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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Former West Virginia head coach Bill Stewart died Monday afternoon, the school announced, after collapsing on a golf course while suffering an apparent heart attack. Good football moments were trickier to come by on his watch in recent years, but our favorite Mountaineers game of the Stewart era was his first: that fateful date with Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.

He is survived by his wife, Karen, and son Blaine. Our sincere condolences to the Stewart family. RIP, Whittlin’ Bill.

Dana Holgorsen vs. Nick Saban? Yes, please. (AP)

It’s not a done deal just yet, but if you’d care to have a sympathetic crew of scientists cryogenically freeze you to make good and sure nothing happens to you during the next two football seasons, it’s an understandable impulse: Alabama and West Virginia are in negotiations to open the 2014 season as part of the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic. WVU officials confirmed the possibility to the Charleston Daily Mail.

We have spent more time watching these two teams than any other save our actual alma mater, but even if you despise both programs it’s hard to deny the curb appeal of BOOM GRR DEFENSE versus HISS SPAT OFFENSE. This particular game of Red Team Blue Team, still more than two years away, will be hard to top for other neutral-site organizers in terms of pure built-in narrative and mayhem potential. Start building your Walking Dead bunkers now, Atlanta residents, and disguise your couches as chest freezers for the duration of the weekend.

Oklahoma indefinitely suspended four players for violating team rules, including Jaz Reynolds (16) and two other receivers. (Getty)

In descending order of 2012 impact, let’s review the latest round of offseason bad life decisions made in the Big 12:

• Oklahoma: Four players suspended indefinitely, three of them receivers, for (all together now) the ever-popular-and-mysterious Violation Of Team Rules. The absence of wideouts Trey Franks, Kameel Jackson and Jaz Reynolds will significantly deplete the Sooners’ receiving corps, but OU blog Crimson & Cream Machine thinks the presence of Kenny Stills and a few promising underclassmen could make up the difference:

The bottom line is that Stills, Metoyer and Gardner are all capable of drawing the double-team and Jaz Reynolds wasn’t. Whoever replaced Reynolds must be ready to make and immediate impact and get the offense clicking quickly.

If the suspensions hold up into the season then the Sooners may have lost a lot in terms of bodies but when it comes to the product on the field they didn’t lose much at all.

Defensive back Quentin Hayes is the fourth offender. He recorded three solo tackles as a redshirt freshman in 2011 and saw action in a special teams capacity.

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Legendary coach Barry Switzer is the patron saint of Campus Union’s college football awards; Dana Holgorsen is one of our distinguished spring 2012 imaginary award recipients. (US PRESSWIRE)

[Previously: 2011 midseason Switzies | 2011 year-end Switzies]

Preseason football is meaningless football, but that won’t stop us from handing out imaginary trophies to the luminaries of spring. Be sure to also check out Andy Staples’ post-spring Top 25 and Stewart Mandel’s 10 spring lessons.

• The Paul Erdős Plaque for Most Relentlessly Complex Spring Game Scoring System: Auburn, which awarded players extra points for “explosive plays”  and consecutive first downs, confounding all onlookers.

• The Mark Mangino Medal of Mean Expectation Lowering: Quoth Dana Holgorsen, tempering fan panic as he tinkers with his offense: ”The guys in there? If we’re playing with them in the fall, we’re not going to win.”

• Most Likely To Announce His Own Retirement At Halftime Of The First Game Due To Incurable Sadness: We had Frank Spaziani slotted in here until about three minutes before hitting the “publish” button, when we realized we’re not sure if he’s capable of processing human sadness. Would Kirk Ferentz make an able runner-up candidate? He keeps right on losing running backs, had to replace two coordinators and has a Week 1 date with Northern Illinois. The Huskies are themselves replacing Chandler Harnish, but if Jordan Lynch can even prove a halfway passable facsimile … oh, man.

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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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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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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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Like you, these fans are very unhappy about having to suffer through an interminable offseason. (AP)

Take some feel-good newsbits and unserious readings with you into the first bleak weekend of this interminable offseason. We’ll get through this together, I swear, by the blood of Terry Bowden. 

• Speaking of the offseason: It’s here. And it’s horrific. Pre-Snap Read is here to help, with 230-item to-do list to while away the winter, spring and summer with tasks from the practical (“Make a new set of house keys”) to the conciliatory (“Go to one NBA game — but that’s it”) to the fantastical (“Imagine ’95 Nebraska against 2011 Alabama”) to the downright goofy (“Don’t use chewing tobacco for a month”).

• Here’s one way: How many paranoia-induced patterns can you spot in the last AP Poll of the 2011 season? Re-rank the one-loss teams. Re-rank the four-loss teams. Marvel that Cincinnati is in there at all. We killed an hour with this at breakfast, easy.

• The greatest downtime distraction returns: The Fulmer Cup makes its triumphant re-entrance onto the national scene, with a couple false alarms already on the books but no official points tallied after three days and change. We spoke too soon! Great hustle, South Carolina! C’mon, Ohio State, get with it! Urban Meyer’s your coach now and everything!

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Robert Griffin III's showing against Oklahoma was one of this year's indelible moments. (US PRESSWIRE)

It is the third full day of the 2011 offseason and the 2012 preseason. It’s really the second for me, having spent most of Tuesday trying with increasing reluctance to get out of New Orleans. By quick shoddy math, I’ve been on the road 27 days out of the last 41. I got to see a host of familiar faces this season and postseason, and meet so many of you for the first time. I get asked a lot: How did you get into this? If you know me from back home, it usually comes out Why did you get into this? I usually want to talk about Larry, but don’t. It explains things, but it takes a while. From now until August, though, we’ve got nothing but time. Time and recruiting and police blotters and calendar-cussing, and precious little else.

I grew up in a football-loving family in a football-loving town. I was pulled out of school on more than one occasion to get a head start down to Tuscaloosa or Birmingham for the Third Saturday in October. The effects of this did not show up right away, because I was a drama geek from a very young age, and to attend football games and smile through black-painted lips was to plumb the depths of human indignity. Then I went and studied performing arts at a big football university, where we didn’t have shows on home game Saturdays because the audience wouldn’t have had a place to park. This insurmountable logistical problem meant departmental drones could have it both ways, six shows a week and belting out our own operatic harmonies to Rocky Top in the student section on what was supposed to be our day of rest. (I still do this. Just not in the press box.)

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