I said it on Tuesday, and it’s worth repeating: The first rule in conference realignment is, Nothing is a done deal until it’s a done deal. I should have stopped there.

Because while everyone from the New York Times to the West Virginia dailies in West Virginia was literally proclaiming the Mountaineers’ pending defection from the Big East to the Big 12 “a done deal” — local outlets even went ahead with the obligatory “Meet the new rivals” stories — the actual deal was about run into a big, L-shaped wall:

After being informed by Big 12 officials that it would be admitted to the conference, West Virginia now finds itself in a holding pattern.

A Big 12 conference call Tuesday night was expected to be a formality on West Virginia’s road to admittance. Instead, objections were raised.

A late push by Louisville has put political pressure on the Big 12 and opened the possibility of Louisville’s being the university that is admitted instead of West Virginia. Two people with direct knowledge of the situation said that lobbying by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, including to David Boren, the president of the University of Oklahoma and a former senator, helped slow West Virginia’s admittance to the Big 12.

Again, the locals confirmed the eleventh-hour backtracking. A source “with direct knowledge” of the negotiations told the New York Times “it’s 50-50 right now between West Virginia and Louisville” to replace (presumably) SEC-bound Missouri as the tenth team at the Big 12 table, and the issue may not be settled until the next Big 12 board meeting on Monday night. If the Mountaineers remain a tentative favorite, obviously the question is a long way from being settled.

It’s not one either side is likely to concede, either. If the reports of West Virginia’s exit were greatly exaggerated, the reports of the Big East’s impending demise as a major football conference were not: Losing Louisville would leave the league in the same position, standing by with five remaining members — Cincinnati, Connecticut, Rutgers, South Florida and West Virginia — and a continental expansion plan — Air Force, Boise State, Houston, Navy and SMU — that doesn’t go far enough to take its automatic bid to a BCS bowl game off the bubble, risking its demotion to the ranks of the Have-Not leagues.

In fact, if Boise and Co. aren’t convinced that the new alignment secures the bid past 2013, they may decide to take their chances in the pending Mountain West/Conference USA merger, and the Big East will be forced to join or die. The lone invitation to the Big 12, with its rock-solid BCS bid, is like the letter of transit in Casablanca.

If high-ranking senators are directly involved in the lobbying process, the dollar signs in someone’s office are already blinking with a vengeance. And as Rich Rodriguez — or anyone who’s read about his exit from Morgantown in the new book “Three and Out” — can tell you, the combination of politics and football in West Virginia is not for the feint or trusting of heart. That goes double where there’s big money involved. It goes triple where they feel like they’ve been betrayed. I hope McConnell and the Cardinals came to play hardball, because the fight for the last ticket out of the desert is about to get ugly.

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

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BEST OF TIMES: A snapshot of teams, coaches and players at their peak…

Tommy Tuberville. Tubs has spent the better part of two years at Texas Tech toiling in the long, unforgettable shadow of his swashbuckling predecessor, much of it based on the simple fact that Tuberville is not, nor ever will be, Mike Leach. He was the guy who watered down the offense that had defined the Raiders to the rest of the country and hadn’t won any games worth writing home about. Suddenly, in the span of a few lightning-delayed hours, he’s the guy whose offense put the ball in the air 53 times in the upset of the year.

Where the national narrative is concerned, the Raiders’ 41-38 ambush of Oklahoma as 29-point road underdogs is about OU’s uncharacteristic failures at home — the win snapped a 39-game winning streak in Norman dating back to 2005 — particularly on defense. As far as Texas Tech is concerned, though, it was the moment when its new regime came into its own, and did it in precisely the high-flying fashion that put Raider football on the map: After a 452-yard, four-touchdown barrage against the Sooners, Tech ranks third nationally in passing, fifth in total offense, has scored at least 34 points in every game and ought to return to a warmer welcome than usual Saturday against Iowa State.

USC‘s Defense. All things considered, Saturday’s effort in a 31-17 upset at Notre Dame was the Trojans’ best in two years under defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, in more ways than one: The Irish’s 267 total yards was a new season low for both offense and defense, Notre Dame’s offense only reached the end zone once (its second touchdown came via kickoff return) and three ND turnovers gave USC eight takeaways in the last two games — three more than it managed in its first five games combined. “Hopefully, this is who we are,” said head coach Lane Kiffin on Sunday. “I would kind of argue we’ve been this way more than we haven’t.”

For his sake, he’d better hope Saturday was who the Trojans are, and that they’re only getting: Next up is Stanford, currently averaging more than 46 points on a little shy of 500 yards per game with minimal effort from quarterback Andrew Luck, which shouldn’t need much time to bring the brief nostalgia trip back to reality.

Cincinnati. Congratulations, Bearcats: Two weeks into conference play and you’re the last Big East team standing without a conference loss. Enjoy it, before you get consumed by the knot that is the Big East standings, too.

