Pat Forde has a nice article about the story of the Tulane football team, whose bizarre and monumentally difficult season has been a testament to perseverance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Delta is still a tropical storm, and could remain so “well into Sunday” as it accelerates off to the east-northeast.

Well, a win is a win, right?

RouSean Cromwell tipped in a missed free throw with 13 seconds left and Southern California hung on to defeat Alaska-Anchorage 57-56 Saturday for fourth place in the Carrs/Safeway Great Alaska Shootout.

Nothing fills me with Trojan pride like following up a loss to Oral Roberts with a one-point win over a Division II team to earn fourth place in a third-rate preseason tournament. Fight on!! ;)

Notre Dame 38, Stanford 31, final.

The Irish finish 9-2. The Farm finishes 5-6. Notre Dame will go to the BCS, either the Fiesta or Orange Bowl. Stanford will not go bowling — the loss to UC-Davis making the difference between a winning season and a losing one.

Notre Dame’s performance was, obviously, not terribly impressive. But the Cardinal also should get some credit for playing hard and well. Stanford’s 31 points ties USC for the second-most scored on the Irish this year (only Michigan State had more, with 44). Hopefully this will give pause to all those Pac-10-bashing Domers. Stanford is a middle-of-the-road team in its much-maligned conference (they went 4-4 in Pac-10 play, losing to USC, Oregon, UCLA and Cal), yet they took the BCS-bound, Top 10-ranked Irish right down to the wire. The Pac-10 is a good conference, people.

P.S. Oh, and congratulations to Dmytro Aponte, who wins the BrendanLoy.com Notre Dame prediction contest with a 10-1 record! (His only error was predicting a win over Michigan State.) I’ll post the full final results at some later date, when I’m feeling less lazy. :)

Your ball, Brady Quinn. No pressure. There’s only $14.5 million riding on this drive. :)

UPDATE: Woohoo!!! Irish score the TD and get the two-point conversion, so it’s 38-31 Notre Dame! Stanford has 55 seconds (and no timeouts) to try and drive 80 yards and send the game to OT.

Notre Dame and Stanford are underway, and it took the Irish exactly 15 seconds to take a 7-0 lead. Heh.

In other news, Fresno State is clearly having a post-USC letdown, trailing Nevada 17-3 early.

UPDATE: It’s Notre Dame 14, Stanford 14 at halftime. Yikes.

UPDATE 2: Stanford trails by only two points, 23-21, after a kickoff return for a touchdown. (It would be 27-21, but ND missed an extra point and a field goal earlier.)

In other news, Fresno State is going to lose. They’re down 38-27 with 1:12 to go.

And that’s just from the Good-news desk. :> / Joe Loy, obviously :}, guestblogging from the Not Football bureau. ;>

Northeastern China: Toxic benzene spill shuts off running water to millions; threatens far-eastern Russia downstream, prompting Chinese Foreign Minister to apologize to Russian ambassador. (”I’m just as Sorry as you are, Dmitri.” ~ Pres. Merkin Muffley :)

Central China: Richter 5.5 quake wallops Jiangxi province, epicenter in city of Ruichang.

Southeastern Turkey: 5.3 tremblor clobbers Malatya province.

Southwestern Colombia: Galeras volcano erupts; said to be Settling down now.

…a handful of residents in Genoy, a small farming village, refused to leave, saying a statue of the Virgin Mary they erected near the crater would protect them.

“Proof of the Virgin Mary’s support for us is that the ash fell on Pasto and not Genoy,” said villager Dolores Triana.

Pasto, about 12 miles from the volcano, was blanketed by a layer of ash after Galeras blew, forcing residents to don goggles and face masks.

Of course we Report, you Decide. // But if I were a Pasto fellow I’d be reciting 10 Rosaries & making a very good Act of Contrition. ;> (Hi,Bea. / C’mon now, no offense meant to the Genoyans or the Pastodos, I’m Catt-lik too remember. :)

And finally:

At very very Far out Itokawa :) ~ contrary to previous reports, probe Hayabusa DID touch down the First time ~ and now SEEMS to have landed, and left, Again ~ but, still is behaving Crankily. [Yes, yes, Stipulated: on balance this one really IS Good news. :] ~

TOKYO - A Japanese spacecraft showed signs of trouble Saturday after apparently landing on an asteroid and collecting surface samples in an unprecedented mission to bring the extraterrestrial material back to Earth, officials said.

The Hayabusa probe, hovering about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the asteroid, appeared to be shaking due to a possible gas leak from a thruster, said Atsushi Akoh, a spokesman for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.

JAXA will put Hayabusa into “safety mode” - which stabilizes the probe by turning its solar panels toward the sun - for two to three days to investigate, Akoh said.

…But the agency will not know for sure if Hayabusa collected surface samples until it returns to Earth. It is expected to land in Australia’s Outback in June 2007.

…The landing on the asteroid was Hayabusa’s second, following a faulty touchdown days earlier. JAXA lost contact with the probe during that attempt and did not even realize it had landed until days later — long after it had lifted off.

