Football plate is full, but she saves some room for the dogs

Thanksgiving weekend is so not about eating turkey and sitting around with loved ones.

It's about getting the heck away from the table and being first to grab the remote control.

Really, from dawn until dusk Thursday, Friday, Saturday and today, you could be watching football games that will be crucial to portioning out decimal points in the blurry BCS college football title chase or deciding NFL playoff spots.

On Friday you could have been watching Arkansas upset Louisiana State and on Saturday seen Georgia Tech dissect Georgia and have the epiphany that the Southeastern Conference just isn't that great in football this season. What good win does Alabama have? That one over Georgia? Maybe not so much.

Are you so sure, after watching, that Georgia and LSU and Auburn and, yes, Alabama, are so much better than Oregon State, Oregon, California and Arizona?

Also on Saturday you could have looked in on Missouri and Kansas and been so horrified by the Tigers' blotchy gold uniforms that you didn't notice Missouri isn't very good either and that USC fans better not hold their breaths waiting for the Tigers to upset Texas or Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship game.

But back to Thursday, you could have shoveled breakfast off the table Thursday while drooling over the smell of the stuffed turkey in the oven and wondered why you must watch the Detroit Lions every Thanksgiving.

In the Olden Days, the Lions were good every once in a while. And if you were growing up in Chicago and both the Lions and Bears played on Thanksgiving, you wished your mother would serve dinner on TV trays so the games weren't interrupted.

Now you see the Titans destroying the Lions and quick, switch the channel and find the National Dog Show on NBC and just as if it were a football game where there was a bad call, the network decision to not show the Glen of Imaal terrier (one of which is watching the show from your living room quite intently) causes someone in the house to cuss out that bad edit as if it were a missed holding call.

So if the Glen of Imaal doesn't make the grade, neither does NBC and it isn't necessary to go back to the Lions game either.

Instead there's time to watch Cal State Fullerton have a 14-2 run and make 19th-ranked Wake Forest sweat in a college basketball game at the Anaheim Convention Center.