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WORST OF TIMES: …and of the ones way down in the hole.

Maryland. The Terps fired an alum with ten solid years in College Park and a second ACC Coach of the Year award to his name in 2010, and what did it get? An uninspiring replacement, a set of widely mocked uniforms and a direct line to the bottom of the ACC standings.

Since knocking off suspension-ravaged Miami on opening night, Maryland has dropped five of six — the one win coming over Towson — with a 31-point home loss to Temple, a blown second half lead against Clemson and, most recently, a 41-16 rout at the hands of reeling Florida State. Already, first-year coach Randy Edsall has had endure heavy attrition and public grumbling about the transition from predecessor Ralph Friedgen. Sophomore Danny O’Brien, widely regarded as the best quarterback in the ACC coming into the year, is fleeing for the exit at the end of the year. With another loss or two over he last five, more than a few Terp fans will be suggesting they send Edsall packing instead.

Rick Neuheisel. Sure, mathematically, UCLA still has a lot to lose: At 3-4, the Bruins are only one game below .500 and only one game back of Arizona State for the lead in a weak Pac-12 South — newcomers Colorado and Utah have yet to win a game in their new conference in eight tries — theoretically leaving a further downward trajectory as a division title, a winning record and finally another season on Neuheisel’s watch are successively crossed off the checklist in November. Neuheisel has even vowed not to throw in the towel, on the heels of a fresh vote of confidence from his athletic director. Surely there are still deeper disappointments to come.

Mathematically, yes. Emotionally, no: After last Thursday’s nationally televised, 48-12 embarrassment at Arizona — not just a loss at the hands of a lame-duck outfit that had just fired its head coach on the heels of its tenth consecutive loss vs. I-A/FBS competition, but a listless massacre at the hands of a lame-duck outfit that had just fired its head coach on the heels of its tenth consecutive loss vs. I-A/FBS competition — even one-time Neuheisel backers aren’t bothering to pretend he can still salvage his job. Things could conceivably get better, as improbable as that seems. But once you’ve watched your defense yield 254 yards on the ground to the nation’s 119th-ranked rushing offense, it cannot possibly get any worse.

Navy. Saturday’s 38-35 loss to East Carolina was the Academy’s fifth in a row, putting the Midshipmen on the fast track to their first losing season since 2002. The worst part of the skid: Four of the five losses have come by three points or less, two of them marred by controversy in the final seconds.

On the bright side, they get a chance to right the ship this weekend (no pun intended) against a perennial punching bag.

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

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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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The first rule in conference realignment is, Nothing is a done deal until it’s a done deal, a lesson we’ve learned the hard way two years in a row. At the moment, though, everyone with the slightest interest in the subject — up to and including the power brokers of the schools and conferences in question — is working on two assumptions that appear very, very certain.

The first is that Missouri is days away from announcing its formal withdrawal from the Big 12 and subsequent arrival in the SEC. Chancellor Brady Deaton has already been given the go-ahead to execute the move if and when he sees fit, and his latest message to the Big 12 is “I wish them the best and all of that.” The second assumption, as reported by multiple outlets this morning, is that the Big 12 will respond immediately to Missouri’s departure by extending an invitation to West Virginia:

West Virginia is headed to the Big 12, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, a move that leaves the Big East with five football programs and an uncertain future. The person said Tuesday that the Mountaineers had “applied and are accepted,” leaving only legal entanglements from making the move official. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal had not been formally announced.

Word from the locals is that the move is “a done deal” — there’s that term again — with a press conference conference scheduled for tomorrow. I think it’s safe to book it: The Mountaineers are headed for the Heartland.

The good news for the Big East: Having now successfully blunted the exits of Missouri and Texas A&M with the addition of West Virginia and TCU, the Big 12is  reportedly content to remain at ten members for the foreseeable future, meaning it won’t be pursuing Louisville as a potential target for expansion. The bad news for the Big East: With its most consistently successful football school leaving five second-rate football programs in its wake, the Big East as we know it is finished as a major football conference.

If it remains as a free-standing football conference at all, it will be in barely recognizable form — of the eight charter members for Big East football in 1992, only one remains: Rutgers — and it will be without its only notable asset, an automatic bid to the Bowl Championship Series. That bid only existed in the first place because of the presence of one legitimate national power (Miami) and respectable lot of second-tier contenders (Pitt, Syracuse, Virginia Tech and West Virginia) in the mid-nineties, any of which was likely to be making a few national ripples at any given time. The bid barely survived the exit of Miami and Virginia Tech to the ACC in the last decade, and may have already been on the chopping block with Pitt and Syracuse’s decision to follow the ‘Canes and Hokies out last month. West Virginia’s defection is like the last crew member hopping into the last lifeboat.

