Until Further Notice

Fact: USC is Number 1. We can quibble about strength of schedule, the early bye week, etc as the season goes on. For right now, SC held serve at home and then went on the road and pounded a legitimate opponent into submission in its own house. When you run for 300 yards on Nebraska (who has had consistently strong defenses through all its upheaval), the nation should take note. I’m comfortable putting the Trojans at the top until they show otherwise, or until Florida or LSU get another quality win by a healthy margin. Does anyone want to try to tell me Nebraska is a worse opponent than the overrated Virginia Tech squad that played torro to LSU's bullfighters? (In the weak Big XII, Oklahoma will need an exceptionally strong set of performances, and since it’s well-known that Bob Stoops runs up the score, voters should be very careful how much weight they give to OU’s margin of victory.)

What about the Ducks? Oregon looks as-yet unstoppable, but I’m not sold yet; I’m Tina and I’m not going back to Ike until November comes without any bruises. Ever since 2002, with one exception Oregon has had a bad habit of tanking down the stretch.

I will seen Oregon (@ Stanford) in person this week; I’ll revise and/or strengthen my opinion after that.

San Jose State got shut out by Stanford, 37-0, and after a lame and uninspired effort Spartans coach Dick Tomey put out a serious warning:

Well we were awful, we were badly coached. We were a bunch of prima donnas. We just don't compete. We are going to practice at 6:30 in the morning. Full gear. Anybody not there is cut and any coach who is not there is fired. We've got a short time to put this thing together but right now were just the [blank]. Stanford's really improved their game and that just shows how much better their coaches are then we are. How much better their players are than we are. They've done a great job. I commend coach Harbaugh and his staff.

Keep in mind this is nearing 11pm. After a busride home, the players weren't going to get to bed until after midnight. I'm all for morning practices, but 6:30 the morning after a game is beyond the pale. Coming off a 9-4 season, San Jose State was supposed to have its best team in its three years under Tomey, but three tough road games (Arizona State, Kansas State and Stanford) and injuries to its one-two running punch may have put them out of another good season.

Misnomer of the Week: “You can’t lose your job to injury”

I haven't done the researchy-things to figure out where this idea came from, but football fans appear to be walking around with the idea that a starter's job belongs to him no matter how much time he misses with injury. You may have seen "coach" Dick Butkus saying this in his fraudulent ESPN reality show.

In Michigan's dilemma over the injured Chad Henne and the true freshman fill-in Ryan Mallett, fans are suggesting Henne's position on the depth chart is sacrosanct. (Mallett has shown little to graduate him past a three-year starter, but in two weeks' time he might have a thick enough resume to merit a competition.)

This discussion reached the height of proposterity in the Brady vs Bledsoe debate in 2001. When anyone with eyes could see Brady was the best guy for Bill Belichick's strategy, Bledsoe hardliners cried about how unfair it would be for the incumbent to not get back on the field when he recovered from the shorn artery that opened the door for one of the biggest stars in American sports. (Three Super Bowls later...)

This axiom is a bogus idea. In the football meritocracy, the best players play - period. Sometimes your half-injured guy is better than the backup. Sometimes the backup comes in and tears it up, and might even encourage the coaching staff to change up the gameplan to fit the new guy's skills. And occasionally you find that diamond in the rough who just needed a shot of game action to prove himself.

It appears to be an unspoken policy in the NFL; but it's different in the pros - players aren't rapidly developing with experience and playing time, and it's rarely the case that you simply can't play a promising player because of myriad shortcomings that mollify with experience. It's pretty clear who's better than whom, and the best guys play when they're not on the training table.

Let's put it in perspective: if you couldn't lose your spot because you were on the mend, no one would know who Lou Gehrig is.

AROUND THE PAC-10

It was another big weekend for the state of Oregon. After the Ducks pantsed Michigan and Oregon State's flopover provided another plus in Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly's Michigan head coaching application packet, both teams managed to win last weekend.

The state of Washington wasn't too bad either. While UW lost at home to Ohio State, it was not your average 19-point loss if you've been following Washington football. This was a full stadium, watching a team go toe-to-toe for close to three quarters with a national championship contender. The Huskies were not afraid to deploy QB Jake Locker in triple-option schemes, and he threw a frozen rope touchdown pass that must have broken the receiver's hand.

Meanwhile, Washington State slapped border sister Idaho around, tacking on more points than USC did (45 to 38). (The Vandals also scored four touchdowns, 18 points more than they did against the Trojans). Alex Brink threw for over 400 yards again, and the Cougs have scored 111 points in three games.

UCLA coach Karl Dorrell got exposed again in an ugly 44-6 loss at Utah in which the Bruins turned it over five times. Anyone who thought UCLA was even a dark-horse national championship contender had been in the smog too long, but I'm the biggest UCLA doubter west of the Central Valley and I didn't see this one coming.

