like Billy Packer, are simply tired of the Valley or perhaps you just hate sight hounds. These are all valid reasons for determining your rooting interests in a bracket-free March.

While my buddies are weighing Butler’s tournament resume against their recently spotty performance, I only need to know one thing: the Bulldogs play in gym with 10-foot hoops and a 15-foot free throw line and you can find those exact same measurements at Hickory High School. Go Butler.

--Unless you’re a fan of one of the Goliaths, having your team in the tourney can only cloud your judgment when it comes to handicapping. If, say, Davidson or Winthrop is your team, how far do you take them? Dent your bracket or dent your team pride? That’s essentially the question.

I would hate to be the dyed-in-the-wool Winthrop fan that had to watch the team race to the Elite Eight while you had them exiting early.

Of course, if you simply abstain from the insanity, you can continue to follow the tournament in the same way you’ve followed sports your entire life: cheer for the good guys and come up with wholly irrational reasons to love or hate everyone else.

--The great line about poker players goes something like this: Chips (sometimes representing entire mortgages) are just a means to keep score.

The same can be said for brackets. As much as we want to revel in the upset and soak in the sappiness of “One Shining Moment,” it’s mostly about proving that you know more than all your friends and co-workers.

Normally, I’m entirely in favor of such endeavors. Fantasy sports? Company softball? Good and great. These people should be aware of your prowess.

Still, I’m sitting this one out. I’m not some March Madness martyr. I loathe people who are consciously contrarian more than most things, but I hate Ohio State even more and now I’m free to root against them with all my heart.

My personal worth is no longer directly proportional to the depth of Creighton’s bench, and this is liberating. This is madness.

There will certainly be withdrawal symptoms. You may find yourself silent during office scuttlebutt. Simple words like “upset” and “spurtability” might leave you grinding your teeth. This is a normal part of the purification process.

Simply stay the course and realize that there are 65 teams that await your highly personalized analysis.

What could possibly be wrong with Wright State?

That's for you to decide. This is your tournament.

Weak Off

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Reportedly, a sage NFL soothsayer by the name of Dan Reeves told a veteran defensive back prior to Super Bowl XXXIII “Beware the idles of the off-week.” Eugene Robinson didn’t listen.

With two weeks of constant pressure from waiting for the biggest game of the year, trying to win one for the coach with a mended ticker, and being upstaged by Ray Buchanan’s dog collar at media day, Robinson finally broke less than 24 hours before kick off. You know the rest. Undercover cops and the world’s oldest profession. It’s the most famous off-field incident in Super Bowl history and it probably left Reeves with a pregame dream so bad as to rival that of Calpurnia Pisonis.

But we shouldn’t have been surprised. A week without football will do weird things to a person, which makes the NFL’s almost annual fortnight fast prior to the Super Bowl that much more troubling.

Forget for a moment overblown hype, extended preparation, and margin of victory. The two-week wait jeopardizes something much more valuable for you and me: the precious Circadian rhythm sports fans develop between August and February.

Football is built on the seven-day schedule. For players, the actual game day represents their current level of achievement on the gridiron. They start out playing on Fridays and if they’re good they graduate to Saturdays and if they’re great they get to suit up on Sundays.

It’s not that much different for football fans. Buy the groceries Wednesday, go to the movies during the week, and get the grunt work out of the way for the good stuff on Sunday. We’re conditioned to expect it right at 1 pm, but we’ll start salivating hours before. Yet here we sit today with nothing, the first empty Sunday in exactly 130 days.

Baseball fans can get their fix every day between April and October. Any time you want it during the summer, baseball is there. Hoops and hockey are haunted by the fact that their postseason tournaments define their seasons. You can pay attention now but you really don’t have to. Can you tell me your favorite NBA, NHL or college team’s schedule for the next two weeks? I can’t, but I could recite the entire 2006 Bears schedule by mid-August. I didn’t need an advent calendar, I knew it was Christmas when Chicago went to Detroit. Such is the power of NFL schedule.

So why does the league continue to eschew one of its defining characteristics? Theories abound but the answer is probably simpler than you think: the NFL takes an extra week because it can.

