Perennial Big East doormat Rutgers became bowl-eligible today with a win over Navy. Any bowl trip would be Rutgers’s first since 1978 — but with the Scarlet Knights holding a 3-1 record in the Big East, I’m thinking bigger. What are their odds of winning the conference and playing in a BCS bowl?

I love this idea, not only because rooting for underdogs is fun (and Rutgers gives a whole new meaning to the term “underdog”), but because if anything could shake up the BCS (well, aside from a third consecutive year with more than one team having a reasonable claim to the national championship), it’d be Rutgers in the Sugar Bowl.

Unfortunately, Rutgers’s one loss is to West Virginia, which is undefeated in the Big East right now. That means the Mountaineers need to lose twice for the Scarlet Knights to pass them in the standings. (Technically, if West Virginia loses once and both Rutgers and Pittsburgh win out, there would be a three-way tie for first, in which case the bowl representative would be the highest-ranked team among the three, not the head-to-head winner — but it’s inconceivable that Rutgers, with a schedule strength in the 90s and a nonexistent human-poll profile, would be ranked ahead of WVU and Pitt in the BCS.)

In the event of a two-way tie with Pittsburgh, the Scarlet Knights get in because they beat the Panthers head-to-head last month. And the Big East’s other one-loss team, South Florida, plays at Rutgers next week, so if the Knights win out, USF won’t be an issue.

So, to review: if Rutgers wins out (at home vs. South Florida, at Louisville, at home vs. Cincinnati), and West Virginia loses two of its final four games (at South Florida, at home vs. UConn, at Cincinnati, at home vs. Pittsburgh), the Scarlet Knights go to the BCS — probably the Sugar Bowl, according to this article.

Hey, it could happen. :)

Notre Dame’s next opponent, Tennessee, just lost 16-15 to South Carolina. The Vols are now 3-4, having lost three games in a row. (Admittedly, the first two were to undefeated Alabama and then-undefeated Georgia.) This is bad news all around: ND’s strength of schedule looks even worse, Tennessee will come to Notre Dame Stadium pissed off, and if the Irish beat the Vols next Saturday, it will look less impressive.

Other teams on Notre Dame’s schedule went 4-5 today.

According to CNN, there has been a deadly train crash in India that has killed 102 people (so far). Apparently it was dark when the train attempted to cross tracks that had been partially swept away by severe flooding; seven cars are still submerged. I suspect many more will be found dead, as the pictures make it look pretty much unsurvivable.

Also, there has been a terrorist bombing in New Dehli, with 55 victims (at last count). No group has taken responsibility, although it is suspected to have something to do with Kashmir. The attack was actually three separate incidents, all in crowded marketplaces (reminiscent of attacks elsewhere).

Check out any news outlet for more.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

Undefeated UCLA and unranked Stanford are going to overtime. The Bruins trailed 24-3, but scored 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to tie the game.

I hate to admit this, but I’m rooting for UCLA. I want the Trojans to be the ones who end their undefeated season, dammit! So… FIGHT ON, BRUINS!!! :)

Meanwhile, undefeated Texas is losing to unranked Oklahoma State, 28-19 late in the third quarter!

Will three undefeated teams lose today? (Earlier, Georgia lost to Florida.)

UPDATE: Bruins win!

And Texas has taken the lead.

UPDATE 2: Texas wins, too. So there are five undefeated teams still standing: USC, Texas, Virginia Tech, Alabama and UCLA.

Undefeated Georgia just lost to Urban Meyer’s Florida Gators, 14-10. So now there are only five undefeated teams left in the country, and only one in the SEC (Alabama).

USC, on the other hand, is not going to see its undefeated season end. They’re leading Wazzu, 48-13 with 7:20 to go.

Meanwhile, our resident Terps fans are doubtless on the edges of their seats, as it’s #10 Florida State 28, Maryland 27 with 7:58 left in the fourth quarter. A win would create a three-way tie atop the ACC’s Atlantic division among three two-loss teams: Maryland, Florida State and Boston College. With a game in two weeks against Boston College and the head-to-head tiebreaker over FSU, the Terps would control their own destiny in terms of getting to the ACC title game — win out and they’re in.

UPDATE: Florida State survived, 35-27. USC won its 30th straight, 55-13. And now Stanford is leading UCLA, 7-0, early in the second quarter.

Guestblogger: David Kreutz

The Trojans are dominating the Cougars with a score of 38-6 at halftime. USC lineman Winston Justice recovered a Reggie Bush fumble in the endzone to score his first-ever touchdown.

