Saturday his hair stood in a clump, straight up in the air, frozen in place. It looked like he hadn't slept or shaved. His gray hoodie neither channeled his inner Bill Belichick nor wore him well. At least he looked better than the week before, when his entire being was comically drowned in a Maryland monsoon.

Two weeks, two desperate late-game visions involving Charlie Weis. He survived a furious rally at Navy, he didn't Saturday against Syracuse. He looked both battered by the elements and out of his element.

Saturday it was another blown lead, another crushing loss, another round of questions about whether this guy is capable of waking the echoes at Notre Dame as he had once assured with over the top braggadocio.

Only now he doesn’t even look like a guy in command of his program but rather a coach with more questions than answers, someone hanging on not pushing forward.

Image may not be everything in college football – wins are – but it is something and no coach is projecting a more

NORMAN, Okla. – College football's leadership has hatched plenty of harebrained ideas in its annual quest to ruin the national championship chase.

The one that promises to derail the season of either Oklahoma or Texas, which, you might recall, actually beat the Sooners last month, might be the most bizarre

The Big 12 South champion could be determined by a poll of faceless, feckless and too often partisan voters far from these windswept plains.

Only a sport with such a profound lack of leadership, in this case Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, could descend into a cross between figure skating and "American Idol."

The Big 12 failed to come up with enough of its own criteria for breaking a three-way tie at the top of the standings, as Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech could produce. Instead it was willing to punt to the computers and voters who determine the BCS rankings. Whatever team is ranked highest wins the division.

Among the problems: Few of the coaches who vote in the coaches' poll

As a kid, Bob Stoops used to live for Friday nights and Cardinal Mooney games. His dad, Ron Stoops Sr., was the defensive coordinator at the Catholic school on the South Side of Youngstown, Ohio, and it was there, watching the Cardinals, watching his dad's handiwork, that that old coaching axiom sunk in.

Defense wins championships.

There's never been a flashy thing about Bob Stoops. He's what you'd expect out of a guy from Youngstown, who went to Iowa and settled at Oklahoma, rebuffing all those NFL coaching offers.

He keeps it simple. He says little and promises less – other than effort. He believes in fundamentals and open-field tackles and hard work and toughness. There is a right way and wrong way to do everything, and if you have to ask which way Stoops favors then you don't know the man.

It is how he, as an assistant, won the reputation as college football's best defensive mind, how he secured the storied Sooners post despite no head coaching experience and how he rewarded that

BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. – They flew in Angelo Dundee, the legendary, 87-year-old trainer, put him in a black Chevy Suburban and hairpin-turned him 6,700 feet up a mountain. At the end was Oscar De La Hoya's training camp for his Dec. 6 welterweight fight against Manny Pacquiao.

It was also De La Hoya's fraternity house – if early mornings, quiet nights, dropping weight, small meals, long altitude runs, sobriety, celibacy, seclusion and a lot of old guys hanging around can be called such a thing.

De La Hoya thinks it can. This is fun, he keeps claiming. "Once in a big while we go out for sushi," he offered. On this day, Veterans Day, De La Hoya said he would shake things up by baking a cake in honor of Joe Chavez, who tapes his hands, and Dundee, both veterans.

"People ask me, 'Civil War?'" Dundee said.

De La Hoya gets asked every single day why someone with so much money and so much fame continues at 35 to retreat to the hinterlands for months of monotony so some young guy has the

LAS VEGAS – Marty Morgan was a wrestling coach at the University of Minnesota in November 1997 when he attended an open tournament in Fargo, N.D. He went to watch one of his guys, Shelton Benjamin, when he noticed fans crowding around one mat, whooping it up at the action.

"You could hear 'oohs' and 'ahhs' from the other side of the gym," Morgan said.

He and a fellow coach wandered over and discovered Brock Lesnar, a huge South Dakota farm boy then attending a junior college. He was annihilating the heavyweight that had previously defeated Benjamin.

"We looked at each other and said, 'Oh my goodness, what is this? Look at this guy? Look at this intensity?' "

The next day, they flew Lesnar to campus. Two days after that, they signed him to a scholarship before any rival schools could scout him. It was a smart move. Lesnar was the NCAA Division I runner-up as a junior and national champion as a senior.

"There's never been a doubt in my mind that Brock is a world-class athlete," Morgan

BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. – Oscar De La Hoya could only smile and shake his head at the latest round of criticism directed his way. The shots he expects. The source, on this occasion, he didn't.

Freddie Roach is De La Hoya's former trainer. They worked together in the 2007 fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. and starred in the HBO documentary on their preparation.

De La Hoya is using a different trainer, Ignacio "Nacho" Beristain, though, for his Dec. 6 welterweight fight against Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Roach claims he isn't upset about not getting the job. He is Pacquiao's longtime trainer and will be in his corner that night. He claims it's how the situation was handled – he first heard about it in the media – that bothered him. In an interview with FOXSports.com last week, he unloaded on his former boss.

He called the 35-year-old De La Hoya an "old man." He predicted Pacquiao would knock him out in nine rounds. And he denigrated De La Hoya's entire 39-5 career,

AVONDALE, Ariz. – Jimmie Johnson was crushing the competition all afternoon, lap after lap as he pushed toward the historic moment he would all but assure a third consecutive Cup championship.

It's a stretch of domination not seen in three decades and he's doing it with breathtaking ease. Once again he enters next weekend's finale with a nearly insurmountable lead of 141 points.

Johnson is so good right now that the guy who finished second to him in Sunday's race at Phoenix International Raceway could only shrug and bow.

"It's really a privilege to finish second to him," Kurt Busch offered.

What Johnson's doing now is the NASCAR equivalent of Tiger Woods sprinting toward a grand slam, Lance Armstrong gliding down the Champs-Elysees for a seventh consecutive year or the New England Patriots streaking to 18-0.

Yet, with it still a real possibility that Johnson would secure the championship in this very race, ABC determined it was better to cut away from the conclusion in favor of

BATON ROUGE, La. – The rumor was the state of Alabama had sent prison guards to protect Nick Saban. Presumably, these were the people on the payroll best suited to beat back a riot.

Considering the scene at overwrought Tiger Stadium after Saban's current team, Alabama, beat his former team, Louisiana State, 27-21 in overtime, this seemed prudent. The stands in the Southeast corner had erupted into a frenzied mix of jubilation and jeers, the two schools' fan bases side by side, the hate and hysteria palpable.

All eyes were on Saint Nick as he headed to the locker room. You couldn't miss him in the middle of a pack of state troopers who rolled 13 strong (there were no prison guards.)

Saban never bothered to look up at the scene. He kept his head down and his jog brisk, fleeing his old joint with the victory that deep down he coveted for more reasons than the BCS standings.

He's been steadfast that his four-year tenure at LSU would not be defined by the angry mob of former worshippers,