Could Kyle Brotzman’s notorious miss against Nevada in 2010 be a boon for Boise State? (Peter Read Miller/SI)

Stanford’s offensive coordinator position was recently endowed by an anonymous donor to honor Andrew Luck (gross autoplay video alert at that link). The donation got friend of the program The Gurgling Cod thinking about how to turn this into a rivalry game:

UGA FAN PROTIP — make anon gift to GT, name OC position after Reggie Ball. #trollanthropy espn.go.com/college-footba…

— The Gurgling Cod (@TheGurglingCod) May 23, 2012

Monied fans, you have your marching orders. Our previous bloggy home has just wrapped up an annual charity drive in which donations are given to match rivalry scores (say, $70.33 for enthusiastic fans of January’s Orange Bowl outcome), but an endowment? Oh, that’s a gift that lasts and lasts. We have 10 modest suggestions for our readers overburdened with spite and disposable income:

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Unlike baseball, college football is actually supposed to have an opening weekend. (REUTERS)

All this chirping about based ball’s Opening “Day” just makes us pine for five months from now, when college football will accomplish in five days what baseball crams into nine or so. Is it too early to start making out our Week 1 mayhem wish list? Probably!

Thursday, August 30

• South Carolina @ Vanderbilt. James Franklin taunts Jadeveon Clowney after the Commodores pull off a late go-ahead touchdown, and the ensuing fracas manages to convince SEC officials to suspend the South Carolina stalwart. Seeking revenge, Steve Spurrier departs Nashville with five or six of Franklin’s scholarship quarterbacks, to feather his depth-chart-fiddlin’ nest back in Columbia. No one is truly satisfied, but no lessons are learned.

• Minnesota @ UNLV. TCF Bank revokes Golden Gophers’ stadium sponsorship after team refuses to pay $5,000 in ATM fees following return from Vegas.

• UCF @ Akron. Zips win, and Terry Bowden gets free jousting privileges at all Medieval Times locations for life.

• UMass @ UConn. In their FBS debut, the Minutemen rout the Huskies, relegating Connecticut to the MAC by a previously unnoticed realignment provision. All involved parties agree this is probably in everyone’s best interest.

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Brady Hoke, Michigan men’s basketball coach John Beilein and UM athletic director/pizza magnate Dave Brandon are featured speakers in a “six-day executive education program intended to teach business leadership through lessons learned in U-M sports.” We cannot attend ourselves, but imagine the week will be overflowing with pizza-based metaphors. Below, an artist’s rendition of the Wolverines’ defense under Greg Robinson:

Some light reading and our favorite stories of the week to speed you through Friday.

Everything I’ve ever known is a lie. RT @ASUDevilscom: Brock Osweiler measured 6-foot-6 7/8 at NFL Combine without shoes.

— Gina Mizell (@ginamizell) February 24, 2012

• Can’t trust a blessed thing in this world. If we can’t depend on Brock Osweiler being 6-8, what can we depend on? Next thing you’ll tell us Ron Zook is, at best, a mediocre and unenthusiastic jetskiier.

• More like “leaders of the pack beating a fast trail out of Denton,” amirite, Hoosiers? The problem, in the end, with naming conference divisions “Leaders” and “Legends” is that every league, no matter how stacked, is going to have its Indiana. Smart and sassy Michigan internet fixture MGoBlog follows up our shoddy “research” with some “research” of its own — and speaking of shoddy, Brand Explorers still can’t spell “analysis.” Fun extrapolation from the ensuing comment thread: “This, combined with the the poll posted on the board yesterday, suggests that Michigan fans disapprove of the division names more strongly than they approve of Brady Hoke.” Who just won Michigan a Sugar Bowl, you might have heard.

• The state bird of Ohio. Is not football, but don’t mention that to the northern cardinal.

• Ricky Williams, graven idol. We can only hope that future civilizations, surveying the wreckage of post-zombie-apocalyptic America, will find these bronzed tributes to our beautiful game and build a religion around them.

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Marshall: Determined not to let West Virginia hog the headlines. (US PRESSWIRE)

Crucial reading on topics carefully curated to contain only stories of the utmost importance to speed you through your Friday afternoon. This is our love for you.

• News you can use. CBS is reporting that West Virginia and the Big East have reached a settlement agreement, and Boise State could be leaping in early to take WVU’s place. But of far greater urgency in the Mountain State is this tidbit out of Marshall:

A West Virginia college student is suing a fraternity for negligence, claiming he fell off a deck because a bottle rocket went off in another student’s rectum.
[...]
“Instead of launching, the bottle rocket blew up in the defendant’s rectum, and this startled the plaintiff and caused him to jump back,” and fall off the deck, the lawsuit contends.

