served anyway you like it , as long as it doesn’t include BYU, Texas Tech, Missouri, Arizona, Georgia Tech, Southern Mississippi nor Boise State fillings…at least we have Tulsa on the menu! And this week, Upset specials just $4.99 – served with Corvallis sauce and a side of Husky.

ARTICLES

Triage Time - Will Carroll creates one of many tributes to Ball State’s Dante Love as all in the FCB community sends out their best wishes for his healthy recovery.

From the Shotgun – Daniel saw most of I-10 this week driving from Orlando to El Paso for the UCF at UTEP CUSA. Before that he needed to be calmed in anticipation of North Texas at Rice.

Power I - Drew lines up 8 yards deep (like Herschel used to) to get the best view of the RB landscape. He still suggests trading Donald Brown

Going Deep – Vince pumps up the permastarter list to 14 plus shares a white rap homage to the new Georgia Tech football team.

Feast or Famine - John hustles with some great WR pickup ideas, especially freshman Philip Payne of UNLV. Good trading strategies too to setup the rest of your season.

BlitzIndex Defense rankings - Northwestern and Minnesota in the top quartile? The world may truly be coming to an end, I do not know what to believe anymore.

WEATHER

Storms threaten the Carolinas through the Northeast, so offenses may have to deal with lots rain from Tropical Storm Kyle .  Weather.com racks up all the games for ya.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

I will be posting pix from around Stillwater , OK later this weekend over at the Forum on Ning. If the Cowboys can deliver a butt-whupping then the Big 12 may further cement the conferences perception above the Pac Ten. But if they lose to Troy again and the Sooners slip up against TCU you can throw all of this right out the window.

If TCU does win, we all should immediately sign up for the MW Network to watch Brigham Young, Utah and maybe even Air Force aim high for prominent bowl bids.

Daniel promises to post some pics from his road trip to ElPaso too – he was worried about the ability to get gas through the Mississippi River Valley area but his last check in was he finally made it through Dallas.

Alabama at Georgia – 17-10 final, but who wins?

USC blew it again – in successive years they have lost to a 40-point dog and now a 25-point dog.

At times, I wonder why the SEC gets as much love as they do. I mean, you saw the god-awful Mississippi State / Auburn game, right? How good can the conference be if Vanderbilt is 2-0 in-conference? And Tennessee is pretty terrible, too. What the heck? Then I remember the conference has the last two national title winners and four, maybe five, legitimate national title contenders and I’m all right again. (But if you have to go through Ohio State to win a title, does it really count?) Hey, shut up.

So what’s up with the SEC this week? Well, there’s a pretty good game in Georgia / Alabama, and there’s a group of three games that look interesting but may not necessarily be too exciting. As always, South Carolina brings up the rear – oh, and we get some rescheduled hilarity.

Also, if you run across any USC fans this weekend, please check to make sure they didn’t break any bones when the bandwagon crashed in Corvalis on Thursday night. Safety first.

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Week Five rolls around and already the #1 team in the nation, USC, has been knocked off by a feisty Oregon State Beavers program (can we just tell you how happy we are that Jacquizz Rodgers is on our fantasy roster?). Could it be that the 2008 version of Upset Saturday is just around the corner? And could it be that some of those could come at the hands of smaller conference programs like Colorado State (playing California), TCU (in Norman to play the Sooners), or Fresno State (would it really be an upset if they beat UCLA, though?)?

Some of the aforementioned squads have some major things going for them, a few of which are discussed in this week’s column. Check out Mark Hafner of Houston and a statistical comparison to wideouts like Jarrett Dillard and Michael Crabtree, the nation’s leading receiver in Marshall’s Darius Passmore, Navy reserve safety getting swung on by Rutgers’ quarterback, Mike Teel, Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore‘ s hometown becoming the subject of a documentary on small-town football, and the (re)returnof Tyler Graunke to the Hawaii Warriors’ offensive huddle.

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Nick Gerogosian is the MAC Daddy, writing about the Mid-American Conference for years at Vandelaysports.com. He shares his insights weekly with us at Fantasy College Blitz. And pay attention – he called the winner of all twelve games on the schedule last week.

Ball State’s 42-20 win over Indiana was the Cardinals first-ever over a Big Ten opponent in 20 games. The 22-point margin of victory was the fourth highest by a MAC team in a victory over a Big Ten foe. The widest margin ever was 31 points by Toledo in a 2001, 38-7 win over Minnesota.

Ball State’s 4-0 start is the school’s best since the 1998 squad began the season with five consecutive wins. Up next for the Cardinals is Kent State, which will be BSU’s first home league contest. Ball State freshman Sean Baker has four interceptions and a fumble return for a touchdown in the last two games. Baker ran back a pick 40 yards for a 28-20 lead vs. Indiana last week.

Akron’s win at Army was the fourth road win vs. a non-conference FBS opponent in four seasons for head coach J.D. Brookhart. He has also guided his Zips squads to road wins over Middle Tennessee (2005), N.C. State (2006), and Syracuse (2008).

Toledo’s Alex Steigerwald set a league record with his 20th consecutive field goal in the Rockets game Saturday vs. Fresno State. The NCAA record is 30 straight.

THIS WEEK’S GAMES:

Four conference games highlight this week’s eight-game overall schedule involving MAC teams. Defending champion Central Michigan hosts Buffalo in a meeting between teams 1-0 in league play. Western Michigan looks to go 2-0 when the Broncos host Temple.  The MAC Game of the Week television package features two conference games – Northern Illinois at Eastern Michigan, and Kent State at Ball State.  Non-conference encounters have Akron hosting Cincinnati from the Big East televised by FSN Ohio; Bowling Green makes its second consecutive road trip to the Mountain Time Zone when the Falcons play at MWC member Wyoming after playing at WAC member Boise State two weeks ago; Toledo hosts Sun Belt representative FIU; and Ohio hosts VMI from the Big South.

The breakdowns… Read the rest of this entry →

This marks our first year in partnership with Head2Head Sports and we were motivated to jump in with them because of the fun factor of their College Salary Cap game. Similar to most of the salcap games you are used to, but in order to excel at the H2H version you need to recognize some of its unique rules.

While some have argued that the salary cap style game presents an even more egregious step beyond fantasy sports in “taking advantage of college amateur athletes”, I still maintain this is a celebration of the college football player and their schools much more than some veiled attempt to profit off of them. (Man, I am on a soapbox a lot these last two weeks!)

- The H2H game only counts games on Saturday in the Big 6 Conferences (commonly erroneously referred to as BCS conferences), so this week PINE TIME the Southern Cal, Oregon State, UConn and Louisville stars. You really will not see any hint that they are playing off-weekend at any point of the H2H process except to the warning headers on the Set Lineup page. They benevolently add a pre-paid trade for every player you have on your roster from those schools. Read the rest of this entry →