Don Hansen's Football Gazette
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"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
2-27-2008

After ending the 2006 season by covering Boise State's "miracle" win over Big XII champion and perennial national title contender Oklahoma in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, plus LSU's 41-14 rout of Notre Dame in the Allstate Sugar Bowl and Florida's BCS title game win over Ohio State by the same score, which was the biggest victory margin ever by a #2 over a #1, I didn't think it would be possible to have a more fulfilling year in 2007. Oh how wrong I was! This season's scheduling was just as elegant as last year's, but with more games, more history and at least as much excitement. On top of it all, I watched as a 54-year old dream came true in what had to be 2007's most anticipated game, Navy's 3-OT 46-44 win over Notre Dame in South Bend. Not only was I able to witness the end, after 43 frustrating years, of college football's longest-ever losing streak in an annual rivalry, but I was also able to put to rest a personal ghost from 1953. The ghost was named Frank Verrichione, the infamous Fighting Irish Offensive Tackle who perpetrated two fake injuries in what became widely known as the "Fainting Irish" game. The late-season 14-14 tie with Iowa was Notre Dame's only blemish that year, but the win-at-any-cost trickery to stop the clock just before the end of each half to allow desperation ND scores did not save Irish national title hopes, nor did it keep legendary coach Frank Leahy from being eased quietly into retirement at the end of the season on the heels of a national outcry about Notre Dame's questionable sportsmanship and game ethics. I was only 11 years old on that fateful November 21st in 1953, but listening to the game repulsed me just as much as it did the Hawkeye radio broadcasters who were on the scene in South Bend, and I made a promise to myself that someday I would be at Notre Dame Stadium to see the Irish get beaten by a team they usually handle with ease. Thank you, Middies, for giving me a two-fer on November 3rd, 2007!

But that was hardly the only remarkable game of this past season. In addition to seeing games in 28 first-time-for-me college venues, a couple of them were also the venue's first game. I visited Latrobe, PA, on September 1st for the resurrection of a long-dormant football program at Saint Vincent College. The first game at the Saints' new Chuck Noll Field, named for the 4-time Super Bowl-champ Pittsburgh Steelers coach (whose former team has been conducting its pre-season camp at SVC for years), was a 32-13 win by Gallaudet, which also let me witness GU's first game back as an official D-III varsity after ten years as a club team. On Labor Day in Toronto a couple of days later, I witnessed the initial game at U of T's brand-new multi-purpose Varsity Stadium, built on the site of the historic old venue of the same name. Unfortunately, the Varsity Blues still have not figured out how to win, losing to Waterloo by a 42-17 count on their way to another 0-8 season and thus extending their futility to 49 games, the longest losing streak in Canadian college history. Later that evening in London, ON, I caught my first Canadian college overtime game as the visiting Queen's Golden Gaels scored a 26-20 win over Western Ontario after a last-minute game-tying rally in regulation. That outcome, however, would later be avenged by the Mustangs in the post-season playoffs.

The firsts kept coming the next weekend as Sandy joined me in Cincinnati for a getaway weekend, which was mostly me getting away to football games while she enjoyed our comfortable hotel. On Thursday evening I visited Nippert Stadium to see the hometown Bearcats crush Oregon State 34-3 in the Beavers' first game ever against UC. The next night it was another first, an international high school game between Cincy powerhouse Colerain HS and Clarke Road HS from London, Ontario. The Canadians were, as expected, hopelessly overmatched playing U. S. rules, and the 77-8 final score could have been anything Colerain wanted it to be. On Saturday I witnessed the first "home" game in Marian College history, a 39-7 loss to McKendree at Indianapolis' Pike High School, the Knights' temporary venue until an on-campus facility is built. The next day in Delaware, Ohio, I caught Lake Erie College's first "college" game, against Ohio Wesleyan's JV, and the Storm won by a 33-3 tally on the way to a 7-2 season as a start-up club team.

The next weekend's "first" was my initial overnight drive of the year, something I promised Sandy I'd try hard to avoid in the interest of health and safety. However, I just couldn't resist the idea of seeing Southern Virginia play a neutral site game against Lincoln U. of Missouri on a comfortable Friday evening in Kentucky. The 39-23 score, with LU's Blue Tigers prevailing, was not indicative of the game's competitiveness, and SVU would go on to a 6-5 season, its best ever, while Lincoln would win only one more game in 2007. The venue, Morehead State's Jayne Stadium, was conveniently located roughly halfway between the two competitors' campuses, but a circuitous 9-hour drive from the Atlanta airport. My problem was making good on a long-standing commitment to D-III LaVerne's legendary retired head coach Roland Ortmayer, now 91 years old and making his home in an assisted-living center just three blocks from the stadium which bears his name. I promised Ort on a visit last January that I'd take him to 2007's first LaVerne home game, which would also be former East Texas Baptist assistant Andrew Ankeny's initial home game as the Leopards' new mentor. It was a special day in LaVerne football history, as Ankeny is the first ULV head coach since 1947 who is neither Ort nor a former player and coach under Ort, who retired in 1991. In order to get to LaVerne for the Noon PDT kickoff, I had to drive all night from Morehead, KY, to Atlanta to board a 7:50AM flight to Ontario, CA, then rent a car and drive 15 miles to LaVerne. I got to Ort's about 50 minutes before kickoff, but the wheelchair that his nurses provided had some problems, and after some hurried and very makeshift repairs, we wheeled him down the street to the game, whose kickoff we witnessed from the parking lot! Ort was to have tossed the coin, but he had to settle for being honored at halftime of the Leopards' disappointing 34-0 blanking at the hands of the playoff-bound Whitworth Pirates. Ort's daughter Corlyn was kind enough to drive him back home at the end of the 3rd Quarter, but I got some great photos of Ort with his family and friends at this very special afternoon of memories. That evening I drove to Citrus Stadium in Glendora, barely ten miles from Ortmayer Stadium, to see Citrus College beat Compton College, 42-21, in just my eighth California JuCo game...16 teams down and 56 to go! Sandy has agreed to move to the Golden State for the football season in 2010 so I can watch the last of the JuCo teams that I will not have seen by then, almost all of them in California.

I drove to Phoenix the next morning to pick up Sandy for another quick getaway, this time a couple of nights in Sedona, before putting her back on a plane home on Tuesday afternoon on my way back to California for a short baseball interruption, a quick stop in San Diego for my first Padres home game at Petco Park. Then it was back to Ontario Airport for my return to the Deep South and a Wednesday night Atlanta Braves game at Turner Field, my first time there. On Thursday I caught my final two as-yet unseen Mississippi JuCo teams, with the highlight of Southwest Mississippi CC's 25-21 last-gasp comeback win over East Central CC being the chance to sit with the Mulkey family of Tickfaw, Louisiana. Otis was the first to strike up a conversation in the stands, and before long I was chatting with his brother, Les, the father of SMCC's freshman kicker, Les, Jr., and also of Kim Mulkey, the celebrated NCAA-Champion Baylor U. women's basketball coach. I see a nice catfish dinner in my future next time I get a chance to stop in Tickfaw!

Then it was back on a plane to California, this time from Jackson, MS, to San Jose, for another Sunday-Monday getaway with Sandy, who was attending a workshop at Lake Tahoe. On the way to Tahoe City, of course, I had to get the hardest JuCo challenge in California out of the way...a cold afternoon game at College of the Siskiyous in Weed and a rainy evening contest at Shasta College, east of Redding. The latter was another first for me, as Butte's 40-34 win over Shasta in four OT's was my first 4-Overtime game at any level.

The last weekend in September was a breeze by comparison, with a Thursday night game in Martin, TN (barely a 7-hour drive from home) and a Friday night high school game in Indiana, and both were down-to-the-wire thrillers. Saturday's game at Butler was the bubble-popper for the Bulldogs' season-opening 4-game winning streak, as San Diego's All-American QB Josh Johnson led a 56-9 stinging that was the beginning of BU's 0-7 skid over the remainder of the year. I got to Owensboro, KY, that night in time to see the final 3 periods of Kentucky Wesleyan's 47-0 rout of newcomer Kentucky Christian, which would go winless in its inaugural season.

The next week was somewhat more of a challenge, as I saw 9 college games in 7 days, beginning in Memphis with the hometown Tigers' key Tuesday night 24-21 win over Marshall to ultimately qualify for a bowl game. On Wednesday it was on to Hattiesburg, MS, to see former Texas State head coach David Bailiff win his first game as Rice's head man, a huge 31-29 upset of Southern Miss's Golden Eagles. Thursday's Lane College home 35-24 win over Kentucky State and Friday night's 44-35 Utah win at Louisville were both preceded by restful nights, but then it was another overnight marathon to get to Saturday's 11:00AM Kansas @ Kansas State kickoff in the 105th Sunflower Showdown game. This was the first of several big previously unseen traditional rivalry games that I was able to check off my to-do list in 2007. KU's 30-24 comeback win turned out to be the key game in Kansas' best season ever. It was also, I discovered three months later when I reviewed my lifetime college football log, the 1,001st "official" college football game I'd seen in person. Another overnight drive ensued, after stopping in North Newton, KS, for Bethel College's 41-0 blanking of Southwestern that evening. It was a six-hour drive to Omaha for a 6:50AM flight to Denver and on to Boise for Sunday night's New Mexico State-Boise State game on the blue turf at Bronco Stadium. This one had been on my schedule since visiting with NMSU coach Hal Mumme in Las Cruces in early March; I thought 2007 would be the Aggies' turn-the-corner year under offensive genius and good friend Mumme, and what better place to win the big one than at BSU? I'd hoped to be there when it occurred, but the 58-0 wipeout by the Broncos was hardly what I had expected; I guess the Aggies will just have to wait until next season to get over the hump. At least I got a Gold Pin on Boise that day (a Gold Pin on my master map means a team has now been seen at home, away from home and at a neutral site, the best a team can get in my geographic lexicon--so far there are 95 such teams!). I was back in Omaha by Noon the next day, and after visiting my 85-year old Uncle Paul and Cornhusker-crazy Aunt Jerry in Elkhorn, NE, I managed to squeeze two more football games in on a rare Monday (the Dana JV's over Midland Lutheran's JV, 27-12 in Blair, and Dordt's new preparatory club team in a 14-6 win over Iowa Central CC's JV at Sioux Center) before heading to Greene, Iowa, my boyhood home, for a day of R&R with my 89-year-old mother, Mary.

Then it was off to Pittsburgh to see the second of Navy's three marathon multi-OT games of 2007, the 2-OT win over Pitt, 48-45, on Wednesday evening. By Thursday night I was in Winston-Salem to catch Wake Forest's big 24-21 victory over Florida State, marking the Deamon Deacons' first 2-game win streak over the Seminoles. Then it was back north to see the only lightweight team I hadn't yet seen in a full game, Princeton. The Tiger sprints were, as usual, not up to the task, as Cornell's Big Red sprint team controlled the whole game, 34-0, in Ithaca. The next day was an unusual one-game Saturday, but I killed two birds with one stone, with Hobart's home 55-9 win over the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy (Kings Point); I had not seen either for a complete game, and had to leave my only other KP game at the half to get to North Carolina Wesleyan's first-ever game three years ago. I was able to get back to Chicago in plenty of time to catch a late Sunday flight to Anchorage for the 3-day Arctic Energy Summit, which had a program agenda that involved an Alaska-based non-profit entity which I helped to found and on whose Board of Directors I serve. It was a nice break in my football travels, and it related to the real purpose of my life, which is helping build the "World Link" rail system, a new electrified, high-speed main line railway connecting the world's largest land masses. While football is a great pastime and life-lessons teacher, I think it should always lead to more important things in life, like sustaining conscious life itself.

The final morning in Alaska, I had a few minutes at the conference's cyber-cafe to check how I could possibly fit Danny Woodhead and his Chadron State Eagles into a packed schedule before the season was over...he had just broken the all-time college mark for career rushing, and I desperately wanted to see him before he graduated. Since I had no idea how far CSC would go in the D-II playoffs, it was my great good fortune to discover that Chadron was playing a rare Thursday night TV game the very next night at Nebraska-Kearney, the only place in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference to which I could drive within 11 hours from Chicago. My plane got into O'Hare at 6:30AM, Sandy met me with my car and I headed for Nebraska while she got on a CTA train back into the Loop. I was in the pressbox at Ron & Carol Cope Stadium half-an-hour before kickoff, and I did get to see Danny Woodhead carry the ball...barely. He took a handoff on the game's opening snap, gained five yards and injured an instep while being tackled. He was in street clothes by halftime and missed the next two games as well, which unfortunately kept him from breaking several other NCAA records he would easily have garnered with just a couple of average games. I did visit with Woodhead on-field after the game (more on him a little later), and he was kind enough to pose for a photo with his good friend and Eagles' QB Joe McLain, who took over brilliantly to fill in for his star teammate in the 28-16 win.