I hope Hayabusa did grab some sample Itokawa dust, and will safely transport it to the Queensland bush, where the Rock Wallabies will Jump at the chance to get first Look at it before the scientists arrive. :)

UConn is trying to spoil South Florida’s shot at the Big East championship and the accompanying BCS berth. The Huskies lead the Bulls, 9-0 in the second quarter. The game is at Rentschler Field in East Hartford. If UConn wins, West Virginia will clinch a spot in the BCS — almost certainly the Sugar Bowl. (The Mountaineers, undefeated in conference, play the one-loss Bulls next week in a game that will decide the conference title if South Florida comes back and beats UConn today.)

UPDATE: Huskies win!!! So West Virginia clinches a BCS berth. And with a win next Saturday at home against Louisville, UConn can become bowl-eligible.

The battle for first place in the Big 12 North — sort of like a argument over who is the tallest person in the group of midgets — is going down to the wire. Iowa State and Kansas are in overtime. If the Cyclones win, they earn the right to get slaughtered by Texas in the Big 12 title game. If the Jayhawks win, Colorado backs into the title game on the heels of two straight blowout losses.

UPDATE: Kansas wins! So the Jayhawks are bowl-eligible, probably headed for the Fort Worth Bowl (sorry, New Mexico)… and crappy Colorado (7-4), the only team in the Big 12 North with a winning conference record (5-3), will play Texas — a team they lost to 42-17 on October 15 — next Saturday for the Big 12 championship.

The AP reports:

During its live coverage of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, NBC did not tell viewers that a giant balloon had caught on a street lamp and injured two sisters.

At the point in the broadcast when the “M&M’s Chocolate Candies” balloon was supposed to have crossed the finish line, announcers Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker stuck close to their scripts and the network ran footage of the balloon from last year’s parade.

Couric told the audience they were seeing old footage and bantered with Lauer and Roker, but there was no further mention of the accident.

The New York Daily News adds:

Word from inside NBC was [Couric and Lauer] stayed mum because no one told them what was going on. They just knew that the giant M&M’s balloon never made it to Herald Square.

The producers of the telecast are from the entertainment wing - not news - and apparently didn’t believe the incident deserved mention.

So there were Lauer and Couric, people accustomed to covering breaking news when all the facts are not known, missing a major story just blocks away.

Couric didn’t learn about the accident until she was off the air, and Lauer apparently found out when he got home.

The situation exposed the perils of having newscasters anchor entertainment events. …

NBC left Lauer and Couric journalistically dangling and, as a result, risked their credibility with viewers.

I’m guessing Lauer and Couric are not happy about this.

Tropical Storm Delta’s winds are down to 40 mph, and it’s expected to become extratropical “in a day or two.” Delta is heading northeast toward Europe and Africa, but likely will not make it all the way there. The Storm Track has more.

Let it be known that Becky’s mom makes, like, the best pumpkin pie on the face of the earth. Seriously.

I had several slices with dinner tonight, and will be having several more for breakfast in the morning. And more with lunch. And more after dinner. I hope y’all feel appropriately jealous. :)

In other news, as I believe I may have mentioned before, Arizona is purty.

I wrote below that, assuming the Irish win tomorrow, “the Fiesta Bowl pick[ing] Notre Dame over Penn State [is] probably the more likely scenario, all things considered.” I think that’s most likely true, but I wanted to add a tidbit of “real reporting” that casts at least some doubt on it.

I have a source who recently either overheard or participated in a conversation with a member of the Orange Bowl selection committee. The gist of the conversation, as it was relayed to me, is that the Orange Bowl really, really, really wants Notre Dame, and is willing to do whatever it can to snag the Irish — including “buying off” the Fiesta Bowl, whatever that means. Now, my understanding is that what the Orange Bowl did three years ago, using a largest-payout trump card to usurp the normal BCS selection rules and set up a surprise USC-Iowa Orange Bowl, can only happen once every four years. I could be wrong about that, or the Orange Bowl guy could have something else in mind, or he might just have been shooting the sh*t and expressing more of a wish than an actionable plan. I’m not sure. The only thing I have confidence in is that my source’s account is accurate; what it means, I don’t pretend to know.

Whatever the Orange Bowl has in mind, the fact is that, to my knowledge, the Fiesta Bowl holds pretty much all the cards, so long as Texas beats Iowa State or Colorado next Saturday. So I am continuing to assume that Notre Dame is headed to Tempe if they beat Stanford tomorow. But it’s worth noting that other possibilities do exist, and a trip to Miami is certainly not out of the question for the Irish.

P.S. CBS SportsLine’s J. Darin Darst has more on the wider bowl implications of the Fiesta Bowl’s choice. And the Arizona Republic’s Andrew Bagnato writes that the “Irish’s rise may put Fiesta officials in a BCS bind.”