Of the five members left standing, three of them — Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida — are less than a decade removed from the obscurity of Conference USA, and a fourth (UConn) is barely a decade removed from its transition out of I-AA. The fifth is Rutgers.

The hope for those schools when they were “promoted” to the Big East to replace Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech in 2004-05 was that the newcomers would rise to the level of the new surroundings as emerging, “big time” programs. For brief stretches (Louisville under Bobby Petrino, Cincinnati under Brian Kelly) they managed to look the part. But the reality was the opposite: The addition of mid-major schools brought the Big East that much closer to a mid-major conference. Since 2004, five different head coaches have won the Big East championship at five different schools — Walt Harris at Pitt, Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia, Petrino at Louisville, Kelly at Cincinnati and Randy Edsall at UConn — and all five have accepted more attractive offers from outside of the league immediately after winning the title. Among those offers were gigs at Stanford and Maryland.

It was already a stepping-stone conference, a poaching ground for the actual players, and now that there’s nothing left worth poaching, it’s left to join the other Have-Not leagues that have never pretended they’re anything but. In fact, survival may dictate that it literally join them, under the umbrella of a massive “super conference” already being forged by an unwieldy marriage of convenience between the Mountain West and Conference USA. The merger gives those two conferences — or one conference, or whatever it is now — all of the leverage in the next round of musical chairs: Where the Big East appeared poised to invite up to six Mtn. and C-USA teams to fill out its dwindling ranks, there is no compelling incentive to leave a relatively stable ship for one that appears to be sinking. Suddenly, it’s the Big East that has to accept the reality of the new landscape, or cease to exist.

There’s still a chance (possibly a distant one, but a real one) that a colossus consisting of the Mountain West, Conference USA and the Big East could sustain an automatic BCS bid. The tentative plan, according to the Boston Globe, is a 28 or 32-team league split into four divisions, the winners of which would meet over the last two weekends of the regular season in a mini-playoff for the bid, which frankly sounds like kind of a great idea for everyone involved: It opens access to more schools without adding another slice to the pay, and thereby also increases the competitiveness — i.e. undefeated Boise State (of Houston, or Hawaii, who whomever happens to be the hot upstart du jour) gets the automatic bid out of a huge pool of teams instead of unranked UConn out of a very small one, which would also free up a coveted at-large bid that would have gone to undefeated Boise State for the traditional power conferences. That’s not as good as a playoff (which the Mountain West still wants, for the record), but it is a proactive solution to a lot of problems.

That’s one thing the Big East has never had: A solution. Poaching Conference USA for Conference USA-level programs bought it a little time, but it did nothing in the interim to address the larger existential crisis — the never-ending, decades-long trend toward separating the “Haves” from the “Have Nots” — that forced it to fill out its ranks with the Have-Nots in the first place. When the Big East escaped the guillotine last summer, its response was to invite TCU and dither over the addition of Villanova. The former hopped another ship before it ever came aboard, and nobody outside of Philadelphia and a board room in New York even pretended to care about the latter.

The time for the only, bold proactive decision the league seemed to have at its disposal — kicking out Notre Dame in non-football sports, in hopes of grinding the realignment gears to a halt by driving the Irish into the Big Ten — has long passed. And Notre Dame may be on its way out, anyway.

What the Big East is left with, then, is a shell that no one has any good reason to join and its remaining members are actively attempting to flee. If it survives — and it still might, with the possible addition of Houston, Air Force and others — it will be with the scraps the rest of the adults’ table has already passed over. And soon enough, it will arrive to find its chair has been taken away.

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

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Making the morning rounds.

• Hokie Hokie hurt. Virginia Tech linebacker Bruce Taylor — a 2010 All-ACC pick currently leading the Hokies in tackles for the second consecutive season — will undergo season-ending foot surgery next week, making him the third defensive starter ruled out for the year since opening day. Tech was already playing without defensive linemen Antoine Hopkins and Kwamaine Battle (both victims of knee injuries) and linebacker Jeron Gouveia-Winslow (foot), and played last week without All-ACC cornerback Jayron Hosley. Taylor’s replacement, former starter Barquell Rivers, has played just a few dozen plays this year due to injury himself. In all, the Hokie D could be traveling to Duke Saturday with five opening-day starters on the sideline.

