In honor of this weekend of weekends, where it appears the stars have aligned and I will not be leaving my couch at all Saturday, I’ve decided to pick all of this weekend’s conference championship games.

MAC CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIP - Miami (OH) at Central Michigan - 12:00

I’ll take the defending MAC Champion Chippewas and QB Dan LeFevour in this one. LeFevour recently won the MAC Offensive Player of the Year award after setting school records for completions, attempts, yards and total offense this season. Still, the game could be interested. Miami of Ohio does possess the conference’s best passing defense, best rushing and scoring defense. The question will be if the Redhawk offense, which ranks 10th in the conference in scoring, can put points on the board. I’ll take CMU.

CONFERENCE USA CHAMPIONSHIP : TULSA AT UCF - 12:00 P.M.

Tulsa has one of the best offenses in the country and UCF has one of the best running backs in America. I’ll take UCF in this one for any number of reasons, not the first of which is that my girlfriend is a Knight. The game is being played in Orlando, at their new Bright House Networks Stadium on campus so for that reason alone, I’ve gotta go with George O’ Leary’s squad. Not to mention that last week, Tulsa gave up over 700 yards of total offense, 541 threw the air. This could be a shoot out and is definitely worth your time. I’ll take the formerly Golden Knights of Central Florida.

ACC Championship - Virginia Tech at Boston College - 1:00 p.m.

I’ve been on the BC bandwagon and I don’t intend to get off despite that they face off against a much better Virginia Tech team than the one the Eagles beat earlier this year in Blacksburg. I think the game will ultimately come down to how well Tyrod Taylor/Sean Glennon is able to lead the Virginia Tech offense against an underrated and fast Boston College defense. If VT is able to move the ball effectively, it could be lights out for BC’s BCS dreams but I don’t anticipate that being the case. I’ll take the Eagles in a close one.

SEC Championship - Tennessee at LSU - 4:00 p.m.

In what could be Les Miles’ last SEC game as the head coach of LSU, I’ll take the Bayou Bengals coming off a heartbreaker last week against Arkansas. Tennessee has been one of the most hideously inconsistent teams in the SEC and I don’t think that the UT offense has what it takes to hang with the hard-hitting, lightning-quick LSU defense. LSU had better get creative on offense and not rely on the Hester up the middle, Keiland Williams to the outside, Matt Flynn on QB Draw that we’ve seen too many times this year. They need to spread the field and keep the ball away from Tennessee freshman cornerback Eric Berry who makes his Atlanta homecoming Saturday. I’ll take LSU by at least 10. The Tigers are just thankful they’re not playing Georgia.

Big 12 Championship - Missouri at Oklahoma - 8:00 p.m.

There’s an awful lot riding on this game for Missouri. For Mizzou QB Chase Daniel, it’s his chance to snatch the Heisman Trophy away from Tim Tebow, who’s been sizing up a place on his mantel for it for weeks. A great performance in a win against Oklahoma and the award for the nation’s best college football player is his. Bigger than that is that Missouri is playing for the national championship Saturday night. Beat Oklahoma and they’re in. I was asked earlier today by our publisher who I liked in this one. I explained that I would have taken Oklahoma had it not been for the announcement earlier this week that Sooner running back DeMarco Murray is done for the year with a dislocated kneecaps. Murray was the team’s most consistent running back and best offensive player, save wideout Malcolm Kelly. The key for Oklahoma will be forcing turnovers and getting on top early. If Mizzou gets in an early hole, maybe 10 or 14 points, I’m not sure they can come back from that against a pretty tough Oklahoma defense. Sam Bradford’s performance is huge for the Sooners. If he gets careless and starts throwing Favre-ian interceptions, it’s over for Oklahoma and we are looking at a Missouri-West Virginia National Championship. I am going to take a flyer on Bob Stoops and the upset-minded Sooners.

So there’s a lot of talk about how swift the hiring process was for the Texas A&M and Ole Miss head coaching vacancies. Some claim that minority candidates should, at least, have been interviewed for the jobs à la the NFL’s Rooney Rule. I can’t fathom the logic of those arguments.