As much as the NFL is destination programming for millions of Americans every Sunday, the Super Bowl is final destination programming for everybody. Football fans would wait until June for the Super Bowl if they had to and the casual fan, who may watch only one game a year, will show up at the same time everyone else does (with some sort of dip) and all of this represents a disturbing trend in the way we watch professional sports: longer seasons and less control.

While media in general, from TiVo to iTunes, continues to move towards increased user control the professional leagues still horde their content with a Caesar-like autocracy.

Last year the NBA Finals didn’t start until June 8. Twenty years earlier it was over on that exact date. Major League Baseball is reportedly close to finalizing a deal that would give exclusive rights to their Extra Innings package to DirecTV, effectively taking baseball out of hundreds of thousands of homes across the country. With a DVR you can catch 24 whenever you want and, if you’re a Time-Warner subscriber, I recommend Thursdays because it helps you forget that you can’t get The NFL Network.

To say that the extra week between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl is an indication that the NFL is a money-hungry, me-first, corporate beast that doesn’t care about its fans would be fun but overly simplistic. Instead let’s look at this odd football-free weekend as an opportunity rather than a slight. It all starts with Roger Goodell.

As the NFL’s new commissioner, Goodell didn’t take control of the league until the season was a mere month away. Paul Tagliabue’s fingerprints will still be all over the Lombardi trophy this year, but it’s the future that should interest us.

Imagine if Goodell did something increasingly rare in the modern sports landscape and threw the fans a bone, heard their cries and sacrificed a little on the back end to actually give something back. Idealistic? Yes. If only there was more time to mount a serious campaign and snow under the NFL offices with letters and e-mails. Wait, what are you doing today?

The timing really couldn’t be better. While Bud Selig is mulling perhaps the most controversial TV deal ever, Goodell could step right in and become the greatest commissioner of the new century by comparison. All it would take is one press conference.

We aren’t asking much. Just give us our football straight, no buffer. Or, continue to ignore the very pulse of football as a spectator sport, the weekly fix that’s lined the coffers and made junkies out of us all.

It wouldn’t be the first time fans felt betrayed by the big-wigs, but you, Mr. Goodell, have a clean slate. Don’t leave everyone asking the inevitable:

Et tu, Roger?

Big 12 Championship a Throwback

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Forgive football fans in Oklahoma and Nebraska if they’re a little misty-eyed this week. It’s the time of year where nostalgia is being packaged, pushed and peddled across the country.

Rudolph and Charlie Brown are on the television sets again, more people will hear a Bing Crosby song in the next week than the rest of the year combined, and the Cornhuskers and Sooners are playing for the conference championship.

Same as it ever was.

Except it hasn’t happened before. At least not in the Big 12.

Somewhat silently, with the downfall of Miami and Florida State and the rise of the Big East garnering much of the spotlight, the Big XII has put together one of its worst seasons in the league’s decade-long history. The 2006 trail of tears:

-- The league won exactly zero games against ranked nonconference opponents in nine attempts this year. September’s Separation Saturday may not have cleared up the national title picture as much as we had hoped, but it went a long way towards cementing the Big 12’s place in the conference pecking order.

On that third Saturday of the season Iowa State fell to Iowa, Texas Tech was nearly shut out by TCU, Colorado succumbed to Arizona State, Nebraska folded against USC and Oklahoma “lost” to Oregon. Weeks like that early in the season had the conference looking like the littlest “Big” in the BCS.

-- Since the league’s inception in 1996, it has had three Heisman trophy winners and five runners-up. This year no conference representative will be in New York. The league’s Heisman hopes went down with Adrian Peterson on October 14.

-- In nine of the Big 12’s previous ten seasons, at least one team has headed into the conference championship game ranked in the AP top three. This year Oklahoma (AP #8) is the league’s only representative in the top 15.

For a conference used to contending for national titles, the 2006 campaign seems like one to be stricken from the record books. (Along with that Oklahoma-Oregon debacle.)

Which is why the first meeting between Oklahoma and Nebraska in the Big 12 Championship game couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. With a horde of young talent learning the ropes in Manhattan, Columbia and Stillwater, the Big 12 slipped a bit from its usual perch near the top of the college football mountain.

