July 2010 Archives
Running Back LaMichael James will have Ducks in contention to fly South to Pasadena for the second consecutive season.
The unofficial opening for the Pac-10 football chase begins today, when the Rose Bowl plays host to the conference's football coaches, along with 10 of its top players, including gunslingers Jake Locker of Washington, Matt Barkley of USC and Andrew Luck of Stanford.
The season officially kicks off in a little more than a month, so what better time to look into the crystal ball and come up with what I think will be the shape of the conference standings come December.
Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott just announced that with the addition of Colorado and Utah - expected to be for the 2012 football season - the Pac-10 will change its name to the Pacific 12.
Meanwhile, the Big Ten, which has had 11 teams since Penn State joined the Midwest conference in the 1990s, recently announced that it will still be the Big Ten, despite adding a 12th team - Nebraska in 2011.
I guess they know how to add out west.
No word yet on the Big 12, which is slated to be reduced to 10 teams after Nebraska bolts for the Big Ten in 2011 and Colorado for the Pac-12 in 2012.
There was no announcement of how the new Pac-12 will divide the divisions or if a conference championship game in football will be held, as most experts expect, or where it might be held.
I still say the Rose Bowl would be the best site.
Conference athletic directors, according to reports, are slated to meet on Friday and discuss division alignment.
USC just announced that effective Aug. 3 that West Covina native Pat Haden will replace Mike Garrett as the school's athletic director.
This is a move, sans the hiring of Haden, that most have speculated would come in the wake of the NCAA putting the football program on a two-year bowl ban and reducing the team's scholarship limit to 15 per year over the next three seasons, down from 25 a year.
Garrett, in my opinion, sealed his fate when his first and only response to the sanctions was that he believed they were the result of "jealousy and envy" by the other institutions in the NCAA.
The 1965 Heisman Trophy winner has always come across with a personality and attitude that acted like he would put up with the so-called cheating as long as winning was the end result.
Pat Haden is completely different. He, like anyone else who competes, wants to win, but he wants to do it within the rules. It was true when he was setting the San Gabriel Valley record for most touchdown passes in area history while at Bishop Amat, when he was quarterbacking USC to an 18-17 victory over Ohio State in the 1975 Rose Bowl and in recent years when he was lead analyst for Notre Dame football telecasts on NBC and as a member of USC's Board of Trustees.
USC couldn't have picked a better man for the job.
I can guarantee he would never fire a coach via voice mail.
Alabama and coach Nick Saban are the favorites to hoist the BCS crystal ball in 2010.
The more things change, the more they stay same.
At least that's the way it's looking for the upcoming college football season, where the same candidates who vied for the Bowl Championship Series title are expected to re-up for another year.
With most conference media days slated to be held over the coming week, including the Pac-10, which is slated for next Thursday at the Rose Bowl, this seems like the perfect time to come with our preseason Top 5, and our best bet for which two teams will spend the New Year's in Glendale, Ariz., the site of the 2011 BCS championship game.
