There is no such thing as a compelling photo of NCAA COI deliberations, so here is Sebastian in a vaguely menacing posture. (AP)

Assorted items of varying degrees of interest which you may have missed while grudgingly watching playoff football and sending surly tweets to the Golden Globes:

• The NCAA is Lucy, and Miami football is the football, and we are Charlie Brown running toward it, or something? This metaphor holds up only to demonstrate how very much we wish for this all to be over, but here we go: The Miami Herald is calling the release of NCAA allegations against the Hurricanes football program “imminent,” just short of the investigation’s two-year anniversary. Bylaw Blogger John Infante lays out all the ways this process could still be stalled, and how the Miami case might affect Oregon’s.

• Mike Stoops also a fan of Hi Haters Friday! Friday night, 6:06 p.m., Tulsa World‘s John E. Hoover posts a transcript excerpt of a Mike Stoops radio interview, specifically a question regarding Johnny Football: “They’re gonna be tough to deal with. If they can keep him out of jail or keep him eligible, he’s gonna be pretty good.” Friday night, 10:37 p.m., Tulsa World post headline: “Mike Stoops regrets controversial comments on Manziel.” Had Stoops’ defense possessed that kind of on-the-fly adaptability in the Cotton Bowl, perhaps Manziel would not have scored four touchdowns against it, PAAAOWL.

• Roster blotter. In better news for Miami: Seantrel Henderson, Brandon Linder and Curtis Porter announced Monday morning they all intend to return to the ‘Canes in 2013 … in even better news for Profiteroles fans, Dri Archer will stay on for his senior season at Kent State … Iowa State quarterback Jared “That Kid Who Beat Oklahoma State” Barnett and linebacker C.J. Morgan intend to transfer … Texas defensive tackle Brandon Moore will enter the draft … also declaring is USC corner Nickell Robey, whom we will dearly miss watching because of his too-perfect defensive name … Oregon linebacker Anthony Wallace will transfer … Case McCoy and Jordan Hicks have been reinstated at Texas … and Casey Pachall returns to the Horned Frogs.

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What glories yet await Cory Dorris and the Golden Hurricane as Conference USA play continues? (AP)

Our weekly highlight show of lesser FBS luminaries. Non-AQs and independents, be welcome.

Tis the season for car commercials with big-ass bows and conference math. We attempted to explain, in bewildering detail, how the MAC races could shake out from here in our Wednesday night MACtion preview. We are here to inform you (with some glee, as we adore late-season chaos) that the MAC has far from the most convoluted conference race situation at the moment. Very quickly, the current states of the remaining non-AQ conference races, as teams not named Navy or BYU begin to prettify themselves for postseason suitors:

• Conference USA: Two teams with perfect 6-0 league play records top the two divisions: Central Florida in the East and Tulsa in the West. After Saturday, one squad’s record will bear some blemish when the two clash in Tulsa, but don’t expect that to affect the race. The Knights have only UAB to clear after that in the regular season, and hold a head-to-head advantage over East Carolina, the only other team in the division with fewer than three conference losses. Tulsa’s championship game aspirations could still be spoiled with a loss tonight and another at SMU November 24, assuming the Mustangs (4-2 in league play) beat Rice in the meantime.

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Colby Cameron and Johnny Manziel lead two of the nation’s top offenses. Who wins? Or will they decide to film a buddy cop comedy instead? JOHNNY FOOTBALL AND THE COLB-CAM: LOOSE CANNONS. (AP-Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

Our weekly highlight show of lesser FBS luminaries. Non-AQs and independents, be welcome.

It is time. The Ohio Bobcats are 6-0, bowl eligible and unranked and likely to stay that way for a little bit while AQ teams above them take losses and are dropped in the polls accordingly. They’re also not making a great case for Big Important Bowl Inclusion, having allowed three non-AQ teams (Marshall, UMass and Buffalo) to play them closer than their Week 1 opponents at Penn State. Six MAC teams remain on the schedule, not one of which finished 2011 with a winning record and only one of which (Kent State) is currently above .500 in 2012. If the Bobcats plan on ascending into the national Top 25 before the year is out, they’ll have to stage some blowouts.