By Saturday I was in Birmingham for a clever triple-header, starting with Centre's 24-17 win over first-year program Birmingham-Southern at Noon, followed by the 2nd Half of Austin Peay State's comeback 28-25 win at Samford (the score was 3-0 SU starting Q3!), then topping it all off with Houston's 49-10 massacre of UAB at "historic" Legion Field. It certainly wasn't a good day for the home teams, was it? I caught an early morning flight from Atlanta next morning, in time to see the Miami Dolphins get embarrassed by Tom Brady's franchise-record 6-TD passing day as his Patriots jumped out to a 42-7 halftime lead en route to an easy 49-28 win. Once again, Sandy was able to join me that night for a few days of relaxation at South Beach, broken only by a quick jaunt up to Jacksonville for my other NFL game of the 2007 season, Peyton Manning's surgical dismemberment of the Jaguars in the Colts' 29-7 win on Monday night.

By Thursday morning I had put Sandy on a plane back to Chicago and flown back to Atlanta myself, on the way to what I can only call my "miracle" rescheduling coup of 2007. Wofford and Western Carolina were the only Southern Conference teams which I had not yet seen for a complete game when their 2007 slates were released, but their game was set for October 27th, the same Saturday Faulkner was at UNC-Pembroke. Since that was my "ultimate" game for 2007, pitting the final two unseen new programs against each other, the choice was a no-brainer. For some obscure and still unknown reason, while I was on a July "vacation" in CA (more about that later!), I hit on the Catamounts website and discovered to my utter amazement that the Wofford game had been changed to Thursday night, the only SoCon non-Saturday TV game of the season. I literally jumped for joy, as that gave me an easy Carolina weekend, and it was just as spectacular as it was effortless. Wofford almost blew a 44-24 lead with 10 minutes to play, hanging on for a nail-biting 47-44 win that WCU had a couple of chances to steal. Friday night I checked out North Carolina's best high school program, as I caught Independence High's 21-7 decision over East Mecklenburg HS in Charlotte...the Patriots' only loss in seven years was to a Cincinnati school in the early-season Herbstriet Challenge in Ohio. Saturday's double-header saw the UNC-Pembroke Braves do in Faulkner by a 43-22 tally, on the way to a 4-7 inaugural campaign, while the Eagles could muster only a 1-9 record by season's end. The nightcap saw the Chanticleers of Coastal Carolina come from behind late to frustrate VMI, 42-35. To end the trip, I swung by Hattiesburg, MS, for the second time in 2007 to see Sunday night's USM-Central Florida game, and the Golden Knights' 34-17 win may well have been the one that ultimately cost Jeff Bower his job after 16 seasons as head coach at his alma mater.

On the way to the Navy-Notre Dame game the following weekend, I checked a big D-II traditional rivalry game off my want list, the "Battle of the Ravine" in Arkansas. Henderson State and Ouachita Baptist are across State Route 7 from each other in Arkadelphia, and I had seen simultaneous or overlapping games at their two stadia three times, but I couldn't pass up the chance to see them play each other on a Thursday night. HSU's 18-0 win was their first shutout in the 81-game rivalry since 1968, and the pageantry alone was worth the trip. It also gave me a chance the next night to see my first Arkansas high school game since 1971, when I worked there as a railroad consultant. After the euphoric experience that weekend in South Bend, a couple of days at home gave me the energy I needed to start what seems now like my yearly MAC pilgrimage, with Tuesday's game at Western Michigan starting an 11-day span in which I covered six exciting Mid-American Conference matchups. West Division champ Central Michigan came from behind to keep its MAC slate clean at WMU 34-31, then Akron schooled Ohio U. 48-37 at the soon-to-be-history Rubber Bowl on my way to Thursday night's thrilling last-minute 38-31 West Virginia win over Louisville. I got to visit with WVU's now-former coach Rich Rodriguez (more on him later, too!) in his office after the game, and I would never have guessed he would be on his way to Michigan less than a month later instead of taking his Mountaineers to a national championship game. On the way back home I stopped at Eastern Michigan to see Bowling Green tie down the MAC East with a 39-32 win over the improving Eagles. I blew off two potential double-headers on Saturday, one in Texas and the other in Iowa, to stay home with Sandy, taking just enough time out of our "movie" weekend to see the University of Chicago's 51-6 romp over Eureka, a game which was of interest only because they were the only two Illinois schools I had not yet seen for an entire game. In return for remaining home, the Maroons rewarded me with one of the rarest-of-the-rare, a quadruple-century rushing game, with all four U of C rushers gaining 100+ yards in the game!

Ball State scored 21 unanswered to break a 20-all halftime tie with Toledo in my first-ever visit to Muncie the next Tuesday night, and Akron left its offense back at the Rubber Bowl in Wednesday night's desultory 7-0 loss at Miami U. My hopes of seeing the Michigan-Ohio State game that Saturday, or alternatively the Purdue-Indiana game in Bloomington, were frustrated by credential denials at both places during the week, so Don Hansen helped me find what turned out to be an even better day on Saturday to follow up on Eastern Michigan's big 48-45 upset at CMU on Friday night; he found a night game in Beaver Falls, PA, the NCCAA Victory Bowl, which I had not yet covered, between Geneva and visiting Malone; that game proved to be an easy drive from the first-round D-III playoff game at Case Western Reserve, a Noon kickoff in Cleveland. Besides being the first playoff game, first home playoff game and first playoff win ever for CWRU, the game was undoubtedly the best game in Spartans history as well. Trailing 14-3 with 11:01 to play, they outscored Widener 18-6, with a school-record 97-yard TD pass from Dan Whalen to Shaun Nicely at the 7:23 mark to take their first lead at 15-14, and a last-gasp 14-play, 73-yard drive that took just 1:21 and had three successful 4th-down conversions, including Whalen's 7-yard TD pass to Jeff Mayer with 2 seconds left to play. The 21-20 win put the Spartans at 11-0, the highest win total in school history, but the game was special to me personally as well; CWRU was the only Ohio team I had not yet seen for an entire game! The Victory Bowl that evening was something of an anti-climax by comparison, with Malone's Pioneers leaving the Golden Tornadoes in the dust, outscoring Geneva 31-0 in the final 10 minutes of the half to reverse a 10-7 deficit and win 45-17. Thank you, Don Hansen, for putting me in the right places at the right times that weekend!

The next weekend was another breeze. Friday night I was back in Toronto for the Vanier Cup game, Canada's collegiate national championship. My favorite CIS team, the Manitoba Bisons, were trying to end an undefeated season with their first Cup win since 1970, and I was happy to see them succeed with a 28-14 win over Saint Mary's U. of Halifax, which had won Cups in 2001 and 2002. Then it was off to Lexington, KY, for Saturday afternoon's Kentucky-Tennessee rivalry to end the SEC regular season. The Wildcats had lost 22 straight to the Vols (now the long active annual series streak after Navy ended its record futility at Notre Dame), and I had hopes that 2007 might be the year I got to see two such streaks ended. The 'Cats rallied valiantly to put the game into OT after appearing to be hopelessly out of it with 8 minutes to go, but then proceeded to blow several chances in the four ensuing OT periods, including a potential game-winning chip shot FG that was blocked by the Vols in OT #2. A failed 2-point convert in OT #4 left Kentucky on the short end of a 52-50 decision, so that little piece of history will have to wait a while.

I was in Arizona for an unusual December 1st double-header the next weekend, with a Friday night New Mexico State-Fresno State game in Las Cruces thrown in just for fun. The Aggies came close, but ended up on the short end of a 30-24 score as I got to visit with Hal Mumme once more before 2007 ended. The drive to Phoenix was as harrowing as I've ever experienced, with gale force winds and a torrential downpour making travel on I-10 almost death-defying, but I made it as far as the west side of Benson, about three hours short of Phoenix, before giving up for the night. Thanks again to a stroke of good fortune, I was able to see a very good JuCo bowl game, the Valley of the Sun Bowl, at Mesa Community College in the afternoon (the Thunderbirds rocked Fort Scott CC of Kansas, 47-31) and still make the kickoff of that evening's Territorial Cup rivalry game at Arizona State's Sun Devil Stadium, all of five miles away. ASU, under new coach Dennis Erickson, held on for a 20-17 verdict over Arizona's visiting Wildcats to end with a 10-2 log to end the regular-season.

That left only two playoff weekends before the 1-A bowl season began, and they both wrote some interesting history. First was Appalachian State's 55-35 home win over Richmond in a Friday night 1-AA semi-final game; the Mountaineers' all-everything QB Armanti Edwards rewrote the all-divisions record for QB rushing with 313 yards on 31 carries, for a 10.1 average per carry, scoring 4 TD's in the process. If that weren't impressive enough, he also rang up a remarkable Passer Rating of 247.7 on 14-of-16 passing for 187 yards and 3 more TD's, with no INT's and no sacks to lead App State to its third straight 1-AA title game. The game also saw a combined rushing total by the four QB's in the game of 428 yards, another all-time record! It took another of my 'never again' overnight drives to get from Boone, NC, to Maryville, MO, for Saturday night's NW Missouri State-Grand Valley State game, but it was worth every snowy mile! Not only did the Bearcats avenge their D-II title game losses of the past two years by upsetting their unbeaten and #1-ranked nemesis, but they did it convincingly under difficult conditions, as snow, cold temps and high winds conspired to make it a generally miserable night for all present. Xavier Omon, NWMSU's star Running Back, added to the lustre of his previous week's 309-yard, 3-TD performance against Chadron State by racking up 292 more yards and 3 scores on the ground, including a school- and conference-record 98-yard TD dash to ice the 34-16 verdict in the final period. He also caught an 11-yard TD pass for good measure. It was the Lakers first loss in three years, ending a 34-game streak!

Championship weekend was next, with App State capturing its third straight crown at the expense of the Delaware Blue Hens, 49-21, in Chattanooga. While the stats weren't quite as impressive, the team effort was dominating, and it was only fitting that after embarrassing Michigan to open the season, the Mountaineers should end it with another 1-AA title. The Bearcats weren't quite so impressive the next afternoon in Florence, AL, however. They have now lost three consecutive title games after Valdosta State rallied with a TD in the final minute to pull out a 25-20 win for their second championship win in four years. The Blazers managed to hold Omon to just 63 yards and a 2-yard TD on 27 carries, but the "X-Man" ended his stellar Bearcat career with 7,073 yards, the 2nd-highest rushing total in D-II history, and he was the only player ever to rush for more than 1,500 yards in all four years of eligibility.

My bowl season this year, thanks to an inability to find airplane seats the week before Christmas, didn't start until the Motor City Bowl the day after the Holiday. In what can only be regarded as the best MCB ever, Purdue kicked a field goal as time expired to repel MAC Champion Central Michigan, 51-48. In the process, Boilermaker QB Curtis Painter threw for 546 yards, the 4th highest total in bowl game history. Two nights later I covered my first Texas Bowl at Houston's Reliant Stadium, where TCU held off a last minute Houston threat to beat the Cougars, 20-13. Just 200 miles farther west at the Alamo Bowl the next night, it was a privilege to watch Penn State in Joe Paterno's 500th game, the most ever for a head coach at one institution. The Nittany Lions overcame always-tough Texas A&M, playing for interim coach Gary Darnell after the dismissal of Dennis Franchione, by a 24-17 tally. Then it was on to Shreveport for the Independence Bowl, one of my favorites (I've seen 7 of the last 8!), to see two high-profile coaches duel after disappointing seasons. Nick Saban of Alabama and Dan Hawkins of the Colorado each needed a win to avoid ending 2007 with a losing record, and Saban, the highest-paid college coach in history, succeeded by holding of the Buffaloes by a 30-24 count.

It took another overnight drive to make my 6:10AM New Orleans-Phoenix flight for the Insight Bowl at Sun Devil Stadium, which meant I started December and ended December in Tempe. Oklahoma State, a 49-33 winner over emotionally-charged Indiana, was the main reason I wanted to be in Arizona to celebrate the New Year. The Cowboys were the only team in North America that I had not seen play in the past 18 years. I had no idea in 1977, the last time I saw OSU play my beloved Iowa State Cyclones in Ames, that one day I would want to have a game program and photos of every team in the US and Canada. I now have those things. I was so tired by the time I got back to my motel that night that I, for the first time in living memory, did not ring in the New Year where I was, and I slept in the next morning, too. My 12:15PM non-stop to New Orleans got me to the SuperDome in plenty of time for what I hoped might be a reprise of last year's Boise State-Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl thriller, with the 12-0 Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors playing the role of this year's unbeaten WAC underdog against the SEC's mighty Georgia Bulldogs in the Sugar Bowl. Alas, the WAC could not surprise a BCS powerhouse two years in a row, and the 'bows were embarrassed, 41-10, by UGA's awesome defense.

