College football thoughts

My thoughts on the college football season...

1. Colorado is not good. I meant to live-blog a game or something, but really, what other conclusion could I have come to? There’s plenty of blame to go around-the new coach hasn’t made a lick of difference, Bernard Jackson throws more passes to the ground than to his receivers (49.7% completion rate this year), and the defense has kept things just close enough to get us beat.

By the way, how much of a grace period does a new coach get? Do we give him four or five years to get all of his kind of players on the team? Or can we expect him to, you know, do his job the first few years, too? I don’t think Dan Hawkins should be fired or anything, but I guess I expected a lot more this year.

2. BYU is back...I guess. Somehow BYU has slipped back in to its rightful place at the bottom of the Top 25 polls. I’m not the biggest fan of Alma’s mater, though I do hate Utah at least as much as I despise Nebraska.

When I was a kid, the Captain and I used to look at the AP polls on Tuesday to see where BYU should be ranked. This usually involved counting out spots in the “Also receiving votes” section and determining that the Cougars were 28th or so in the nation. Good times. They brought back the old jerseys, and now they’ve brought back the old tradition of beating up on crappy teams all year long. See? New coaches don’t have to struggle.

3. Should Louisv-I mean Rutgers-play in the title game? Last Friday on PTI, Lee Corso announced that no matter what happens this year, Rutgers wouldn’t deserve a national title game berth over a team from a real conference. Big surprise. Corso, like Billy Packer on the basketball side, is one of those college analysts who can’t stop hyping the big schools.

I’m not sure that makes him wrong, though. Rutgers’ schedule is pretty easy, and they’ve had some close calls. They’ve only played one ranked team all year (Louisville last week). Big schools play way tougher schedules! Um, right?

Maybe. Michigan, for example, has only played one ranked team so far. They still have to play Ohio State, the current No. 1 in both polls. Does that really count, though? Some people already think a Michigan-Ohio State rematch should be the national title game, regardless of who wins. Rutgers isn’t allowed to lose any games.

Most top teams have played two or three ranked squads already. Thus Rutgers’ schedule has been easier than most, but no one in college football plays a good team every week.

And Rutgers is undefeated, something only Ohio and Boise States can say. Yeah, the schedule’s easy, but it’s the best they could possibly do. Look at it this way: if you put Peyton Manning, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Brian Urlacher in Rutgers uniforms this year, they’d obviously be the best team in college football, but they’d still only be 9-0. (They’d be 9-0 since Rutgers hasn’t played Florida…right, Peyton?) My point is that we don’t know how good Rutgers can be, because they’ve passed every test so far.

My answer’s kind of a cop-out-I want to see what happens in the last few games before I say if Rutgers deserves a spot. I do think it’s too early to say they don’t deserve a spot, though.