The Living Room Times

I’m hosting an informal, opening-night-of-football Live Chat (mostly for testing purposes) here. Come on by! Go Boise State!

With the season getting underway in less than seven hours, I’d better publish these now…

• Notre Dame will go 9-3. They’ll barely survive a scare from Nevada, then lose one out of the Big Ten trio (Michigan/MSU/Purdue), then beat Washington to come into the USC game at 4-1. There will be much talk of waking up the echoes. It won’t happen. After the latest Trojan beatdown, the 4-2 Irish will finally beat Boston College (for the first time since the Clinton Administration), demolish Wazzu, and beat Navy. They’ll then lose on the road to either Pitt or Stanford, while beating UConn in between. I’m going to guess the Irish’s non-USC losses will be to Sparty and the Drunken Trees. If so, the loss to Stanford will be particularly crushing, because the Irish will arrive in Palo Alto as BCS contenders, and leave as Gator Bowl-bound pretenders. Will nine wins and a New Year’s Day bowl be enough to save Charlie’s job? Maybe, but remember, 9-3 is not good enough!

• USC will go 11-1. They’ll beat up on San Jose State, expose Ohio State, survive a scare from Washington, steamroll Wazzu, edge Cal, crush Notre Dame, avenge themselves against Oregon State… then lose at Oregon. They’ll win out the rest of the way, and will be very much in the national championship conversation at season’s end. But with Florida being the OMG BEST TEAM EVER playing the OMG EASIEST SCHEDULE EVER* but nevertheless getting credit from the pollsters for playing in the OMG TOUGHEST CONFERENCE EVER (it’s a WAR!), there’s really probably only one spot in the title game up for grabs — and unless the Big 12 produces a two-loss champion, they’ve pretty much got it reserved. Oregon, being Oregon, will of course go 9-3, with losses to Boise State, Utah, and Stanford, but will nevertheless go to the Rose Bowl because they’ll own the tiebreaker over USC. The Trojans will instead go to the Fiesta Bowl, which is awesome, where they’ll play Boise State, which is less awesome. My head will explode, as I’m forced to root for Goliath over David. USC will win, of course, unless Boise is able to suit up Vince Young somehow, because USC only loses BCS bowls when VY is involved. Trojans finish 12-1, ranked #2 in the country, but looking like the best team in the land, as per usual. Fans will once again muse that USC could have won 16 straight national championships, or something, if only they could win a damn game in the state of Oregon. Oh well, maybe next year. Beat the Rainbows!

*Except for Penn State’s schedule.

• Buffalo will not repeat as MAC champs, or even MAC East champs. But they’ll have another winning season, will go to the International Bowl again, and will win it this time. There will be another round of speculation about Turner Gill leaving. He won’t.

• Michigan will go 6-6, forcing MGoBlog to post pictures of kittens at various points throughout the season. But the Wolverines will get to play in a bowl, and comparisons will be made to Notre Dame ’08. They will, however, lose the bowl, to finish 6-7. Rich Rodriguez will start demanding that the players practice 25 hours a day.

• Florida will beat Tennessee by a score of 8,237 to 0. Or thereabouts.

• John L. Smith will slap himself at some point during his first season as Arkansas’s special teams coordinator. Alas, it may not be televised this time.

• Colt McCoy will win the Heisman, because you can’t play quarterback for Texas while having a name like “Colt McCoy” and not freakin’ win the Heisman at some point.

• Tim Tebow will lose his virginity. Okay, this isn’t really a prediction, since I have no way of knowing whether it’s realistic, and it’s unverifiable anyway, but I just wanted to include it because it was fun to write. Ha ha. Tim Tebow’s a virgin. Ha ha.

• South Florida will win the Big East. UConn will do better than expected. Pittsburgh will be a big disappointment, and Dave Wannstedt will be back on the hot seat. Syracuse QB Greg Paulus will get sacked roughly 346 times, and the Orange will finish last in the Big East. Again.

• There will be another three-way tie for the Big 12 South championship, this time between Texas, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State. This will cause the space-time continuum to implode.

• The Mountain West will cannibalize itself, with TCU, BYU and Utah all going 7-1 in conference play, with losses to each other (and, in BYU’s case, a close loss to Oklahoma). None of them will get BCS bids, because Boise State will go undefeated, and the other at-large spots will go to USC, one of the Big 12 South runners-up, and Penn State, despite the latter’s peewee league nonconference schedule. There is no justice in the world. Back to the Las Vegas Bowl, Mormons!

• These predictions will look totally ridiculous within a few weeks, if not a few hours.

(Go Broncos! Beat Ducks!)