“I can’t remember” a more injury-plagued season, said coach Frank Beamer, in his 25th year as Tech’s head coach, “but I think it’s just the way it goes. Some seasons you get to play with the same guy every week and that just isn’t the case for us.” [Associated Press, Washington Post]

• Seeking a second opinion from Dr. Kiper. Injured Arizona State cornerback Omar Bolden, a 2010 All-Pac-10 pick who was ruled out for the year with an ACL tear in the spring, tweeted Monday that he’s been cleared by a doctor to return “from a medical standpoint,” but also added, “I won’t play unless I’m just as effective as I was 6 months ago. … Refuse to damage stock!” Bolden returned to non-contact drills last week, but didn’t want to put a timetable on a possible return, according to the Arizona Republic, because “he doesn’t want to disappoint himself or fans if he doesn’t meet it.” [@Os_Island_TS]

In other injury news… Northwestern quarterback Dan Persa is listed as “questionable” again, this time for the Wildcats’ trip to Indiana. … Alabama offensive lineman Cyrus Kouandijo, one of the most hyped freshmen at any position in the 2011 recruiting class, is undergoing season-ending surgery to repair a “pretty significant knee injury.” [al.com] … South Florida loses starters at wide receiver and cornerback for the rest of the regular to a fractured ankle and ACL tear, respectively. [@CoachHoltzUSF] … And Florida, mercifully, expects senior quarterback John Brantley to play Saturday against Georgia for the first time in nearly a month, relieving the offense of the ongoing growing pains of freshmen Jacoby Brissett and Jeff Driskel. [Orlando Sentinel]

• Mo money, mo problems. More than 300 current college football and men’s basketball players from Arizona, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Purdue and UCLA have signed a petition asking the NCAA to “realize its mission to educate and protect us with integrity” by giving players an unspecified cut of ever-ballooning revenues. “I really want to voice my opinions,” said Georgia Tech defensive end Denzel McCoy, a redshirt freshman who led 54 other Yellow Jacket players in signing the petition. “The things we go through, the hours we put in, what our bodies go through, we deserve some sort of (results). College football is a billion-dollar industry.”

The petition by current players — a first — joins ongoing lawsuits by former players demanding to be compensated for use of their image in commercial products, among other rights that are standard in every walk of American life not governed by the NCAA. The next item on the agenda, according to perennial NCAA critic Dan Wetzel: A player boycott of minor bowl games. [Associated Press, Yahoo! Sports]

• Berry back in police sights. Ohio State running back Jaamal Berry has been named as a suspect — but not charged — in an assault against a 21-year-old non-student who was allegedly “struck in the face with a closed fist” during an altercation last Friday, according to a campus police report. The victim told police that Berry started yelling “vulgar remarks” at him after he was hit by a car, and proceeded to cross the street and punch both the victim and a friend. Berry was later identified by a witness and by the victim, who confirmed Berry’s identity when he was shown a photo; athletic director Gene Smith said the department is aware Berry may have been involved in an altercation.

The incident is the second alleged assault involving Berry in less than a month, following a bizarre case in which he reportedly attacked another student in a state of unexplained delirium last month. [The Lantern]

Quickly… Washington State‘s student paper calls for Paul Wulff to be fired. … Mysterious vandals target Texas’ campus in Austin. … The Big Ten take on the “Oversigning Bowl.” … Will Muschamp laments “a lot of wasted ink” on the fact that he played at Georgia, whatever “ink” is. … The Knight Commission: Still probin’ after all these years. … And Missouri is still technically a member of the Big 12, but its chancellor wishes the conference “the best, and all of that.”

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

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Weekly notes from the undercard.

Houston trashed Marshall Saturday, 63-28, arguably its best win to date en route to a 7-0 start that has the Cougars ranked in the top 20 of every major poll. Riding the record-breaking arm of quarterback Case Keenum, UH is leading the nation in passing offense, total offense and scoring offense, has scored at least 49 points in four consecutive games and is outscoring by an average margin of almost 26 points. Keenum now owns one major NCAA passing record and is closing in on a couple more. And yet, arguably more than any other team in the country, the jury remains out on its place in the national conversation.

Jeff Sagarin ranks Houston’s schedule as the 117th-toughest in the nation, behind a handful of I-AA/FCS outfits like Gardner-Webb and South Dakota State.
Of the Cougars’ first seven victims, one (UTEP, at 4-3) is currently sporting a winning record. Their next three opponents (Rice, UAB and Tulane) have combined to win five. By the time they hit season-ending dates against SMU and Tulsa in November, it’s entirely possible they’ll have ten wins to their name without a single .500 scalp among them. If they run the table to 13-0, including the Conference USA Championship Game in December, the most valuable win on their resumé will be against either SMU or Southern Miss, and the only one win will be over a team from a “Big Six” BCS conference: UCLA, which appears on the verge of firing its head coach. This team has “Hawaii 2007″ written all over it.

Still, the cold reality of BCS arithmetic leaves the window at least cracked for the at-large BCS opportunity that Hawaii blew in spectacular fashion four years ago. At this point, we can be reasonably certain that three of the four at-large bids belong to Boise State (assuming the Broncos close out a manageable schedule as usual) and the second-best teams in the SEC and Big 12. We can be equally certain that there won’t be an at-large bid for the ACC or Big East, or for Notre Dame. That leaves three options for slot no. 4: The runner-up in the Pac-12, the runner-up in the Big Ten and Houston.

