Even Zook can't recruit bigtimers in the Big Ten

Florida took care of business against Georgia last night, which they needed to do. It's amazing that Dennis Felton is still employed with a 9-48 road record, but that will change soon. Things get interesting for Florida again Saturday night in Knoxville. It's a game they weren't expected to be able to win, but UT's plenty vulnerable. Five more regular season wins and UF's going to the NCAAs, so there's no pressure but there is a big opportunity.

It's easy to believe the current state of college football is cyclical. Just because the Big Ten has been down the last few years doesn't mean it won't get back to an elite level soon. That's what they keep hoping in the midwest, but the latest recruiting data is saying something else. I'm as skeptical of recruiting hype as anybody, but when six of the schools in a BCS league with its own TV network are putting together classes outside the top forty that means something. Ohio State will always be good and eventually Michigan will regroup, but for the next few years the odds are it will continue to be the Buckeyes in the BCS getting used as a pinata by a bigtime team over and over.

NBC Sports has put together a list of the supposed best twenty non-yearly rivalry out of conference college football games for 2009. If LSU at winless Washington and Nevada at Notre Dame are really two of the best ten available non-conference matchups, those first few weeks of the season are going to be brutal to watch.

David Beckham might leave MLS and return to Europe to play. Turns out he hasn't been able to get this country to care passionately about a sport that people have been ignoring since the NASL went under in the early Eighties. Who could have ever guessed that would happen, besides any American sports fan?

Looking for something to jazz up your Super Bowl party this weekend? Everyone has their secret weapon - Pat Dooley's is using cashews instead of beans in his chili. Odds are if you hurry, you can be the first one on your block to show up with the Bacon Explosion. If you believe in the theory that if you're going to be bad, you want to be really bad, this thing's for you.