Two nights later, in Miami for the FedEx Orange Bowl, I witnessed the end of KU's magic 12-1 year as the Jayhawks defense sparkled in a 24-21 win over Virginia Tech. In the interview room afterwards, VT head man Frank Beamer looked as down-in-the-dumps as I've ever seen him, as his Hokies had desperately wanted to end 2007 on a upswing to help the campus heal from the horrific massacre there last spring. On the other side, I've never seen a happier QB than Kansas' Todd Reesing. Small and largely overlooked when he came out of high school in Austin, TX, the sophomore has now taken one of the Big XII's long-disparaged programs to a huge BCS Bowl win. Take that, Longhorns! Thanks to the foresight of the NCAA's bowl schedulers, I was able to easily make the 2nd International Bowl in Toronto at Noon on the 5th, and was treated there to the Ray Rice Show. Rutgers' star RB made hash of the Ball State defense with his bowl-record 280 yards on 35 carries, including a late 90-yard TD run, his fourth of the game, to put the icing on the Scarlet Knights' 52-30 win. In the process, he became RU's first 2,000-yard single-season rusher and the 14th in 1-A history.

My season-ending bowl trip was eerily like last year's, as I left Toronto for Mobile around 6PM, spent a short night at a motel in Central Kentucky and parked at the GMAC Bowl 30 minutes before kickoff. While the previous GMAC Bowl had also been a blowout, Tulsa QB Paul Smith made this one a rout of record proportions. He hit on 27 of 45 passes for 312 yards and 5 TD's as the Golden Hurricane blasted Bowling Green State, 63-7, the largest winning margin in bowl game history. It was Smith's 14th consecutive 300+ passing effort, breaking Ty Detmer's NCAA record of 13, and in so doing he helped Tulsa become the first team ever to have a 5,000-yard passer, a 1,000-yard rusher and three 1,000-yard receivers! Smith also had 9 carries for 46 yards and another score, ending his career as the only Tulsa QB to start in four bowl games. This game was one of those rare mismatches that was actually enjoyable to watch (unless, of course, you were a Falcons fan!).

Last year's BCS Championship Game was in Arizona, so I didn't get much sleep on my way to the New Orleans airport for an early morning connection to Phoenix via Atlanta. But this year, with the game in New Orleans, I was able to get a good night's sleep in Mobile, get my oil changed there and check into that night's hotel in Hammond, LA, before even heading to the SuperDome. My "pressbox seat" was actually on the field, in a low temporary bleacher on the LSU side of the field, between the 20 and 30 yard-lines. Security pretty much confined us to our seats, from which very little of the field was visible, so I watched most of the game, just as you probably did, on the huge TV screens at either end of the field. I was able to get a few photos which were not entirely blocked by players or photographers on the sidelines, and one of them was of LSU's final TD pass, which left Ohio State in the same position it was last year...hopelessly beaten and humiliated! I had a nice halftime chat with ESPN field reporter Shelley Smith, who was seated nearby, and who, like every football reporter I've talked to in the past few years, detests the idiocy and arrogance of the BCS system. In fact, I have yet to visit with any football fan, reporter or broadcaster who thinks the BCS is the way to decide a national champion...to a person, they agree that actually playing the games, as is done in every other division and every other sport, is the only way we will ever see who is really most deserving of the title.

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Several other exciting events happened on the way to my football journeys in 2007. The California "vacation" I alluded to earlier was actually a Honeymoon of sorts. Sandy and I have been living together as fully-commited life partners since the end of 1986, but she is not the kind of woman who always dreamed about a big, fancy wedding. So we never had one. A couple months after we moved into the downtown Chicago apartment building in which we still reside, I was struck by a city bus, which skidded over my right foot and came to a stop on my lower left leg. The date was July 7, 1987, and I didn't get out of the hospital until September 16th, twelve general anesthesia operations later, and still in a wheelchair I would keep for several more months. Miraculously, the amazing doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital were able to save my crushed leg and rebuild it so I can walk with no outward sign that I lack feeling between my knee and my ankle, or that I have no calf muscle or Achilles tendon. On the first anniversary of the accident, Sandy and I went to one of Chicago's best French restaurants to celebrate all the blessings that had occurred in our lives since the previous July 7th. I wore a tux and Sandy an evening gown, and the maitre' de sat us at a nice window table, which he assured us we would enjoy. What he didn't say was that he was seating us next to the best table in the house, which at that very moment was being occupied by former President Jimmy Carter, his wife Rosalyn, their son Chip and his wife. We did enjoy a wonderful dinner, and when the Carter family was ready to leave, Jimmy came to our table, introduced himself and his clan, and we visited for a couple of minutes. When we sat back down, Sandy said something about July 7th being quite a special day in our lives. We decided that, if we ever did have a wedding ceremony, it should probably be on that date. From then on, whenever anyone asked us if we had set a date yet, we answered "Yes, we have" and let it go at that. If they pressured us, we'd say "July 7th, we just don't know which year yet." For the past ten years I'd been thinking that July 7, 2007, the 20th anniversary of my miraculous survival, might be the perfect day to finally have our long-awaited wedding.

Sandy, who had accepted my ring and marriage proposal on Valentine's Day of 1987, was not particularly interested in planning a wedding for any day, as she had long since come to the conclusion that marriage, as an institution, has ruined as many lives as it has blessed. Her theory has always been that we love each other, we're happy with each other, so why do we need the validation of outside parties such as Church or State. But we had often speculated that if we ever did have a formal marriage ceremony, it would be a small, private celebration in the gazebo overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Ritz Carlton-Laguna Niguel, our favorite hotel in Sandy's favorite State. I realized, of course, many years ago that July 7th, 2007, would be a high-demand day for weddings, as that particular accident anniversary happened to fall on 7-7-07, a great day for numerologists. But since 7 has always been my lucky number anyway, what could be better? So Sandy actually helped me plan our modest little "wedding" on 7-7-07...she made the hotel reservations (we did not make a "wedding" reservation, which would have cost thousands extra and had to be made years in advance!), ordered the flowers, the cake and the "reception" drinks, and reserved our airline tickets and rental car, while all I had to do was arrange for the license and a judge to preside.

We did not invite anyone to join us, but my older sister, Vicki, had remembered my mentioning the date months before, and she inquired if we were still going ahead. When I confirmed, she asked if she could come (she's a family wedding fanatic!), and, of course, we welcomed her. Sandy's older sister, Lynn, found out about our plans in a routine phone conversation a week before we were to leave, and she and Sandy's mother, Carol, flew into panic mode thinking they were going to be left out of a special family event. They were supposed to be in Las Vegas that weekend, but quickly made an alternate plan to bring Sandy's niece, Lauren, with them to California instead, and spend a few days at Disneyland after our special day. Sandy and I flew to LAX on the 5th, and purchased our license and met our judge-officiant in Santa Ana on the 6th, on our way to picking up the flowers, cake and supplies for our in-room private reception. While there were at least 11 other big, fancy weddings at the Ritz-Carlton on the 7th, each costing tens of thousands of dollars, we got married quietly and anonymously on our favorite spot in a 15-minute ceremony that started at 07:07.07 hours (military time, since our judge was a former U. S. Marine!) on 07-07-07 with, quite remarkably, seven people present! To top it all off, Lynn surprised Sandy with the gift of their Grandmother's wedding band, which she had been given many years earlier...and how many diamonds do you suppose are in that ring? You guessed it...7! That day, with its sunrise ritual, champagne breakfast, champagne "reception" with four other family members present, champagne "high tea" in the afternoon and champagne supper, and with Sandy looking regal throughout in a white lace ankle-length gown I had gotten her years ago, will be an indelible dream-come-true for as long as my synapses keep firing.

But that was just the start of the adventure; Sandy booked us into the Bel Air Hotel for four nights to start our "honeymoon" trip, and we spent those days in a dream state, almost like the movie stars who have made the Bel Air such a storied place in Tinseltown lore. By the 15th we were headed up the coast toward Canada, with stops in Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Eugene and Seattle, where I left Sandy at our hotel for the evening while I attended the Orioles-Mariners game at Safeco Field. The next night we were in Vancouver, and Sandy made herself comfortable again at the hotel while I rode a Skyrail train to BC Place for the unbeaten BC Lions 22-18 win over Hamilton's winless Tiger-Cats. Both Safeco and BC Place were new game venues for me, but two nights later (after a refreshing stop in Whistler, the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics) we overnighted in Kamloops, BC, primarily so I could watch my first Canadian Juniors game west of London, ON. It was the first home game in the history of the Kamloops Broncos, a new franchise whose uni's looked as though they came right out of a Denver Broncos gift shop. The visiting Victoria Rebels made the 7:00 news just before game time, as one of their busses burned up en route to Kamloops. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the gear that was destroyed delayed the start of the game for 75 minutes while the local high school found substitute equipment for the Rebels to dress out. Despite their appearance as a rag-tag outfit, Victoria played as if nothing had happened, routing the Broncos, 57-2. Kamloops wasn't as bad as the score might indicate, but the first two points in franchise history did come on a voluntary safety by the Rebels, not on a sterling defensive play by the home team!

That was the end of sporting interruptions on our 'honeymoon' trip, but there were plenty of other highlights. We spent a couple of nights and three very enjoyable days at the spectaculary beautiful Chateau Lake Louise, on the Alberta side of the Rockies, before heading into Calgary for a night. Then we turned south to return our brand new Chevy Malibu rental car to LAX (it had 3 miles on the odometer as we drove it off the Alamo lot!), with stops in Butte (the opening day of the last Evel Knievel Days before he left us), Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Along the way we photographed an inspection train on Canadian Pacific's great high bridge at Lethbridge, Alberta; we toured Yellowstone Park and Jackson Hole for the first time; visited with a former colleague (from my days on the Rock Island Railroad in the late '60's) and his wife in Salt Lake City; and saw the Cirque du Soleil Beatles tribute production the night we were in Las Vegas. By the time we got home, we had pretty much wasted the month of July...but what a memorable waste it was!

* * * * *

I was looking through the Chadron State website a few days ago, trying to get my mind around the remarkable feats of college football's all-time leading rusher, Danny Woodhead, when I made an equally remarkable discovery. In a news clip about CSC Academic All-Conference football players, there was a link to the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference's website, where all of the RMAC's all-academic teams were listed. To my sheer and pleasant amazement, the Eagles of Chadron State, unbeaten in consecutive regular seasons and with a 23-2 record after two playoff years, also have by far the highest number of Academic All-Conference selections. More than half of the RMAC's academic first team (13 of 25) are from Chadron, including Woodhead. Of the eight unanimous first team academic selections, seven were from CSC, including both Woodhead (3.72 GPA) and starting QB Joe McLain (3.56 GPA), both with double majors in math and physical education. Starting LB Zack Wheeler sports a 3.67 GPA in Math and Physics. No other RMAC school had more than four first-team honorees. Among the 82 players on RMAC's roster of first, second and honorable mention academic teams, 30 are from CSC, double the number from any other member school. The average GPA of Chadron's 13 RMAC first team academic award winners is 3.63, far higher than the school's all-college GPA. All told, 35 players achieved recognition on one of the college's fall semester honors lists, meaning approximately one-third of all football players at Chadron are honors students! Even more impressive is the fact that these academic achievers are not bench-warmers; many of them are starters and All-Conference football selections as well. It's inspirational to find a school that can turn out a 3-time conference offensive MVP, 2-time Harlon Hill Trophy winner and concensus All-American like Woodhead who is also a team leader in the classroom. Thank you, Chadron State, for setting the standard for STUDENT-athletes!

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The strange tale of Rich Rodriguez's breaking his contract at West Virginia to head for Michigan just keeps getting weirder. You may remember that Coach Rod told his bosses at WVU, shortly after his #2-ranked team tanked in a 13-9 home loss to traditional rival Pitt to end the regular season on an inexplicable downer, that he was resigning to accept the head coaching position at Michigan, replacing the retiring Lloyd Carr. I had visited with Rodriguez in his office less than a month before, and nowhere did I see any signs of the disaffection that apparently existed between him and WVU's Athletic Director, Ed Pastilong. Subsequent press reports have indicated that Rodriguez was upset with WVU's administration, from the AD up through the school's President, all the way to Governor Joe Manchin's office, for their failure to address in a timely fashion his requests for modernization of the Athletic Department to take advantage of additional funding opportunities afforded by a championship-calibre football team. There have been accusations of broken promises and political manipulating, broken lines of communication and contract disagreements, shredded documents and attempts to steal recruits, all of which have led to a messy lawsuit by WVU, and counter-suit by Rodriguez, over the $4 million dollar buyout fee in the agreement reached just last August which kept Coach Rod in Morgantown after he had been wooed by Alabama at the end of the 2006 season. It's really too bad that good people, which I know those on both sides of this lawsuit to be, have to clash over ego problems (on both sides) and money issues, when the real name of the game is COLLEGE FOOTBALL. No one is going to win this lawsuit, no matter how much money changes hands, as both WVU and Rodriguez have egg all over their faces. Let's just hope it will be behind us and forgotten by the time the Mountaineers, under new coach Bill Stewart, and the Wolverines tee up the ball at the end of August to chase their respective football destinies!

