College football has tough act to follow after 2007
CHRIS DUFRESNE / ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL
The 2008 season begins Thursday and will be hard-pressed to match the unpredictability of last season.
Wouldn't it be something if 2008 could match last year's trip-wire to trip-wire action?
Forget about it.
"I don't think there can ever be a season like last year," Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel said this week.
Daniel was in the huddle for a lot of the muddle.
His Tigers went from No. 1 in the nation on Dec. 1 to not even making it to a Bowl Championship Series game.
Three-loss Illinois, which lost to Missouri in the season opener, played its season-ender in the Rose Bowl.
You could look it all up in "Ripped Knee's Believe It Or Not," published by University of Oregon Press.
It was the season Appalachian State shocked Michigan, Stanford jaw-dropped USC, Hawaii finished 12-1 and Notre Dame finished 3-9.
The No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the Associated Press media poll lost on the same weekend three times while USC, California, South Florida, Boston College and Oregon all climbed to No. 2 before losing grip.
Cal was a granola-bar toss from No. 1 when its backup quarterback let the clock expire in a home loss to Oregon State. Cal then skidded, Tedford over heels, out of the poll.
Missouri and West Virginia entered the final weekend 1-2 before both got hit with 1-2 sucker punches.
Ohio State was No. 7 in the BCS in mid-November, yet somehow climbed to No. 1, while Louisiana State hilariously advanced from No. 7 on Dec. 1 to No. 2 on the evening of Dec. 2 in a circus-like circuitous route to its second BCS national title in five years.
Georgia got by-passed in the standings without playing and did not take kindly to it, responding with an eight-team playoff proposal that had the legs of an abalone.
Such is the ruinous state of this playoff-less sport that ESPN was willing this week to offer the Southeastern Conference $2.25 billion over the next 15 years to televise field chunks of this organized fraudulence.
It's not that 2008, to be unveiled in five acts starting tonight over a long Labor Day weekend, doesn't hold promise.
The Pacific 10 Conference campaign, for season's sake, opens Thursday, with Oregon State traveling to Stanford.
"I suppose you've got to jump into it sometime," Beavers Coach Mike Riley said.
June Jones (remember him?), who left Hawaii for Southern Methodist, a Phony Express football operation since getting hammered with the NCAA Death Penalty two decades ago, makes his debut at Rice on Friday.
