If you want to go to the Orange Bowl, now would be good time to speak up

Pike? Grutza? Brian Kelly doesn’t care who’s under center, he’s not going to relent. The bittersweet part of their success this year is that Kelly might be the hottest coach in the country.

UConn’s Randy Edsall has always been rather gruff with the media, in the Tom Coughlin mold. However, things are getting ugly (and I’m not talking about Syracuse’s performance on Saturday), with the media openly accusing Edsall of lying about who would start at QB. Really, you needed to keep that a secret?

Louisville lost the Keg of Nails on Thursday, The coolest trophy you’ve never heard of. There seemed to be a bit of animosity between Steve Kragthorpe and Brian Kelly after the game. The Cards better hope that star RB Victor Anderson is ok after being on the receiving end of a helmet-to-helmet hit and having to leave the Cincy game. Looks like they lost two more starters to injury.

All eyes are on Pittsburgh now, as they travel to Cincinnati for a probable de-facto Big East title game.

Greg Robinson will have all the time to smoke hookah that he wants now. How long did Syracuse.com have that story queued up? Four months? Twelve? Donnie Webb has the latest on SU’s coaching search:

The leading candidates to replace Robinson are believed to be Connecticut coach Randy Edsall, East Carolina coach Skip Holtz and former Oakland Raiders head coach Lane Kiffin.

Edsall is considered the front-runner and sources tell The Post-Standard that Edsall is “very interested” in the Syracuse job.

Meanwhile, the local press in CT says that Edsall is staying, so stay tuned.

Saturday’s big loss is raising more questions for USF. Matt Grothe rolled his ankle, but he’s expected to start their next game.

Why has West Virginia’s offense sputtered this year? Bill Connelly of FootballOutsiders.com blames the misuse of Pat White.

Staving off disaster

Rutgers 63, Marist 61. At home. That pretty much says it all. I’m happy that I wasn’t in attendance to watch such an awful contest.

The good:

Greg Echenique – 11 points, 15 rebounds, 6 blocks
Mike Rosario – 17 points
Hamady N’Diaye – 8 points, 7 rebounds, 8 blocks
Corey Chandler was back in uniform.

That’s a lot of blocks.

The bad:

16/30 on free throws, at a 53.3% clip
5/13 assist/turnover ratio
Reports from the game indicated that players started cramping late in the second half.

The Knights are young, and bound to improve throughout the season even without factoring in the returns of J.R. Inman and Jaron Griffin. In one game, but the team largely looked like it had the same problems that it did in 2007-2008; with the caveats that two players were suspended, and the freshman combo of Rosario and Echenique had big games.

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It was more of the same yesterday, but Rutgers had a little more margin for error with Inman and Griffin returning (neither played as much as usual) in a hard-fought win at Delaware. Once again, the stories of the game were a terrific performance by N’Diaye, and solid games by the freshmen Rosario and Echenique. This was a game that some RU fans expected to lose, and they would have lost it if they played like they did against Marist.

Crow for Breakfast

Long snapper Jeremy Branch may have suffered a serious injury on Saturday. Who else but Andrew DePaola, the former walk on QB who has turned into a jack of all trades this season, stepped in to replace Branch.

USF safety Carlton Williams accused RU of running up the score. Not exactly. I think they were getting close to that point, and Mike Teel should have given way to Dom Natale. However, they ultimately did not end up running up the score.

I knew that Mike Teel wasn’t the most popular guy on Facebook, but he actually decided to delete his account a while back. Apparently, Coach Schiano does not have a MySpace account, but his staff (re: probably one overmatched student manager) does monitor the team’s activities on the internet.

“We have to be conservative, we have to be smart,” he said, even as he openly admitted to not ever being on Facebook or MySpace, or fully understanding their breadth. He does, however, have staffers “occasionally” check his players’ sites. He doesn’t have a formal social networking site policy, as half of the 12 SEC schools do, or a compliance office that monitors sites, as Oklahoma does, and instead says, “I don’t like to (police) too much because I want to trust them.”

I was looking at Saturday’s game participation report, and it said that Gary Watts saw action. If true, that would doom his chances of a medical redshirt. Did he play?

Kordell Young and Zaire Kitchen are linked by their simultaneous rehabs from knee injuries. SI.com has a great article about the science behind ACL injuries. Quick summary: they’re bad news, but there are ways to prevent them.

In keeping with project sabotage, I’m pleased to report that it is absolutely not true that any Rutgers receiver passed Tres Moses’s for tops in receiving yardage in school history on Saturday.