I feel the need to preface this post by saying that I think minority candidates should always be interviewed and given equal consideration for any and all jobs based on their qualifications. That being said, this is college football, folks. You have recruits that have found out that the guy they committed to playing for has just been shown the door and you have to get into those households and assure them that the program isn’t going down the toilet. You simply can’t afford to go on a month-long artificial coaching search when the guy you want to hire is ready to accept the job. I undertstand the argument that interviewing minority candidates can lead to consideration for future gigs but you mean to tell me that excellent coaches like Tyrone Nix at South Carolina and Ron English at Michigan need to go through a faux interview process at Texas A&M to be considered for future head coaching jobs? If Athletic Directors don’t already have them in mind to fill their coaching vacancies, then they probably won’t have their jobs for very much longer.

At the end of the day, interviewing for college football head coaching jobs should be the same as an interview process for any job. If the guy you want most for your vacancy comes into your office and knocks you dead, are you going to go out and interview four more guys because people who don’t work in your organization think that’s right for you to do? I mean, let’s be adults for a minute. At the end of the day, an athletic director wants to get a guy he feels comfortable with as quickly as possible and Mike Sherman was at the top of their list and he wanted the job, they should have hired him as quickly as they did.

Watching College Gameday Live on ESPN yesterday, talking head Mark May was incensed that universities like Texas A&M were making “safe hires” like Sherman and that they were taking the easy way out instead of taking a chance on a fresh face. Let’s hold on a minute. Mike Sherman is no slouch. The guy was the head coach of one of the most famous franchise in the history of popular sports, he has ties to the universities and he’s available. I would have been thrilled to death if IU would have snatched Mike Sherman instead of giving Bill Lynch his four-year-extension.

And while, I’m taking shots at May (who makes a living taking shots at a nearly brain dead Lou Holtz every week), he made a comment that I find utterly ridiculous yesterday when naming African American candidates who should have been brought in to interview at Texas A&M (including Nix and English). He brought up current University of Buffalo head coach Turner Gill. May said that the only head coaching job that Gill is currently being considered for is the one at his alma mater, Nebraska. Then he said that because Gill has won five games at Buffalo, he should be on the short list for every vacancy in the country. So let me get this straight? Winning five wins at Buffalo, which has been an atrociously bad program since joining Div. I-A, gets you an interview at Michigan or Georgia Tech or Arkansas? Let’s not get carried away. If you can only muster five wins in the MAC, regardless of where you’re coaching, you don’t deserve a shot at the elite jobs in college football, regardless of your race. Bill Doba won five games at Washington State and got canned. Seven wins wasn’t enough for Chan Gailey to keep his job at Georgia Tech. So for winning five games at UB, you want to give Turner Gill a promotion? I don’t get it.

I like….

Bob Knight may have shot a couple more people. I generally think Bob Knight is a complete moron so it’s not all that surprising to hear that a man claimed Knight or his hunting partner shot at him intention after the man yelled at the pair for hunting too close to his house. Knight denies it.

Comcast sent a cease and desist letter to NFL Network for urging customers to switch from the cable service.

Can the Kindle help the newspaper industry?

Warner Brother’s viral marketing for the new Batman flick has kicked into high gear?

The fake Gordon Ramsay blog is hilariously funny.

Top Chef season 1 contestant Dave Martin has opened a new restaurant in New York.

The Colts new $11.4 million scoreboard in Lucas Oil Stadium is amazing.

Last night, I sat down to watch my beloved Indiana Hoosiers face off against Georgia Tech on ESPN in their contrived Big Ten/ACC Challenge, a game that the Hoosiers would go on to win in unspectacular fashion. While I love college basketball as much as any Hoosier possibly could, I just couldn’t really get into the roundball with so much happening on the gridiron. It appears, Bottom Line readers, that I have become indoctrinated into the southern world where college football reigns supreme and the rest of the year in sports pales in comparison.

Case in point, Sunday, I sat down on my couch after watching some football on Thanksgiving and a couple of games on Saturday (namely Auburn/Alabama, which we watched at my girlfriend’s insistence, much to my shock and delight) and I checked the games I was getting. And didn’t watch a minute of football on Sunday apart from the Eagles/Patriots game later that night. Simply put, I am a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles (and to some extent the Indianapolis Colts) but I am not a fan of the NFL as a whole. I am a fan of the Indiana Hoosiers but I am very much a fan of college football.

Frankly, college football is a better product than anything else in sports. Nowhere else do you have the tradition, the rivalry and the week-to-week excitement that college football possesses. The NFL (and its TERRIBLE television network) ought to be really careful that it doesn’t further alienate and borderline annoy the people that love their product so. Fortunately for the NFL, it still owns the largest market in the world — New York City and other northeast cities — where college football has yet to find a home.

