Since the NCAA has made a stand against the evils of academics and endorsed a 12th game for college football, we might as well throw our requests in as to how that game should be scheduled.
Darrell Hackney, the floor is yours.
1. UAB versus (INSERT LARGE PROGRAM HERE). Are we joking? Hell yes. But since it's going to happen anyway, we've decided to embrace the inevitable and hug up to the plague of aspiring mid-major/ginormous university games that will result from the addition of a 12th game. We're not cracking on UAB in particular--they're a fun team to watch, produced a first-round draft pick in Roddy White this past season, and have a ginormous quarterback in Darrell Hackney, who the media guide lists at a mendacious, dainty 240 lbs. You just have to figure most programs will straddle the line between improving their strength of schedule and going for the ducats...which means upcoming mid-majors, warm up the buses and crack out the deposit slips: the field is now yours.
2. ARKANSAS VERSUS TEXAS. An old-school matchup if there ever was one. (An overused term, I know, since a lot of things by definition are old-school and not begging for a comeback, like biplanes, polio, and that weird Whodini "let's wear funny hats" school of hip-hop. Apologies, but it still applies.) Two years ago, Mack Brown learned the painful lessons of the "Houston Nutt Rules," falling in a game that scuttled Texas' BCS hopes and watching the Arkansas madman/head coach give the inverse hook 'em to the maniacal Hogs fans in the stands. Texas got their revenge last year, but the old Southwestern Conference matchup is too good to lose. How can you not love a vicious agricultural matchup between hogs and cows? It should be the barnyard classic, and it should be on the docket every year.
Texas: put this madman on your schedule every year.
3. USC VERSUS ALABAMA. Okay. We know. This sounds like slaughter in the making right now, and it likely would be. But traditionally, you don't get much holier than the matchup of Alabama versus a Pac-10 team-after all, the 1926 matchup between the Crimson Tide and the UW Huskies was the game that, in the words of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer author Warren St. John, marked "the Big Bang of the South's obsession with football." A matchup like this would solve so many of the sports-bar, internet forum hypotheticals for that year: Pac-10 brains versus SEC speed, toss-it-around spread versus three yards and a cloud of dust, and fanwise, rv-lovin' rednecks versus Beemer-driving Brie eaters.
With Reggie Bush on the field, it wouldn't be pretty. But USC-Alabama would be a rivalry worth reviving.