CONTENT WARNING: If you prefer not to acknowledge, however tangentially, that uteruses are a thing, this may not be the post for you. Come back later for more jokes. 

We have met Bill Hancock a couple of times, in passing, at media functions, and he seems nice. That’s not a veiled Southern put-down. He seems like a nice person. But man alive, he is just flailing right now. And while it is his job, some of it has been sad and weird to watch. We are currently serenely agnostic when it comes to the question of where to host college football’s new future playoff games. We’d totally, happily watch one staged in the Georgia Dome or the JerryDome. We think December games on campus sites could be great fun, whether in Madison or Los Angeles or Baton Rouge.  We’re cool either way. Really.

Hancock is really not cool either way, and now we almost want to root for campus play out of pure spite, because this is straight irrational from a man who should be way better at spin by now:

“Can Manhattan, Kan., take care of 1,200 media?” BCS executive director Bill Hancock asked reporters, wondering what would happen if Kansas State finished in the top four. “Where will people stay?”

Andy Staples took a swing at this particular malarky piñata last week, and today, anti-BCS crusader Dan Wetzel dives in with some well-placed logic jabs:

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A lovingly curated selection of our favorite stories from the past week to speed you through your Friday:

A message from the Catlab Foundation For A Better Life.

• Playoff advocates kissing nurses in the street! V-BCS Day is upon us, yet somehow the hysterically misnamed EVERY GAME COUNTS Facebook page remains standing.

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The Big Ten and Pac-12 sure do love the Rose Bowl. But will that love cause the rest of us to resent the Granddaddy? (US PRESSWIRE)

Hey, neato, BCS honchos are exploring new formats for college football’s bloated and occasionally nonsensical postseason! USA Today has a cache of documents with all the details, and included among them is one horrifying scenario that’s either an elaborate prank of admirable intricacy or a dire klaxon that signals the triumph at last of #feelingsball over reason.

[Proposed plans include] a heretofore undisclosed four-team playoff proposal that could expand the semifinals to preserve an annual Big Ten-vs.-Pacific-12 matchup in the Rose Bowl.

In the latter plan, the four highest-ranked teams at the end of the regular season would meet in semifinals unless the Big Ten or Pac-12 champion, or both, were among the top four. Those leagues’ teams still would meet in the Rose, and the next highest-ranked team or teams would slide into the semis. The national championship finalists would be selected after those three games.

For the record, here’s what that plan would have looked like if it had been in place the past five seasons. Are you not entertained?

And you know what else rankles? Apart from making a mockery of the definition of the Redbird Reading Group-level term “semifinal,” it turns swaths of sports fans, however tangentially, against the Rose Bowl, and the Rose Bowl is one of our very favorite things. (If you’ve never been, change that. Even if you get an Illinois-USC matchup and don’t like your baths bloody, there’s still the parade and the golf course tailgating and Pasadena to explore.) We lived 20 minutes from the stadium for a few years after college. It is our favorite place on earth. And if we  now lived someplace where the weather in January was at all similar to Chicago in January, we, too, would probably make complete prats of ourselves to score a guaranteed trip to Southern California on an annual basis. But surely Jim Delany makes more than enough fat bills from his cashy conference to score a sweet timeshare in the ‘Bu, somewhere. Must we really all suffer, must our precious game suffer, so that one man may savor his Pie ‘n Burger in prosaic silence?

A curated selection of sporting types responding to this development, after the jump:

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Obie gets to take off the suit (probably), but staging December and January games can be a full-time gig. (AP)

We joked Monday about how we would’ve loved to work for the Fiesta Bowl during the John Junker heyday, because who doesn’t enjoy attending $30,000 birthday parties? But you, gentle readers, may be as surprised to learn that bowl employees work more than four days a year as our own mother was to learn that we work more than four months. While recuperating from the crush of bowl season, Campus Union spoke with bowl worker bees and executive types busy putting bows on their 2011 games while laying the groundwork for the 2012 postseason. Here’s what we learned.

