MOREHEAD, Ky. – It might be time to give Bill Hodges the Satchel Paige line: Don't look back, Bill. Steve Prohm might be gaining on you.

Hodges was the rookie coach at Indiana State in 1978-79 who won his first 33 games, not losing until the national championship game. It helped that he had a kid named Larry Bird on the team.

Prohm is the rookie coach at Murray State who has won his first 19 games, the most recent being a hard-fought, 66-60 victory Wednesday night over rival Morehead State. Prohm isn't blessed with a Bird, though he does have a special point guard in Isaiah Canaan. And he has a team on a fairly amazing roll.

Prohm is believed to be on the best start to a head-coaching career of anyone since Hodges. Bill Guthridge won his first 17 games at North Carolina in 1997-98. Prohm Tennessee-waltzed past that Saturday by beating Tennessee Tech. Then he dispatched the Eagles. Next up is a visit to SIU-Edwardsville on Saturday.

If Murray wins out in the regular season, Prohm will

NEW ORLEANS – Perhaps we should have known Sunday morning, when Nick Saban was both witty and relaxed in his final news conference before he undressed Les Miles.

Saban doesn't do witty and relaxed very often. Maybe once every lunar eclipse. When Saban was making jokes, that might have been the clue that his team was absolutely locked and loaded to take down LSU.

What the Crimson Tide did to the top-ranked Tigers was no joke. The rematch was a mismatch. A beatdown. A complete reversal of the taut, 9-6 loss in Tuscaloosa in November. This 21-0 anticlimax was nowhere near as close as the score.

Alabama didn't just outhit LSU. It was able to outwit LSU as well.

Saban always is difficult to beat in rematch situations; this victory makes him 7-1 at Alabama in the next meeting with a team that defeated the Crimson Tide, and he was 8-1 in such games while the coach at LSU from 2000-04. But this one might be his payback Picasso, a masterpiece of preparation, alteration and focus.

At the least,

NEW ORLEANS – If you want to know the biggest reason the SEC is winning all these national championships, you have to look beyond the talent, the coaching, the facilities and the money.

You have to look at Anna and Walter Smith.

They're a Tuscaloosa couple that my friend Michael Casagrande of the Decatur (Ala.) Daily wrote about in November. The Smiths have taken to sleeping in their car in a parking lot every week to get good seats … for Nick Saban's radio show.

The week Alabama played LSU, the Smiths pulled their Ford Escape into the parking lot of Buffalo Wild Wings in Tuscaloosa on Wednesday morning, 35 hours before Saban's show aired. That's 35 hours early. For a radio show.

They ate their meals in the restaurant and slept in the car. The goal was to get the best seats for the show.

Here's the real kicker: They're not the only lunatics in town.

One of the Buffalo Wild Wings managers said the couple used to arrive around 2 a.m. the day of the show but were beaten out for

NEW ORLEANS – The ruler of college football sat in the shade on a bench at the Windsor Court Hotel on Sunday, looking quite relaxed.

There had been meetings earlier in the day and there were a couple of phone interviews to come, but for the most part, Mike Slive is just along for the joyride at this BCS national championship game.

The biggest concern for Slive, the SEC commissioner, was figuring out the best time to enjoy an afternoon cigar.

Monday night, a Jewish lawyer with an Ivy League education and a Northeast accent will add another line to his résumé as the best commissioner Dixie ever has had. His league will win an unprecedented sixth consecutive national title, when either Alabama or LSU prevails in the Superdome. But first, Slive sat down with Yahoo! Sports to talk about his league specifically and college sports in general.

Q: Simple question: How does it feel to have both competitors in the title game?

Slive: "It's exciting, as you'd expect it to be, when you've got the

NEW ORLEANS – On the night of LSU's September home opener against Northwestern State (La.), senior quarterback Jordan Jefferson was in Tiger Stadium but out of sight.

He watched the game on a TV in the locker room.

"It was very difficult," Jefferson said. "I was cheering them on, supporting them."

When the Tigers practiced during that first month of the season, Jefferson often watched from a balcony overlooking the practice facility. He was in limbo – not completely off the team, but not on it.

That was his position after being charged with a felony, second-degree battery, stemming from a Baton Rouge bar brawl in August. Witnesses said he kicked a man in the face, a charge Jefferson denied. He had 49 pairs of sneakers confiscated by police and checked for DNA evidence.

All of Louisiana had an opinion on Jefferson – and many of them were not kind. A guy who never had been in trouble growing up in a middle-class family in St. Rose, La., found his character being assailed from all sides.

NEW ORLEANS – It's a seven-hour drive from Dallas to Baton Rouge, La., which is a long time to think. And cry. And, if you're Steve and Cynthia Kragthorpe, ultimately to laugh.

"Laughter," Steve says, "is the best medicine."

They needed medicinal laughter on that drive in July, after Steve got the jarring news from his doctor that he had Parkinson's disease. That followed the jarring news the previous year that Cynthia had multiple sclerosis. And that followed the jarring news in late 2009 that Steve had been fired as the coach at Louisville after just three seasons.

It has, by almost any measurement, been a brutal run for the Kragthorpes.

But not by their measurement. They use a different yardstick than most of us. That's why they could laugh at their ailments on that car ride, poking fun at each other and the "cool couple" the former college sweethearts had become in their 40s.

"This is just a speed bump," Kragthorpe says. "Not a mountain."

The Kragthorpes don't make mountains out

NEW ORLEANS – Maybe Penn State got it right.

Let's start with that charitable assumption because we really don't know. We don't know whether the reported hiring of New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien as the man to succeed the winningest coach in college football history will fly or fail.

And we won't know for a couple of years at least. The sports noise stream is full of premature proclamations gone wrong; I was sure Gene Chizik would bomb at Auburn and Frank Haith would bomb at Missouri, for example. How do those “bad hires” look now?

So the prudent thing to do is to let O'Brien prove or disprove his worthiness for the job. But Penn State has given us a staggering amount of reasons to doubt it up to this point.

What the university has done well in the tawdry two months since the Jerry Sandusky scandal broke couldn't fill an eye-dropper. What it has done poorly about the situation would overflow an Olympic-sized pool.

The countenancing of Sandusky's presence on

NEW ORLEANS – In pro golf, they keep something called a "bounce-back" statistic. It quantifies how often a golfer follows a bogey with a birdie.

If they had such a stat for college football coaches, Alabama's Nick Saban probably would be your national bounce-back leader.

Saban has a remarkable track record of following a loss to an opponent with a victory in the next meeting. He is 6-1 in "revenge" games with the Crimson Tide. Before that, he was 8-1 in revenge games at LSU. He has almost perfected the payback.

Whether that springs from a Cro-Magnon impulse for vengeance or an analytical approach to fixing mistakes is immaterial. Maybe it's both, but whatever it is doesn't much matter. Saban is all about "The Process," but the end results show that he's simply a difficult coach to beat on back-to-back occasions.

This is, of course, an important part of the storyline for this BCS national championship game. Alabama lost to LSU 9-6 in overtime in November. For once, payback doesn't have