There are a lot of ‘ifs’ in that scenario that break against the Cougars, beginning with the biggest: If they fail to run the table, the discussion is moot. But if the competition is between, say, a two-loss Oregon, a two-loss Wisconsin and an undefeated Houston, the latter may not be dismissed from that discussion so easily.

• THE CRIB SHEET. Elsewhere in mid-majordom…

• In Conference USA news, Southern Miss sits atop the East Division after a 27-3 rout of SMU. The Golden Eagles are now 6-1, bowl eligible for the 14th consecutive year, ranked No. 25 in the coaches poll and well on their way to their best record since winning 10 games in 1988. USM is the clear favorite to win the East Division, though it still has to play East Carolina, which is also 2-1 in conference play. Like Houston, though, all but one team remaining on the Golden Eagles’ schedule — UTEP — has a losing record.

• The seventh annual Michigan MAC Football Championship (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing) was won this weekend, shockingly, by Eastern Michigan, a 14-10 winner over Western Michigan over Western Michigan in Ypsilanti. The championship is a round-robin affair between the three MAC schools in Michigan — Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan and Central Michigan — . EMU will get to keep the championship’s trophy for at least the next year.

• The fourth quarter woes for Utah State just won’t go away. The Aggies led in the fourth quarter against Louisiana Tech, but allowed the Bulldogs to score 10 fourth quarter points and rally to a 24-17 win. It’s the fifth game the Aggies have let slip away this season after leading in the fourth quarter.

• RUSH THE FIELD: Wins worthy of a bleacher-clearing celebration.
Western Kentucky is quickly becoming the hottest team in college football. OK, that’s a bit of an overstatement, but the Hilltoppers have won three consecutive games, including last week’s shocking upset of one-loss SBC frontrunner Louisiana-Lafayette, more than they won in their first two years as a I-A/FBS program combined.

“This is a great win for our guys, our University and our fans,” said coach Wille Taggart. “I’m really proud of the way our entire team got themselves ready and took care of business.”

The win was so thrilling that 15,000 fans on hand actually stormed the field — possibly a first in Bowling Green, at least as a “major” program, and we have four minutes of video to prove it:

• GAME OF THE WEEK: UAB 26, Central Florida 24
In one of the more shocking upsets of the non-AQ season, UAB’s Ty Long kicked a 40-yard field goal with 21 seconds remaining to give the Blazers their first win of the season over fast-fading UCF. The Knights actually got the ball past midfield with 14 seconds left, but UAB safety Chase Daniel intercepted a Blake Bortless pass at the goal line to seal the win.

What happened to Central Florida? The defending Conference USA champs have been in a tailspin, losing four of their last five games since a 2-0 start.

• YOUTUBE DEDICATION OF THE WEEK:
This week’s YouTube dedication goes out to Tulsa’s alternate helmets, which were definitely a fashion statement.

• PLAYER OF THE WEEK: Bobby Rainey, RB, Western Kentucky.
Rainey racked up 206 yards rushing — 99 in the fourth quarter alone— and three touchdowns to lead the Hilltoppers’ upset of Louisiana-Lafayette. Through seven games, he’s topped 100 yards on the ground in every game but one and ranks third in the nation in rushing.

Honorable mention: East Carolina quarterback Dominique Davis set an NCAA record by completing his first 26 passes against in a 38-35 ECU win over Navy. … Florida International linebacker Winston Fraser had a career-best 17 tackles in a loss to Arkansas State. … Boise State linebacker Byron Hout had a career-best 18 tackles in the Broncos’ win over Air Force. … And Nevada running back Mike Ball rushed for a career-high 198 yards and a touchdown in a win against Fresno State. His runs of 35 and 41 yards were the longest by a Nevada player this season.

A SOMEWHAT ARBITRARY MID-MAJOR TOP 10
1. Boise State (7-0). The Broncos actually got a stiff test against Air Force’s triple option, but survived to maintain their undefeated campaign.
2. Houston (7-0). Marshall talked a little smack heading into the game and Keenum and the Cougars made them pay with one of their most ruthlessly efficient games of the season.
3. Southern Miss (6-1). The Golden Eagles are off to their best start since 2000 season. After starting 6-1 that year, however, they went on to drop three of their next four.
4. TCU (4-2). Apparently the Horned Frogs put their bye week to good use as they destroyed New Mexico 69-0, their first shutout of the season.
5. BYU (6-2). The Cougars earned bowl eligibility by defeating Idaho State, their fifth consecutive win after a 1-2 start.
6. SMU (5-2). The Mustangs were crushed by Southern Miss, but remain the biggest threat to Houston in the West Division.
7. Arkansas State (5-2). The Red Wolves have quietly crept into the Sun Belt title picture, but still have a lot of tough competition remaining.
8. Louisiana-Lafayette (6-2). The Ragin’ Cajuns perhaps got a little high with their surprising success over the first half of the season and overlooked Western Kentucky. They can still win the Sun Belt, but they’ll have to regroup from a bad loss.
9. San Diego State (4-2). The Aztecs had the week off, but should have an easy time with Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado State before their showdown with Boise State.
10.Toledo (5-3). The Rockets are the only undefeated team in the MAC West, but Ball State, Eastern Michigan and NIU are all in the hunt.
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Honorable Mention: Temple (5-3), Eastern Michigan (5-2), Ohio (5-3), Bowling Green (4-4).

