Optimism is incurable, especially as fall breathes eternal and signals the coming of a new college football season. It doesn’t hurt to have a Heisman darkhorse as well as a future NFL draft pick sharing space in your backfield. Yet before we expect a dazzling Chip Kelly offense to carry the Ducks to conference contention we must ask where is this year’s chink in the armor? Last year the Ducks had a few gamebreakers on defense. Gone ...

At the heart of the controversy over using a polling system to choose a champion is the fact that strength of schedule considerations often trump outright W-L records. Since most games are played in conference, each year's endless debates about relative conference strength are justifiably contentious. As passionate as those discussions are, opinions become especially inflamed over out of conference schedules. This is because in college football, teams have the freedom to select their own OOC ...

Quick!  When was the last time the University of Memphis won a conference championship in football? If you're a diehard fan, you know the last time the Tigers won a conference championship in football was 1969, when the Tigers won the Missouri Valley Conference, their second straight conference championship in football. In the 13 years that Conference USA has sponsored a conference championship in football, the Tigers are the only charter member of the conference to ...

The offensive line is not normally a hot topic on most sport sites. Normally when you see news about the guys that live in the "trenches," it's about an injury or two. Maybe a missed assignment that got the quarterback drilled in the back by a blitzing linebacker is the topic for the day, but they don't generally get a lot of love. As we focus on 2009 and begin to predict how the Bulldogs will ...

The preseason poll has become an institution in college football. We've all seem them, read them, and many of us have created them. But preseason polls rarely live up to their hype. Only 10 teams have been ranked the preseason No. 1 and won a National Championship. With that in mind, there are several teams that appear in the top 25 that are just not going to live up to the hype this year and are going to ...

Any half-decent KU football fan knows exactly who our starting skill-players will be.  The Hawks may not get TONS of national attention, but at this point it's hard to watch college football and not at least know the names. There are some other names on offense, however, that aren't as popular...yet.  In fact, if you don't know these guys names already, take a minute to learn them. Here are a few guys I expect to have really ...

From Humble Beginnings To The Top Of The College Football Mountain. Dr. Kevin McCarthy’s Historic Photos of University of Florida Football takes Gators’ fans on a visual history of the Florida Gators Football program. This book is a must have for any Gators fan and should be displayed proudly on your coffee table. With the success of the Gators Football program in the last few years, there are lots of new fans that may not be ...

Here at the University of South Carolina, the students have returned to campus. With them, comes a lot of talk about the upcoming football season. The topics have been varied, but one thing seems to be on every Gamecock fan’s mind. It can be summed up into two words: nine seniors. Some are focusing on the negatives of the situation. Nine is an incredibly small number. There just isn’t any way around it. This is a ...

Lou Holtz made a bold prediction last week that has both Notre Dame fans and haters buzzing. He predicted that Notre Dame would go undefeated and play in the BCS Title Game against Florida. Of course the USC fans and other haters say that it is impossible. Nothing is impossible and Holtz's prediction is more possible than the haters will acknowledge. I think Notre Dame were re-energized last Christmas in Hawaii. I expect big things for ...

As a fan of both Rutgers and Big East football, I usually try to defend the conference against its mightier and more profitable leagues. The Big East has amassed a 12-4 bowl game record the last three seasons. Since the two former Big East powerhouse schools in Miami and Virginia Tech left for the ACC in 2003, the conference has gone a respectable 3-2 in BCS games.  This time, I cannot. Allegedly, the Big East wanted ...