Apparently bowl games are not immune from the poor economy. How else does one explain the Military Bowl’s new mascot, Sgt. Stripes — basically a photo commemorative Military Bowl football with cartoon eyes Photoshopped on? Photshopped!

According to the Military Bowl release, Sgt. Stripes will have his own Twitter account and “pop up at landmarks throughout the region and pose with local celebrities as a way to engage fans in the game.” Sgt. Stripes has already posted four Twitter updates and a picture from the Comcast SportsNet studio in Washington.

Of course, Sgt. Stripes will also have his own spot on the bowl’s Facebook page.

I get that the mascot is not supposed to be high tech and it’s supposed to be funny (I chuckled) and that the simplicity of it is, in fact, the beauty of it. But for a bowl sponsored by Northrop Grumman, I expected a mascot with some muscle. Like, perhaps a fighter jet with the Military Bowl logo on it or an aircraft carrier. Heck, I would have settled for a WMD with the Military Bowl logo. Just something that screamed military.

Instead, we got cartoon eyes.

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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As conference expansion talks have seemingly locked in on Missouri, West Virginia and Louisville, BYU — an early favorite in projections to the Big 12 — has been left out in the cold. According to coach Bronco Mendenhall, the Cougars’ faith is a big reason why.

As a Mormon-based institution, BYU has additional rules and stipulations that govern its athletics, among them an inflexible ban on games on Sunday. Faced with potential conflicts and culture clashes, several leagues — the Pac-12, Big 12, Big East — have only taken a cursory look before moving on.

Mendenhall expressed his frustration with the expansion process Tuesday night on KSL in Utah.

“(BYU is), by design, to be very unique and someone in a conference has to want that culture with our values,” Mendenhall said. “Not only all of our sports teams that are excellent, but they have to want a school that has the values that we have.

“Those that want us, fantastic. And if they don’t, I would rather stand alone. Then my job is to help lead the program to the point where you can’t be ignored any longer. That will accumulate over time through our record. That is just simply kind of the brutal facts of where it is.”

BYU broke off from the Mountain West last year, opting for independence in an attempt to earn greater revenue with its television partnership with ESPN and greater exposure and notoriety by playing more high-profile opponents. (And to avoid taking a backseat to its Pac-12-bound rival, Utah.) The Cougars have struggled some on the field, against the Utes in particular, but are still one of the more attractive options in terms of all sports and academics available.

Just a few weeks ago, BYU was reportedly being courted by the Big 12, which seemed like a good fit for a faith-based school.

“The Big 12 has already shown that they have some interest in already doing (taking a faith-based institution) with Baylor and they’ve just taken TCU,” Mendenhall said. “Unlike the Pac-12, which made it very clear that it did not want a religious-based school.

“I know one of the criteria’s they’re mentioning in talking about West Virginia is they were in the Top 25 four of the past five years, which I think our record is very similar. [BYU's record from 2006-10 was virtually identical to West Virginia's. — ed.] Our basketball program is certainly on par or better than the majority in the country and all of our sports. So, there comes this really unique issue, just to be very blunt, of culture and we have a very unique institution.”

But the uniqueness of BYU isn’t much of a selling point in the current game of musical chairs, and Mendenhall knows that if the university gets passed by in this round it could be awhile before it comes again. So he’s not shy to hitch BYU’s wagon to the nearest shining star, Boise State.

“All of these moves are revenue-driven, they’re TV rights driven and they are access driven to the highest level of bowl games that there are,” Mendenhall said. “You could certainly find yourself on the outside looking in as one of those teams, as we are now, that have to win every game. That is simply the way it is. Boise State finds themselves in a similar situation.

“It would make a lot of sense to me, if anyone wanted a partnership and wanted a natural rivalry to take us and Boise and put us in the league and you’d have a Mountain West imprint, so to speak, and you’d have two excellent football teams and I think people would be surprised at what would happen.”

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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USC coach Lane Kiffin is trying to quash his team’s public verbal bashing of Notre Dame after several of his players publicly accused the Irish of giving up after during the fourth quarter of the Trojans’ 31-17 win in South Bend on Saturday night.