Texas looked like the league’s only contender, but when Colt McCoy went down, so did the Longhorns. Missouri and Texas A&M made strides, but they weren’t quite ready to make the leap this year. Oklahoma and Nebraska both survived mid-season setbacks to secure their spot, and somehow it feels right.

See, this is the way we assumed it would always be when the Big 8 merged with four teams from the Southwest Conference in 1996 to create the Big 12.

In the quarter-century prior to the birth of the new super-conference, Oklahoma or Nebraska won the Big 8 championship 23 out of 25 years. In the 1980s alone, the two teams’ yearly regular season match-up decided the conference champion seven times.

For the better part of 20 years it seemed like every OU-NU game was a Great Plains playoff that was one of the last pieces in the national championship puzzle. Between 1970 and 1995, enough oranges littered the fields at each team’s Memorial Stadium to fill the actual Orange Bowl. The names were as electric as the games and plays themselves: I.M. Hipp, Elvis Peacock, Jarvis Redwine, Buster Rhymes, Wonder Monds, The Boz.

The Big 12 changed all that. The two-division format meant that Oklahoma and Nebraska would no longer meet every year and both teams filled their traditional post-Thanksgiving slots with regional rivals. New conference heavyweights like Kansas State, Texas and Texas A&M were emerging as was a more modern, spread-offense brand of football and the Big 8 titans would take their lumps.

Back in 1996, Oklahoma opened play in the Big 12 with three straight sub-.500 seasons under John Blake before Bob Stoops arrived in 1999 and resurrected the football program sooner than anyone could’ve imagined with a national title in 2000.

But as Oklahoma began their return to prominence, Nebraska started their descent. Stoops first year in the conference marked the Cornhuskers’ last appearance in the Big 12 championship game. In 2004, Bill Callahan was named head coach and charged with overhauling the option offense. By that time, Oklahoma was fully rebuilt. Nebraska was just beginning. The rivalry was officially in limbo.

Things heated up again pretty quickly, however. Callahan’s arrival meant the departure of defensive coordinator, Bo Pelini, who went straight to Oklahoma in 2004. Norman’s most wanted, John Blake, became Nebraska’s defensive line coach. In his first OU-NU game, Bill Callahan, angered by a perceived attempt at running up the score, angled for a stick-it field goal to end the game, then exited the field under the traditional hail of oranges and infamously called the Oklahoma fans “(expletive) hillbillies.”

But it isn’t hate that makes a rivalry great, it’s stakes and they are as high as they’ve ever been between the new Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Bob Stoops is looking for a win and the BCS bowl berth that would accompany it to cap off a tumultuous season and bring to a close perhaps his most masterful coaching job to date.

Meanwhile, Bill Callahan is searching for that signature win that would officially move Nebraska out of the rebuilding stage and into the reloading phase.

Even the game itself is a throwback with a modern twist. Remember “Irresistible Oklahoma Meets Immovable Nebraska?” The roles might be reversed this year with the Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year, Nebraska’s Zac Taylor, going toe-to-toe with the conference’s Defensive Player of the Year, Rufus Alexander of Oklahoma.

Sure there’s no national title on the line, there won’t be any fruit-flinging from the fans on hand and the winner “only” gets the right to play college football’s ultimate nouveau-riche Boise State.

But in a year that has felt far from traditional in the Big 12, Oklahoma-Nebraska might be just the mix of new-school and nostalgia the conference needs heading into the bowl season.

Now the only question is how far can you throw a bag of corn chips?

Cinderella in Cleats

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Before the brand new collapsible goalposts at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium could even reach the ground last week following Louisville’s 44-34 victory over West Virginia, college football fans across the country were already debating the Cardinal’s place in the national title picture.

Would Louisville leap Florida in the BCS rankings?

Does any Big East team have a resume worthy of title game consideration?

Will the SEC be penalized again for being the toughest conference in the country?

Louisville did overtake Florida in the latest BCS rankings, stoking the fire burning beneath the title game debate and bringing sports talk across the country to a boil.

But through all the strength of schedule and common opponents hemming and hawing, one thing seemed conspicuously absent: our traditional love of the underdog.

This is still America, after all: The birthplace of the Revolution, Bluto’s Pearl Harbor speech and the 5-12 upset.