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Matt Hinton contributed to this post.
Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

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Adjusting to the weekend’s new realities.

• Where everyone’s a champion. Literally. After the depressing three-way tangle that sent unranked, unqualified UConn into the slaughter last year, the best-case scenario for the Big East — at least from a BCS perspective — was the emergence of a clear frontrunner that took early command of the conference race and rode it into the postseason with a conquering flair. Good luck with that.

With Syracuse’s 49-23 thrashing of the league’s consensus frontrunner, West Virginia, seven of the Big East’s eight teams already carry at least one conference loss, including all three of the preseason favorites — West Virginia, Pittsburgh and South Florida, the only winless team at 0-3. Five of the eight are currently sitting at 1-1, in a web that already includes an unfathomable number of Team A > Team B > Team C > Team A scenarios.

The only team rising above the mire? Cincinnati, which rallied for the game-winning touchdown with 12 seconds left Saturday in a 37-34 win over South Florida to move to 2-0. If the Bearcats keep it up, the Big East may have a solid, undisputed champ that just happened to be blown out by one of the lesser members of the SEC in September. (See below.) If not, brace yourself for another knot and another prestige bid wasted on a middleweight clinging to the bottom of the polls, at best.

• We need a new carrot. Here’s Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly last week, speaking with the confidence of a coach in the midst of a four-game winning streak on the importance of the USC game as part of the Irish’s larger goal of landing in a BCS bowl:

“We want to get into a BCS game, and we know what we have to do. And that is, we’ve gotta win each and every game we play. So every game for us since going 0-2 has been that way. It’s been the same focus for us. It’s a huge game for us against USC. There’s no question about the tradition and the rivalry. But if we beat USC and don’t beat Navy, it doesn’t mean much. So I think that’s the perspective we take.”

And here’s Kelly on Sunday, after a 31-17 loss effectively snuffed out the Irish’s BCS hopes — no team has ever earned an at-large bid with more than two losses — insisting to a roomful of reporters already beginning to look toward 2012 that his team still has “plenty to play for”:

“I’ll be honest, the dangling of the [BCS] carrot is more about a sound bite,” Kelly said in his usual teleconference. “It’s not what we do on a day-to-day basis. We don’t come to practice dangling that carrot. We’re just so focused more on the detail.”
[…]
“I think you guys have more of a global view of everything,” Kelly said. “We just don’t operate that way. We’re dealing with a day-to-day process. We’re looking how we can improve, how we can stop Navy. The radio shows, the pundits can talk about that stuff. We just don’t get into those conversations. We focus on the day-to-day.”

Tangibly, the only goal Notre Dame has left to play for is the Champs Sports Bowl, its likely destination barring a complete collapse down the stretch that knocks the Irish out of bowl eligibility altogether. Less tangibly, Kelly said the larger goal remains “program building,” which sounds a lot like the same goal the Irish had around this time last year, after falling to 4-5 with back-to-back losses to Navy and Tulsa. From there, Notre Dame won three straight with a true freshman quarterback, including upsets over ranked Utah and USC, and crushed Miami in the bowl game to put “BCS Bowl” back at the center of the dartboard going into 2011.

The current team is set at quarterback (that freshman, Tommy Rees, appears entrenched as a sophomore), but now has four more imminently winnable games coming against Navy and the bottom half of the ACC Atlantic — Wake Forest, Maryland and Boston College — to get younger guys into the rotation, especially on the senior-laden defense. (Including linebacker Manti Te’o, the Irish are likely to be replacing their top six tacklers after the season.) If all goes according to plan, there’s one more big, measuring-stick game — at Stanford to close the season — to go out on the same mojo they rode in on, before the process starts over again with the trip to Palo Alto as the key reference point.

• Speaking of building for the future… Another week, another new tribulation for Tennessee, which plans to throw true freshman quarterback Justin Worley into the fire for his first career start Saturday against South Carolina. In fact, Worley’s first snap from center will be the first he’s ever taken as a college quarterback, just one measure of the impatience beginning to overtake the Vols in the midst of a four-game SEC losing streak. In two games since sophomore starter Tyler Bray went out with a broken hand against Georgia, senior Matt Simms has hit just 14 of 37 passes with three interceptions and zero touchdowns — bad enough to find the bench even when you’re throwing against arguably the two best defenses in the country, LSU and Alabama.