Kiffin said today he called Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly and also issued a public statement in an effort to paper over the mini-controversy. Unfortunately, he only apologized for one of the many comments out of the Trojan camp in the past couple days, including his own.

“On behalf of our football program, I apologize for Chris Galippo‘s statements after the game. I’ve addressed this with Chris and he is remorseful,” Kiffin said in a statement. “I also called Coach [Brian] Kelly to personally apologize.  As I said to the media immediately after the game, I thought Notre Dame played extremely hard throughout the game. It was another classic rivalry game and we feel fortunate to have won.”

Kelly refused to get into a war of words with USC and acknowledged making mistakes during the game’s final minutes, including not using any of the Irish’s three timeouts as USC killed nearly seven minutes’ worth of clock on ten consecutive running plays to end the game.

“I think right around the 3:30 mark is when I started to think about the potential for using timeouts. Just never felt like the right situation,” Kelly said. “I think we were in a number of second and shorts, and where the ball was, I don’t know, intuitively, instinctively, I didn’t pull the trigger on a timeout.

“It had nothing to do with, ‘Hey, we quit,’ or ‘We give up. Words don’t mean much. We don’t spend much time on that. We got beat, and they can say whatever they want.”

Galippo, who tweeted his apology Monday, had the most publicized comments after the game after questioning Notre Dame’s strategy.

“At the end there, when they didn’t call those timeouts, they just quit,” Galippo said after the game. “That’s what Notre Dame football is about. They’re not anything like USC.”

But running back Marc Tyler and quarterback Matt Barkley also chimed in. Barkley told a Los Angeles radio station Monday that he agreed with the assertion that Notre Dame players had thrown in the towel.

“It seemed from our sideline and our perspective that they did give up,” Barkley told 710 ESPN. “It seemed uncharacteristic of Notre Dame. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been on that sideline.”

Kiffin isn’t blameless in all this. Even he had choice words about the final minutes, stating that he was shocked the Irish didn’t use their timeouts and try to get back in the game.

“The game was far from over,” Kiffin said after the game. “Obviously, over two minutes left with three timeouts, there’s a lot of football left. But I’m not complaining.”

But Kelly said his team is ripe for ridicule after the way it played against the Trojans.

“Our guys know what happened. They got their butts beat,” Kelly said. “They didn’t play very well, and that comes with it. You get what you deserve.”

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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Now in its seventh year, the College Football BlogPoll is a weekly effort of dozens of college football-centric Web sites representing a wide array of schools under the oversight of SB Nation. As always, this is an ever-evolving snapshot meant to judge teams exclusively on their existing resumés. It pays as little regard as possible to my guess as to what’s going to happen over the course of the season, or what would happen in a make-believe game “on a neutral field” or anywhere else. It’s subjective, but ideally, it’s not a guess: It’s a judgment on the evidence that actually exists. It is not a power poll.

LSU alternates back to the top in my weekly rotation between the Tigers and Crimson Tide, which (mercifully) has just one more week remaining before there’s a reason to actually rank one ahead of the other. For now, for the fourth edition in a row, they remain 1a and 1b, in no particular order. They have clearly been the two most dominant teams in the country over the first eight weeks and attempting to discern between them before they play is an exercise in futility.

• Cowboys are aliens. Meanwhile, Oklahoma State slides up another spot into Oklahoma‘s vacated No. 3 position, and I’m beginning to understand what the computers see in the Cowboys. I think some human pollsters have been a little slower to come around on OSU because a) They’re not a traditional power, a la Alabama, LSU and Oklahoma, and weren’t considered serious national contenders coming into the season, and b) They’re considered vulnerable defensively, a perfectly valid criticism for an outfit yielding well in excess of 400 yards per game.

