Hosted by My Opinion On Sports this week, we submit our answers to the Blogpoll Roundtable questions of the week.

1. Which coaches are clearly on the hot seat at this point? Who is surprisingly not?

There’s a slew of easy answers, most notably the dead ringer for Uncle Fester whose team clearly forgot the basic tenets of the Geneva Convention against Florida International last Saturday night. The midfield waterboarding of an FIU trainer was simply unspeakable. And involving the wounded in the battle? Clearly against international law. If boosters don’t sack Coker first, Samantha Power will surely be hot on their heels.

We’ll see you at the Hague.

A piece of expired meat on the coaching buffet sorely in need of spotlighting is Mike Riley, a coach who’s lived each degree on the great compass of coaching. He’s gone from being highly coveted to unwanted to back to coveted and now has swung back to extremely, extremely unwanted, a holding pattern for him now that will result in his quiet, inevitable firing following the season.

Riley’s big victory last season over Cal should not impress; the Beavers faced as discombobulated a team as Tedford’s fielded in his tenure there last year, and following their complete use of all talent fuel in the game against the Bears they went on to lose all but one of their remaining games. (And that was over lowly ‘05 Washington, a team whose stank-nasty quotient was only exceeded by lowlier ‘04 Washington.)

The ‘06 numbers don’t exactly change the trend arrow on Riley, either: a 3-3 record boasts plenty of resume-fluff in victories over Eastern Washington, Idaho, and the slightly less-lowly Washington Huskies. They lost huge to Boise State and Cal and could only muster six points over Washington State. The rest of their schedule only features Cal, USC, and road trips to UCLA and Arizona before the Civil War matchup with Oregon, who will do things to them also possibly prohibited by both local, national, and international laws.

Evidence aside, the whole commentary above is just designed to free up the eventual hiring of Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron away from Oxford to coach in Corvallis. We’ve got a warehouse full of “Orgeron State” t-shirts we have to move; the sooner pink slips start flying, the sooner we get that Port-Au-Prince bookie off our backs.

2. Pick three of the undefeated teams and state your case as to why they won’t run the table.

Ohio State/Michigan. Because we passed college algebra, dammit.

West Virginia. Someone, most likely Louisville, will clap their hands like the adult in the room and insist that they stop all that flimflam in the backfield right this instant. With that defense they could, too. West Virginia’s defense, too, will blitz themselves right out of a game one of these days, since they’re a bit undersized and prone to getting worked on the run and burned by the long pass. A team specializing in both (L-ville or even conceivably Tyler Palko and Pitt) will do that this year.

USC. Three strong possibilities loom: Notre Dame, Cal, or Oregon could all in theory beat USC. The pageant winner in formally entering USC into Mere Awesomeness will likely be Cal, since Pete Carroll’s going to blitz Brady Quinn blind just as Jon Tenuta did in the GT game, and unlike everyone else who’s tried the game plan has players who can close gaps with the necessary speed. And Oregon just…we don’t trust them against USC, which has nothing to do with USC but instead with Cal, who demolished them in their matchup.


Cute. Flashy. Still untrusted.

3. Which conference is playing the best football right now?

The one we watch the most, which is the answer everyone else will give under different guises.

4. Which team is playing above and beyond your expectations this season?

Wake Forest. A team of players scarcely recruited for D-1 ball and named after malevolent church officials? Sign us up. They’re one blocked field goal away from being undefeated, had Gaines Adams not had the glowing Playmaker circle under him on that particular play. Their season began with the loss of their starting running back and starting quarterback, and yet they’ve only lost a game against decent competition.

They also have a regular feature of their run game called “the orbit sweep,” which is just rich in NASA dork cool points. Jim Grobe, we heart your playcall terminology.

5. Which team is crashing and burning in regards to your expectations?

Iowa. We tried desperately to shower concern rays effectively on a team we thought would surely challenge for the Big Ten, but losing to Indiana scuttles our support in both poll votes and aforementioned concern rays. The disappointment may be less to blame on Iowa than it was on the inexact science involved in the pick. In our attempt to untangle the Big Ten after the easy pick of Ohio State at one, we looked for quarterbacks. Hennebriation caused us to hedge on Michigan, but we gambled on one quarterback named Drew to have a phenomenal year and carry his team to the 2 slot. Since [NAME ALSO REDACTED] coached Stanton, Drew, we were forced to go with Iowa.

Blame the shoddy prognostication, not the team.

6. Is your pre-season BCS championship game prediction still alive?

We had one? Oh, yeah. Boise State versus Illinois. Totally not happening now.

Our actual pick is lost to history, but we think we saw an Ohio State/USC matchup or something like that, a very plausible scenario at this point. Take any other teams from the top ten and insert them in the same place and you may say the same thing, since a one-loss scrum for the title game still remains possible between a bushel of teams.

The biggest loser–if they care about the postseason exhibition that ends with the awarding of a useless crystal football–would be an undefeated team from the Big East, who cannot have an invitation, is not on the guestlist, and sure as hell can’t pay their way past the bouncer, much less the VIP. This is not fair, but given Florida’s status above Louisville in the first round of BCS, it is an accurate statement confirming most people’s suspicions about the math involved in creatng the BCS: its very weakness is the squishy, fallible humans who construct it. If only we could remove them from the equation…

The robots would never let this happen.