“I just feel like for us to go out and win games, we’re not throwing and catching the way we need to,” said coach Derek Dooley. “We just need to make this move. It’s not something that’s done on a whim.” No, it’s done out of pure, groping desperation.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Adjusting to the weekend’s new realities.

• Where everyone’s a champion. Literally. After the depressing three-way tangle that sent unranked, unqualified UConn into the slaughter last year, the best-case scenario for the Big East — at least from a BCS perspective — was the emergence of a clear frontrunner that took early command of the conference race and rode it into the postseason with a conquering flair. Good luck with that.

With Syracuse’s 49-23 thrashing of the league’s consensus frontrunner, West Virginia, seven of the Big East’s eight teams already carry at least one conference loss, including all three of the preseason favorites — West Virginia, Pittsburgh and South Florida, the only winless team at 0-3. Five of the eight are currently sitting at 1-1, in a web that already includes an unfathomable number of Team A > Team B > Team C > Team A scenarios.

The only team rising above the mire? Cincinnati, which rallied for the game-winning touchdown with 12 seconds left Saturday in a 37-34 win over South Florida to move to 2-0. If the Bearcats keep it up, the Big East may have a solid, undisputed champ that just happened to be blown out by one of the lesser members of the SEC in September. (See below.) If not, brace yourself for another knot and another prestige bid wasted on a middleweight clinging to the bottom of the polls, at best.

• We need a new carrot. Here’s Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly last week, speaking with the confidence of a coach in the midst of a four-game winning streak on the importance of the USC game as part of the Irish’s larger goal of landing in a BCS bowl:

“We want to get into a BCS game, and we know what we have to do. And that is, we’ve gotta win each and every game we play. So every game for us since going 0-2 has been that way. It’s been the same focus for us. It’s a huge game for us against USC. There’s no question about the tradition and the rivalry. But if we beat USC and don’t beat Navy, it doesn’t mean much. So I think that’s the perspective we take.”

And here’s Kelly on Sunday, after a 31-17 loss effectively snuffed out the Irish’s BCS hopes — no team has ever earned an at-large bid with more than two losses — insisting to a roomful of reporters already beginning to look toward 2012 that his team still has “plenty to play for”:

“I’ll be honest, the dangling of the [BCS] carrot is more about a sound bite,” Kelly said in his usual teleconference. “It’s not what we do on a day-to-day basis. We don’t come to practice dangling that carrot. We’re just so focused more on the detail.”
[…]
“I think you guys have more of a global view of everything,” Kelly said. “We just don’t operate that way. We’re dealing with a day-to-day process. We’re looking how we can improve, how we can stop Navy. The radio shows, the pundits can talk about that stuff. We just don’t get into those conversations. We focus on the day-to-day.”

Tangibly, the only goal Notre Dame has left to play for is the Champs Sports Bowl, its likely destination barring a complete collapse down the stretch that knocks the Irish out of bowl eligibility altogether. Less tangibly, Kelly said the larger goal remains “program building,” which sounds a lot like the same goal the Irish had around this time last year, after falling to 4-5 with back-to-back losses to Navy and Tulsa. From there, Notre Dame won three straight with a true freshman quarterback, including upsets over ranked Utah and USC, and crushed Miami in the bowl game to put “BCS Bowl” back at the center of the dartboard going into 2011.

The current team is set at quarterback (that freshman, Tommy Rees, appears entrenched as a sophomore), but now has four more imminently winnable games coming against Navy and the bottom half of the ACC Atlantic — Wake Forest, Maryland and Boston College — to get younger guys into the rotation, especially on the senior-laden defense. (Including linebacker Manti Te’o, the Irish are likely to be replacing their top six tacklers after the season.) If all goes according to plan, there’s one more big, measuring-stick game — at Stanford to close the season — to go out on the same mojo they rode in on, before the process starts over again with the trip to Palo Alto as the key reference point.

• Speaking of building for the future… Another week, another new tribulation for Tennessee, which plans to throw true freshman quarterback Justin Worley into the fire for his first career start Saturday against South Carolina. In fact, Worley’s first snap from center will be the first he’s ever taken as a college quarterback, just one measure of the impatience beginning to overtake the Vols in the midst of a four-game SEC losing streak. In two games since sophomore starter Tyler Bray went out with a broken hand against Georgia, senior Matt Simms has hit just 14 of 37 passes with three interceptions and zero touchdowns — bad enough to find the bench even when you’re throwing against arguably the two best defenses in the country, LSU and Alabama.

“I just feel like for us to go out and win games, we’re not throwing and catching the way we need to,” said coach Derek Dooley. “We just need to make this move. It’s not something that’s done on a whim.” No, it’s done out of pure, groping desperation.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Making the morning rounds.

