The first entry was lost and this is late in arrival because everything had to be re-done, so I'm a little miffed right now, to put it mildly.  Anyway, enjoy.

---ESPN's ($) Bruce Feldman details this week's story lines.

ESPN College GameDay is headed to... you guessed it, another SEC stadium this weekend!  Remind me again what all that kvetching was just two weeks into the season about the SEC being ignored by ESPN?  You guys are like needy little children sometimes.  They're headed to Arkansas to see the Hogs play Tennessee. 

---ESPN's Ivan Maisel goes to bat for Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe.

The winning formula?

Grobe brushed off one question about how Wake Forest can win when the other team gains more yards. But when pressed, he tried to explain.

"We've played pretty good special teams, we've played pretty good defense most of the time, and offensively we've taken care of the football. Typically when you do that, you're going to end up in the fourth quarter with a chance. What's happened is we've ended up in the fourth quarter with a chance a lot, and we've found a way to get it done. We've got a lot of fourth- and fifth-year guys."

Good assessment.  I would add good timing, as they have assembled a veteran team just as the top half of the ACC slogs through a down year where every team is nearly equal but also nowhere near the top of the college football heap.  Sometimes discipline is the difference for survival in the middle of anarchy.

Grobe is a good coach, even without this year's accomplishments.  I've long admired the Demon Deacons' rush attack, kind of a Minnesota-lite.  My one quibble is that they've completely underutilized reserve receiver Kevin Marion.  He's electric with the football, always making a big play on returns and reverses.  Get him the ball!

---Also, Maisel reveals the wise-cracking side of the California offense.

On a modest tangent, there's this quote from Cal quarterback Nate Longshore:

"This is pretty much a job," the quarterback said. "All we do all day is football. If you don't enjoy it, life gets pretty miserable, pretty tedious. We try to enjoy it. We're up here so much.

That kind of quote has to be like nails on chalkboard to the NCAA's ears.  With all the APR and other fronts and measures they're trying to protect their coffers from Congress and ticked-off former athletes who believe things shouldn't be as exploitative as they have been.

Change is a-comin', the question is 1)what will happen and 2)when.

---ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski has a conversation with himself a hypothetical Louisville fan.

I doubt USC would beat Louisville by two touchdowns.  It's probably the other way around.  Just sayin...

---I'm starting to come around with ESPN's Pat Forde.  I really cringe reading some of his stuff, but other times it's quite interesting.

He does a yeoman defense of the Big East in this week's Forde Yard Dash.

Ever since Louisville (2) beat West Virginia (3) 44-34 Thursday, critics have been bashing the two teams and their conference like the most vicious political attack ads. You'd have thought the Big East had come out in favor of flag burning and flag football.

Never, to The Dash's best recollection, has an entertaining game between top-10 teams provoked such a backlash.

The Dash suspects this all comes down to laundry and logos. The trappings of tradition have a funny way of altering perspective. If the arriviste Cardinals had an orange steer on the side of their helmets and the nouveau riche Mountaineers wore cardinal and gold, reviews would have been more favorable.

When Texas and USC racked up 1,130 yards and 79 points in the Rose Bowl, it was considered one of the greatest games ever played. When Louisville and West Virginia combine for 1,018 yards and 78 points, it's the result of atrocious defense better suited to the Western Athletic Conference than the BCS Championship Game.

Vince Young, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart can make good defenses look bad. So can Brian Brohm (4), Steve Slaton (5) and Pat White (6), especially with game plans conceived by Bobby Petrino (7) and Rich Rodriguez (8). Ask SEC blueblood Georgia, which had the No. 8 scoring defense and No. 18 total defense nationally in 2005 but was blown up for 502 yards and 38 points in the Sugar Bowl by West Virginia.

The establishment critics don't want to hear that. They want to decide the championship game on laundry.

"We're new," Petrino said Monday. "We're a new player. There's a lot of tradition at other schools, a lot of tradition in other conferences. We have to go through all this and be able to understand why people say those things."

It's not hard to understand the motivation for knocking the unbeaten Big East teams as national title contenders, but The Dash says that a 12-0 team from that league deserves to play for it all.