Top 25

#16 Florida is leading undefeated #4 Georgia 14-3 at the start of the second half.

Maryland is hoping for an upset over #10 Florida State, the Terps lead 21-14 over the ‘Noles at the start of the third quarter.

The undefeated Crimson Tide of #5 Alabama are currently rolling over the Utah State Aggies, with a 28-3 lead going into the 4th.

Rounding out the top 25 in action so far, #11 Penn state is up over Purdue 23-7 in the 3rd quarter.

Pac-10

In addition to USC/WSU, one other Pac-10 game is in progress and in a surprise the 1-6 Arizona Wildcats are leading the Beavers of Oregon State 23-10 at the half.

45 officers and 6 civilian officers of the New Orleans Police Department have been fired for deserting the force in the run-up to, or aftermath of, Hurricane Katrina. (Hat tip: the forums.)

Once upon a time, an egghead pondered the question: why exactly were some people immune to the Black Death? His quest for the answer led him to an English town named Eyam, where the plague had been introduced by disease-ridden fleas hitchhiking on a bit of fabric. The townies knew about the plague and asked their spiritual leader what to do. He said, look, we’re all gonna die, so let’s just stay here. Or something like that.

Everyone expected a ghost town when they came to Eyam the next year. But, SHOCK, there were some people still alive. People who had come into contact with the virus and still survived, defying the odds. Incidentally, cats and dogs were also living in harmony.

When modern day egghead saw this, he said, WTF!?!? So, he studied the descendants of these people and found a gene that I nicknamed Rover. Rover prevented the plague from entering the cells to infect them. Weird, eh?

Egghead’s research was eventually found by egghead 2.0. Egghead 2.0 was researching AIDS and he decided to look at why some high risk people just don’t seem to contract the virus. In doing so, he found Rover, the same gene that protected people from the bubonic plague. His human guinea pig was inject with 3,000x the normal amount of the HIV virus needed to infect a person and still wasn’t infected. It’s all about ROVER!

The, uh, official story is available here.

Newington beat Maloney yesterday, 34-0, to improve to 5-2 on the season and 3-0 in the CCC South. (Articles here and here.) The Indians are now two wins away from their first conference championship since 1993. Next week they host Bristol Central, which has an identical 5-2 record and figures to be the season’s final tough test. Then they travel to Bulkeley (0-7) and finish the season on Thanksgiving with a non-conference game against Wethersfield (1-5).

In other NHS news, Living Room Times pool veteran Danny Pilz, co-champion of the 2004 NCAA women’s basketball pool, won the CCC South cross-country championship! Congrats, Danny!

Hurricane Beta caused extensive damage to the Colombian island of Providencia, but just “one minor injury” has been reported, and “Juan Guillermo Angel, who was directing Colombia’s response to the hurricane from San Andres Island…said the island’s 5,000 residents and [the] handful of tourists appeared safe.”

Charlie Weis has signed a contract extension that is supposed to keep him at Notre Dame through 2015. (Hat tip: kormal.)

Tomorrow is my 24th birthday. It’s also the last Sunday in October, which means that at 2:00 AM, Daylight Saving Time ends, and clocks throughout the country — except in Hawaii, Arizona, and here in (most of) Indiana — “fall back” and essentially repeat the 1-2 AM hour. The result is a “25-hour day.”

Of course, this is a legal construct, not an astronomical one; it won’t take the Earth any longer than usual to rotate once around its axis tomorrow. Still, I must say, I like the idea of having a 25-hour-long birthday!

The last Sunday in October has been the ending date of DST since 1966. (Source.) I was born on Friday, October 30, 1981 — at 9:22 AM Eastern Standard Time in Hartford, Connecticut — and, checking the calendar, I see that I’ve had three Sunday birthdays: my second birthday in 1983, my seventh birthday in 1988, and my 13th birthday in 1994. By ‘94, I was old enough and nerdy enough that you’d think I would have thought of this, and would have revelled in the idea of a 25-hour birthday. But I don’t recall thinking about it at the time. Perhaps I did and forgot, or perhaps I was too distracted with the far more important fact of becoming a teenager — not to mention the REALLY big distraction in my life at the time: earlier that month, I had “asked out” a girl for the first time ever. :) Ah, middle school…

Anyway, because I live in a part of Indiana that doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time (yet), I won’t get to personally experience a 25-hour birthday tomorrow. D’oh! And because Congress is changing the ending date of Daylight Saving Time from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November starting in 2007, this is my last chance for an extended birthday. The next time my birthday falls on a Sunday, in 2011, Daylight Saving Time won’t end until November 6, barring another changing in the law.

