James White was part of a Badgers ground game that tallied 539 yards and eight scores. (Getty Images)

Quick hits from the Championship Saturday action. For more on Week 14, check out our Friday Snaps, coverage of Louisville-Rutgers, Oklahoma-TCU and the epic clash between Alabama and Georgia, plus our complete Top 25 review.

• Wisconsin 70, No. 14 Nebraska 31. This game wasn’t even as close as the final score indicates, which is really saying something. The Huskers were down 42-10 at the half — Wisconsin scored its final touchdown of the second quarter on a trick play with 20 seconds left on the clock, because Bret Bielema enjoys reminding folks he’s Bret Bielema — and scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter after the Badgers had already crossed the 60-point mark.

“We kind of set our minds before the game that this is our game,” Monteé Ball said afterward. “The running backs were going to set the tempo.” Offhand, with 539 yards gained on the ground alone, we would venture to suggest they succeeded in their efforts.

Fun tidbit: Ball rushed for 201 yards on 21 attempts and three touchdowns, and was neither the leading scorer nor the leading rusher for the Badgers. Melvin Gordon rang up 217 yards on nine carries with one score, while James White added four touchdowns and 109 yards on 15 carries. Lost in all that: Taylor Martinez doing this Family Circus touchdown run. Don’t forget that Taylor Martinez did this, because it was awesome.

Wisconsin trailed Nebraska 3-4 in the series before tonight’s cannon show. Has a series ever been leveled with such gusto? And what will a defense of Stanford’s caliber make of these five-loss Badgers, who wouldn’t have even been in position to claim the Big Ten title and earn a Rose Bowl berth if not for other programs’ sanctions? “It’s OK to get there,” said Bielema of the Rose Bowl, “but you need to win it.” They’ll get their shot on New Year’s Day. [BOX | RECAP]

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It’s unlikely that Jordan Lynch and NIU can slide into a BCS bowl, but when have we ever liked sure things? (AP)

Quick hits from Friday night’s college football conference championship games. For more on Week 14, check out our Championship Saturday Snaps, coverage of Louisville-Rutgers, Oklahoma-TCU and the epic clash between Alabama and Georgia, plus our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 19 Northern Illinois 44, No. 18 Kent State 37 (2OT). Jordan Lynch put on a show in Detroit, and NIU’s defense played the part of showstoppers in the 2012 MAC championship game. The Huskies won their second consecutive conference title, in their third consecutive conference title game appearance, but this is MACtion, dahling. And MACtion would never, ever wind up without a flourish.

Down 10-0 late in the first quarter and looking slightly discombobulated, the Huskies executed a bit of gridiron theater we might have expected out of the early-season Golden Flashes, back when they were returning fumbled punts the wrong way down the field and tackling their own teammates for safeties: They attempted a fake field goal attempt that was interrupted by their own timeout call, effectively icing their own kicker, who wasn’t even planning to kick. Problem? Not for a team with Lynch, who returned to the field after the break, converted fourth-and-three on his own two feet, then continued running for 14 additional yards. Viva MACtion!

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Stepfan Taylor (33) and Stanford will look to pull off a repeat performance against UCLA next week. (AP)

Snap Judgments from the Week 13 late slate. For more, check out Friday’s Snaps, Saturday’s early Snaps, Saturday’s midday Snaps, our recaps of Michigan-Ohio State, Florida-Florida State and Notre Dame-USC and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 11 Stanford 35, No. 15 UCLA 17. With tonight’s victory, the Cardinal secured a share of the Pac-12 North division title and set up a rematch for the conference championship six days from now in Palo Alto. The win was all but assured midway through the second quarter, when Stanford jumped out to a 21-7 lead on a 49-yard Stepfan Taylor touchdown run; UCLA didn’t come within a score of catching up again all night. Stanford’s last conference title came in 1999; the Cardinal will be making their first appearance in the Pac-12 championship game.