• A poet can survive everything but a misprint. We have friends who are Actual Reporters who occasionally lament that they cannot, in their professional lives, take overt swings in print at players and coaches who displease them. To them, we say: Do not abandon hope. Seen a lot of mannered comedies? Restoration-era scribes knew better than just about anybody how to slice an offending party to ribbons with pure politesse. Some of the best stone-cold bitchery we’ve ever seen in ink has come from the Associated Press. It’s more of a structured art form, like composing a sonnet, but the constraints give the finished product an elegant beauty. Today’s lesson, from ESPN.com news services:

LSU quarterback Jordan Jefferson says he believes the major reason the Tigers suffered the first shutout in BCS title game history, a 21-0 rout to Alabama on Jan. 9, was because of the offensive game plan. Jefferson, on the same day he pleaded not guilty to a simple-battery charge stemming from an Aug. 26 arrest, second-guessed the offensive play calls in an interview with Atlanta radio station WCNN.

• And speaking of poetry. Is Butch Davis taking an advisory role with Tampa Bay rather than the DC job so he can remain on UNC’s payroll? Doug Farrar tweeted that Davis “has the ethical compass God gave a wolverine,” which we find difficult to argue. What animal would you associate with Davis, gentle readers?

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Isaiah Crowell's 2011 Signing Day announcement has yet to be topped, but should be an inspiration for all future recruits. (AP)

The fact that we’re still discussing Isaiah Crowell’s puppy-bearing 2011 Signing Day announcement a year later proves that, no matter what turns the running back’s career in Athens might take, the moment was a smashing branding success for the University of Georgia. This year’s haul of signing ceremonies has been light on pageantry, although one Mississippi State commit did involve an actual human baby in his announcement. So wags the world away. In a fit of wishful thinking, we got to fantasizing about blue-chip athletes swanning about campus with jars full of stinging insects and elite high school prospects piloting heavy machinery through school property, and before too long we had this list of schools whose commits we would very most like to see follow in Crowell’s footsteps and introduce a wee young mascot at their Signing Day ceremonies. Those  Top 25 teams are as follows:

25. Big Cat Schools. Your Wazzus, your FIUs, your LSUs. Perhaps unfairly dinged because there are just so many Big Cat schools, and if this becomes a trend we’ll soon have a Signing Day entertainment market saturated by baby lions and bobcats. Any LSU prospect bringing along a white tiger with purple eyes to match the Bayou Bengals’ latest Pro Combat unis, however, will receive an instant and much-deserved rankings boost. (This being LSU, we estimate this is at most three years from happening.)

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The Superdome turf is no longer "Mardi Grass," but Hokies fans are still soaking up the spirit of Mardi Gras. (AP)

The 2012 Sugar Bowl is just hours away. We’re sure you have so many questions. We’re here to help. (For an Xs and Os breakdown, check out George Schroeder’s game preview.)

• What’s all this, then? Not the national title game, but near the national title game! The 78th annual Allstate Sugar Bowl will prime the city of New Orleans for the BCS National Championship Game six days later.

• Where will this game be played? The Mercedes-Benz Superdome, home field of the New Orleans Saints and Tulane Green Wave.

• When is it on television? Kickoff is scheduled for 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 3. The game will be televised on ESPN.

• Whom does it feature? Traditionally, the first pick from available SEC teams plus a BCS at-large selection, but not this year.

• What about this year? Thanks to next week’s all-SEC West lineup in the title game, two at-large picks were given to the Sugar Bowl, and the results, on paper, were less than thrilling: 10-2 Michigan will face 11-2 Virginia Tech, a matchup that inspired waves of hostile bewilderment from onlookers who expected the Sugar Bowl to maybe pick at least one top 10 team.

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Denard Robinson rushed for two touchdowns and passed for three more in a win over Ohio State. (US PRESSWIRE)

Snap Judgments from the Week 13 early shift. For swing shift Snaps, click here. For late Snaps, click here. For Andy Staples’ recap of LSU’s win over Arkansas, click here. For Staples’ take on Alabama’s rout of Auburn, click here. For a recap of all the Top 25 action, click here. For highlights from SI.com, click here. 

• No. 17 Michigan 40, Ohio State 34: I swear, looking at Michigan box scores week after week, you’d think nobody knows that Denard Robinson is a player who ought to be defended on the football field. This week’s reasons to put a body on Denard: 14 pass completions for 167 yards and three touchdowns and 26 rushes for 170 yards and two additional scores. This week’s reason a team might put bodies on Denard and still lose: The Michigan quarterback’s ability to place the football in the hands of running back Fitzgerald Toussaint, who will then do things like run for 120 yards.