So now, if I run for Congress in 2010, you’ll all know the secret reason why. I want a 25-hour birthday, dammit! ;)

Bryan Woods at The Storm Track is sounding the alarm about the potential for Hurricane Beta — currently a Cat. 1 — to veritably explode today into a monster hurricane:

Beta formed a pinhole eye [overnight]. … Remember: as soon as Wilma developed a pinhole eye in this region, she strengthened from a Cat. 1 to a Cat. 5 overnight. The SHIPS model is indicating over a 60% chance that Beta’s winds will strengthen by at least 30 mph in the next 24 hours.

He adds, “There is only one eyewall in place so I do not expect an eyewall replacement before landfall. … The situation in Nicaragua could be very serious tomorrow.”

The pinhole eye is “a little bit hidden in most infrared and visible satellite images,” but you can see it clearly via microwave imagery here.

I don’t plan on liveblogging today’s college-football action as extensively as usual. For one thing, I have a lot of work to do; for another thing, Notre Dame has a bye week and USC’s game isn’t televised here in South Bend, so if I’m ever going to take a weekend “off” from college football, this is the one.

But anyway, here is a look at some of the day’s big games, and other miscellaneous games of interest to me and/or my readers. All listings are South Bend time, which today — for maybe the last time ever (or maybe not) — is the same as Chicago time, not New York time.

Link (where available) goes to the box score, or will once the game is underway.

Undefeated teams in action
* Alabama vs. Utah State, 2:00 PM
* Georgia at #16 Florida, 2:30 PM
* USC vs. Wazzu, 2:30 PM
* UCLA at Stanford, 5:30 PM
* Texas at Oklahoma State, 6:00 PM

Notre Dame opponents in action
* Michigan State vs. Indiana, underway
* Syracuse vs. Cincinnati, underway
* BYU vs. Air Force, 2:00 PM
* Purdue at Penn State, 2:30 PM
* Navy at Rutgers, 2:30 PM
* Washington at Arizona State, 4:30 PM
* Michigan at Northwestern, 6:00 PM
* Tennessee vs. South Carolina, 6:45 PM
* See also USC and Stanford, above

Miscellaneous others
* Illinois vs. Wisconsin, underway
* Baylor vs. Texas Tech, underway
* Buffalo vs. Ohio, 12:30 PM
* Maryland at Florida State, 2:30 PM

Full scoreboard here.

Fight on Trojans, beat the Cougars!!!

The mysterious sweet smell that perplexed New Yorkers on Thursday evening has vanished without a trace, and still, nobody knows what the hell it was. Has someone invented a maple syrup-smelling form of aerosolized anthrax, or something along those lines? I certainly hope not, and officials say no. The New York Times reports:

Late yesterday, nearly 24 hours after the smell had spread through the city, sparking hundreds of bewildered calls to the city’s 311 emergency hot line, officials said that they had determined that the smell had not been hazardous and that it had dissipated as quickly, and mysteriously, as it had appeared.

Even after chasing down anonymous tips and chasing up several blind alleys, however, they did not know where it had come from.

The odor was first detected around 8 p.m. on Thursday in Lower Manhattan. It seemed to spread quickly uptown and into parts of the other boroughs - so quickly that officials expressed concern. The city’s Office of Emergency Management sent out feelers to the Police and Fire Departments, state emergency response agencies in New York and New Jersey, and the United States Coast Guard, which communicated with tugboats and container ships at sea to determine whether the odor was being detected there.

Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, coolly told reporters yesterday that tests and air monitoring had revealed “nothing of a hazardous nature.”

“It’s believed to be some sort of food substance, but we can’t substantiate that at this time,” Mr. Kelly said. He confirmed that the source of the smell seemed to be in Lower Manhattan. …

With the cold nighttime air trapped under a lid of warm air over the city, and only a 3-mile-an-hour wind, any odor would have been kept low to the ground, where it could have slipped between buildings to work its way uptown and to the other boroughs, said Patrick Kinney, an associate professor of environmental science at Columbia University.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at City Hall about the smell, he repeated that tests showed it was not dangerous.

I don’t understand how they can be so confident that it’s “not dangerous” when they still don’t know what it was, but oh well. Hopefully they’re right. Seriously, though, what “sort of food substance” has a sufficiently powerful odor to spread throughout an entire city??