Johnathan Franklin, he of the 131-yards-per-game rushing average, was held below 100 yards for just the fourth time this season, recording 65 yards on 21 carries and scoring one of the Bruins’ two touchdowns. Taylor more than doubled up Franklin, gaining 147 yards on 21 carries and scoring twice, all before being rested in the fourth quarter. UCLA quarterback Brett Hundley, meanwhile, threw for 259 yards but was sacked seven times — bad even for an offense that ranked 110th nationally in sacks allowed before this game, and above even Stanford’s lofty four-sack average.

Not to take anything away from Stanford, which has done some very neat work this season in the absence of Andrew Luck, among other key figures, but it’s all right to feel the tiniest bit let down about this. If only for the sake of variety, it would’ve been interesting to see UCLA play Oregon for the first time this season and not the Cardinal for a second in a week. But if we got everything we wanted, there’d be no point in writing fanfic about Ron Prince becoming monarch-commissioner of college football, and where’s the fun in that? The battle for a Rose Bowl bid begins next Friday at 8 p.m. ET. [BOX | RECAP]

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De’Anthony Thomas torched Oregon State for 122 rushing yards and three scores. (Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)

Snap Judgments from the Week 13 midday flight. For more, check out Friday’s Snaps, Saturday’s early Snaps, Saturday’s late Snaps, our recaps of Michigan-Ohio State, Florida-Florida State and Notre Dame-USC and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 5 Oregon 48, No. 16 Oregon State 24. Despite the typically gaudy final score for the Ducks, this game was close well into the third quarter. Two De’Anthony Thomas touchdowns in just more than two minutes, separated by a Beavers fumble on a kickoff return, put the game out of reach. And Oregon being Oregon, the Ducks piled on just a bit, with Kenjon Barner and Marcus Mariota adding another pair of touchdowns around a second-down Sean Mannion interception. Turnovers completely hamstrung Oregon State this afternoon; the Beavers committed six in all, including three interceptions that killed off three of their four final drives.

While the Ducks’ most memorable defensive plays occurred in the air, their offensive attack was confined largely to the ground. Mariota completed 17-of-24 attempts for 139 yards and a touchdown and rushed for an additional 85 yards and a score. The best of these: a 42-yard touchdown run just more than two minutes into the first quarter. Ahead of him in rushing: Barner, with 221 yards and two scores on 29 carries, and Thomas, with 122 yards and three scores on 17 attempts.

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Bacarri Rambo had a fumble recovery and a pick in Georgia’s rout of Georgia Tech. (Scott Cunningham/Getty Images)

Snap Judgments from the Week 13 early slate. For more, check out Friday Snaps, Saturday’s midday Snaps, Saturday’s late Snaps, our recaps of Michigan-Ohio State, Florida-Florida State and Notre Dame-USC and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 3 Georgia 42, Georgia Tech 10. Looky here, it’s two teams headed to major conference championship games next week! Don’t be too hard on Tech; the Jackets and their coach have battled the flu all week, were operating without the services of leading rusher Orwin Smith and still managed to pile up 458 yards in Sanford Stadium. It was scoring that posed the problem; Tech didn’t even attempt a punt in the first half but had three drives snuffed out by a fumble, a failed fourth-down attempt and an interception, respectively. Its second-half drives fared little better, ending in two punts, one touchdown and three more unsuccessful fourth-down conversions. Georgia’s first seven drives, by contrast: touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, punt, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown. Mark Richt, in his postgame press conference: “Our goal was to win every phase of the game, for every unit to win. I think we may have done that.” Seems like a solid take, coach.

The result is the biggest margin of victory for the Dawgs in their year-end rivalry game since 2002. And speaking of records: With Saturday’s scoreboard assault, the 2012 Bulldogs are officially the highest-scoring squad in program history. That same 2002 team scored 450 points in 14 games; with 12 games down and two to go, this year’s squad is already at 456. Safety Bacarri Rambo tied Jake Scott’s school record for career interceptions at 16. And Aaron Murray is now the first SEC quarterback to put up three consecutive 3,000-yard seasons.