Michigan’s defense, the year’s most reluctant talking point, must not be overlooked here. Ohio State’s Boom Herron was contained to 37 yards on 15 carries, his third consecutive sub-century game after running wild against Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana following his return from suspension. More problematic for the maize and blue was Braxton Miller, who cracked 100 yards rushing for just the third time this season (accomplished previously against Indiana and Penn State) while shattering his former personal best outing as a passer with 235 aerial yards and two touchdown passes. The Buckeyes hung with it early and late, turning a 16-7 first-quarter deficit into a 24-23 halftime lead and adding 10 more points in the fourth to make the margin of loss more than respectable.

Still, the streak ends here. The Wolverines, you’ll recall, hadn’t beaten the Buckeyes since November 2003. They can now start their own cheeky counter: “It has been two hours since Michigan beat Ohio State in football.” We’re also almost surely witnessing the end of the tenure of Luke Fickell, a Buckeyes lifer thrust into a near-impossible situation in the wake of NCAA scandal and Jim Tressel’s resignation.

Time now to look to the future: Miller appears to be a young quarterback with many fine double-threat attributes. Wonder where the Buckeyes will find a head man with experience coaching up such athletes? Anybody hear anything? [RECAP | BOX]

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After starting the season 0-2, Mark Richt's Georgia Bulldogs won nine in a row to claim the SEC East. (AP)

Snap Judgments from the Week 12 early shift. For late shift Snaps, click here. For swing shift Snaps, click here. For Stewart Mandel’s take on the BCS chaos, click here. For Andy Staples’ Nebraska-Michigan wrap, click here. To see how Top 25 teams fared, click here. For highlights from SI.com, click here.

• No. 13 Georgia 19, Kentucky 10: An uneasy afternoon for several SEC teams playing presumed gimme games began with one division very nearly folding in on itself.  But now the race is over, and the Georgia Bulldogs are the sacrificial critters who will be handed over in an early December ceremony to an SEC West team that will almost surely make mincemeat of them. My Athens-educated beau has been referring to today as “2 for $20 Saturday,” with slapdash games barely qualifying as football littering the schedule.

Georgia prevailed despite problems cropping up early and often in an area that has been fraught with drama this season: the tailback position. With Richard Samuel not slated to return from injury for several weeks and Carlton Thomas missing a game for unspecified personal reasons, the first drive of the game was about the worst possible time for freshly hatched star Isaiah Crowell to leave the game. He sprained an ankle during a collision with a teammate, and did not return. For what should be obvious reasons, the ground attack didn’t really gain any traction until the second half.

Aaron Murray appeared out of sync with his receivers, and promising drives were cut short by turnovers. We can let the defense escape largely without criticism; despite allowing one monster pass from Maxwell Smith to Matt Roark and committing a couple boneheaded penalties, Todd Grantham’s boys played lights-out ball. From here, of course, it only gets harder. [RECAP | BOX]

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USC's defense has a history of failing to contain Oregon star LaMichael James. (ZUMApress.com)

Plot threads to track in Week 12:

• No. 18 USC @ No. 4 Oregon: I’m not trying to reduce the Trojans to one guy, but if Robert Woods ends up having to sit out this game, it’s going to lose its appeal in a big damn hurry. Limited in practice with shoulder and ankle injuries this week, Woods is traveling with the team to Eugene, but he has yet to be officially cleared or ruled out for action. This game has so much potential to be good television, but a lot of that depends on watching Woods and Matt Barkley play pitch-and-catch. These things happen, particularly this late in the year, but what a shame if we don’t end up getting to see these two squads meet at full strength.

The factors that remain: First and foremost, LaMichael James having the Trojans’ number. They’ve never been particularly adept at stopping him, despite playing the Ducks at a point in the season when it’s obvious James needs bodies thrown in his way. He appears to be back in fine form after missing two games with a dislocated elbow, recording more than 300 yards over the past two weeks against Washington and Stanford. This year’s USC ground defense is statistically stingier than the 2009 or ’10 squads, so maybe the Trojans will make a game of it. They’d better, down their star receiver.

This isn’t to say USC lacks other offensive weapons. It is, after all, USC. Wee tailback Curtis McNeal is coming off a personal-best game against Washington, and wide receiver Marqise Lee, though not quite as gaudy a threat in the return department, is on pace to record more receiving yards as a freshman than Woods did last year.

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