Months of moving parts

Every postseason college football contests maintains a year-round calendar of sorts, though we were surprised on both ends of the spectrum by just how many and how few year-round employees are retained by certain games. (For comparison’s sake: The Outback Bowl employs five year-round staffers; the Music City Bowl has nine, most of whom double up with duties to the Nashville Sports Council; and the Orange Bowl has 30, with plans to bring on an additional nine full-time positions this year to accommodate preparations for hosting the BCS title game.) The timeline varies wildly based on available personnel, resources, the organization’s presence in the community and how the game approaches its own team selection process. The first scout I personally laid eyes on last season was a very nice lady representing the Champs Sports Bowl in Morgantown in Week 3 during LSU-West Virginia. Both squads, of course, would go on to win their conferences and play in BCS bowls, but that early in the season, bowl scouts share the same disadvantage as the rest of us: All they have to go on is preseason rankings and their own prognostications.

Still, for a game like the Chick-fil-A Bowl, which draws from two of the more voluminous conferences, scouting all potentially eligible teams in person in a single season is a daunting task. Volunteer CFA scouts go out in Week 1 to begin assessing various SEC and ACC squads, though the bowl’s selection committee does not convene until November.

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Former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker (right) will reportedly plead guilty Tuesday to state and federal charges. (AP)

John Junker, ousted Fiesta Bowl CEO, will formalize his shaming of the yellow-blazer brotherhood on Tuesday, according to the Arizona Republic. The paper spoke to Junker’s defense attorney, who says his client will plead guilty to state and federal felony charges stemming from his use of bowl employees and resources to influence politicians in the area.

Sadly, however, we’ll be deprived of the privilege of hearing any more from Junker regarding the necessity of taking a bowl security consultant to a Phoenix strip club. More from the Republic report: ”Despite accusations in the report that Junker used bowl funds for questionable spending, he will not be charged with any crimes related to spending at the Fiesta Bowl under the plea agreement.”

We have always wanted tips on how to best $30,000 for our own birthday party, and will have to take our quest elsewhere. RIP, John Junker administration, 2000-2011. You sound like you were a super entertaining place to work, for a while.

Nick Saban and Les Miles will lead Alabama and LSU in Monday's BCS title game rematch. (Getty Images)

The 2012 BCS National Championship Game is just hours away. We’re sure you have so many questions. We’re here to help. 

• Where will this game be played? The recently befancied Mercedes-Benz Superdome, home field for the New Orleans Saints, Tulane Green Wave and the Sugar and New Orleans Bowl games.

• When is it on television? Kickoff is scheduled for 8:30 p.m. on Monday, January 9. The game will be televised on ESPN.

• Whom does it feature? The two top-ranked teams in the BCS standings, which you might have heard are from the same conference this year! Did you hear anything about that? Did you? No. 1 LSU and No. 2 Alabama will converge in New Orleans tonight to decide college football’s 2011 champion.

• But didn’t LSU and Alabama already settle this on the field? Sssshhhh.

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Les Miles' LSU team avoided its customary stumbles in 2011, winning 13 games and the SEC championship. (Getty)

The 2011 LSU Tigers are the second Bayou Bengals squad to make a title run under Les Miles. Baton Rouge-based teams coached by The Hat are no strangers to fine results and good fortune on the field, but up until now there’s been a reliable stumble — two of them, in fact — in each of the Tigers’ most successful seasons. The 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2010 teams all finished with two losses, making an 11-2 record (12-2 in that rip-snorting ’07 title-winning campaign) Miles’ apparent ceiling. Two losses, always two losses. Can we really be blamed for cheekily predicting in the preseason that LSU would once again hoist a certain crystal ball in New Orleans, but become the country’s first three-loss BCS champion along the way?

The ’07 squad had some realigning to do after an ’06 season that concluded with a Sugar Bowl victory over Notre Dame. Gone was offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher, bound for Florida State. Snatched away in the draft were Jamarcus Russell, Dwayne Bowe, Craig Davis and LaRon Landry. The schedule was one that would do LSU no favors, featuring No. 9 Virginia Tech, No. 14 South Carolina, No. 7 Florida, No. 18 Kentucky (hey, remember that?), No. 19 Auburn and No. 18 Alabama, the last four of those in consecutive weeks. And it wasn’t the best teams on that list who would be the Tigers’ temporary undoing. A Wildcats team riding Andre Woodson into the top 20 and an unranked Arkansas squad got the better of LSU, the latter at home, both in triple overtime.

Missouri’s demise at the hands of Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship game and West Virginia’s brain-boggling upset by Pitt in the 100th Backyard Brawl sent LSU to the title game anyway, but one other opponent came perilously close to canceling that trip before it was even a possibility: No. 7 Florida, itself coming off a national title in 2006. That 28-24 home win was fueled by fourth-down conversions, a fake field goal and a last-minute touchdown scramble by Jacob Hester.