On paper, though, Oklahoma State is competitive: Like Alabama and LSU, they’re winning by more than three touchdowns per game, have wins over a pair of teams currently ranked in every major poll (Texas A&M and Texas) and three “secondary” wins (over Missouri, Tulsa and UL-Lafayette) that easily rank alongside the Crimson Tide/Tiger routs over the bottom half of the SEC — the computers, in fact, tend to view the Cowboys’ schedule as the toughest of any ranked team except Texas A&M (see below). Caveats about the defense remain going forward, but they haven’t stopped OSU from putting together a first-rate resumé to date.

• Movin’ on up. Texas Tech and USC vault from out of the poll altogether to the mid-teens on the strength of big wins over Oklahoma and Notre Dame, respectively, and the Red Raiders may be my Restrospectively Overvalued Pick of the Week. I feel better about the Trojans, though, on the heels of what feels like a breakthrough win in South Bend: After a month of squeaking by the likes of Minnesota, Utah and Arizona, SC finally delivered its first legitimately impressive win of the Kiffin era. At the same time, it got a strength-of-schedule boost from Syracuse‘s surprising blowout over West Virginia, good enough to rocket it into its highest standing of the year — just in time to trashed by Stanford this weekend in the L.A. Coliseum.

• Parity before the storm. The Big 12 is the big winner this week with seven of ten teams in the poll at large, better than its nearest competition in the top-heavy SEC and muddled Big Ten (five teams apiece) and dramatically better per capita. Of course, those seven teams also have 13 games left to play against one another, and unbeaten Kansas State alone is about to embark on a four-week gauntlet against Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M and Texas that could eject the Wildcats from the rankings in short order. But considering it’s going to survive the current round of conference realignment, after all, this isn’t a bad time to be in that league, unless you happen to be a defensive coordinator.

• Proof. This week’s resumé grid for public consumption:

L: Losses
PPG: Average margin of victory (points per game)
YPP: Average margin per play (yards per play)
Sked: Strength of schedule (as calculated by Jeff Sagarin)

As always, everything will be completely different next week.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Cal coach Jeff Tedford has told his players that whatever happened between UCLA and Arizona should stay between those teams and not have a bearing on the Bears’ game against the Bruins this week.

That’s good in theory, but it’s hard denying that six UCLA players, including three of the team’s top four receivers, will be suspended for Saturday’s game after last Thursday’s bench-clearing brawl during the Bruins 48-12 loss to the Wildcats.

“I told the team that has nothing to do with us,” Tedford said. “We’re not going to get caught up in that. I know there’s going to be a lot made of it through the week, but I want us to stay away from that.”

But it’s a huge opportunity for Cal to get a much-needed win and move one game closer toward bowl eligibility after missing the postseason a year ago. UCLA’s best receiver will be Nelson Rosario, who has 30 catches for 558 yards, but after that it’s pretty bleak. Josh Smith, who has six catches, will start and UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel is considering burning the redshirt of freshman receiver Devin Lucien.

But Tedford quashed any thinking of a potential opportunity and thinks the losses of the six players will actually make UCLA a stronger team.

“I’m sure they’ll rally around the people that are playing,” Tedford said. “I know how teams typically respond to something like that. There’s a rallying cry. Really, anytime you see something like this happen, teams come out stronger than anything because of solidarity and the rallying cry it can bring out.”

Neuheisel is hoping Tedford is right. The Bruins are still in the hunt for the Pac-12 South and despite their loss to a bad Arizona team, the Bruins could win that side of the conference should they win out. That’s a pretty tall task, considering they still have games against Arizona State and USC remaining.

“You have to discard he emotional setback that that game can give you because it’s baggage,” Neuheisel said. “It doesn’t help you go forward. It needs to be instead churned into fuel that can help energize you for the next contest. That’s exactly where we have to be. We have to get energized. We’ve been through tough losses here before and we’ve responded and we need to respond again.”

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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For those of you keeping track this summer — and there were a lot of you — Oregon cornerback/return man Cliff Harris‘ driving record produced even more eye-popping stats behind the wheel than last year’s All-America campaign on the field: 118 mph on a suspended license, $8,500 in fines for at least 11 outstanding citations, a one-game suspension for arguably the biggest game of the year and finally six more games in depth chart limbo, where he’s remained since being pulled over back in June.