This week, national spotlights will be trained on Louisiana Tech, a team less likely to go undefeated but more likely to impress the BCS if it does. A matchup viewed as a high-stakes Week 1 upset possibility has only seen its stakes increase since Hurricane Isaac forced a six-week delay, as both LaTech and Texas A&M went and got themselves ranked. Tech’s No. 23 AP ranking is just the second AP nod in program history and its first since 1999. A&M has rattled off four straight wins since dropping its first SEC game to Florida in Week 2, with the final scores ranging from the predictable (70-14 versus South Carolina State) to the uncomfortable (30-27 at Ole Miss).

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Assorted bests and worsts from college football’s weekend that was:

• Best Gameday surprise. This is a category that rolls deep every year, but we have yet to see much on television or in real life that tops the South Carolina mascot (the live one) being offered a glass of Steve Spurrier-branded wine. I mean:

Did Sir Big Spur sample the Steve Spurrier wine? twitter.com/gogamecocks/st…

— GoGamecocks.com (@gogamecocks) October 6, 2012

We live in the greatest country on earth, and don’t you ever forget it.

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ULM quarterback Kolton Browning edged the Warhawks past Arkansas and into history. (Wesley Hitt/Getty Images)

Our weekly highlight show of lesser FBS luminaries. Non-AQs and independents, be welcome.

• HAIL TO THE SUN BELT, SURE IS A FUN BELT, RA RA RA! What could top Utah State’s thrilling Friday night victory over Utah? Nothing short of Louisiana-Monroe taking a top 10 SEC team to overtime, on the road, and pulling out the win on a fourth-down quarterback dash. Said quarterback, Kolton Browning, has since been named Davey O’Brien Quarterback of the Week and a Walter Camp National Player of the Week honoree. Browning accounted for 481 of ULM’s 550 yards of offense, and four of the Warhawks’ five touchdowns. The Warhawks have their first win over a ranked team since leveling up to FBS, and to round out the weekly awards, have been named Week 2′s Tostitos Fiesta Bowl National Team of the Week. Last week it was Ohio. (A moment of cynicism: We love the attention being bestowed on non-AQs more than just about anybody right now, but this Tostitos shout out is pretty adorable considering how nigh-impossible it would be for the Bobcats or the Warhawks to actually make it into the Fiesta Bowl.)

• It is barely Week 3 and we are already out of poll puns. Idle in Week 2, Boise State is unranked in both major polls for the first time in four years. BYU is the only ranked team in this week’s AP Poll at No. 25, with Boise State, ULM (whee!), Ohio and Utah State also receiving votes. The Aggies’ lone vote is the program’s first since 1966; the Warhawks’ 23 are their first in team history. We hesitate to even mention the Coaches’ Poll for fear of helping its continued legitimacy, but teams receiving votes from disinterested voting SIDs include Boise State, BYU, Louisiana Tech, Ohio, Nevada and ULM.

• EA Sports loves USA, after all. EA Sports personnel have been spotted in Mobile, making preparations to incorporate South Alabama into the next edition of NCAA Football.

• The best news. Tulane’s Devon Walker is reportedly “alert and responsive” following spinal surgery. Tulane has set up an assistance fund in his name; for more ways to support the Walker family, click here.

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Tell us you wouldn’t love to see Frank Solich back in a big one. Imagine the glowers! (AP)

While we’ve been neglecting this space over the past week or so, we’ve been working behind the scenes helping to prep SI.com’s preseason packages. You can view all 2012 preseason content here; below, we’ve excerpted passages from our five non-AQ conference reports. Yes, we think Ohio could go undefeated. Stop that chuckling, chuckleheads.

MAC

Can Ohio really enter the BCS discussion? Ohio didn’t receive a single vote in the AP Poll. Not so much as a courtesy nod in the No. 25 spot from a single voter. So you might be wondering about our 12-0 crazypants prediction. Well: The Bobcats return 14 starters and are fresh off a Famous Idaho Potato Bowl victory. (Stay with us here.) They catch a Penn State squad that will likely be reeling at least a little bit early on, have Marshall as their only other remotely viable out-of-conference opponent and then settle into a conference slate which features not a single team that produced a winning record in 2011. Of course, we also had Washington as our sleeper national title game pick in 2010, so expect the Bobcats to lose to UMass or something, and expect that to be our fault. [Read the rest]