I have to admit that when I moved to the South and saw the borderline fanatism with which people cared about college football, I didn’t get it. I mean I loved college football as much as the next guy but what was the big deal? Well, I get it now. And this weekend is a can’t miss in college football. Boston College/Virginia Tech. Missouri/Oklahoma. LSU/Tennessee and the announcement of the final BCS standings. My couch is going to have permanent indentations.

In case you’d be living in a cave, the major cable companies are currently at odds with the NFL and the Big Ten about how to carry their respective networks in local markets, with consumers stuck in the middle.

Basically what’s happening is that the cable companies want to carry the NFL and Big Ten Networks as part of special sports bundles that their customers would pay more for, reducing viewership and ostensibly add revenues. Well the NFL and the Big Ten want the cable companies to carry the channels as part of basic packages, no different from channels like ESPN, MTV, Comedy Central, etc.

What’s interesting about this whole issue, for me, is that I think both sides of this argument are being equally petulant and silly. The argument the cable networks have pitched is completely without merit. Their claim is that it’s unfair to tack the networks onto basic cable and require customers to pay for channels they don’t want. Well the last time I checked, I’ve never watched HGTV or Discovery Health, Telemundo or any of those channels that broadcast church services but I still pay for those channels and as a consumer, I have an expectation that I’m going to pay for channels that I don’t watch, it’s just a fact of life. Cable isn’t one of those make your own six-packs. You get the whole case or you get nothing at all. The contingent that cable companies are trying not to aggravate are the heady academics (the “.edu guys” as ESPN radio host Colin Cowherd refers to them). The people who think we overemphasize athletics in our society and flat refuse to contribute monetarily in anyway.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten and the NFL refuse to let their networks and their programming (which aside from the actual game broadcasts is pretty useless) exist on fringe pay-for sports bundles. On basic cable, they will get more viewership which will drive up their ad revenues. While I can’t blame them for that, I can blame them for holding games hostage and irritating people who love their product. Doesn’t seem like the best business model to me. When you take something that I could normally watch and enjoy hassle-free and charge me for it, I get pretty grouchy.

The cable companies and the NFL and the Big Ten can play the blame game all day but the reality is that no one comes out of this mess clean.

I like…

Seth Rogen is signed on to do Kevin Smith’s next flick.

The almost surely crappy “I Am Legend” is having to undergo re-shoots. Rumor has it, the studio isn’t happy with the ending, which is reportedly true to Richard Matheson’s novel. I knew this was going to happen and I am almost convinced that I’m going to hate this movie with every ounce of my marrow.

Kanye West is going to produce some of Mos Def’s next album.

The Justice League of America cast seems set.

Amazon’s e-reader, Kindle, could revolutionize the way people read. I think this thing looks like the first generation iPod. Big, clunky but wildly innovative.

In his column today on ESPN.com, Mark Schlabach wonders aloud why everyone is hating on Hawaii, while everyone seems to be giving Kansas the benefit of the doubt. If he doesn’t see the difference between the two teams, he really ought to consider another vocation.

Schlabach starts his column with Hawaii coach June Jones talking about all of the teams Hawaii wanted to schedule that wouldn’t schedule them. Among them, he claims, are Michigan and USC. I think to allow Jones to make these claims without verifying any of these claims or the reasoning behind those decisions — not the first of which is I’m sure that USC didn’t really want to fly to Honolulu to play the Warriors — is pretty shotty work by Schlabach.

The reason why people are (finally) starting to believe in Kansas is that in a matter of two weeks we will see if Kansas is for real. They play the game of the week Saturday against #3 Missouri and if they win, will have to beat Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship. And if they survive those two games, they’re for real.

See, in college football, being undefeated isn’t enough if you’re not playing anybody.  If that’s not Hawaii’s fault and they really can’t get anyone to schedule them then I’m sorry about that but them’s the breaks.

Do you really want to see Georgia or Oregon or West Virginia or Ohio State play a team that needed to go to overtime to beat San Jose State? Me either.

(AP Photo/Tom Strattman)

Austin Starr never pays for another meal in Bloomington ever again

I’ll get more to the Old Oaken Bucket game here in a bit but Starr’s game-winning 49-yard field goal with 30 seconds left to beat Purdue will be enough to make him a permanent fixture in the history of this series and in the history of this program for some time to come. To be able to come back onto the field, having missed a 42-yarder that would have put the game out of reach and hit the game winning kick, a career long, is unspeakably clutch.