One significant quibble: nobody deserves anything in college football.  Sorry, Herbstreit, a one-loss SEC team doesn't "deserve" to be in a BCS title game anymore than an undefeated Big East team "deserves" to play for the championship (sorry, Pat).  Each team must be evaluated on its own merits, to the best of our abilities, and then go from there.

Besides, could we be any more vague?  A one-loss SEC team could be Florida or it could be Arkansas or until last week, it could have been Tennessee.  But all of these guys are not equal.  Nonsense, all around!

I believe it's more difficult to finish undefeated in the Pac-10 than in the SEC, but that doesn't make a Pac-10 team any more deserving of anything.  If and only if an undefeated Pac-10 (or whoever) team is the best or second-best team in the country do they "deserve" to be in a title game.

End the entitlements, let the teams speak for themselves.

---Interesting article from ESPN's Bill Curry about negative forces around programs, the Fellowship of the Miserable (or FOM's) as he calls them.

When the [USC] Trojans lost a squeaker to Oregon State last week, Coach Carroll immediately reconfirmed what he has taught his team since he arrived at USC. You must have a realistic perspective; not foolishly optimistic, nor pessimistic. Nobody wins them all, and these things happen. No big deal. That was his public posture. If he was rough on his team in private, no one else was privy to that. What he was doing was underscoring the fact that realism is the healthiest way to deal with football's inevitable vagaries. His team most likely will snap back.

Curry's pieces are almost always interesting and thoughtful, but he clearly doesn't have a good read on Carroll here.  The guy is relentlessly positive.  Somewhere deep in his conscience ---my apologies for a crude analogy here but it's important to know the psyche involved--- Carroll thinks he defecates gold.  I'm only half sarcastic.  His whole mentality since arriving at USC has been to "do it differently, do it better, do it like it's never been done".

That is not the talk of a realist.  The crazy thing is he basically managed to do what he said, from mid 2002 to 2004 or 2005 depending on your whole interpretation of the Norm Chow departure.

---CBS' Dennis Dodd says Colt McCoy should be up for the Heisman Trophy.

Apparently his coach disagrees!

"I just don't think personally that freshmen should be up for the Heisman," [Texas coach Mack] Brown said.

Brown is always lobbying.  This is just hilarious and ironic on a million different levels.

More Dodd goodness:

Headlines we thought we'd never read:

Arkansas wins SEC with third starting quarterback

Are the defenses really so superior in the SEC when a one trick pony offense flourishes in the league?  Usually what makes an offense so impossible to stop is its ability to be balanced and force defenses to constantly guess or surrender to one facet to hopefully slow down the other.  Arkansas is getting almost nothing from its quarterbacks yet continues to put up points and yards against SEC defenses.

Just sayin...

Also, after Wisconsin's first-half clock milking stunts, Dodd hopes to have written the obituary on the new clock rules.

If you saw it live or visited youtube.com, you saw the tipping point for these crazy game-shortening clock rules.

Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema intentionally ran down the clock in the first half against Penn State by instructing his players on the kickoff team to go offsides. Twice.

The first kickoff came with 23 seconds left in the half. After two flags, there were only four seconds left. Wisconsin then kicked off conventionally and recovered a Penn State fumble, but time had run out.

Paterno was livid, but Bielema had done nothing more than exploit a loophole in the rules. Beginning this year, the clock starts when toe meets ball on kickoffs. Never mind that no actual football was being played.

Bielema's gamesmanship received national attention. Rightly so, because the rules have made a mockery of the game. Teams have had to call a timeout late in the game after a change of possession just to get their offenses on the field.

The prediction here is that this will be the episode that will lead the NCAA rules committee to begin to change these insane roles when they meet early next year.

Let's pray.

---The Sporting News' Tom Dienhart documents an amazing array of coaching rumors.

I heard something interesting about Norm Chow recently from a very good source that basically sets any potential college destination to all of two places.  One is entirely unlikely, the other is a lukewarm fallback.  Have fun guessing those destinations.  Oh, and I'd be shocked if he were to take any position other than offensive coordinator.  Apparently he's just not interested in being a head coach.  At least, that's how he feels as of a few days ago while still employed as an NFL offensive coordinator almost certain to be on the chopping block at season's end.

---The DFW Star-Telegram's Wendell Barnhouse wants some kind of playoff.

Flimsy, and antagonistic (Millionaire Boys Club???).  Class warfare, anyone?

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