As of Monday, “limbo” would be a step up: Harris added three more lines to the box score in the form of fresh citations for driving with a suspended license, driving while uninsured and failure to wear a seatbelt. To his discipline record, coach Chip Kelly has added “a complete prohibition from all football activities until the matter is resolved.” His odds of seeing the field again this year from the furthest reaches of Kelly’s doghouse: Well, better than his odds of fulfilling projections as a first-round draft pick, at least.

Kelly has earned a reputation for a killer poker face when it comes to extended discipline: Before he relegated the most dangerous defender in the Pac-12 to second string, he also upheld season-long bans against two other former Duck stars, running back LeGarrette Blount and quarterback Jeremiah Masoli, for exploding into a post-game rampage and allegedly robbing a frat house, respectively. (Blount was granted a pardon near the end of the 2009 season, ultimately sitting out ten full games; Masoli made the decision a little easier by getting arrested again.) With Kelly, the suspension is just phase one, from which players seem to start over from square one.

That’s a luxury you have when you’re able to consistently plug new players into one of the most prolific offenses in the nation. In Harris’ case, he also has the luxury of a two-week buffer in which “tough love” is unlikely to have any impact whatsoever on the results against Washington State (against whom Oregon opened Monday as a 36½-point favorite) and Washington. After that, the Ducks’ season will be made or broken in back-to-back dates with Stanford and USC, and their NFL-bound quarterbacks, Andrew Luck and Matt Barkley, at whose expense Harris collected three of his Pac-10-best six interceptions last year in Oregon’s biggest wins en route to the BCS Championship Game. With a perfect finish and a little help, a return trip to the title game may still be on the table. Whether that remains true with one of the most dynamic players in the country watching from the sideline — and whether Kelly will stick by his guns if it looks like it doesn’t — we may be about to find out.

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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Quarterback Matt Barkley thinks Notre Dame players quit in the final minutes of USC’s 31-17 win over the Irish in South Bend, a sentiment several USC players have expressed since the game ended.

“I was shocked that they didn’t use the timeouts because we got on the field with … about seven minutes left, and I thought they were planning on stopping us and saving their timeouts for the end when they had the ball,” Barkley said Monday in an interview with Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley on 710 ESPN in Los Angeles. “It seemed from our sideline and our perspective that they did give up. It seemed uncharacteristic of Notre Dame. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been on that sideline.”

Notre Dame had timeouts to burn in the fourth quarter when USC got the ball back with 6:43 remaining and chose to sit on them while USC used 10 consecutive runs to whittle the clock down. USC players were baffled by the move because Notre Dame could have gotten the ball back with ample time had it gotten a defensive stop and had some clock management.

“At the end there, when they didn’t call those timeouts, they just quit,” USC linebacker Chris Galippo said after the game. “And that’s what Notre Dame football’s about. They’re not anything like USC.”

On Monday, Galippo backed off those comments, saying on Twitter that he didn’t mean to offend anyone and that it was a great game by both teams.

USC’s comments are probably some of the harshest that have come out of this bitter rivalry in quite some time, but Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly refused to fire back during his teleconference Sunday. Kelly, whose team is 4-3, unranked and in line to finish yet another season without a BCS bowl berth, didn’t think his team ever quit.

“I don’t know if that’s the case,” Kelly said. “To the victors go the spoils. I think we probably would have said the same thing last year. Again, how we evaluate our players, we didn’t play the kind of football we wanted to play.”

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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It seems like every week teams are doing something to make their uniforms a little more snazzy and this week it’s Ohio State‘s turn.

On Monday, Buckeye tight end Reid Fragel tweeted a photo of the new helmets his team plans to wear for this weekend’s game against Wisconsin. And they actually look pretty fresh (do the kids still use the word fresh?) with silver sandwiching a red panel down the middle and the player’s numbers on either side.

The entire uniform is part of Nike’s Pro Combat series, which also has made uniforms for Michigan, Stanford and LSU.

