Jimmy Clausen, driving someone around with a load of booze?

Nothing like getting the season off to a strong start.

UPDATE: Since I was so kindly called a mongoloid in the comments for my haste in simply pointing to a news story, I’ve happily made the correction naming the correct Clausen wunderkind of the day. I guess I’m still just stuck on the last one we had here. Oops. Sorry for being an actual human being that made a mistake.

Charlie Weis Sues Bacon Double Cheeseburgers For Being So Delicious.

The USC Trojans are ranked #1 in the preseason coaches’ poll, with 45 of the 60 first-place votes. And of course, John David Booty is #1 in Heisman hype.

LSU is ranked #2, Florida #3, Texas #4 and Michigan #5. Rutgers is #17, Boise State #23, Hawaii #24, and Notre Dame tied with South Carolina for, effectively, #29. Speaking of South Carolina, hapless Duke got a vote, again, thanks to Steve Spurrier.

Fight on Trojans, Beat the Vandals! Goooo Irish, Beeeeat Jackets!

Brady Quinn is holding out.

Meanwhile, contrary to previous reports, the Notre Dame-Michigan rivalry has been renewed for the next 25 years. Or, as The Rock puts it, “With this deal Kevin White has ensured that Notre Dame will have [at least] two top opponents [each season] until Chelsea Clinton battles Jenna Bush for the ‘32 presidency.” Heh.

The Notre Dame-Michigan football series will apparently take at least two years off when the current contract expires in 2011.

Lame.

&otStewart Mandel asks the question.

I’ve expressed my opinion about retroactive forfeits before, and that applies to the Sooners as well:

I hate the idea of retroactive forfeits. I think they’re dumb, dumb, dumb. We all know that UMass was in the 1996 Final Four; we all know that the Fab Five played in two national championship games. Removing the banners and altering the record books doesn’t change history, and pretending it does has always seemed rather Orwellian to me. … [A]ltering the results of games that were played three years ago flies in the face of common sense, doesn’t it?

As I clarified in a later post:

I’ve already expressed my opinion about the Orwellian absurdism of these retroactive forfeits. I suppose I can see the logic behind it if the team knew at the time that it was using an ineligible player… but to declare a player ineligible long after the fact, because of conduct that the team knew nothing about, and then to change the results of the team’s games on that basis? That strikes me as totally ridiculous and lame. It would be a different situation if the allegations involved something that changed the competitive balance of the game(s) in question (e.g., performance-enhancing drugs, gambling on the outcome, etc.)… but if not, and if the team was itself innocent of any deliberate wrongdoing (or willful blindness), then I’d say the punishment doesn’t fit the crime… especially given that the punishment does violence to common sense by literally rewriting history. (And for the record: ;Well, what else can we do?” is not a valid reason to impose an otherwise unsupportable punishment.)

Beyond that, I’m not sure what else there is to say, except to remind Trojan-haters that the apparent unfairness and hypocrisy in the NCAA’s actions (and inactions) isn’t the result of some grand pro-USC conspiracy — it’s quite obviously the result of the different circumstances of the two cases, specifically relating to the fact that the NCAA lacks the power to force Reggie Bush to talk, now that he’s in the NFL. Stewart Mandel explained this well back in May:

It’s not that the NCAA is stalling — it’s that it’s flailing. Through this case, we’re seeing first-hand just how limited the organization’s enforcement powers really are. If Bush were a current student-athlete, the NCAA could hold him out of competition until the matter was resolved. It could also sanction him if he failed to cooperate with investigators (much like it did Maurice Clarett for lying to investigators). With Bush being a professional football player, however, the NCAA holds no more authority over him than it does over you or I. The same goes for other, non-university parties.

Not only are Bush and his family declining to speak with investigators, but, according to reports, they also recently reached a settlement with Michael Michaels — the man whose house the Bush clan supposedly lived in rent-free — that specifically prohibits him from talking to investigators. In other words, they bought him off. And Ornstein, obviously, has no motivation to cooperate — he’s going to do whatever it takes to protect his client’s name.

If you look back, nearly every major NCAA infractions case over the past decade — from the Alabama/Albert Means saga in football to the basketball scandals at Michigan (Ed Martin), Ohio State (Jim O’Brien), Minnesota (an academic advisor writing papers) and Georgia (Jim Harrick/Tony Cole) — has included the presence of at least one voluntary whistle-blower. More often than not, they’ve also involved local or federal litigation that produced subpoenaed testimony. The NCAA is almost entirely dependent on others to do its dirty work, and so far, no one has stepped forward to help them on this one.

Earlier this month, Pac-10 enforcement chief Ron Barker told SI.com’s Michael Silver, “This is the first time I’ve encountered anything like this, where all parties — even those who’ve turned against each other — have not cooperated with an investigation.” Translation: They talked to Yahoo!, but they won’t talk to us.

(Long-delayed hat tip: BK.)