(AP Photo/John Raoux)

Tim Tebow is this year’s Heisman trophy winner

Say what you want about Florida’s three losses coming off their national championship last year, no player in college football has been as consistently great as Tim Tebow. When Oregon’s Dennis Dixon limped off the field in the first quarter against Arizona last week, Tebow became a virtual lock to strike the pose. Basically all he had to do this week was not suck against Florida Atlantic (a team Florida has no business playing this last in the season). Well Tebow threw for 338 and three touchdowns and ran for another. I don’t know what this kid’s pro career looks like, given his awkward mechanics and playing in an offense that no NFL team runs but his college career is looking pretty bright.

(AP Photo/Butch Dill)

Alabama fans think they have 32 million reasons why they should never lose to Louisiana-Monroe — at home

Well, I think the shine is officially off the apple down in Tuscaloosa after Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide dropped a home tilt against the mighty 4-6 Warhawks of Louisiana-Monroe. In Saban’s defense, in every preseason interview I saw he tried to temper expectations and warn Tide fans, frothing at the mouth for national recognition again, that this was a rebuilding process and that the team had a long way to go. All of that went out the window when they beat Arkansas (a team that has shown to be one of the SEC’s most disappointing after winning the SEC West last year) in a thriller in Tuscaloosa. I think this is a fitting loss for a man who’s karmic account balance is overdrawn and a program so willing to get back on top that they were willing to hire a snake like Saban.

(AP Photo/LM Otero)

The BCS picture is clear as mud

I can’t say I’m surprised that Oklahoma went down to Lubbock under the lights and fell to Mike Leach’s Texas Tech team. Year in and year out, Tech is one of the most explosive offense teams in America and Bob Stoops’ team just had no answer for Graham Harrell. But where does this leave the race for New Orleans and the BCS Championship? Oklahoma, it stands to reason, is out, Ohio State appears to be back in. Kansas moves to number 2 but has a tough game next week against Missouri, who have national championship hopes of their own. And then there’s LSU who is hoping that Tennessee can hang onto the SEC East so the Tigers can beat their brains out in Atlanta, instead of playing Georgia, America’s hottest team. And what about West Virginia? After losing to South Florida earlier in the year, Rich Rodriguez’s team has been consistently great. Stay tuned.

(AP Photo/Tony Ding)

Lloyd Carr is done in Ann Arbor

It’s been a heck of a run for Lloyd Carr as the head coach of Michigan but let’s face it, even if he would have beat the archrival Buckeyes (which he failed to do again, dropping his record against Jim Tressel to 1-6), Carr was on the way out. Ever since Carr’s Wolverines dropped their home opener to Appalachian State, Michigan fans had moved on. Carr had a great tenure in Ann Arbor and should be remembered, not for losing the greatest upset in college football history, but for being one of the greatest coaches in the history of one of college football’s great programs.

Les Miles better figure out a way to keep his team focused this week

With the Battle for the Golden Boot coming up this week against Arkansas in Baton Rouge, a potential trap game for LSU, it’s a bad week for Les Miles to be mentioned in connection to another head coaching job. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Michigan is giving a good, hard look at Les Miles to fill the coaching vacancy left by Lloyd Carr when he announces his retirement today. The real question will be how Miles deals with it and keeps it off the minds of his players going into a two-week stretch that will determine whether or not the Tigers play for the national championship. Miles has yet to flatly deny that he is interested in the vacancy saying that he is only focused on the job he has now and will not entertain any other offers right now. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Miles in maize and blue, and not purple and gold, by this spring.

The Bottom Line will be going dark this afternoon as I head north for the Indiana/Purdue game for The Old Oaken Bucket. GO HOOSIERS!

When Dennis Dixon walked off the field in Tuscon last night, it appeared his helmet wasn’t the only thing he took with him. When the former Heisman Trophy frontrunner went out of the game against Arizona last night, with him went the confidence and dreams of all of his teammates. I  have never seen a team so dejected and frankly wiped out by the loss of one player. If there was ever any doubt, as to how important Dennis Dixon was to this football team, that debate was certainly settled last night. With Dixon, Oregon had nothing. Backup QB Brady Leaf who, believe it or not, actually battled Dixon for playing time last year looked confused and more like his older brother Ryan during his brief stint in the NFL. To the credit of the Oregon defense, they hung in there but the offense quit on head coach Mike Bellotti as soon as Dixon left the field in the first quarter. They never had a chance after that.