With each passing year the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament becomes less about crowning a champion and more about seeing if David State can knock off Goliath U. Documenting the fate of basketball “mid-majors” has become its own cottage industry, and schools like Valparaiso, Hampton and Richmond are reborn every March, whether they’re playing or not.

While we’re all eager to try and make the glass sneaker fit each spring, it doesn’t feel like we’re quite ready for a Cinderella in cleats.

Why not?

Proponents of a college football playoff often cite the Big Dance as the model for the excitement a full-fledged tournament could bring to the college gridiron. But whether or not we ever actually get that winter formal, this year may prove that we have to be prepared for a relative newcomer to crash the party.

In 1992 the NCAA trimmed the number of scholarships available to D1-A teams from 95 to 85, effectively ending the days of the eight-man-deep depth chart that had kept schools like Miami and Nebraska constantly in the hunt and introducing parity as the newest hot topic in college football.

But even with the reduced numbers, since 1992 no team has won a share of the national title with an all-time winning percentage of less than .610. Over the same time span on the hardwood that number drops to .520 which may help explain the controversy currently surrounding the Louisville football team.

If college basketball is a meritocracy, then college football is a plutocracy run by the Wolverines, Longhorns and Trojans of the world. As college football fans we’ve always wanted tradition, fights songs we can hum along to and uniforms that haven’t changed since Keith Jackson was calling Pac-8 games.

But it might be time for a change.

Should Louisville run the table and win the national title, they would become the team with the lowest all-time winning percentage to do so in the past 25 years. A veritable new kid on the block.

Sure the Cardinals started the season as the 13^th-ranked team in the country and everyone knew that with their schedule they would be a part of the chase, but just four years ago they finished fourth in Conference-USA and got smoked by Marshall in the GMAC Bowl 38-15.

And if the idea of Louisville getting a shot to win it all is considered controversial, then the notion that Rutgers could sneak in there should they finish undefeated with victories over Louisville and West Virginia might seem downright laughable.

The prevailing thought is that even if Rutgers ends up as the Big East champion, it has too much ground to make up in the BCS standings to have a chance at the championship game. But if some of us are begrudgingly willing to give Louisville their chance, why not Rutgers? It may be far-fetched, but it’s not unprecedented.

In 1984 BYU started the season unranked, played a WAC schedule that featured no ranked teams and won three of those conference games by a touchdown or less. Must’ve had a big bowl win, right?

Nope, BYU wrapped up their first and only national title by beating a 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl. The Cougars only played one ranked team all season long, beating #3 Pitt in the first game of the season.

Louisville’s AP ranking heading into their Thursday night tilt at Rutgers? Number three.

I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

In reality, a Rutgers win on Thursday probably dashes the Big East’s hopes of gaining the much-needed legitimacy a national title appearance could provide. But it still provides the conference the opportunity to point and snicker at the up in arms ACC, where Wake Forest and it’s all-time winning percentage of .399 is leading all the Big East defectors who supposedly decimated the league.

Are any of this year’s non-trads better than any of the one-loss giants? Probably not, but it might just be time to find out.

Glass cleats could complement that crystal football quite nicely.

Fast Times at TV High

Originally published on FOXSports.com

It used to be so simple; America was an apple pie and hit-and-run kind of place. There was no argument. But in recent years, America has started to feel a lot more like a hot wing and bump-and-run joint. The NFL runs its own network. College football is available on no fewer than seven national cable channels every Saturday. But the newest trend in sports programming, high school football, may be satisfying our football appetites better than any of them.

Shows like Two-A-Days and Friday Night Lights along with the unparalleled availability of live games have thrust high school football into the national spotlight. Taking a little bit of baseball’s innocence and a lot of football’s extravagance, the grassroots game seems to be sprouting up everywhere.

With apologies to All the Right Moves, high school football first gained any sort of wide spread cultural significance with the publication of H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights in 1990. Bissinger left his job as an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, moved to Odessa, Texas, an oil boom town gone bust, and spent a year documenting the Permian Panthers’ 1988 season.