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
12-19-2007

The coaching carousel has brought some surprising changes to the landscape of college football this holiday season. As I commented in this space early in the year, several universities had the good fortune of having loyal, long-serving head coaches who were dedicated to their jobs at what, in today's market, must be considered bargain prices. One of these was Jeff Bower at Southern Miss, who spent his playing days as the Golden Eagles' starting QB, his 8-year assistantship and entire 17-year head coaching career committed to the USM football program. Bower has had 14 straight winning seasons, four Conference USA titles, three CUSA Coach of the Year awards, a 6-5 bowl game record and he was named CUSA Coach of the Decade for the 1990's. In 2005 Bower led the Eagles through the toughest of times during the school's recovery from the massive damage suffered at the hands of Hurricane Katrina, and won a season-ending Katrina-relocated New Orleans Bowl in the process. He was so loyal to his school that he managed the pain every day on his way to work of having to drive by the site where one of his two daughters was killed in a tragic auto accident ten years ago at the age of 17. If this weren't contribution enough, Bower has achieved the enviable record of graduating more than 80% of his players. You can imagine my shock, then, when I read a few weeks ago that Bower had been asked to resign, despite another winning season which USM ended with a bowl game appearance. Bower not only won 119 games, averaging just over 7 per year, he was fourth in tenure among active coaches, trailing only Penn State's Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden of Florida State and Virginia Tech's Frank Beamer, when AD Richard Giannini told him that "fan apathy" was the reason for his decision. Did losing two close games this year on national television damage the school that much? Is it the job of a coach who built a solid program in the backwaters of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and who helped raise the funds for a major stadium expansion and facilities improvements, to also do the job of the AD, who should be held accountable for ticket sales and marketing? What is Southern Miss thinking when they send the message to other potential coaches that even the most successful and dedicated coach in school history is not safe from the whims of a blame-casting administration? How much more will they pay to replace Bower under such irrational circumstances, not just in dollars to the new coach, but in lost credibility with fans, recruits and holdover players? It seems to me that this is another red flag about how money pressures are skewing the logic of major universities' perceptions of the mission of athletics in an educational setting. It also prompts me to predict that Bower's ignominious removal at USM will not achieve its purported objectives; if the Golden Eagles' long string of winning seasons comes to an end in 2008, no one at USM should be surprised.

* * * * *

I was also surprised greatly by the recent hiring of West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez by the University of Michigan. Coach Rod is a WVU alumnus, and I didn't think someone who was a virtual god in his native Mountain State would leave such a comfortable "home" for one of college football's most pressure-packed situations, especially with a national-championship-calibre program already in place under his watch in Morgantown. I wonder if playing for the BCS title this year, had the Mountaineers not been upset by Pitt on the final day of the season, would have changed his decision? Or was it all about the major money the Wolverines offered to get a "name" coach? I love Rich Rodriguez and wish him nothing but the best at Michigan, but I'm still shaking my head over his decision to step down from the pedestal he had built for himself in one of America's most football-crazed States. The only personal upside of this move is that now, when Michigan plays Ohio State, I'll know both coaches from covering them in their previous iterations at lower-division schools, Coach Rod at Glenville State and OSU's Jim Tressel at Youngstown State. Hey, maybe this will give me a better chance at getting that elusive pressbox credential to cover next year's Wolverines-Buckeyes matchup, the only traditional rivalry game for which both schools have so far been unable to find room for me!

* * * * *

My shock was less pronounced when I learned that my friend Joe Novak had decided to retire after 12 outstanding years at Northern Illinois. Joe and I were each given an award by the All-American Football Foundation a couple of years ago at a banquet in Chicago, and we have visited several times since, mostly after critical NIU wins on their way to their only MAC Championship Game in 2005. Joe's legacy at NIU will endure for a long, long time...seven consecutive winning seasons, a ranking as high as high as #12 nationally in 2003 after wins over three BCS conference teams, including #15 Maryland, #21 Alabama and the Big XII's Iowa State. Joe handled with aplomb the disappointment of not getting a bowl invite that year despite a school-record 10 wins, and won the first of his two bowl games the next season, a 35-21 Silicon Valley Classic comeback over Troy to end with a 9-3 record. During NIU's seven straight winning years(2000-06), the Huskies totalled 53 wins and 30 losses, giving them a better record than Notre Dame, Illinois and Northwestern over that span. In fact, NIU was the only non-BCS team to have no losing seasons in the first seven years of the 2000's. Also in that span, five Huskies were named All-Americans, two more than NIU had in the previous 52 years! Joe also coached 1,000-yard rushers in each of his final nine years, including Michael "The Burner" Turner, now with the San Diego Chargers, and last year's national rushing leader, Garrett Wolfe, currently in his rookie season with the Chicago Bears. Nine of Joe's former Huskies are on NFL rosters, which says loads more about his coaching ability than it does about the attractiveness of NIU as a recruiting destination. Joe acquired that coaching ability honestly, playing for the legendary Bo Schembechler at Miami of Ohio, the "Cradle of Coaches." He worked under another Miami coaching product, Bill Mallory, as the Defensive Coordinator at NIU in the early '80's, helping the Huskies win their first-ever D-I bowl game with a 10-2 conquest of Cal State-Fullerton in the 1983 California Raisin Bowl. He moved on to Indiana with Mallory in 1984, and helped coach the Hoosiers to six bowl game appearances in 11 years before coming back to Dekalb as head man in 1996. Coach Novak retires after seeing the completion in August of one of his pet projects, the completion of a state-of-the-art student athlete center just north of Huskie Stadium. Joe, you will be missed by everyone who cares about college football, and NIU football in particular. Here's wishing you and your beloved Carole a long, happy and productive retirement!

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I'm off on a ten-game bowl circuit this Holiday Season, and I'll see games from Detroit to Tempe and from Toronto to Miami, with two stops in Texas, three in Louisiana and one in Alabama along the way. I'll stay in the Gulf South for a week after the BCS Championship Game at the Superdome so I can cover my first Cactus Bowl D-II senior all-star game in the Rio Grande Valley on January 11th. My season-ending wrapup will be found here after I get home in mid-January, and there are plenty of new records, outstanding performances, exciting games and bizarre happenings to recount from my 80 college games and more than 60,000 miles of football travels this year. Please check back in a couple of weeks for the best of 2007, as seen through the eyes of your peripatetic correspondent! Happy New Year to All!

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
11-29-2007

For those of you who, like me, can't get enough football, especially college-style football, there is good news to discuss. A new spring-time professional football league is being formed that will use NCAA rules, as opposed to the NFL's many convoluted permutations. The league will own all of the teams, with each team managed by a local board, unlike the NFL with its mega-ego owners and its huge TV-driven payrolls. Players in this new league must have exhausted their college eligibility and received a four-year college degree in order to qualify, so the game atmosphere should be much more urbane. I have dreamed of someone with lots of money grasping this very concept for years now, and the All American Football League is just what I ordered! The AAFL's games begin on April 12th of next year, with six initial teams in football-friendly locations. The as-yet unnamed teams will represent six different States: Michigan, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas. Michigan's gridders will battle at Ford Field in Detroit, home of the NFL Lions. Alabama will play at Birmingham's famous Legion Field, while Arkansas will also play in the State Capital, at Little Rock's War Memorial Field. Florida will play home games in three locations, with two NFL stadia (Tampa and Jacksonville) joining the U. of Florida's famous Swamp in Gainesville for at least one of the five home games in the initial 10-game schedule. Venues for the Texas and Tennessee clubs are still under negotiation. Wherever they decide to play, I plan to be at Tennessee's opening-day battle as they entertain Michigan. I'd love to see college-rules outdoor professional football do well in the spring and early summer, and the AAFL's Board of Directors appears to be a harbinger of such success. The board includes names like Doug Dickey, retired head football coach and Athletic Director at Tennessee; former ACC Commissioner Gene Corrigan; Jack Lengyel, former Navy AD and President of NACDA; Pete Dalis, retired AD at UCLA; and Cedric Dempsey, former head of the NCAA, who serves as Chairman of the Board of the new league. There are other successful business people on the board, as well, so that the league's guidance is in the hands of a well-rounded group of football and business leaders. In my mind, this is the type of athletic enterprise that could easily expand to almost every State with a big college football following, which means easily two dozen or more teams if the league catches on. Here's wishing good luck to this new venture, which breathes a lungful of fresh air into the idea of springtime football after the lingering stench of 2001's failed XFL.

The Canadian college football season ended last Friday night (11-23-07) with this year's edition of the Desjardins Vanier Cup to cap four weekends of playoffs. For the second time in three years, the Cup was won by Canada's only unbeaten team surviving the season, the 12-0 Manitoba Bisons. It was Manitoba's first Cup win since 1970, and the Gold & Brown are now 3-1 in national championship tilts. Their 28-14 win over St. Mary's University was another frustrating end for the Huskies, who have now played in five of the last nine Vanier Cup games, winning only two, including the 2001 contest against Manitoba in the Bisons only other appearance since 1970. SMU may have had a letdown after the previous week's big 24-2 upset of #1 Laval in the Uteck Bowl semifinal game at home in Halifax. The Huskies surprised most CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sport) observers by shutting down the vaunted Rouge et Or offense, which had rolled over its previous opponents by an average score of 38-15, including a regular-season crossover win over SMU by a 29-22 score. But the big difference may have been the loss of QB Eric Glavic to a knee injury in the Laval game; Glavic is this year's Hec Crighton Trophy winner, Canada's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, and the Huskies clearly missed his leadership in the championship game. Manitoba got to the final by rolling over Western Ontario by a 52-20 count in the Mitchell Bowl, after surprising Western had eliminated both Queen's and Ottawa, the top two seeds in its conference, the OUA.

The Vanier Cup game was a close affair in the opening half, with SMU scoring first on a 13-yard pass from Glavic's replacement, Ted Abraham, to Fraser O'Neill to cap a 71-yard, 8-play march. Two Scott Dixon field goals, from 27 and 40 yards out, made the score 7-6 SMU at the Quarter mark. Manitoba took the lead for good with a 39-yard pass from John Makie to Steve Gronik following the second of DB Mike Howard's record-tying three interceptions of the game. Howard also had an end zone INT earlier to thwart an SMU threat, and he was awarded the Ted Morris Memorial Trophy as the game's MVP. Makie's only rushing TD of the season, from 6 yards out, gave the Bisons a 20-8 lead in the 3rd period, and Dixon added two more field goals to up the lead to 26-8 before the Huskies answered with an Abraham-to-Shawn White 8-yard pass late in the game, but they were forced to concede a safety in the final minute to round out the scoring. Abraham's final numbers were 15-of-32 for 192 yards and both SMU scores, but he was clearly overshadowed by Makie's 16-of-31 for 261 with no INT's. The winners ended up with 430 total yards to 303 for SMU, capping the most successful season in Manitoba history. Next year's Vanier Cup will be held at Hamilton's Ivor Wynne Stadium for the third time in five years.

This season has been one of the most exciting in my 18 years of heavy football travels, including last weekend's 52-50 triple-overtime Kentucky loss to Tennessee, continuing the Wildcats' 23 years of frustration at the hands of the Vols. Next week I'll review the highlights of what has to be the best of those 18 years, and I'll preview my Bowl Game coverage for this year, which will include ten good matchups. See you then.