The embarassment of Arizona football continues, a 29-27 loss to New Mexico being the latest insult. It's brutal to make these predictions this early, but it will be a race between Mike Stoops and Dorrell to fax those resumes out to get dibs on the best assistant coaching jobs for next season.

Floppycock Of The Week
There won't even be a list of finalists. It's gotta be Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis. I won't even bother linking to the criticisms; I can't open my apartment door without being hit with another hyperlink to ND hysteria (from Domer blogs) or schadenfreude (from everyone else).

It's hard to describe from a straight football standpoint how hosed Notre Dame is. Meechigan didn’t play out of its mind, but the execution was masterful – every Notre Dame mistake got punished. Turnovers were turned into points. Missed blocks turned into sacks. No running game led to a ridiculous pass rush. Notre Dame gave plenty of opportunity, and Michigan capitalized every time, even with a true freshman playing his first full game under center.

Playing well against an inferior Notre Dame team is, well, something for Michigan to be proud of given their recent history against inferior Notre Dame teams (1998, 2004, 2005).

But back to Domer Nation - In the interest of preventing redundancy, I will attempt to add two fresh points to the discussion after Weis laid that thousand-yard shellshock stare on the media after the game.

First, this team is poorly coached in the fundamentals. Before you even get into coverages, blitzes, pass-protection schemes, combination routes, you've gotta coach the basics - stance, steps, leverage, snapping the ball, handing off, blocking, tackling, catching, and the like. The recent evidence suggests - nay, proves - that Notre Dame has been slacking off practicing these things. Hundreds of high school centers who aren't going to Notre Dame on scholarship can execute a shotgun snap without a problem for an entire season.

This leads to…

Second, I'm questioning Weis’ ability to coach his program. Notre Dame has way more talent than what's getting on the field. The results suggest either gross coaching incompetence, or a disconnect between coaches and players. (Stanford fans will notice the team looks a lot like the Cardinal's 2006 squad - listless, passionless, without cohesion or a sense of team).

Weis is obviously a good football man and knows his X's and O's, but I think he's made major miscalculations regarding:

a. Managing a depth chart when there is no waiver wire to get new guys. They seemed to spend a lot of time running up the score with Quinn's crew instead of getting experience for new guys.

b. What needs to be done to turn 18-year old former high schoolers into complete class-A football players. That's probably a pro thing, where the players already have a full toolbox of skills and you maintain them with some drills (or let them bleed away, more accurately). The bad snaps and the regression of their highest-profile recruit (Sam Young, started as a true freshman last year) indicate this.

It's possible he saw USC tearing things up and thought you just bring in the top players and they automatically play at an All America level. NFL-centric types love to tell me that "college coaches aren't that smart, they just get the best players." He's totally in love with his own intelligence, so Weis may have bought into that and skimped on talent development, expecting natural ability to take over.

Another thing: The offensive line has stunk, big time, and Domers are content to blame the line coaches and demand that they be fired. But is it possible these guys aren't that hot on their coach sticking them with a true freshman at quarterback and relegating the seniors to a rebuilding season? In a larger sense, could it be that the elder statesmen of the team - the ones recruited to work in Tyrone Willingham's non-boastful, head-down program - don't care much for having an arrogant gasbag at the top?

Going back to his history, Weis may only now be realizing that the Bill Belichick way, cutting any malcontents without reconciliation, simply can't work in college football.

Someone told me we were "overreacting to the latest data point." There's not one latest data point - there's five, as in five straight blowout losses, each one a deeper miasma than the one before it.

A final point: Why did Weis run off quarterback Demetrius Jones? In the beginning, it sounded like Jones' transfer to Northern Illinois (a bizarre and unclear story at this point to begin with) was simply a case of a guy who got beat out and wanted to play elsewhere. Then Jones fired back against the impression he snuck out the back door without telling the team by suggesting Weis misled him about his shot to be the starter. (Side note: Jones' bio is still available on Notre Dame's athletic site.)

Notre Dame has had success (Arnaz Battle, Carlyle Holiday) in turning their castoff running quarterbacks into wide receivers. Hell, they’ve had a guy flip-flopping between tailback and linebacker (Travis Thomas), but apparently Jones was promised he wouldn't be split wide for someone else to throw to.

Another good dual-threat player Notre Dame couldn’t make use of became a legend at his new school – Northwestern quarterback Zak Kustok, who was an absolute star for his two seasons in Randy Walker’s super-spread offense.

Either Jones had an attitude problem, or they asked him to switch positions and he said no), or he got run off. Any of these make someone look bad, and I'm inclined to expect more from a middle-aged coach than a 19-year old ballplayer who lives under said coach's fist.