While the book may have been meant to expose the passion and delusion of big time Texas football: 20,000 seat stadiums, chartered planes, fussy boosters, it actually accomplished the opposite and generalized the experience for the rest of the country. From six-man teams with volunteer firefighters on the chain gang to 6A schools with national schedules they all have one thing in common: unbridled passion, both in the stands and on the field.

My high school team, representing a community of 900 people, won one game in two years yet even I, by displaying a bit of a knack for catching the football, was asked for an autograph. Sadly, it remains the only one in existence, but I’m sure there are thousands of former high school players who could claim the same experience and much more. There’s a Mike Winchell, a Don Billingsley, a Boobie Miles for every town and that doesn’t discount their experience or the book. If anything it magnifies it and that goes a long way towards explaining the game’s newfound popularity on the small screen.

In 2004, Friday Night Lights got the Hollywood treatment at the hands of director Peter Berg. The film was beautifully shot and featured the best sports movie score since Jerry Goldsmith’s work on Hoosiers but, almost in answer to the question Head Coach Gary Gaines put to his players in the movie, it wasn’t perfect.

Friday Night Lights suffered some of the same problems that plague all sports movies. The “every play is the greatest play you’ve ever seen” syndrome was in full effect, and there were some authenticity issues for obsessive people like me. Blue Oakley visors, Under Armour and Nike gloves in 1988? Nike Sharks and Neumann gloves are more like it. But for the most part, the movie stayed on top rather than teetering over and after the tearful scene where Boobie told his uncle “I can’t do nothing else but play football,” I was hooked. Not perfect, but good enough to win.

Now if you watched any football at all this season, you probably knew that Tuesday was the premiere of Friday Night Lights on NBC. I was wary coming in as this represented a copy of a copy of a copy scenario, but after seeing the pilot, also directed by Peter Berg, I’m begrudgingly invested.

No longer set in 1988, the school is now the fictionalized Dillon. The players, while drawing heavily on their real-life models, aren’t real either. The super-quick cuts and Explosions in the Sky soundtrack are carried over from the film, but at this point the topic isn’t new. It is no longer shocking to see an overbearing booster lay in to the poor head coach, even if that booster is played by Mack Brown in what must’ve been a great role reversal for him. It’s become hyper-realistic, so bizarrely true that we don’t even notice anymore.

But the season’s other football program, MTV’s Two-A-Days, succeeds on this very front. Everything in that show is imminently recognizable to anyone who has ever attended high school. I can see Alex go to his homecoming dance with a tie that’s knotted three inches too short and I know he’ll get better. I watch Goose fall into the dreaded “guy friend” zone with Kristin and I feel bad for him. I’ve been there.

Like Permian in 1988, life is supposed to be totally unrealistic as a member of Hoover High, the number one high school team in the country, but it’s not. It looks exactly like high school as I remember it.

In Friday Night Lights’ pilot episode, Tim Riggins’ brother told him, “This is life, this isn’t Maxim magazine.” But high school football is Maxim magazine. It’s misguided, irrational, sexy and fun. The perfect summation of youth.

Boys playing a man’s game are turned into heroes for a season or two, every Friday is the most important day of their life, the girls are always attractive and the drama always severe. It’s realistic because it’s unrealistic. That’s high school.

Then you go to college and you move on. If you’re still toting those old game films to the dorms, your new neighbors will quickly tell you to grow up. But I think that’s what will keep high school football on television for good. Be it a TV drama, a reality a show or an actual game between two schools you’ve never heard of, they’re selling nostalgia, a chance to relive the glory days in the privacy of your own home, guilt-free. I don’t want to have a terrible haircut anymore or listen to crappy music or worry about acne, but I don’t mind being reminded of what it felt like the first time around.

Friday night lights? I’ll never get those back, but now I’ve got them on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday instead and I can’t turn away.

Husker Baby

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Sometimes I fear for the sports fan souls of my unborn children. What if they grow up supporting a team I loathe? How can I ensure that doesn’t happen? Am I totally crazy if I do? Luckily, a few football-mad minds in Texas have come up with an answer: officially licensed, team specific videos for your baby.