SPARTANS WIN FIRST-EVER PLAYOFF GAME WITH MIRACLE ENDING

By Craig Burroughs, National Correspondent

Cleveland, OH (11-17-07): Case Western Reserve had never before won 10 games or played in the D-III playoffs, but the Spartans showed all the nerve and verve of a seasoned playoff competitor by overcoming a 14-3 final period deficit to pull out a spectacular 21-20 victory over former two-time national champion Widener. The Pride, playing in their 12th D-III tournament, displayed their poise and tradition with a defense which frustrated CWRU drives in each of the first three quarters. WU took advantage of a short Brian Calderone punt with a 3-play, 38-yard series ended with Matt Campbell's 38-yard strike to WR Mike Falkenstein for the only points in the opening period. Early in the 2nd Quarter, Sam Coffey nailed a 24-yard field goal to cap a 73-yard CWRU 18-play foray to cut the Pride's lead to 7-3, and that was the score at halftime after the Spartans' only other threat was stopped when QB Dan Whalen lost a fumble while being sacked by OLB Keith Wilson on a 2nd-and-goal play from the Widener 4. By the end of the 3rd Quarter, the Spartans had earned 15 First Downs to just 8 for Widener, and had snapped the ball 63 times for 222 net yards to the Pride's 45 plays gaining 175. In the process, Whalen lost another fumble on a Wilson sack and, with 2:10 left in the period and backed up to his own 10 by a Robert McHugh punt, Whalen threw an interception which John Martorell returned 21 yards for the only score of the stanza. Now trailing 14-3 and time running out, the Spartans responded with a 72-yard march culminated on the 14th snap with RB Corey Checkan's 2-yard dive to cut their deficit to 5 at 14-9 after Whalen's 2-point try fell incomplete. On the ensuing series, Case held at its own 42, but McHugh backed the Spartans to the wall with another well-placed punt which was downed at the CWRU 3. There was still plenty of time left for another long drive to gain their first lead of the game, but Whalen and WR Shaun Nicely decided to spare their fans the agony and suspense by connecting on a school-record 97-yard TD catch-and-run over the middle to put Case up at last, 15-14. The veteran Widener program was not about to fold its tent and sneak back to Chester, PA, without a fight, however; after an exchange of punts, the Pride took over at midfield and leading ground-gainer Ian Decker got 11 yards on the first play and caught a pass from Campbell for 7 more on the next. A 13-yard pass to WR Kevin Fisher and a 15-yarder to Falkenstein set up Decker's 1-yard go-ahead smash with just 1:27 left to play. Now down 20-15 and starting at his own 27, Whalen had to engineer a miracle drive to extend the best season in Case history for at least one more game. The first miracle came on 4th-and-10 and the ball still at the 27, when Whalen found Nicely over the middle again for 20 yards to keep the home fans on the edge of their seats. Whalen's favorite target, WR Jeff Mayer got a 1st Down two plays later with a 6-yard grab, then saved the day one more time with a 28-yard catch on 4th-and-13 from the Widener 41 with just 19 ticks remaining. A spike and two incompletions left Whalen facing another 4th Down, must-make play at the Widener 7 with six seconds on the game clock, and, amazingly, he found Mayer again, half in and half out of the end zone. The Linesman ruled that Mayer had the ball over the goal line before being driven back by Widener defenders, and CWRU had gotten 14 plays into 1:21 of clock time to tally the spectacular winning score with just 2.4 seconds left. Whalen not only avoided the goat's mantle for his two fumbles and TD-producing INT, his last-quarter heroics gave him a career-best day with 25-of-47 passing for 306 yards and two critical scores, plus 9 rushing yards on 8 carries. Case gained a total of 440 yards and 23 first Downs on 90 snaps, while Widener had 13 first downs and netted 262 yards on 64 plays. Mayer ended the day with 10 catches for 90 yards and Nicely, who played high school ball with Whalen at Willoughby (OH) South, totaled 132 yards on 4 catches. Campbell finished with 183 yards on 20-of-36 passing for the Pride, with his top receiver, Falkenstein, getting 87 yards and a TD on 6 receptions. Widener's Decker was the top ground-gainer in the game, with 65 and a score on 15 tries, while the Spartans were led by Billy Deitman's 54 yards on 9 carries. Wilson was the losers' defensive standout, with 4 solo tackles and 6 assists, including a 3-yard sack and a 1-yard TFL to go with a forced fumble, a 9-yard fumble return and a pass break-up. The Spartan defense was keyed by ILB Mike Tuertscher, who also had a 3-yard sack and a 1-yard TFL among his 5 solos and 6 assists, plus a 13-yard INT return. The Spartans now move on to host a 2nd-Round game against North Coast champion Wabash next Saturday.

PIONEERS ERUPT WITH 31-POINT SECOND QUARTER TO CAPTURE VICTORY BOWL WIN OVER GENEVA

By Craig Burroughs, National Correspondent

Beaver Falls, PA (11-17-07): Twenty minutes into this year's 11th annual Victory Bowl, the score was tied 10-10 and exhibited all the signs of a game that might well be decided on the final possession. Then, suddenly, Christmas came early for the Malone Pioneers as the host Geneva Golden Tornadoes started handing out gifts right and left. It all started with an Offensive Interference penalty that put the ball at the Geneva 18 with a 1st-and-25. After losing 2 more yards on three snaps, the Tornadoes punted to Malone's Tyler Davis, whose nifty 23-yard return spotted the ball at the GC 32. Four plays later, star RB Bernard Payton dashed 20 yards up the middle to give the Pioneers a 17-10 lead. An even bigger gift came on the first snap after the ensuing kickoff, when Geneva's leading rusher Gerard Muschette fumbled and the loose ball was covered by Malone's Kevin Kapostasy at the GC 29. Facing a 3rd-and-20 thanks to a holding penalty, QB Billy Bob Orsagh found SE Derek Deardorff with a 39-yard TD aerial to give the Pioneers a 24-10 lead with just under eight minutes left in the Half. DB Eric Hart unwrapped the next present when he intercepted a Bobby Bondi pass on Geneva's third snap, returning it 2 yards to the GC 35. This time the Pioneers overcame an Illegal Procedure infraction, with Payton carrying the load once more. He rushed for 8 yards on 2 plays, caught a 23-yard pass to put the ball at GC's 3, then smashed over from there to make it 31-10 less than five minutes after the game had been tied. But the greedy Pioneers were not done; forcing a punt on Geneva's next possession with 3:37 left, they moved 81 yards for their only long drive of the half, scoring on the 11th snap, a 15-yard flip from Orsagh to WR Mike Clapham just 29 seconds before intermission to grab an insurmountable 38-10 lead. The anticlimactic 2nd Half saw Geneva score once in the 3rd Quarter on a 7-yard Bondi-to-Parker Nuetzel toss to end an 81-yard march, but that was answered in the 4th by Malone's exclamation point play for the night, a 73-yard Orsagh-to-Deardorff bomb to make the final score 45-17. Bondi and WR Ryan Forbes had given the Golden Tornadoes an early 7-0 lead with their 13-yard TD connection on GC's first possession, but Payton answered that with a 22-yard gallop to tie the score on his way to three TD's and 185 net yards on 40 carries. He also caught 5 passes for 36 yards, but Deardorff's 133 yards and 2 TD's on just 4 catches stole the receiving show for Malone. Orsagh had a sterling night under center for the Pioneers, amassing 295 yards on 16-of-33 passing, plus another 19 yards on 6 rushes, including a single sack. Muschette's 40-yard gainer was the long play of the night for Geneva, and he finished with 59 yards on just 5 carries to lead the Tornadoes. Bondi hit on 17 of 39 passes for 213 yards and 2 scores, and ran for 19 more on 11 carries, but gave up an interception and was sacked twice. Defensively, Pioneer LB's Dan Hromada and Ronell Lee led the charge, with the former tallying 7 solos and 2 assists, while the latter had 2 sacks and a third TFL among his 4 solos and an assist. Geneva also had a couple of standout LB's in Zach Feltrop and Brad Roman; Feltrop had a huge night with 10 solo tackles and 8 assists, while Roman had 9 and 6, with a 3-yard TFL. They also had plenty of help from DB Richard Kolesar, who forced a fumble to go with 7 solos and 10 assists. After losing its first Victory Bowl following four wins in four appearances, Geneva's Golden Tornadoes finish at 8-3. Malone ends its season with an 8-4 record and its first Victory Bowl title in its second try.

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
11-14-2007

November 11th, 2007, was a very special day in college football history, and not coincidentally, it was a day I had been awaiting for almost 54 years. Let me give you the back story. November 21st, 1953, may seem like long ago, but it was a seminal date in my life-long love affair with college football. I was an extremely impressionable 11-year-old growing up in rural Northern Iowa at the time, and that was the day my (and every other Iowan's) beloved Hawkeyes took their modest 5-4 record into the Cathedral of College Football, Notre Dame Stadium, to battle the unbeaten and #1-ranked Fighting Irish. Iowa fans had become well acquainted with losing in the years after World War II, and former Michigan All-American blocking back Forest Evashevski had been hired away from Washington State the year before to disrupt that familiarity. Evy, as he became affectionately known to Iowans, had the Hawkeyes on the rise toward two Rose Bowl wins and an eventural #1 ranking of their own in the late '50's, but this game was widely expected to be a blowout win for the Irish. Surprisingly, as the 1st Half neared its end, the Hawkeyes held a 7-0 lead with Notre Dame threatening but with no time outs remaining. With just seconds left on the clock and the Irish failing to score on a play which did not stop the clock, Notre Dame's big All-American tackle Frank Verrichione fell to the ground with a mysterious injury, stopping the clock until he could be helped off the field. That delay gave the Irish just enough time to get off one final play before the gun, and they scored to tie the game at 7 going into intermission. The 2nd Half proved to be a virtual carbon copy of the first, with Iowa retaking the lead at 14-7, then struggling mightily to hold the Irish at bay. As the final seconds were ticking away toward a huge Iowa upset, Notre Dame was again in the red zone with no time outs and no way to stop the clock without using their now not-so-secret weapon. Verrichione again had to be helped off the field, once more giving ND an extra play, and they scored the tying TD with just 6 ticks left on the game clock. A suddenly healthy Verrichione was overheard after the game bragging to teammates and fans about how he had saved the day for ND, and that merely confirmed the loudly-voiced speculations of Iowa's incensed radio broadcasters to whom I was listening (I was switching back and forth between the timeless Jim Zabel on WHO and WMT's legendary Tait Cummins). It was little solace that Iowa's 5-4-1 record gave them the 9th spot in that year's AP rankings, or that they had cost now-2nd-ranked Notre Dame a national championship despite season-ending wins over UCLA and USC. It was clear to Iowans, and to everyone else outside of South Bend, that Notre Dame's win-at-all-cost attitude included a clear willingness to cheat to gain that end. The firestorm of negative publicity that erupted nationwide as a result of the "Fainting Irish" game resulted in the quiet retirement of Notre Dame's famous Head Coach Frank Leahy a month later, and it also begat my strong desire to someday see a Notre Dame home loss to a team they always beat. I have for at least ten years been harboring the desire to see Navy end its almost obscene NCAA-record losing streak against the Irish, and after watching Navy get steadily better under former Georgia Southern mentor Paul Johnson over the past few years, I started more than a year ago to plan killing two birds with one stone. That's where November 3rd, 2007, derives its double significance for me; I could see Notre Dame lose at home, and to a team it had beaten 43 consecutive times, thus allowing me to witness the merciful end of the longest annual rivalry losing streak in college football history. I began telling friends over the past year, including Navy SID Scott Strasemeier on more than one occasion, that I was going to my first Notre Dame home game this season, and that it would be the Navy game, so I could see the Middies beat the Irish for the first time since 1963, when Roger Staubach was at the helm. I even told the owner of my favorite Mexican restaurant in the world (it's called La Posta in Mesilla, NM, if you're as big a fan of Mexican as I am), who is a Navy supporter, that he should plan on being at that game if he were really interested in seeing Navy history. Needless to say, both his dreams and mine came true on 11-3-2007, as the Middies came from a 21-14 halftime deficit to win 46-44 in three OT's, thanks to the gritty performance of this year's version of Staubach, a young Hawai'ian QB named Kaipo-Noah Kaheaku-Enhada (or just plain Kaipo, if you're a broadcaster!). Kaipo will always be one of my greatest college football heroes, because his hard work made two of my fondest dreams come true. I literally floated home from South Bend on a cloud that night, and that day will always be remembered as one of the very best in all my years of football travels.

One of the many valuable lessons I've learned in well over a million miles of football road trips is the difference between domination and dominion. The former is when you try to plan and control everything that happens to you. The latter is when you trust that what you want to happen will happen, whether you think you have it planned or not. Last Saturday was a perfect example of the difference. I have been trying for more than two years to find an old steam locomotive whistle to use as the centerpiece of a traditional rivalry game trophy which I want to give to two schools dear to my heart who don't have a suitable trophy or name for their longtime series. I had hoped to have it ready for this year's game, but when that proved impossible, I decided to head for Texas for a late-season double-header at Howard Payne and Tarleton State. But then, just a few days before I would have left for the Lone Star State, I was reminded of a game of interest to few besides myself right at home in Chicago that would allow me to extinguish two of the three oldest "partials" on my all-time football log (a partial is a team seen for less than a full 60-minute game). I had first seen both Eureka College and the University of Chicago in separate games in 1993, but missed most of Q1 of each game due to my own carelessness. Seeing them against each other would also have other benefits for me personally: 1) I would be able to see Friday night's Eastern Michigan-Bowling Green State game in Ypsilanti on my way back from Thursday's West Virginia-Louisville game in Morgantown, which I would not have been able to do had I gone to Texas, and I would also get to cover my first game from EMU's new pressbox at Rynearson Stadium; 2) It would give me a chance to spend a rare in-season weekend at home with my darling Sandy, who bends over backwards to see that I get to every football game I want to see each fall; and 3) it would not only save about $350 in gas and motel expenses, but it would give me two free days with no games or driving time, letting us attend 7 movies (Sandy's passion) to get caught up there as well. I never in my wildest imagination could have anticipated the history that occurred in that apparently meaningless little game between 3-5 Chicago and 2-7 Eureka last Saturday. When the 51-6 Maroons' victory was over, the stats book showed that four (that's right, FOUR!) U. of Chicago rushers had accumulated more than 100 yards rushing. In fact, every Maroons player who carried the ball had cleared the century mark. First to get there was RB Thomas Parks, who didn't even start the game, with a spectacular 50-yard TD run early in the 3rd Period on which he broke at least six tackles. He ended up with a game-high 152 net yards on 14 touches. Second across the magic line was RB Joe Steelman, another non-starter whose 14 carries for 107 net yards included a 41-yard 1st Period TD dash. Then came QB John Kiernan with a classy 45-yard 3rd Quarter option keeper for a score, giving him a total of 103 yards on just 9 carries for a whopping 11.4 YPC average. Finally, it took Senior starting RB Mike Serio a couple of nice runs in the last few minutes of the game to bring his game-end net yardage up to 105 on 18 tries. The final total of 467 yards on 55 carries gave the Maroons an 8.3 yards-per-carry average, and Parks and Steelman are just callow Freshmen! Not only was I in the right place at the right time to see this remarkable feat, but it was, like many of my best football memories, not even on my schedule a week before it happened, and I certainly wasn't there because I saw it coming. It's games like this one that have given me the freedom to follow my instincts and not ever look at my planned travel schedule as something carved in stone. In fact, Don Hansen called me early this week and told me that the NCCAA Victory Bowl this weekend in Beaver Falls, PA, is a night game. A little perusal of the playoff schedule made it easy to change my plans for this weekend...I'll scrap the Old Oaken Bucket Game between Indiana and Purdue in favor of a Noon kickoff at Case Western Reserve for the Spartans' first-ever playoff game, against 8-2 Widener, after CWRU's only 10-0 regular season, and then I'll head for the Victory Bowl. And guess which school is now the oldest one on my "partials" list...it's CWRU, of course. That means that on two successive unplanned weekends, I will extinguish three of the oldest problems on my all-time log. On the way home from Pennsylvania I might even get to stop and say farewell to the RCA Dome in its final two months of existence by catching my first Colts home game. It's exciting to think what the next piece of memorable football history might be...I just got off the phone with Tony Neely, Kentucky's SID, who would like very much for me to witness the end of UK's 22-game series of frustrations against traditional rival Tennessee. Needless to say, I'll be in Lexington on November 24th!