• What was he thinking? Part one. USC coach Lane Kiffin said Sunday he was “shocked” that Notre Dame sat on all three timeouts in the fourth quarter of a 31-17 Trojan win, which ended with USC running off the final 6:48 on ten straight runs by tailback Curtis McNeal. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Kiffin said. “Obviously we were happy. I was scared they were going to call them, and I didn’t know what we were going to do kicker-wise. … The game was far from over. But I’m not complaining.” Linebacker Chris Galippo was somewhat more straightforward: “They just quit. That’s what Notre Dame football is all about. They’re not anything like ‘SC.”

“I don’t know if that’s the case,” Kelly said in response to Galippo. “To the victors go the spoils. We probably would have said the same thing last year [after Notre Dame's upset win over USC in Los Angeles]. How we evaluate our players, we didn’t play the kind of football we wanted to play.” [Orange County Register, Chicago Tribune]

• What was he thinking? Part two. In other late time-out news, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s Doug Lesmerises defended Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema’s decision to use two timeouts on defense in the final minute of the Badgers’ loss to Michigan State, giving the Spartans time to pick up an additional first down and throw up the game-winning Hail Mary as time expired. “At that point, Bielema was operating with what he should have thought was one of the best teams, and certainly one of the best offenses, in the nation,” Lesmerises writes. “Getting quarterback Russell Wilson the ball with any time on the clock would have been worth it. The Badgers were too good to play scared and settle for overtime.

” ‘We were going for the win,’ Bielema said afterward, and really, that’s all that needed to be said.” [Cleveland Plain-Dealer]

• D-Day Rock M-Day. Today could mark the beginning of the end for Missouri and the Big 12, according to PowerMizzou.com, which cites three separate, anonymous sources who say university chancellor Brady Deaton will announce the Tigers’ official withdrawal from the conference at a Big 12 Board of Directors meeting in Dallas. On Friday, Mizzou’s Board of Curators authorized Deaton to act on conference realignment and execute all relevant contracts with a new league — presumably the SEC — and Deaton is scheduled to attend this afternoon’s meeting in person.

“On Saturday, and again today, I’ve talked to all sorts of people familiar with the situation both at Missouri and elsewhere,” wrote the Kansas City Star’s Mike DeArmond on Sunday, “and every single one anticipates Missouri and the SEC will announce Mizzou as the 14th member of the SEC at some point this week.” [PowerMizzou.com, Kansas City Star]

• One of us, one of us. In somewhat less solid speculation, the Big East is reportedly being asked to consider joining the forthcoming Mountain West-Conference USA merger to create a sprawling superconference incorporating between 28 and 32 teams. According to a document (origin unknown) obtained by the Boston Globe, the plan would divide the country into four seven or eight-team divisions — the West, Mountain, Central and Big East — whose winners would then stage a mini-playoff for the league’s automatic bid to the BCS. The Big East would actually consider this in order to ensure it keeps its automatic bid to the BCS.

Notably absent from both the 28 and 32-team versions of the plan? West Virginia, which is presumed to be first in line to replace Missouri in the Big 12. [Boston Globe]

• Tate calls it a year. Maryland linebacker Kenny Tate, an All-ACC pick last year as a safety and likely a future draft pick, will undergo season-ending surgery for an undisclosed injury and seek a medical hardship to return for a fifth year in 2012. Tate led the team in tackles through four games but has missed the last three — all Maryland losses — for reasons the school isn’t clarifying.

“It is certainly a blow to our team to lose a player and leader of Kenny’s caliber, but we want to do what’s in his best interest,” said coach Randy Edsall, who expects Tate to miss six to nine months. “Our medical staff determined that surgery was the best way to proceed so that’s what we are going to do.” [Washington Post]

• Tragedy. As rumored on Saturday, the body of an Akron student was found inside the university’s stadium on Saturday morning, an apparent suicide. A spokesman for Akron said the body was found in the stadium’s bleachers around 10 a.m., but declined to release his identity or any details of the ongoing investigation. The Zips’ game against Ohio kicked off as scheduled at 3 p.m. the same afternoon, ending in a 37-20 Ohio win. [Associated Press]

Quickly… USC running back Dillon Baxter may have missed the Notre Dame game to be with his girlfriend as she was giving birth. … Three new injuries Saturday could leave Virginia Tech‘s defense without five opening-day starters for Saturday’s trip to Duke. … Police responding to a noise complaint use a stun gun on two Montana players. … ACC officials teach Florida State an incorrect lesson about punt returns. … Steve Spurrier calls his flap with local writer Ron Morris “history” and says Morris will be allowed at regular press conferences. … Virginia Tech adds another gravestone to its cemetery of road wins over ranked teams. … FX had had some minor technical difficulties at the start of the Oklahoma State-Missouri game. … And Bill Blankenship sings OMC.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Starting for the Denver Broncos today against the Miami Dolphins, Tebow did the thing he does best when it mattered: He won.

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