Now the college game has always spun off some of the craziest fan merchandise out there. Team caskets, assorted foodstuffs, even miniature branding irons that will sear your team’s logo into your favorite tailgating fare. But a group called Team Baby Entertainment may have outdone them all last year with the release of a video called “Baby Longhorn,” which essentially works the same as those branding irons but substitutes your impressionable toddler’s mind for the Grade A beef.

Less than two years after the debut of that first video, Team Baby Entertainment has expanded their college roster to include 20 schools and deals are already in place with Major League Baseball, the NBA and NASCAR for future editions. With more schools on the way, suffice it to say, if your alma mater has a) won a national title, b) suffered major recruiting violations, and/or c) had to cut ties with a notable booster in the past 15 years, they will be available for purchase soon enough.

This all smacked of science fiction to me, from the eerie Phillip K. Dick catchphrase (“Raising Tomorrow’s Fan Today”) to the fact that Regis Philbin proclaimed “Baby Irish” one of his favorite gift ideas of the 2005 holiday season. Of course, I ordered the “Baby Cornhusker” edition immediately.

With no toddlers within arm’s reach, I was left to watch the video myself to determine its efficiency. After a brief intro featuring that sickeningly soothing, brainwashing female voice over some generic sports footage, the video is broken down into six major chapters: band, numbers, colors, traditions, location and “play.” With the aid of my telestrator, I am able to provide the following chapter by chapter analysis:

Marching Band

A nice, subtle way to ease yourself into the brainwashing. Show some shots of the marching band, play the school song and provide subtitled lyrics at the bottom. Wait, who in your target audience can read? Or maybe the better question is, if you’re going to provide the song lyrics, why are they sans bouncing ball? A major misstep here.

Numbers

This is a little easier. Each number, one through ten, is accompanied by footage of a Nebraska player with the appropriate number succeeding on the field of play. But, in trying to think like a four-year-old, I was a bit confused by the number five which used footage that showed Tommie Frazier (#15) throwing a pass to Jon Vedral (#25) that was deflected and eventually caught by Brendan Holbein (#5) for a touchdown. I was certain that multiples would be reserved for “AP: Baby Cornhusker.”

Colors

Refreshingly straightforward. There are only two colors and they are the school colors. Forget the color wheel and your box of Crayons with 64 different options. Red and white, that’s it. I only wonder if the Longhorn and Wolverine editions try to teach kids burnt orange and maize.

Traditions

Apparently the University of Nebraska has only one tradition and that is athletics. That seems fair. I wouldn’t have purchased this video if I felt otherwise.

Location

The most baffling chapter simply because I can’t see any baby being interested in seeing b-roll of students playing Frisbee on the quad from an old campus recruiting video. I remember my campus tours and they were mind-numbing. I was trying to act like I cared more about the English department than the party apartments, my mother was genuinely interested and our poor student guide was trying to convince us that he knew where the library was because he had actually used it. I was 18 at the time. I can’t imagine what it must be like for an 18-month-old.

Play

The big finale and it consists solely of children in officially licensed clothing playing with officially licensed balls. In fact, aside from the seemingly random mascot pop-ups and the occasional spelling of “Huskers,” this video is mostly kids in team licensed clothing. Apparently, even for toddlers, peer pressure is still the best motivator. And don’t worry, there are lingering shots of the other products Team Baby offers, including puzzles, mobiles and blocks. (And I thought they were here to help me, not get in my pocketbook.) If your video actually takes there’s no way you’re getting off without getting the team logo toys. You can’t put a price on not raising a rival child.

Now, it’s not really fair to apply Ebert’s thumb scrutiny to a children’s DVD as a grown Nebraska fan. The real questions at large are: does it work and would a kid want to watch it? My answers are probably and maybe.

There is enough counting, spelling, cute furry mascots and music to resemble an episode of Sesame Street as imagined by the president of your school’s booster club. But if you’re a college football fan with kids I think that if you just keep doing what you’re doing, blocking off every Saturday and maybe making Junior sit down for a few downs with you before his nap, he’ll get the picture. If you’re living in enemy territory, however, these videos might serve as a worthy insurance plan.

Don’t feel guilty, most children’s programs are brainwashing of one sort or another anyway. I know one thing: I’d rather have Tommie Frazier on eternal loop in my DVD player than the Teletubbies or Thomas the Train any day.