While the new helmets – and uniforms – are cool, the Buckeyes probably won’t need any more motivation to get amped (do the kids still say amped?) for a game against a Wisconsin team that is reeling after a last-second 37-31 loss to Michigan State last weekend.

Ohio State has had two weeks to prepare for this game and get its offense squared away after a questionable effort in the 17-7 win against Illinois. In that game, Ohio State completed just one pass — albeit for a touchdown — and managed just 228 yards of total offense. The Buckeyes seemed content keeping the ball out of the hands of quarterback Braxton Miller and relying on the legs of running back Dan Herron and the Buckeye defense, which forced three turnovers.

But Ohio State won’t have the luxury of using just half of the offense against a Wisconsin team that scores quickly and will be motivated to erase last week’s loss.

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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Quarterback Matt Barkley thinks Notre Dame players quit in the final minutes of USC‘s 31-17 win over the Irish in South Bend, a sentiment several USC players have expressed since the game ended.

“I was shocked that they didn’t use the timeouts because we got on the field with … about seven minutes left, and I thought they were planning on stopping us and saving their timeouts for the end when they had the ball,” Barkley said Monday in an interview with Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley on 710 ESPN Los Angeles. “It seemed from our sideline and our perspective that they did give up. It seemed uncharacteristic of Notre Dame. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been on that sideline.”

Notre Dame had timeouts to burn in the fourth quarter when USC got the ball back with 6:43 remaining and chose to sit on them while USC used 10 consecutive runs to whittle the clock down. USC players were baffled by the move because Notre Dame could have gotten the ball back with ample time had it gotten a defensive stop and had some clock management.

“At the end there, when they didn’t call those timeouts, they just quit,” USC linebacker Chris Galippo said after the game. “And that’s what Notre Dame football’s about. They’re not anything like USC.”

On Monday, Galippo backed off those comments, saying on Twitter that he didn’t mean to offend anyone and that it was a great game by both teams.

USC’s comments are probably some of the harshest that have come out of this bitter rivalry in quite some time, but Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly refused to fire back during his teleconference Sunday. Kelly, whose team is 4-3, unranked and in line to finish yet another season without a BCS bowl berth, didn’t think his team ever quit.

“I don’t know if that’s the case,” Kelly said. “To the victors go the spoils. I think we probably would have said the same thing last year. Again, how we evaluate our players, we didn’t play the kind of football we wanted to play.”

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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Quarterback Matt Barkley thinks Notre Dame players quit in the final minutes of USC‘s 31-17 win over the Irish in South Bend, a sentiment several USC players have expressed since the game ended.

“I was shocked that they didn’t use the timeouts because we got on the field with … about seven minutes left, and I thought they were planning on stopping us and saving their timeouts for the end when they had the ball,” Barkley said Monday in an interview with Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley on 710 ESPN Los Angeles. “It seemed from our sideline and our perspective that they did give up. It seemed uncharacteristic of Notre Dame. I wouldn’t have wanted to have been on that sideline.”

Notre Dame had timeouts to burn in the fourth quarter when USC got the ball back with 6:43 remaining and chose to sit on them while USC used 10 consecutive runs to whittle the clock down. USC players were baffled by the move because Notre Dame could have gotten the ball back with ample time had it gotten a defensive stop and had some clock management.

“At the end there, when they didn’t call those timeouts, they just quit,” USC linebacker Chris Galippo said after the game. “And that’s what Notre Dame football’s about. They’re not anything like USC.”

On Monday, Galippo backed off those comments, saying on Twitter that he didn’t mean to offend anyone and that it was a great game by both teams.

USC’s comments are probably some of the harshest that have come out of this bitter rivalry in quite some time, but Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly refused to fire back during his teleconference Sunday. Kelly, whose team is 4-3, unranked and in line to finish yet another season without a BCS bowl berth, didn’t think his team ever quit.

“I don’t know if that’s the case,” Kelly said. “To the victors go the spoils. I think we probably would have said the same thing last year. Again, how we evaluate our players, we didn’t play the kind of football we wanted to play.”

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Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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