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Politicians are hopping on the coattails of this Boise State fan and other playoff proponents. (AP)

• “There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.” Now that changes to the BCS format lurk just beyond the horizon, with popular sentiment for those changes swelling in the wake of another controversial national title game matchup, here come the politicians clambering onto the anti-bowl system bandwagon. Way to be heroes, guys. Way to be.

• Smash segue! That student-athlete stipend legislation is indeed on hold, and the NCAA’s compliance blog has an idea for a fix:

The simplest way to address the issues with an unfunded mandate is often to fund it. However, that is often impossible since funding the program (i.e. raising taxes) is often as unpopular as the program might be necessary. But in this case, the Board of Directors could kill not just two but six birds with one stone. Because the mechanism for funding a large grant-in-aid increase is the creation of an FBS football playoff.

• Penn State things: Mike McQueary is testifying in the Jerry Sandusky case today; the Patriot-News‘ Sara Ganim is live-tweeting the proceedings. Gary Schulz and Tim Curley are also scheduled to appear this afternoon. And Sandusky’s legal team should maybe all just stop talking outside a courtroom.

• Fresh coaches, bought and sold! Rams fleeced! Get it?? And can we please all stop pretending that that gawky hatchet job video of Kristi Malzahn had anything to do with her husband’s career prospects?

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• On Griffin, on Kuechly, on Bullock, on Claiborne!

Western Kentucky running back Bobby Rainey earned a second-team All-America nod from SI.com after rushing for a school-record 1,695 yards. (Don McPeak-US PRESSWIRE)

SI.com’s 2011 All-America team has been released. Other familiar names on the first team: Ball, Mercilus, Richardson, Blackmon, Woods and Upshaw. (And your eyes do not deceive you: That is Western Kentucky’s Bobby Rainey down there on the second team. Yes, that is well-deserved. No, I did not get to pick this team myself.)

• Fresh coaches, bought and sold! Gus Malzahn, ten pounds of GMOOH in a five-pound bag. Arkansas State is a curious choice of destinations for reasons financial, but not geographical, and will lend credibility to our constant shilling for the Sun Belt. Fresno State is reportedly thisclose to announcing Tim DeRuyter as Pat Hill’s replacement, and UCLA will operate in the two-staff tango.

• O frabjous day! Craig James to cease polluting our airwaves?  I knew there’d be a use for this campaign poster someday.  If anybody needs me, I’ll be booking a flight to an upcoming town hall meeting to ask him to sign my copy of Swing Your Sword.

• Realignment tidbit, grudgingly dispensed. Navy to the Big East, very eventually!

• Roster blotter. Time to pop open another little hatch on your Maryland Football Transfers Advent Calendar. Two Oklahoma State linemen have been hit with misdemeanor drug charges. Mike Bellamy, suspended for the ACCCG, won’t suit up for Clemson in the Orange Bowl, either.

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The Mountain West is trying to capitalize on its one season with TCU and Boise State as members by applying for an AQ bid. (Icon SMI)

• Ask me what my job is, then ask me the hardest thing about it: The Mountain West has to look out for the Mountain West, and it’s leveraging every last iota of influence out of its one season with both Boise State and TCU to angle for a BCS auto-bid for 2012 (in which it will operate without the Big 12-bound Horned Frogs) and 2013 (when the Broncos are scheduled to make their exit for the Big East).

• Fresh coaches, bought and sold! Colorado State is expected to announce Alabama offensive coordinator Jim McElwain as the next head coach of the Rams this afternoon. McElwain has been Nick Saban’s coordinator since 2008; this will be his first head coaching position. And Toledo has replaced the recently departed Tim Beckman with his offensive coordinator, Matt Campbell, a three-year veteran of the Rockets’ staff.

• Dispatches from Happy Valley: You can relive the brief proceedings of Jerry Sandusky’s preliminary hearing here, but if you missed his court appearance, you didn’t miss much: Sandusky and his legal team waived the right to the hearing, and the case is going to trial.

• Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly Kuechly: Boston College linebacker Luke Kuechly, who’s already got the Butkus, Lombardi and Lott IMPACT Awards, and of whom we are becoming very fond because he’s a killy defender who looks like a big ol’ mathlete, can add the Bronco Nagurski Trophy to his groaning hardware shelf.

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