C-USA

Houston? Again? Seriously? Maybe? The Cougars have big names to fill, position-wise, and also lost their head coach, but promoting Tony Levine from within makes for a smoother transition. And apart from the above-mentioned Louisiana Tech game, here’s what Houston’s schedule looks like from September to November: Texas State, UCLA, Rice, North Texas, UAB, SMU, UTEP. That’s a lot of practice snaps. [Read the rest]

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Dear, dear Hawaii-San Jose State. We’ll miss you most of all. (AP)

• Idaho football is the sea captain’s daughter in this scenario, we guess. One of the problems with covering conference realignment is the long lead time we have on the finality of it all. The WAC is actually, finally disintegrating, but since we’d already been eulogizing it for months, all we have left to add are dates: The conference intends to drop football after this upcoming season in order to focus on keeping the league together in any capacity at all, which is itself a task fraught with peril. Idaho and New Mexico State, free to good homes. Please give.

• Duck, Ducks. “What it means for Oregon is that even if the NCAA never proves that Oregon’s coaching staff intended the purchase of Lyles’ recruiting service to get them access to prospects or had much contact with Lyles, the school could still face severe penalties.” John Infante breaks down l’affaire Lyles with several ominous conclusions.

• How long do we plan on continuing to pretend anyone will outbid Jerry Jones? Houston and San Antonio aren’t even the shiniest choices in their own state to land the Champions Bowl. And there’s still time, Tampa and Jacksonville! Do it for Beef ‘O’ Brady’s! (For the record, we are still hoping Vicksburg will toss in a bid, because you’ve seen basketball on an aircraft carrier, but never football in a riverboat casino, amirite??)

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A hypothetical Sun Beast logo, courtesy of our friends at SB Nation.

All that fun we had cooing at the logo for the imaginary SUNBEAST football conference, all those times we fantasized (halfheartedly) about the possibility of a UConn-FIU home-and-home series — we were so close to something actually resembling the SUNBEAST and didn’t even know it. From the Tennessean‘s report on Karl Benson’s mad machinations at the wheel of the SBC:

On April 1, Benson emailed a powerpoint presentation to Sun Belt presidents/chancellors and athletic directors, laying out the league’s various realignment options.
[...]
The same presentation included several maps of potential conference mergers – one of which was titled “Makes Too Much Sense” and proposed a 33-school superconference combining the Sun Belt, C-USA, WAC and Mountain West Conference.

We can see it now. A creature with the wings of a falcon, the majestic tail of a mustang, enough feet to make up an entire pack of wolves and the cold, level gaze of Big Red himself. And maybe an eyepatch.

Courtesy of the Texas State 2011-12 Fan Guide

• What’s all this, then? On July 1, a crop of the realignment changes we’ve been so resistant to took effect. Among the movers were the Texas State University-San Marcos Bobcats, now residents of the WAC.

• Do we finally have a new WAC member school intent on staying there? LOLZ of course not! After one year in the great WAC way-station, the Bobcats will join the Sun Belt for the 2013 season.

• Is this at least a program with a modicum of history? Absolutely, and then some. Texas State began play in 1904, and spent most of its modern existence in the D-II Lone Star Conference before beginning FCS play as a Southland school in 1987. The Bobcats won back-to-back D-II national championships in 1981 and ’82, and two conference titles during their FCS stay.

• So they have a big cat mascot. Can we make a rule against new schools entering the FBS having big cat mascots? Too many big cat mascots! I’m a dog person. Too bad. The Bobcats were here first, according to the university: “Texas State was the only college in the country until the late 1920s to possess the name for its athletic teams.”

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UTSA will join the WAC in 2012 as a transitional FBS member before leaving for Conference USA. (Icon SMI)

You didn’t ask, but we answered:

• What’s all this, then? On July 1, a crop of the realignment changes we’ve been so resistant to took effect. Among the movers was UT San Antonio, which joins the WAC as a transitional FBS member along with Texas State.

• Hey, repopulating the WAC! That’s a noble endeavor. Not so fast. The Roadrunners will be WAC members for precisely one year before hopping [<--- bird pun] to Conference USA in July 2013.

• That’s mean! That’s realignment. Who falls behind is left behind.

• Why have I never heard of UTSA having a football program? Up until a very short while ago, it did not. The team began putting players on scholarship in 2010 and played its first season in 2011.

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