Riled up in Utah. Really.

As you might expect, the best rants about the BCS/playoff battle right now come from folks with a Utah address.  The rest of us try to argue back and forth on the merits (well, except for John Feinstein) without resorting to hackery like this:

… Even the Las Vegas Sun, a newspaper circulated within Mountain West Conference borders, editorialized a few days ago that Congress has better things to do than stage a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the BCS. But even that op-ed page blather is populist drivel. Congress, for all its power, has about as much credibility as the BCS. So, what’s the harm? It might delay making us into Canada or Sweden for another day. Something has to be done.

Both sides suck, but Congress can do something.  That’s some wonderfully bitter stuff right there.  It’s almost as good as this breakdown in logic regarding the application of the Sherman Antitrust Act to the matter at hand:

… This law didn’t intend to punish businesses that dominated their market on their own merit, only those who did so through conspiracy ? like allowing Mississippi State but not TCU or its mid-major brethren automatic access to a national title. In other words is the BCS illegally enabling embarrassing college football programs like Duke greater access to money, bowls and championships than say a BYU, Utah or Boise State?

One more time:  there’s no restriction on playing in the BCS title game other than being a member of a D-1 football conference.  None. Does any sane human being really want to argue that Duke has a better chance of playing in this season’s title game than Boise State?

As for the money, how many times does it bear repeating?

Give enough people something compelling to watch all season, Utahns, and you’ll climb those golden stairs.  Meanwhile, could you please shut the hell up?  You’re just embarrassing yourselves.

No fireworks today

Just some random thoughts:

• From a college football news standpoint, this may be the slowest day of the year.
• Who sees more double coverage this year, Julio Jones or A.J. Green?
• I like David Hale’s comparison of Joe Cox to David Greene.  I just don’t know if he’s right.
• I really can’t figure out which team will win the SEC West this year.  Every time I think I’m about to settle on a school, I see a chink in the armor that makes me back off.
• Maybe it’s a reaction to all the sports metaphors littering Palin’s resignation speech, but I have this thought in my head I can’t finish:  if the Republican Party were a college football program, how bad an offseason would we be saying it was having?
• To all the people who keep looking at Notre Dame and seeing an obvious double digit win total for the Irish this year, does it bother you even a little that this is pretty much the same team that lost four of its last five regular season games, including to Syracuse at home?
• Is there any school whose schedule is more of a one game season than Boise State’s?
• The more I think about it, the more I’m amazed by the quarterback situation at Tennessee.  But South Carolina is a close second.
• I have no idea which school will win the Big East this year, which is okay, since I don’t really care, either.
• If you look at the schedules of the schools that are considered the true national title contenders right now, Southern Cal’s is the most credible of the bunch, and it’s not a close call.
• How many ACC teams would you characterize as having potent offenses?
• I think Pat Forde has confused the term “rivalry” with “spectacle”.  Of course, that’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect at the WWL.
• What’s the over/under on the number of snaps Tebow takes lining up under center this year?  And will the average ypp be less or more compared to the average ypp out of the shotgun?
• Anybody who thinks this is the year that the Big XII becomes the preeminent conference in college football needs to take a closer look at the North.  The division race will be fun to watch, but it’s a stretch to see anything close to a dominant team there.