Now that this year's playoff fields have been set in the NAIA and NCAA Divisions II and III, that perennial question raises its ugly head: Can anyone beat Mount Union this year? As I look over the field, it seems unlikely, with St. John' loss to Bethel last weekend making the Johnnies look vulnerable. I had thought, based on past encounters, that SJU might have the best chance of upsetting the undisputed king of D-III football, but now it's hard to imagine anyone getting in the Purple Raiders' way to yet another national title. Larry Kehres is not only on track to become the youngest coach in history to the 300-win mark, he could conceivably hit the 400-win mark by the age of 69. His current record is 256-20-3 with potentially five more wins this year, which means that three more seasons of 13 wins or more gets him to the 300 mark by the end of 2010. He'll be 61 then, and with an average of 13 wins a year after that, 400 will come in scarcely 8 years. Just think, if Coach K is still in the saddle at 77, which is well under John Gagliardi's current age, he could become the first, and probably the last, 500-win college football coach. It seems that Mount just keeps getting better as the years go on. The last six Raiders games this regular season were shutouts, bringing their season total to a D-III record of seven. On the other side of the coin, MTU is riding a 13-year streak of 500 or more points scored, which is also a record, since no other team has ever done that more than three straight years. Because of Mount Union's dominance in D-III, I keep fantasizing about what the Raiders might do if they stepped up in level, if not by leaving D-III, at least by playing an annual non-conference game against a team that might give us a yardstick by which to compare them with other levels. Why not play 1-AA Youngstown State once, or maybe D-II Grand Valley State, or even the NAIA's newest powerhouse, Ohio Dominican. A great site for any of these fantasy games would be Canton's Fawcett Stadium, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, barely 13 miles from the Mount's campus in Alliance. Ironically, I'm probably not the person to be suggesting this...I've seen the Purple Raiders varsity play 7 times, and four of those games were losses. I doubt there is another person alive who can say he's seen that many losses in that few Mount Union games!

With North Dakota State perched atop our 1-AA rankings, it's hard to believe that the Bison will not be going to the playoffs again this year. NDSU is in the third year of its transition from D-II to 1-AA, and in each of those years they've probably had one of the top 16 teams in the higher division. The Bison beat 1-A Minnesota (by a 27-21 score) and MAC West Champion Central Michigan this season, the latter by an embarrassing 44-14 tally. The question that thus arises is this: Why does a school that's clearly ready to compete at a higher level have to be arbitrarily denied participation in that level's post-season playoffs? I understand fully the rationale for a transition period for teams dropping down to a lower division, as their higher grant-in-aid limits, or even grants-in-aid versus non-grants (i.e., D-II or NAIA changing to D-III), would give them a theoretical advantage over their new division adversaries. However, this same rationale makes no sense when reversed. If a team is stepping up to a higher level of competition, what possible advantage would it have over its new opponents if it were allowed to participate in that level's championships? This situation is more puzzling in NDSU's case if the justification is uncertainty about the institution's ability to bear the increased financial burden of the higher division. North Dakota State's Fargo Dome is as good as any facility in 1-AA, and their state university status clearly gives them both financial and academic credibiltiy. It seems both patently absurd and arbitrarily punitive to keep the Bison out of this year's playoffs, as the only people who benefit are the App States, Montanas and Northern Iowas who won't have to play the best team in their division on their respective roads through the playoffs.

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
10-29-2007

The football Gods are certainly smiling on my travels again this year. I was in Alaska a couple weeks ago taking a few days away from the gridiron to pursue one of my other passions (and my life's "great work"), the Bering Strait tunnel and railway construction project. While in Anchorage, I got to thinking about how I could find a way to see Danny Woodhead, Chadron State's newly-crowned all-time king of the rush in college football, so I took a few minutes to check the Eagles' remaining schedule on the internet Wednesday during one of the breaks in the conference I was attending. My Saturday's are firmly committed through the first weekend in December, so I really didn't have much hope of finding anything encouraging, as the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference doesn't play many night games and has not played a non-Saturday game in years. To my eternal amazement, I found that Chadron was playing the very next night at Nebraska-Kearney. Now here's where it gets really spooky...I was scheduled to fly home to Chicago that night on the "Red Eye" and pick up my car at O'Hare (thanks to my darling Sandy getting up in the middle of the night to deliver it to me there) so I could head immediately to Little Rock for a 7:00PM kickoff between Arkansas Baptist, a new JuCo team, and Navarro College, a Texas JuCo I'd only seen scrimmage. But Kearney, Nebraska, the closest RMAC locale to Chicago, is exactly the same distance from Chicago as Little Rock! What are the odds that I would be able to change my schedule 12 hours before leaving Alaska to cover a game the very next evening at the only RMAC campus reachable by car within 10 hours of Chicago? Talk about instant gratification...I was able to solve what I thought might be a really knotty problem within 36 hours of first wondering if it would be possible. The only thing I had to give up, other than seeing a couple of JuCo's I can see any time, was the Friday night high school battle between Homewood and Hoover in Alabama, where I would be seeing three college games on Saturday. Don Hansen was kind enough to call Peter Yazvac, the SID at Kearney, to make the arrangements for me, and by 6:30 Thursday evening I was parked at Ron & Carol Cope Stadium on the UN-K campus ready to see an exciting game between two of the RMAC's top teams, one of them starring the all-time rushing yardage leader. I was not surprised to see Danny Woodhead taking a handoff around right end on the game's first snap, but that 5-yard gainer was the last I, or anyone else, would see of him in uniform that night. He strained the arch in his left foot, and was taken into the locker room for attention after it started bothering him a play or two later. He was in street clothes by halftime, and the best I could do was visit with him briefly on the field post-game and get his picture with teammate Joe McLain, the Eagles' QB who picked up the slack magnificently in Woodhead's absence with three rushing TD's in Chadron's come-from-behind 28-16 win over the Lopers. That means that I've now seen the worst game in the careers of three of football's great rushing record-setters...I also saw R. J. Bowers, the player whose yardage record was broken by Woodhead, in a rare game during his Freshman year in which he failed to score or gain 100 yards. Emmitt Smith, the NFL record-holder, also had his worst day, gaining only 2 yards as an Arizona Cardinal in his return to Texas Stadium the day I was able to see my only Cowboys' home game. When I got to Alabama, I was able to see the start-up Birmingham-Southern Panthers put up a good fight before succumbing to Centre College's Colonels by a 24-17 count. I then headed for Samford's Seibert Stadium to see the 2nd Half of the Bulldogs' Homecoming game with Austin Peay State. The score was 3-0 Samford starting the final half, so I basically got to see almost all of the resurgent Governors' 28-25 comeback win over the favored home team in APSU's first official year back in the Ohio Valley Conference football race. After ending my Alabama day at Legion Field, watching the Houston Cougars humiliate Alabama-Birmingham, 49-10, I drove to Atlanta to catch an early Sunday flight to Fort Lauderdale for an NFL double-bill at two stadia where I had seen several college games but had never seen the local NFL club playing at home. Sunday's afternoon game let me catch up with Tom Brady, whose senior-year spring game at Michigan I had covered, followed by his final college game, a 14-point late comeback to win 35-34 in overtime against Alabama in the 2000 Orange Bowl. Brady is, of course, now the GQ cover-boy who leads the best offense in the NFL, and I watched him break the New England Patriots franchise record with 6TD passes against the winless Miami Dolphins, 49-28. Sandy joined me after the game for four nights in Miami, and she managed to entertain herself Monday afternoon and evening while I drove to Jacksonville to see the Indianapolis Colts best the Jaguars, 29-7, behind another masterful performance by QB Peyton Manning, whose final college game I had also covered at the Orange Bowl two years before Brady's. Few NFL games will interest me more than this coming Sunday's "Game of the Year" clash between these two titans, who are clearly the best QB's of their generation. This past weekend was my "ultimate" game for this season, pitting the only two "new" teams that I had not yet seen, UNC-Pembroke and Faulkner University. The game at Pembroke's brand-new Lumbee Guaranty Bank Field was as competitive as I had hoped, as both start-up programs had gained enough seasoning to begin playing like experienced college teams. The final 43-22 score in favor of UNC-P's Braves was a little deceptive, as the visiting Eagles got inside the home team's 10 on four occasions without scoring, thanks to an interception, a fumble, a missed FG and a blocked FG. The Braves, under former Azusa Pacific coach Pete Shinnick, are now 4-5 and could conceivably win their final two games to finish with a winning record in their inaugural season. Faulkner has only one win so far, but their progress toward a winning tradition was evident in their never-say-die attitude on Saturday. On Thursday this week, I'll see a traditional rivalry game in Arkadelphia, Arkansas...the "Battle of the Ravine" between Henderson State and Ouachita Baptist at OBU's A. U. Williams Stadium. The Reddies will dress in their own locker room and march across the road to do battle with the Tigers in one of Division II's oldest and closest rivalries. Now that I've seen every team in North America and will only have to see a handful of new teams each year to keep that status current, I'm trying to see all of the big rivalries. This year, in addition to the HSU-OBU game, I've already seen Kansas at Kansas State, and plan to see Navy at Notre Dame this weekend, Cornell at Coe the next Saturday, followed by Ohio State at Michigan, Tennessee at Kentucky and Arizona at Arizona State on the succeeding weekends. Because so many rivalry games are late-season dates, it may take me another 8 or 10 years to see them all, but that seems easy compared to covering more than a million miles and 900 games over the past 18 years. It should be a breeze!

As hard as it may be to believe, the post-season playoffs have already begun north of the border. The Ontario teams have already had their opening round, with the top two teams, Ottawa and Wilfrid Laurier getting byes and waiting to host the upset winners of the 3 vs. 6 and 4 vs. 5 games last weekend. Fifth-seeded Guelph surprised 4th-seeded McMaster 25-21 in the first shocker, while #6 seed Western Ontario avenged its opening-day home 26-20 overtime defeat at the hands of Queen's by stopping the Golden Gaels, 27-19, in Kingston. Western's Mustangs now travel to play unbeaten Ottawa in one OUA semi-final match, while the Guelph Gryphons head for Waterloo, Ontario, to meet 2nd-seed Wilfrid Laurier in the other. In the Quebec University Football League, Laval, unbeaten and nationally-ranked #1, as usual, will host #4-seeded Montreal, while the other QUFL semi-final will pit Concordia's Stingers against the visiting Bishops Gaiters. In the Maritimes, 7-1 Saint Mary's, back on top after having a couple of down years, awaits the winner of this weekend's battle between Acadia's visiting Axemen and St. Francis Xavier's X-Men in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Out west, Saskatchewan's two teams meet in one semi-final, with the Huskies of U. of S. traveling to 2nd-place Regina to take on the Rams in a Friday night contest, while unbeaten Canada West champion Manitoba hosts the Calgary Dinosaurs at Canad^Inns Stadium in Winnipeg. If recent history repeats itself, the Bisons will fall prey to one of their own and fail to make it to the national semi-finals in two weeks despite their unblemished record. I'm hoping, for their sake, that this will be the year they finally make it back to the Vanier Cup. I will be there to see the Canadian college football championship at Rogers Centre in Toronto on Friday night, November 23rd, and will have a full report on the game and the playoffs leading up to it when I return.

