ND_Shamrock

Why, Notre Dame? Why?

The Fighting Irish have some of the most iconic images in college football history whether it's the solid gold helmet, the interlocking "N" and "D" or the boxing Irishman. So why in the world does Notre Dame continue to keep peddling the shamrock logo?

For luck, perhaps?

The Irish are debuting their new helmet for the "Shamrock Series Game" against Maryland this weekend in what seems like an attempt to outdo the Terps' uniform creativity.

This is the second time this season Notre Dame is slapping a shamrock on the side of its hats for a game. The Irish did something similar against Michigan earlier in the year, though the helmet was solid gold while this one has some texture to it. However, the luck of the Irish didn't help as Notre Dame lost 35-31 to the Wolverines.

This year is the first time Notre Dame has sported the shamrock since 1959 when coach Joe Kuharich introduced it. The fad only lasted until 1962 before it reemerged this season.

Lucky for all of us

EdsallWhen Randy Edsall was hired as Maryland's coach in January, he called Maryland his "dream job." Apparently, he thought his dream job might also be a rebuilding project.

During his Sunday teleconference — after losing 31-13 to Virginia, the team's fifth consecutive loss — Edsall told media he's not in new territory with the Terps 2-7 season.

"I've been through this before," Edsall said. "I know how to handle it. I know what to do. There is no panic. It was like this the first year when we put the team together in Jacksonville. ... It's Connecticut all over again, 13 years ago. Jacksonville Jaguars all over again. It's going to Boston College when we were there. I've been through all of this. This isn't earth-shattering. It doesn't have me discouraged. I have a vision of what we're going to do and I know we're doing things the right way."

Wait, what?

I get that Edsall's trying to show he had initial struggles at some of his former stops and that each of those teams was able to turn

Charlie Strong is excited — really excited. And who can blame him?

Louisville's 38-35 upset over West Virginia Saturday was the biggest win in Strong's short career and gave the Cardinals a three-game winning streak, one win short of bowl eligibility before. This after no one expected anything from Louisville this season.

So after Saturday's game — before the team broke into a locker room version of West Virginia's unofficial theme song, John Denver's "Country Roads" — Strong allowed his emotions to overtake him and he leaped into his sea of players and began to crowd surf.

It's by far the best coach-team celebration caught on air (and available for public consumption) this season and frankly, a far better crowd-surfing job than that of Notre Dame hoops coach Mike Brey.

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Curtsy (female version of the hat tip) to Kegsneggsblog.com

Graham Watson is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow her @Yahoo_Graham.

If Sunday's reports of Houston Nutt's demise as Ole Miss head coach were premature, it was only by 24 hours: Multiple sources say the axe has fallen this morning, putting the Nutt administration out of its misery after four years, back-to-back losing records and 12 consecutive SEC losses dating back to last season. A press conference has been scheduled for 2 p.m. Central.

For a certain segment of Ole Miss fans — the one that effectively buried Nutt in September, on the heels of a 30-7 embarrassment at Vanderbilt that sealed the Rebels' fate as the worst team in the league — Nutt is already something of a ghost, showing up weekly from beyond the grave to interrupt the ongoing search for his replacement with another depressing facsimile of an SEC team. For everyone else, the season has played out as an extended funeral dirge, at best: The Rebels are 0-6 in conference play, rank dead last in every major defensive category, rank next-to-last in every major offensive category, and just

In a perfect world, the Doc would be given carte blanche to publicly torch the Bowl Championship Series in effigy and institute the elaborate, double-elimination battle royal of his dreams. But we live in the world we live in, so each Sunday the Doc looks at what the new BCS numbers mean for the rest of the season. Rooting interest: Chaos. Always chaos.

It wasn't exactly definitive, but LSU's victory in the SEC Field Goal Fest of the Century does answer the Big Question of the season to date: If the last month of the regular season unfolds according to script, the first golden ticket to the BCS Championship Game belongs to the Tigers. As of right now, the second golden ticket would still belong to Oklahoma State, which controls its destiny down the stretch no matter how many points the Cowboys yield to Kansas State.

Now, on that note, on to the next Big Question, which comes in two parts: Can Oklahoma State's perfect record survive a Dec. 3 assault by Oklahoma on a vulnerable Cowboy

Making the morning rounds.

• This is going to get ugly. Even while vehemently maintaining their innocence, Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and another university official agreed to step down Sunday night after the PSU Board of Trustees met to address Curley's indictment for allegedly covering up reports of sexual abuse by former Nittany Lion defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Curley and Gary Schultz, a senior vice president for business and finance, are both expected in court this afternoon on charges of perjury and failing to report a specific allegation that Sandusky (above) was caught molesting a 10-year-old boy by a graduate assistant coach in 2002, one of at least eight young males prosecutors say Sandusky abused over the span of more than a decade through his work with a local charity for at-risk youth.

According to the Pennsylvania Attorney General, Sandusky was the subject of an investigation by campus police that concerned "allegations of sexually inappropriate

Snap judgments on the weekend's best.

PHYSICS • Eric Reid, LSU.
With the game tied and momentum firmly in Alabama's favor at the start of the fourth quarter, Reid singlehandedly provided an equal and opposite reaction to Trent Richardson's stampede through the LSU secondary moments earlier by taking the ball away from 'Bama tight end Michael Williams on a goal line interception that reversed the course of the game and the season. The Crimson Tide never threatened again, and the Tigers' winning field goal in overtime tilted their orbit on a direct line to the BCS title game.

For the game, Reid tied for second on the team with six tackles, including one for loss, as part of the effort that kept Alabama out of the end zone for the first time in Nick Saban's five-year tenure.

BIOLOGY • Rick Neuheisel, UCLA.
Barely two weeks after being declared legally dead in a nationally televised, 48-12 debacle at Arizona, the Bruins' season was miraculously resuscitated by a 29-28 upset over

Oklahoma State 52, Kansas State 45.
We're much too far along in the season to be surprised by this kind of score, this kind of score being right in Oklahoma State's wheelhouse: The Cowboys yielded 507 yards Saturday night and actually improved in the national rankings, moving up from 111th in total defense to 110th. By now, you're either willing to accept that a turnover-heavy, bend-but-don't-break style can sustain a perfect season despite such ghastly numbers, or you're impatiently waiting for the other shoe to finally fall on these impostors.

Essentially, any debate over the 9-0 Cowboys' merit as a BCS contender comes down to this: Splitting hairs between what's actually a bad defensive performance, and what only looks like a bad defensive performance on the stat sheet because of their rapid-fire style of play.

Last week's 59-24 rout over Baylor was a classic of the latter genre, in which the Cowboys yielded an incredible 622 total yards but also forced five turnovers and led 49-3