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Rex Burkhead goes out with a bang. (AP)

Snap Judgments from Friday afternoon’s action. For more, check out Saturday’s early Snaps and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 17 Nebraska 13, Iowa 7. Bo Pelini was asked in his postgame on-field interview whose decision it was to insert the oft-injured Rex Burkhead into the Huskers’ final regular-season game. He laughed. “His!” The senior standout, absent for much of this season while nursing a knee injury, made the most of his time on the turf, leading Nebraska’s ground attack (69 yards on 16 carries) and scoring the Huskers’ only touchdown of the contest on a three-yard run in the third quarter.

Those of you who find our occasional gleeful odes to MACtion tacky are in for a real treat with today’s box score, where you will find just one player with an individual stat line totaling more than 100 yards. (The lucky lad: Taylor Martinez, who completed 9 of 14 passes for 63 yards and rushed for an additional 41.) Burkhead was trailed  by Ameer Abdullah (50 rushing yards on 14 carries) and Braylon Heard (46 yards on four carries). For the Hawkeyes, James Vandenberg completed 11 of 24 pass attempts for 92 yards and threw two interceptions. Mark Weisman led Iowa in rushing with 91 yards on 29 attempts.

Vandenberg also gave the Hawkeyes their only lead of the game, with a one-yard rushing touchdown late in the first quarter, a lead Iowa hung onto until Burkhead’s run. And for a moment there, late in the fourth quarter, it looked as though we might have a ballgame on our hands again. Given the ball on a Nebraska punt at their own 27 with about three and a half minutes to play, the Hawkeyes executed two consecutive six-yard plays before Vandenberg threw his second interception with just 2:11 remaining on the clock. And practically before time had expired in the stadium, we had that all-important BIG TEN CHAMPIONSHIP GAME TICKETS: ON SALE NOW email land in our inbox. The Huskers have earned at least a share of the division title and will play Wisconsin in Indianapolis on Saturday, December 1. Nebraska won their first meeting in September, 30-27. [BOX | RECAP]

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UCLA’s Johnathan Franklin rushed for 171 yards and two touchdowns in a victory over USC. (Jeff Gross/Getty Images)

Snap Judgments from the Week 12 midday slate. For more, check out our early Snaps, our coverage of Stanford-Oregon, our look at the new BCS landscape and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 17 UCLA 38, No. 21 USC 28. You heard a lot last week about the football monopoly in Los Angeles being over. No, again. No, for real this time. Well, you’ll hear even more about it this week, but only because it’s finally, demonstrably true. (We’re taking suggestions on which board-game related jokes to start making in its place from here on out. Balderdash? Sorry? Jenga?)

On a rainy afternoon in the Rose Bowl, the Bruins dashed out to a 24-0 lead midway through the second quarter, only to see the Trojans snatch momentum back by the start of the third, by which point Matt Barkley had thrown two touchdown passes and defensive tackle George Uko had scored a genuine Fat Guy Touchdown on a slip-and-slide fumble recovery. (Storied rivalry, historic venue, high conference stakes, home-and-home jerseys AND a FGTD: This game had it all, y’all.) A pair of traded touchdowns and a successful USC two-point conversion later, and the Trojans were trailing by three points with a little more than seven minutes left in the fourth quarter.

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Speedster Dri Archer helped Kent State secure its first MAC title game berth by beating Bowling Green. (AP)

Snap Judgments from the Week 12 early slate. For more, check out our midday Snaps, our coverage of Stanford-Oregon, our look at the new BCS landscape and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 25 Kent State 31, Bowling Green 24. Brothers and sisters, we have nearly come to the end of this thing. This is the last normal weekend of college football in the 2012 season: Next week’s games are scattered willy-nilly over the Thanksgiving holiday, and after that there’s just the conference championships and a dozen or so assorted other contests. Then, we will be all plunged into darkness with only the promise of Army-Navy and the New Mexico Bowl to guide us. So we understand your impatience, and you can imagine ours, as we flipped channels today only to be met time and again with lackluster on-field products.

We were delighted but not surprised to find the most compelling action of Week 12′s first flight of games in the form of daylight MACtion. If you’re not a regular reader of Profiles in Profiteroles or lack a fondness for college football’s less-celebrated conferences, you may not be familiar with the works of Kent State’s Dri Archer. The top-ranked kick returner in the FBS got most of the Golden Flashes’ touches at running back today, and to spectacular effect: 241 rushing yards, including touchdowns of 79 and 74 yards.