Speaking of playoffs, this past weekend has given us another dose of parity in the ranks of the major colleges. This week's BCS standings have recent national champions like Florida (#20), USC (#19), and Texas (#15) ranked in the second ten, while Boston College, Arizona State, Oregon, Kansas and Missouri sit in the elite top ten teams, leading even the casual fan to remark about how unlikely it is now to find a true national champion when only two teams are allowed to play for the "BCS National Championship." How good is the field in major college football right now? If the BCS' top 16 teams were the playoff field right now, USC, Florida, Wisconsin, Alabama and Boise State would not make it, while Hawai'i, Connecticut and Michigan, despite its opening home loss to 1-AA Appalachian State, would be in the hunt. What do you suppose the BCS geniuses will do when Michigan beats #1 Ohio State on November 17th to really throw the rankings upside down? Do you suppose they will finally get the message that one game pitting two "chosen" teams just may not be the way to determine a national champion? My guess is that they will remain blind to reality and continue clinging to the absurd idea that the bowl game structure is sacred and will be destroyed by a 16-team playoff. You and I know better, but who are we, anyway? We're just the fans who make the whole system work...too bad they won't listen to us, isn't it?

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
10-3-2007

What is the NCAA thinking, anyway? Two years ago it was the controversial edict that a tiny fraction of its members should have their First Amendment rights denied by a vocal minority of politically-correct activists who think Indian-related team nicknames denigrate, rather than honor, the Native American. Millions of dollars of NCAA funds, not to mention funds of the handful of targeted offenders, have been wasted, with tens of thousands of non-activist citizens, students, alumni and administrators offended in the process. And the jury is still out, so to speak, on that issue, with the University of North Dakota's lawsuit against the NCAA over the use of their famous "Fighting Sioux" nickname coming to trial in December. The most bizarre irony about all of this totally unnecessary fuss is that the NCAA itself chose, just a couple of years before creating the "Indian" debate, to move its headquarters to, of all places, INDIANapolis, INDIANa!!! Then last year the football rules committee, in its haste to cowtow to the television God, changed the time-keeping rules, with disastrous results. Games were indeed shorter, but at the cost of football action, not advertisements, and coaches managed to find the flaws in the new rules with clearly unintended results. Needless to say, this year's clock-management has been returned to "normal." So this year, the NCAA geniuses mandated that the familiar separation of Division 1 football teams into two distinct categories, 1-A and 1-AA, shall henceforth be redesignated the Football Bowl Subdivision(FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision(FCS). Now I am clearly not a genius, like those who sit atop the heirarchies at America's largest and most prestigious universities, so I'm having some difficulty trying to understand how this change could be any more confusing than it seems. First of all, 1-A and 1-AA are very clear and simple, and they have worked well for almost 30 years. Was there a problem here? USA Today and most major newpapers have not confused their readers by referring to FBS and FCS, and have sensibly continued to use the time-honored 1-A and 1-AA monickers. Second, why change to an acronym which includes two of the same words and results in confusing even the most avid of college football fans? Why not call it what it really is...the bowl-eligible division (how about "B"?) and the playoff-eligible division ("P" would work!)? Thus we can easily distinguish between the teams that actually play for a national title from those who vie to play in televised bowl games for the privilege of allowing someone else's opinion to rank them at the end of the season. As we have seen over and over historically, the bowl system is a terrible way to try to determine a national champion in major college football. Three years out of four a one-game "playoff" (i.e., bowl game) is not adequate to crown a true champion. This year is a prime example...this past week five of the Top 10 teams four weeks into the season were upset, most by unrated teams, creating a huge upheaval in the rankings. What's to say that the same teams at the end of the season could not be upset by other teams in the top sixteen in the final ratings? This problem is no longer a whisper to the geniuses who run the NCAA, it is a howling scream. The next time the NCAA wants to introduce a major change, why not make it the only one that really is important? Why not institute the long-needed 16-team playoff in 1-A? Yes, that's right, I called it 1-A!

This year has been a Junior College football year for me so far. While I've seen 4 of the 8 new 4-year teams already this season, bringing my total to 746, I started the season barely halfway through the country's junior college roster. With nine JuCo games now under my belt this season, and at least one more to go, I've reached the 60% mark and seen nine new teams in three States, Minnesota (one of 12 JC's to go), Mississippi (all 14 now seen) and California (20 down and 52 left to see). Since more than half of the JuCo teams in the country are in our most populous State, you can imagine my loving wife Sandy's joy looking forward to a football season in the not too distant future when she will be able to move to California with me. I'll spend Friday nights and Saturdays wrapping up those JC loose ends and weekdays with her enjoying some nice hotels, scenic drives and gourmet meals in her favorite State. And the nice thing is that JC games are just like big college games...exciting, well-coached and well-played. The most recent one I saw was the Shasta-Butte game at Shasta's Memorial Stadium in Redding, CA, a game which went 4 OT's before the visiting Roadrunners prevailed, 40-34. Earlier in the day, at Herschel Meredith Stadium in Weed, CA, the home-standing College of the Siskiyous Eagles saw their 16-point 4th Quarter comeback fall just short in a 33-28 loss to the Golden Eagles of Feather River College. Before leaving for California, I saw a Thursday night game in Summit, MS, between the local Southwest Mississippi Community College Bears and the visiting East Central Community College Warriors from Decatur, MS. ECCC led most of the game, at 14-6 late in Q3 and 21-12 midway through the final quarter, but two Southwest scores in the final five minutes pulled out a 25-21 win for the home team. In the process of enjoying a very good game, I also had the distinct pleasure of sitting with the family of the Bears' kicker, Les Mulkey, Jr. His father Les is also the father of Baylor's famed women's basketball coach, Kim Mulkey. Cousins Otis and Joanne were also there, and we had a proverbial ball talking LSU football (they're from Tickfaw, LA), the Jena 6 (I owned a business in Jena for 10 years three decades ago) and all sorts of other local interests (particularly, good catfish restaurants). I'm looking forward to my next visit to Louisiana, as I have some good eating in store with the Mulkey clan!

This football season has shown how competitive all levels of football are, as the amazing upset of Michigan's then #5-ranked Wolverines by two-time 1-AA champion Appalachian State was followed within the month by Wofford's "upset" of the top-rated Mountaineers in their opening Southern Conference game. Saint John Fisher was expected to cruise through its schedule this year after giving a tough time to Mount Union in last year's semi-finals and returning most of its key players, but the Cardinals got derailed last week, 31-28, at now 3-1 Hartwick, which has won three home games in a row, including a win over Ithaca. Upset is a word which may become harder to use in future months and years as we see college football continue to produce so many good players and well-coached teams. But that's what makes it interesting...you really don't know who is going to win on a given Saturday. You don't, and I don't, but my idol, Don Hansen does! He picked five exact scores a couple of weekends ago, and three on another. I've predicted an exact score precisely once in 14 years of guessing the outcomes of the games I attend. Don's accuracy rate at picking the winners is over 70%, and it is unlikely anyone else in the country can match that level of astuteness. I may see a lot of college football games, but when it comes to assessing college football teams' chances against each other, I've never seen anyone who does a better job than my friend Don.

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
9-22-2007

This season is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and memorable in college football history, what with the remarkable upsets already played and the long list of major powerhouse programs not ranked in today's Top 25, and it has been exceptionally exciting so far in my personal football travels as well. To start it all off with a bang, I stopped at St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN, the morning after this year's first game, North Dakota's rout of Humboldt State in Grand Forks on August 23rd. I had long been curious how college football's all-time wins leader, John Gagliardi, runs his practices without whistles and full-pads-contact, and the Johnnies had a 9:30AM session that day, giving me the perfect opportunity to slake that curiosity. I was amazed to find at least 150 red-clad players on the field when I got there, all taking turns doing play run-throughs in two groups on opposite ends of the field, dressed in shorts, shoulder pads and helmets. Roughly an hour was spent this way before alternate groups started at midfield with 40-second, one time-out end-game drills to see how many times they could score before time ran out. An assistant coach served as referee, calling penalties and keeping track of the clock time with a stopwatch. Tackles were made by tagging the ball carrier or running him out-of-bounds. SJU's offensive teams scored about 75% of the time during this half hour of drills. After practice ended for the morning, I asked Coach Gagliardi if I could take a few pictures of him in his office, and he graciously accommodated. Not only did I get some great photos both of and with this extraordinary coaching legend, we spend more than an hour chatting about football and my extensive travels as his assistants drifted in one by one. He was particularly impressed with my indestructible automobile, a 1992 Oldsmobile station wagon which now has more than 760,000 miles in its rear-view mirror, and he was kind enough to ask me to join him and his staff for lunch at the school cafeteria. One of his assistants, his son Jim, had just purchased a used van with 150,000+ miles on its odometer, and they both wanted to know the secrets behind auto longevity, leaping to the questionable conclusion that I must be some sort of expert because mine had traveled so far. Coach Gagliardi suggested I should write a book on the subject, and I assured him that I would include a car-care chapter in my book-in-progess. He also noticed that I got a spontaneous nose bleed during lunch, a problem I have been tolerating for the past 21 years with little effective treatment. He told me that he had the same condition when he was young, and a doctor recommended a simple solution which he passed on to me and which seems to be working well for me. So I ended up with far more than I had expected when I stopped to watch a St. Johns practice...I got some fantastic pictures, a much better understanding of the SJU dynasty, a terrific lunch, effective medical advice, a handful of new friends, four hours of indelible memories, and a date to come back in the spring to monitor a session of Coach Gagliardi's locally-famous "Theory of Football" class, which is, in reality, a theory of life class. Ironically, two days later as I was heading back toward Collegeville on my way home from a Canadian Juniors game in Winnipeg, the engine in my car finally blew, breaking the crankshaft and stranding me in Rothsay, MN, for a couple of nights before arrangements could be made for its replacement. I drove a rental car from the Fargo airport for a couple of weeks while mine was being rebuilt, putting over 6,000 miles on it in nine States and one Canadian Province in the process. I also bought the rental car company a new airbag at a cost of $1,600, thanks to a gap in the pavement in the middle of a poorly marked construction zone in Indianapolis that caused quite a shock but no physical damage to either me or the car. As a direct result of my automotive adventures, I have been home for exactly one night in the past month, since I had to drive back to Rothsay and Fargo during the two days I might have had at home last week. If I'm lucky, I'll have the luxury of two more nights at home in the next six weeks, as an emergency business trip to Alaska has interjected itself into my football schedule in mid-October. I'm not sure how much more of this excitement I can stand, but I'm hoping that more of it will be on the football field and less of it on the road for the rest of 2007!

I had another wonderful coach-related experience last weekend which took me back to my beginnings as a peripatetic football vagabond in 1990. That was Roland Ortmayer's last of 43 years as head football coach at the University of LaVerne in Southern California, and it was the first of my now 18-season-long quest to capture the essence of North American college football, and the year in which I met him at a Leopards game at California Lutheran. Ort is now 90 and residing with his faithful dog Sport in an assisted-living apartment three blocks from the stadium which fittingly bears his name on the ULV campus. I visit Ort regularly when I'm in California (I have family living 10 miles from LaVerne), and I promised him early this year that I would take him to the opening home game at Ortmayer Stadium this year. That game was last weekend against Whitworth, a team I wanted to see again since I had missed the first quarter of the only game I'd seen the Pirates in against Menlo a couple of years ago. It also gave both Ort and I the chance to see the first game of the Andy Ankeny era at ULV. Ankeny is a former assistant at East Texas Baptist, and he is the first coach at LaVerne since 1947 who was neither Roland Ortmayer nor someone who both played for and coached under Ort. The travel gods conspired to make the day a challenge for me, as my morning flight from Atlanta to Ontario, 15 miles from LaVerne, got away 90 minutes late. Then the rental car I chose had a mechanical "hold" on it when I got to the exit gate, so I had to choose another, which got me to Ort's apartment just 25 minutes before kickoff. Ort's daughter Corlyn and granddaughters Reina and Denise were there to help me with his wheelchair, but complications arose with the chair's leg extensions and we barely got to the field in time to see the kickoff. Despite the logistical frustrations, Ort and his family were able to spend two hours at the game, parked along the sideline near the LaVerne bench, and he was honored at halftime as part of the Community Day ceremonies. Many of his old friends came to visit with him while he was there, including LaVerne's AD, its President, its Public Relations Director and several former players and coaches. He seemed to enjoy the hot dog and the carne asada taco from Cornie's Corner, the student-run concession stand which was operated for decades by his late wife and which still bears her name. The ballgame itself, which no one at ULV expected to win against the playoff-calibre Pirates, was competitive for the 1st Half, with Whitworth getting only a TD and a safety in the opening period and a lone field goal in the second, while LaVerne gained several first downs and looked good on defense. But the roof caved in after intermission, and Whitworth flew home with a 34-0 win, which Ort did not stay around to see end. Corlyn took him home midway through the 3rd Quarter, but it did my heart a great deal of good to see this extraordinary coach and even more amazing human being sitting on the sideline that he patrolled so faithfully for 43 years. One of my fondest wishes is that Ort be given, while he is still alive and alert, the best honor that could be bestowed upon him, induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. He certainly has enough wins (almost 200), but his philosophy was not the win-at-any-cost regime followed by many of the Hall's inductees, so his winning percentage does not meet the Hall's minimum requirements. There are, however, exceptions that can be made to those prerequisites, and Ort will have all the support anyone could ever have from the legions of players whose lives he influenced for the better during his lifetime of devotion to football at LaVerne. My job here will not be done until Ort has a bust in South Bend!