Notre Dame visits Stanford tomorrow at 8:00 PM EST in a game that most Irish fans see as just one final, relatively insignificant bump in the road en route to Choo Choo Charlie Weis’s glorious coronation as the man who brought pride, glory and a BCS bounty back to the land of the Golden Dome.

And while that’s probably true, there is actually a lot riding on this game. To be more specific: a lot of money.

If Notre Dame wins, the Irish finish 9-2 and are virtually guaranteed a BCS berth — most likely a trip to the Fiesta Bowl, or possibly the Orange Bowl. That means a payout of between $17 million and $18.5 million, and because Notre Dame isn’t in a conference, they don’t have to share that money with anyone. It all goes directly into ND’s coffers… enough to pay for roughly half of Charlie Weis’s contract extension. :) This lucrative development is made all the more dramatic by the fact that 2005 is the last year Notre Dame can reap such a bounty. Starting next season, ND will get basically the same deal as a BCS-conference team: about $3.5 million in years when they qualify, about $1 million in years when they don’t.

But although there’s no doubt that Notre Dame has more of a financial stake in this game than their tree-loving opponents do, Stanford has plenty of financial incentive to play hard, too. (Well, perhaps not, since the players don’t see any of that money… but nevermind that.) If the Cardinal win, they will become bowl-eligible, and will be likely be headed for the Las Vegas Bowl to play Utah and, more importantly for purposes of this post, earn a $950,000 payout. But that’s not the half of it. A win by the Cardinal would virtually assure their Pac-10 brethren, the Oregon Ducks, a spot in the BCS, meaning a multi-million dollar payday for the Pac-10 — including about $1 million for Stanford. So this game is actually worth about $2 million to the 5-5 Cardinal!

In fairness, there’s a chance Oregon will be BCS-bound anyway… but it’s by no means a sure bet. It would probably depend on the Fiesta Bowl picking Penn State instead of Notre Dame, sending the Irish to the Orange Bowl and leaving Ohio State out of the equation, since a Big Ten rematch would obviously be unattractive to the Fiesta Bowl. That would mean Oregon goes to Tempe. But if the Fiesta Bowl picks Notre Dame over Penn State — probably the more likely scenario, all things considered — the Orange Bowl will then snatch up the Nittany Lions, and the Ohio State Buckeyes will likely be headed to Tempe to face the Irish. Oregon would still be a possibility, but from a business standpoint, OSU is probably the more likely choice to be ND’s opponent.

If, on the other hand, Stanford wins tomorrow and thus knocks Notre Dame out of the BCS picture, it is all but certain that the Fiesta Bowl will pick Penn State, in which case the Orange Bowl will probably take Ohio State (or perhaps Auburn), and the Fiesta Bowl will then choose Oregon to face the Nittany Lions.

So it is quite possible that this Stanford-ND game is actually a proxy match for the BCS selection battle between Oregon and Notre Dame — or, more broadly, between the Pac-10 and Notre Dame, with about $18 million hanging in the balance.

As a USC grad, I like the Pac-10, and I’d love to see Oregon get in ahead of Ohio State. But I’m also a Domer, and my loyalty to Notre Dame comes first (except against USC). So, all I can say is… GOOOOOO IRISH!!!!! BEEEEEEAT CARDINAL!!!!!!

P.S. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it,” Brady Quinn says of the win-and-you’re-in BCS implications of tomorrow’s game.

Meanwhile, Rivals.com previews the game and proclaims that Stanford will win only if “the Notre Dame charter accidentally stops in Tempe for the Fiesta Bowl already instead of going all the way to Palo Alto.” Heh.

Texas is attempting to complete its perfect regular season — and clear its second-to-last hurdle en route to the Rose Bowl — at Texas A&M right now. It’s close early: 14-9 Longhorns with 13:25 left in the second quarter.

Whether they win or lose, Texas will play in the Big 12 championship game next Saturday. But if they lose today, they’ll only be playing for a spot in the Fiesta Bowl, whereas if they win today, they’ll be playing for a spot in the Rose Bowl.

Texas A&M, for its part, needs a win to become bowl-eligible. And there are an awful lot of Penn State fans who hope they get it. :)

UPDATE: Texas survives, 40-29. So they’re now one win away from the Rose Bowl. Their final hurdle will be the Big 12 title game against either Iowa State (if Nebraska beats Colorado today and Iowa State beats Kansas tomorrow) or Colorado (otherwise).

P.S. The game has Heisman implications, too:

Young came in likely needing a big game to keep pace with USC’s Reggie Bush in the chase for the Heisman Trophy — and his penchant for making big plays in Texas’ biggest games seemed to guarantee it.

Instead, he struggled against a defense ranked 109th in the country with 162 yards passing, 19 rushing and two turnovers that led directly to Aggies’ touchdowns. He did throw for a touchdown and led two key late drives for field goals.

Call me crazy, but I don’t find it terribly impressive that he “led two key late drives for field goals.”

Of course, Reggie Bush ought to win the Heisman running away, anyway. This just makes it more likely that he actually will.