A SALUTE TO YOU, MASTER TROLL. Wearing your own ref's uniform, blowing a live play dead yourself and getting everyone to believe you, and then demanding the ball before making your move and ripping off your detachable clothing? This morning we salute you, Master Troll from Arizona, for making an otherwise unremarkable blowout worthy of two hours of Thursday night viewing.
The ensuing melee resulted in two ejections and could end up costing both teams more playing time in the form of player suspensions, but one person won't suffer the effects of the game's carnage: Rick Neuheisel, who is still UCLA's coach and will be for the foreseeable future according to Bruins AD Dan Guerrero. Before you decide to ride the Rick Train all the way to its logical conclusion, please watch that footage of Moamar Qaddafi being pulled bleeding from a drainage ditch and then decide how far down the line you want to go with that all-in bet, Mr. Guerrero. (BTW, if you wake up and you are surrounded by screaming young men with AK-47s screaming "Allahu e akbar" the word "boned" doesn't begin to describe your conditions.)
Bruins Nation is surprisingly calm about all of this, though, mostly because they appear to be past the point of pain, and now know that Neuheisel is done and whatever's next has already started. Recruits were told to watch the game, and that was in retrospect probably not the best call, UCLA recruiters.
THESE ARE SAGE WORDS. USC/Notre Dame is sort of flying beneath the radar this weekend, and that really is a shame since this could be a very good game, and because One Foot Down has really perceptive roundtable-ish things to say about it. You know, like "One way of improving the gameday environment at Notre Dame would be winning." <---THIS IS TRUE.
IN THE OTHER LARGE WHOLESOME MIDWESTERN MATCHUP. Michigan State folks believe this will be a close game with the Badgers, while Wisconsin types are like LOLNOPE.
GET YOUR F+ ON. The more you read into football stats, the worse Craig James sounds talking about football for a living. This may seem impossible, but then you do it and say, "No, we thought this was the floor, but there's a basement of suck under here we didn't even know about OMG THERE'S BODIES ALL OVER THE PLACE---" (Also: USC/ND preview, where the Irish have to stop the Irish.)
THE GLOVES ARE MESMERIZING. LSU will wear their Pro Combats for the Auburn game, though we don't know where on earth you get Les Miles being lukewarm on them out of that quote. It sounds like every other inscrutable and prolix paragraph Les Miles says to a simple question. Equally inscrutable: ending the streak of night games that stretches back to 1936, where the Tigers played under a set of $7500 lights in front of next to no one.