I was appalled, as I'm sure you were, to read the reports of the on-field melee that took place last Saturday after the Henderson State at Delta State D-II Gulf Coast Conference game in Cleveland, MS. After a 9-7 DSU win in which two HSU field goal tries from inside the 20 were blocked in the waning minutes of the game, Henderson's coach Scott Maxfield and Delta's Rick Roberts exchanged both heated words and blows instead of the usual handshake. Their behavior incited their teams to engage in a helmet-swinging, pushing and kicking riot which was a major embarassment to both schools and to their conference. Conference Commissioner Nate Salant, with the endorsement of the presidents of both schools, suspended both coaches for their games this week, put both on probation for two years with the threat of serious consequences for any future violations of conference sportsmanship and behavioral standards, and also reprimanded DeltaState for lax security both during and after the game. DSU also was cited for ignoring conference rules restricting the seating of home fans in the visitors' seating area, which had resulted in taunting and harassment of HSU fans during the game. Last year's on-field violence between Miami and Florida International players should have given all football fans and school administrators enough of a warning about lack of player discipline and sportsmanship training, but when something like this happens at the Division II level and is incited by the coaches themselves, it is beyond reprehensible. Maybe Delta State should rethink their team nickname...Statesmen seems more than a little ironic in this case!

"THE RED ZONE" 
By Craig Burroughs
7-25-2007

The University of Alabama's January hiring of Nick Saban away from the NFL's Miami Dolphins has brought to the fore some pressing questions about the direction in which major college football is heading. Coaching salaries at school's in BCS-automatic-qualifying conferences have soared out of sight with all the dollars that are now at stake, thanks to television money. Most head coaches at large State universities now make more than their schools' Presidents and the Governor of their respective States (combined!). Saban's $4 million deal at 'Bama, where football is apparently a lot more important than State Government, puts his base salary at more than 35 times the Governor's, and that could well be 45 times if his incentives are met! Not surprisingly, while Saban has set a new gold standard, most States with BCS schools have a large imbalance between coaches' pay and public servants' pay. For example, California's "Governator" earns a $175,000 annual salary, which is in the Top 5 of all State Governors, compared to the $1.5 million paid to Cal's Jeff Tedford and the $1.25 million collected by Fresno State's Pat Hill. Even UCLA's Karl Dorrell, whose yearly $881,000 paycheck isn't even in the Top 50 of today's major college head coaches', is still more than 4 times Governor Schwartzenegger's. The "new" coaches at California's other big schools, Chuck Long at San Diego State ($701,500) and Dick Tomey at San Jose State ($342,100), have less gaudy salaries, but still make much more than their famous movie star boss. The differences are most apparent in less populous States, like Iowa, where Hawkeye Head Coach Kirk Ferentz pulls down more than $2.8 million, while Governor Chet Culver earns less than $110,000, not even 4% of his fellow State employee's paycheck in Iowa City! West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez, at $1,750,000, is compensated more than 18 times the $95,000 salary of Joe Manchin, the Governor of the Mountain State. Because of the plethora of TV money, and the perceived threat of coaches being hired away by the NFL, big-time college coaches have become the latest rock stars of our generation. Saban used the reverse psychology of being "bought back" into the college fraternity by Alabama after leaving LSU for a $5,000,000-plus income with the NFL's Miami Dolphins just 2 years earlier. His somewhat unusual situation has had an unfortunate effect on college football economics, by setting the salary bar unrealistically high compared to the reality of the NFL "threat." There are 119 1-A (Bowl Championship Division) football programs, but only 32 NFL franchises. Most NFL teams prefer to hire coaches who have already been in the league for years, primarily, I believe, because there are major differences between the college and pro games. Very few top college coaches, perhaps no more than 10-15%, would even be offered the chance to jump to the NFL, and if the opportunity did present itself, many of them would be loath to leave something they love, and with which they are comfortable, to enter the dog-eat-dog world of professional football. To a large number of the college coaches I know, money is not the determining factor in their choice of livelihood...it is their passion for the game and their love of the young men they mentor. As an example of this observation, I can offer a few names who have never been paid over $400,000 for a year of coaching a major college football team: 1) Joe Novak, Northern Illinois University, annual salary today of $212,496...Novak's Huskies have beaten Alabama, Maryland and Iowa State in the same season, all of whom went to bowl games, and he has coached the nation's leading rusher as well as coaching NIU to two bowl games and to winning seasons that should have led to bowl game invitations if NIU had been given the respect it deserves. 2) Then there's Chris Ault ($360,000) at Nevada, currently entering his 23rd year of coaching in three different stints at his alma mater; Ault has a 185-78-1 record and has already been enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame; 3) Jeff Bower ($349,983) at Southern Miss, has led his alma mater and Conference USA "Team of the Decade" to seven bowl games in the past eight years, and his 96-67-1 record over his 14-year head coaching career has included a 47-17 CUSA record, a 52-13 home record and road wins over such heavyweights as Alabama and Nebraska; 4) Toledo's Tom Amstutz ($376,400), whose record in his first five years at his alma mater is 45-18, including four division titles, two outright MAC championships and 3 bowl games. I'd rather have any one of these men coaching for me if I were a major college AD, instead of chasing the superstar multimillion dollar men!

If unbeaten Boise State's not-to-be-forgotten 43-42 overtime win over heavy favorite Oklahoma in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl wasn't resounding proof of the desperate need for a playoff in major college football, I can't imagine what would be. The lightly-regarded Broncos, who led 28-10 late in the 3rd Quarter, saw the Sooners tie the game with just 86 seconds to play, with a 2-point conversion no less, then had their first subsequent snap result in an Oklahoma interception and TD return to put them in a 35-28 hole with just 64 seconds to play. The haughty Big XII champions thought they had dodged a bullet, but the Broncos delighted the largely BSU crowd and a rapt national TV audience by firing three more shots at OU, each more damaging than the last. The first, of course, was the 50-yard "hook-and-ladder" play with 7 seconds on the clock to send the game into OT. Then it was the first pass ever thrown by a 2nd-team wide receiver to score an answering TD in overtime after OU's star RB Adrian Peterson had ripped off a 25-yard scoring run to open the OT. And finally, it was the underhand "Statue of Liberty" run by Ian Johnson for the winning 2-point conversion to top off a game in which 37 points were scored in the final 19 snaps, beginning at the 1:30 mark of the 4th Quarter. I heard many veteran reporters in the pressbox remark that this game had to be the best bowl game in history, and some even said it was the best football game they'd ever seen, period! Since Boise State represented the first-ever appearance in a BCS bowl game by a Western Athletic Conference team, it's awfully hard for the BCS bigwigs to argue that games like this one can happen every year, or that only teams from the top six "power" conferences deserve to play for the national title. Remember that Oklahoma is a team that played for three BCS titles in the past six years, winning one of them. Remember also that Boise State manhandled a very good Oregon State team, 42-14, early in the season, and the Beavers went on to give USC its first PAC-10 loss in four years and end the season by beating three other bowl teams in a row. USC, of course, played for three of the last four BCS titles, so maybe the have-nots from the WAC can play with the big boys after all! And if the WAC has teams that can beat perennial BCS title contenders, then it only follows that the Mountain West, Conference USA and the Mid-American have teams that can just as well. TCU showed that when they opened the 2005 season in Norman, beating the Sooners by a 17-10 margin on their way to an 11-1 season in which they beat four other bowl teams, including another Big XII team in the EV1.net Bowl.

Sports Illustrated responded to the Boise State-Oklahoma game with an imaginative proposal for an 8-team playoff using campus sites in mid-December for the first round, 2 of the current BCS bowls on a rotating basis for the semi-finals, then a championship bowl one week into January just as was done this year for the "chosen" Top 2. SI's idea would be a major step forward, but doesn't go far enough, in my mind. I've seen enough college football (990 games to date, and many more ahead, I hope) to know that the only way to know who's going to win on a particular day is to play the game. Did you think you'd watch a one-loss Florida team manhandle the Big Ten's supposedly unbeatable Buckeyes by the largest margin of victory ever by a #2 team over a #1? Nor did I, and it points up the fact that nothing beats playing head-to-head games. No poll or computer analysis or power ranking or strength-of-schedule rating will ever replace the actual playing of games, and there are, beyond the slightest doubt, more than eight teams capable of winning three straight at the end of a given season. The only way I can imagine ever seeing a real "National Champion" in most major college seasons is to have a 16-team FBS (nee 1-A) playoff, maybe by expanding the SI proposal to eight on-campus games in mid-December, with four bowl game quarterfinals, two bowl game semi's, and the Big Kahuna in early January. We've already seen that two college teams can play 8 days into the New Year, so why not let 16 teams vie for the privilege. The SI piece neatly debunks all the specious arguments against a playoff in the only division of any NCAA sport that doesn't have one, so here's hoping that before long the folks in the BCS cabal will realize that they're short-changing not only the people who buy tickets to their bowl games, but also the people who make those games possible...the college students on whose backs they're making untold millions!

After the exciting football travel year I had in 2005, I didn't think it would be possible to have an even better year in 2006. But, as they say, that's why they play the games...you never know what's going to happen on a given day at the ol' ballpark, and 2006 was littered with unexpectedly good games, and some surprising records as well. Not only did I get to see the aforementioned Boise State-Oklahoma thriller (the second-best football game I've ever seen), I got to see another game in Arizona just three nights earlier that was the third-best game in my years of football travels. It was Texas Tech's unbelievable 31-point comeback in the final 20 minutes of the Insight Bowl game against Minnesota. After the Gophers upped their lead to 38-7 halfway through the 3rd, the Red Raiders outscored them 37-3, including an improbable 51-yard field goal to tie the game as time expired. I had been kicking myself for several years about missing the second GMAC Bowl in Mobile back in 2001, the highest-scoring game in bowl history. In that game, Marshall wiped out a 38-8 halftime deficit against East Carolina to win 64-61 in double OT, thus establishing the all-time bowl-game record for largest deficit overcome to win. I would have been at that game if it had not conflicted with the New York holiday trip I take with my darling Sandy every year. We got back from theatre that night in time for me to watch the game's last quarter and OT's, all the while wishing secretly that I were in Mobile instead. Texas Tech's comeback let me come clean with Sandy about my 2001 regrets, and she actually apologized to me for "making" me miss such a thriller in 2001. I told her that there was no way to know in advance, and that now all I need is to see a bowl game that has a combined score of more than 125! And it looks as though we can expect more of the same in 2007. My college season begins on Thursday night, August 23rd, at the Alerus Center in Grand Forks, ND, as the hometown Fighting Sioux entertain Humboldt State. That will be the first of what I hope will be a personal-best 82 college games this season, ending in New Orleans at the BCS Title Game on January 7th. But technically speaking, my football season has already begun...I am sending this column in from Canada in late July, where I've already seen the unbeaten and league-leading British Columbia Lions of the CFL outlast the winless Hamilton Tiger-Cats by a 22-18 score. I've also taken in a Canadian Juniors game, the first home contest in the history of the Kamloops Broncos, a disheartening 57-2 pasting at the hands of this year's BC Football Conference favorites, the Victoria Rebels. This season will also bring in ten more new college football programs, including eight 4-year schools and 2 playing JuCo schedules. The latter include Arkansas Baptist, which will play a schedule loaded with strong Texas JuCo teams, while Manhattan's Globe Institute of Technology will play mostly New York-area JV teams. The four-year schools, in alphabetical order, are: Birmingham-Southern(AL), Dordt College(IA), Faulkner University(AL), Kentucky Christian University, Lake Erie College(OH), Marian College(IN), North Carolina-Pembroke and Saint Vincent University(PA). I will have game stories and more details about each of these new programs as I cover them, with the final two planned to be seen against each other on October 27th, when Faulkner visits UNC-Pembroke. During the year we'll also have more news about the four new programs scheduled to kick off in 2008 and the three we know about so far due to start in 2009. Details on those programs, as well as my updated schedule, will appear in later columns, but you can go to the Football Gazette website to see my currently planned schedule, which will be updated in a few days. Happy Football!

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