College football Saturday open thread

'Twas the Saturday before Thanksgiving and Ohio St. plays... Iowa?

Chipping away, bit by bit and time-honored tradition by set-your-watch-by-it tradition, conference realignment and the BCS are turning college football into NFL-lite.

Time was, November 20ish was the true rivalry weekend: Ohio St. - Michigan, Army - Navy, USC - UCLA, Cal - Stanford... oh, wait, Cal is playing Stanford today. You get the point: Rivalry weekend is now spread out over the last two weekends in November and the first weekend of December. A depressing development in our book.



The ranked matchups:


#9 Ohio State at #20 Iowa


#13 Arkansas at #21 Mississippi St.


#8 Nebraska at #19 Texas A&M


#24 Miami hosts #16 Virginia



Other games of note:

Both #1 and #2, Oregon and Auburn are off.


The subway alum get their fighting Irish at Yankee Stadium against Army.


BCS busters: #4 Boise St. whupped Fresno St. 51-0 last night and #3 TCU, after surviving a scare against San Diego St. last week, has the day off.


Michigan hosts #7 Wisconsin. Word around the campfire is that Rich Rodriguez needs to win one of the two remaining games on the schedule (Ohio St., next Saturday) to hold onto his job. The zone-read spread attack he installed 3 years ago has taken hold, it's the deplorable defense there at Ann Arbor, however, that may be his undoing.

The image above is not photo-shopped. Some genius thought that staging a tackle football game at a place known as "the friendly confines" would be a swell idea. The good news: late this week, Big 10 officials put their considerably larged-sized thinking hats on and decreed that both offenses would be directed away from the ivy-less though padded though still possibly paralysis-inducing outfield wall of Chicago's Wrigley Field. The bad news: this momentous occasion is wasted on Illinois and Northwestern.


#6 Stanford at the cramping Cal Bears


#5 LSU, in their 13th home game of the season, hosts Ole Miss.


USC goes to Corvallis where they have dropped two straight to take on Oregon St.


And deep into the heart of Saturday night, #23 Utah comes out here to the coast to play a resurgent San Diego St. Considering affairs of late with the Aztec program, perhaps, "surgent" would be more appropriate.





And finally, Montana Tech football coach Bob Green announced his retirement yesterday after 24 years with the NAIA Diggers. Why is it only now that we find out about this guy?