THE CURIOUS INDEX, 2/10/2009

30,000 UGA fans in Boulder should be quite the sight. Collision of cultures.

Do not want

Still shines with the brilliance of a thousand suns. Except for that one black smudge that one can ony glimpse out of the corner of your eye—like one of those 1990’s hidden 3-D posters:

Matt Millen was there.

Is that LSU-Mike envy radiating from Columbia?

As for Pac10-12 expansion; if they take Utah and Colorado watch the TCU/BYU to the Big XII dominoes fall and then Boise State is still holding their dicks wondering where all their “break up the big boy party” ammo went.

Unfortunately, I can’t see a scenario where conference expansion dominoes fall and Boise State ends up in a power conference. At least, as long as no one is expanding beyond 12.

If Utah and Colorado go to the Pac-12, the Big 12 would most likely go to BYU or TCU as replacements. Even if Mizzou jumps to the Big Ten, BSU is still on the outside looking in. The football program completely outgrew the school in stature, and there’s no way the haughty Pac-10 folks will take a university with no academic reputation. It’s probably too far for the Big 12, especially with TCU in its backyard and BYU a shorter flight away.

Or Houston or SMU for that matter. As much as it would make sense in a theoretical Colorado/Mizzou exodus to just shove the OK schools to the North and add two of those. So yeah, BYU and Arkansas at least have some semblance of making sense in the North.

You shouldn’t be in the Big 12 if there is any sort of hill or incline anywhere near your campus.

Also, if you want to expand the Pac-10, you need to keep the weird “two schools close together” synergy that they have that ensures there’s always a game going on in AZ, OR, WA, LA, and SF. That’s why I would pick Nevada and UNLV. It’s bottom feeding, but they would get better from the recruiting boost, and USC road tripping to Vegas every other year would be gold.

I see a cloaked and hooded Jim Delaney lovingly petting a pile of greenbacks and saying to young, conflicted Mizzou, “You want this…don’t you?”

If any of these half-assed WE GON EXPAND TO 20 TEAMS schemes come to pass, the Big East is going to be very much left out in the cold. No matter what, though, every day that ND holds out on the Big Integer just to be difficult is a good day.

Dales pale ale is in the middle of the venn for microbrews AND domestic can beer.

and let me tell a story. I’m a PSU fan in Indiana. The summer of ‘07 the Colts caravan thing was touring the state, saying you can maybe meet someone from the team, maybe meet some Colts alumni, see different Colts exhibits, etc. So I took my son when it came to our area. Hottest day of the year. Waited for a couple hours. Got to the Colts Alumni table. There, in front of me and my then 6-year-old son, is Barry F. Krause. And I couldn’t even say any tire changin’ words. We talked, he was very gracious, but wow, that was a surprise shovel to my Penn State head that day.

Surely I can’t be the only one who noticed the delicious combination of irony and crazy contained in the sentence above?

JoPa and Bear, in one helluva’ ugly defensive battle, and one brilliant, brilliant goal line stand. National title on the line.

What’s not to love here?

Nothing stopping a conference by expanding to 14 and going to 7 team divisions.

Heck, the Big East will probably have 30 basketball teams at some point in the future.

…it’s not a proper league, dammit. The one thing that would really upset me about PAC-10 expansion would be the loss of the one conference that does it right.

Well, I wasn’t thinking about Division I-AA, but I actually don’t have a problem with the Ivy League. They also do it right, even if they are insufferable in so many other ways.

As for the Sun Belt…the sheer ridiculousness of joining together the concepts of “Sun Belt football” and “doing it right” makes all efforts at logical argument implode. Ever since Idaho escaped to the WAC, I’ve tried to think about the Sun Belt as little as humanly possible.