Kent State’s other two touchdowns were scored by quarterback Spencer Keith (one passing, one rushing); the last gave the Golden Flashes their final lead of the game midway through the fourth quarter. The Falcons mounted an impressive final would-be scoring drive that ended with Luke Wollet picking off Matt Schilz in Kent State’s end zone with 21 seconds remaining on the clock, and punching the Golden Flashes’ first ticket to the MAC championship game. They’ll face Northern Illinois in Detroit on Friday, November 30. [BOX | RECAP]

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Ty Flournoy-Smith (80), Ken Malcome (24) and the Bulldogs clinched the SEC East title by beating Auburn. (AP)

Snap Judgments from the Week 11 late slate. For more, check out early Snaps, midday Snaps, our recaps of Texas A&M-Alabama and Kansas State-TCU and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 5 Georgia 38, Auburn 0. Aaron Murray constructed four touchdown drives on Georgia’s first four possessions in Auburn tonight, first throwing three scoring passes to three different receivers, then handing off to Todd Gurley for a rushing touchdown late in the second quarter. Murray finished 18-of-24 with 208 yards and three touchdowns. (You’re not hallucinating, watching replays of that third touchdown pass: Tavarres King played wearing No. 15 tonight to honor injured teammate Marlon Brown.) A breakaway 62-yard run by the other half of the Dawgs’ freshman tailback tandem, Keith Marshall, marked Georgia’s last score late in the third quarter. Gurley and Marshall combined for 19 carries totaling 221 yards.

On a Saturday that saw two of the six undefeated FBS teams fall (so far, that is — Oregon and Cal are tied 7-7 as we’re writing this), the one one-loss team in the AP top five sealed its regular-season conference fate. Georgia is your 2012 SEC East champion and will make a second consecutive trip to the Georgia Dome in December, presumably to face Alabama out of the West. Until then, the Dawgs are finished with SEC play, hosting Georgia Southern next week and Georgia Tech the week after that. Auburn, too, will stay in-state, getting Alabama A&M at home in Week 12 and (presumably!) providing a second division title-clinching game at Alabama in the Iron Bowl.

Said Murray in his postgame remarks: “ Like I’ve been saying all year, you just never know who’s going to win.” That may not be entirely true today, but it’s  a nice sentiment. [BOX | RECAP]

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Johnny Manziel (2) and Texas A&M dealt Alabama its first loss since last November. (Mike Zarrilli/Getty Images)

Snap Judgments from the Week 11 midday slate. For more, check out early Snaps, late Snaps, our recaps of Texas A&M-Alabama and Kansas State-TCU and our complete Top 25 review.

• No. 15 Texas A&M 29, No. 1 Alabama 24. We are reminded tonight of how Kevin Sumlin’s first round of interviews went at last summer’s SEC Media Days. No reporter actually stood up, shoved a mic in his face and asked, “HEY COACH, YOU SKEERED?” but something like that wasn’t all that far from happening by the time the Q&A ended. Sumlin dispensed with those questions back in July with gracious humor, some quips and a few dagger stares. Tonight, his Aggies dispensed with the No. 1 team in the country.

Heading into Week 11, Alabama had a perfect record in 2012, one loss in nearly two full seasons of football and a unanimous lock on the No. 1 spot in the AP Poll. And tonight, in Tuscaloosa, the Tide were rudely introduced to a Kliff Kingsbury offense that put them in a 20-0 hole, at home, by the end of the first quarter. ‘Bama answered with two touchdowns and a field goal over the next two quarters, but it surrendered nine more points to the Aggies in the fourth. The Tide pulled to within a five-point, 29-24 deficit on a 54-yard AJ McCarron-to-Amari Cooper score halfway through the final period and held A&M to a three-and-out on the subsequent possession. But a costly McCarron interception inside the five-yard line on what could have been the game-winning drive, plus a ‘Bama offsides penalty with A&M set to punt in the final minute, sealed the stunning upset.

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