P.S. How must Oregon feel about all this? The Ducks, 10-1 and ranked #5 in the final BCS standings in 2005, lost 17-14 to Oklahoma in the Holiday Bowl after being denied a BCS bid which they felt they deserved ahead of #4 Ohio State and #6 Notre Dame, both of whom had two losses. Losing to a 7-4 team in the Holiday Bowl after making that argument was embarrassing enough, but now it turns out the Ducks’ Holiday Bowl loss was to nobody, since Oklahoma’s win has been nullified. Oh yeah, and who was Oregon’s only regular-season loss to? The possibly-ineligble USC Trojans! Oregon finished the 2005 season 10-2, and it may end up that both of their losses were to teams who’ll have to forfeit the victories! Heh. If I were a Ducks fan, I’d be barking quacking mad.

Via Andrew, an interview with Kyle Williams, the recently-graduated Trojan offensive linesman who Becky and I tutored his freshman year at ‘SC. Kyle is now a Seattle Seahawk — and, more importantly, a husband and father. Here he is with his wife Jana and daughter Kylie:

Good for him. Kyle is really a great guy, the kind of person you like to see good things happen to.

Former Tennessee great and Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning hung out with the USC Trojans on Tuesday, treating John David Booty to a 90-minute, one-on-one workout. Peyton (or “Mr. Manning,” as the USC players called him) was at the Coliseum to shoot a TV commercial, and he wanted somebody to practice with afterward. The Trojans were, of course, happy to oblige. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

For those of you who are into college sports recruiting, you’ve probably checked out a player or two on Tennessee based Rivals.com. With a new CEO in place, Yahoo! just inked a deal to purchase the site. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition could be an indicator that Yahoo! is taking a step toward further expansion, driving in an additional 2 Million+ users of Rivals.com into Yahoo!land. The biggest of the potentially huge deals, could find Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp trading MySpace.com for a 25% stake in Yahoo!, which would be a huge boon to Yahoo! as it tries to truly make itself a “one-stop shopping” destination for online users.

Indiana Unviersity’s head football coach, Terry Hoeppner, died this morning of complications from a brain tumor that he’s been fighting for the last year-and-a-half. He was 59.

On Hoosier Nation and Indiana Inside, fans pay tribute.

Charlie Weis announced Friday that Notre Dame will wear green — specifically, Joe Montana Green — against USC on October 20.

The wearing o’ the green will honor the 30th anniversary of the 1977 national-championship team that wore green in a 49-19 victory over USC, with Weis looking on from the student section. Unfortunately for Weis and the Irish, I’m thinking that the similarities between the two games will pretty much end with the color of the jerseys.

(Hat tip: BK.)

Rivals.com’s Steve Megargee suggests the ultimate college-football road trip for the 2007 season.

UPDATE: Just for fun, I decided to go through the 2007 schedule and come up with the ultimate Brendan Loy college-football road trip. My criteria were a bit different than Megargee’s, however. My first rule is that I can’t go to the same stadium twice, so that inevitably juggles a lot of my choices. (For example, I picked UCLA @ Stanford over Tennessee @ Cal on September 1 because the latter would mean I can’t go to USC @ Cal on November 10.) I also tried to cram in as many games as possible — so, for example, if there are any Thursday games, I include them in addition to the regular Saturday game, and if reasonable driving distance allowed, I scheduled games on consecutive days. I even threw in a few possible same-day doubleheaders. The end result? At least 37 games, possibly as many as 40. At least 55 different teams, possibly as many as 59. At least one game on every day of the week, at some point during the season, except Monday. And five USC games, in five different stadiums! If only this weren’t purely hypothetical! :) Full schedule after the jump.

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Like a half-dozen different people have sent me this, so I figure I’d better actually post it. :) Here you go:

Heh.

Speaking of USC football, the kickoff times for a bunch of their games were announced yesterday, along with the rest of ESPN/ABC’s Saturday Night Football slate.

Former Notre Dame runningback Darius Walker — who declared for the NFL a year early, then went undrafted this past weekend (oops!) — has been signed as a free agent by Da Bears. (Hat tip: Emily.)

The Blue-Gray Sky has a complete rundown of which Notre Dame players went where, drafted and undrafted alike. There’s also a lengthy post about Brady Quinn’s precipitous drop in the draft. Among other things, it strikes me that Charlie Weis is really putting his reputation on the line for Quinn — well beyond what a coach would naturally feel obligated to do for an ex-player, I think — and if Quinn flops in the NFL (not that I’m predicting that), Weis’s prediction that he’d be the next Tom Brady or Peyton Manning is going to come back to haunt him, chipping away at the “genius” label. Just saying.

With the NFL Draft later today, ESPN is comparing last year’s draft class to this year’s, and they just advertised a SportsCenter segment that promises to answer the question of who’s better, Matt Leinart or Brady Quinn.

Umm… didn’t that game already happen? ;)