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FanHouse writer John Walters is living in South Bend, Ind., during one of the most pivotal seasons in Notre Dame history. Check back daily for his dispatches on the Irish.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Flat-lined against a blue-gray sky...huh?

Greetings from the Notre Dame Stadium pressbox, which is filled with budding eulogists this afternoon. National scribes from publications and websites alike, many of them here to see whether USC will blow out the Irish and put the nail in Charlie Weis' coffin.

Sorry, I just don't see it that way.

Follow John Walters live blog after the jump.

MINNEAPOLIS -- For the University of Minnesota, this has been a long time coming.

In 1981, the Gophers played their last football game at Memorial Stadium. The decision was made to move home games to the Metrodome, which isn't terribly far from campus but is definitely not a "typical" college football stadium. By 2002, the university was looking into the feasibility of an on-campus stadium. In the spring of 2005, funding was finally approved. On Sept. 12, 2009, the dreams of many Gopher football supporters became a reality.

Derek Dooley thought he was happy practicing law at a private firm in Atlanta in the mid-1990s. Despite his football bloodlines -- he is the son of legendary Georgia head coach Vince Dooley -- Dooley believed his calling was the courtroom and not on the sidelines.

He was wrong.

"Football has been a part of my life, but I kind of grew up never really wanting to coach -- I am not sure why," Dooley told FanHouse.

"I did fairly well in school, I enjoyed the challenge of law school, and I went on to practice law. But I guess football was in my blood. It wasn't that I didn't like practicing law as much as was I just missed all the great things associated with athletics and football. I am really glad I made the switch when I did and it has worked out so far."

When college football coaches decided that their little shred of transparency -- making each coach's final ballot public -- was just too much sharing, there was some outcry over the decision to go back to anonymous balloting in 2010. All accountability and openness of the votes appeared to be out the window.

Sports Illustrated has decided that it will go to court to force the ballots to be opened to public scrutiny. Starting this week, they intend to file state-level Freedom of Information Act requests at each public institution where there is a participating coach.

Former San Diego State head coach Chuck Long really wants to collect his $715,900 salary from the school. The Aztecs and Long's attorney still have not worked out an arrangement for Long to get most of his money from the contract after being fired in November. Instead he is doing "special projects" for the school. In grade school, this would have been considered "busy work."

Long's first assignment was to write a report on ways to improve the football program. Specifically, "streamlining admissions for student-athletes, housing of football players and attracting youths and families to SDSU with sports camps." He turned it in at the end of July and his recommendations appear to have come from repeated viewings of the first half of "Revenge of the Nerds."

The capsulized version of the 23-page action plan: lower admission standards for football players -- especially for junior college transfers, give them the best dorm housing on the campus (it has a pool, grill and the best dining hall), and let them join fraternities if they desire.

Hard to believe it only took him about six months and 23 pages to come up with these recommendations.

Penn State garnered top party school honors this year in the annual Princeton Review's ranking of top party schools. The top 20 schools are listed, and as I wistfully scanned the list and daydreamed about a time when all I had to worry about was whether the kegs would make it through the night or whether we'd have to scramble for more cases of Natty Light, I came to a startling conclusion: It's almost as if major college football and partying go together.

Shocking, no?

So in honor of college football's apparent impact on the most important ranking this side of the Harris Interactive Poll, let's run through the 20 party scenes -- including one college you've never heard of, ClayNation style.

Nothing worse than a planned construction project running headlong into a recession. Financing shrinks, credit gets tighter and there is just less money available. It does not matter if it is for a private project or a public deal. Rutgers was dealing with just that problem as they started to expand their stadium.

The plans were not quite grandiose, but they did have a lot of extras beyond simply expanding the seating capacity. There were suites, expanded facilities, all sorts of amenities that have become standard in modern stadiums. Of course, with New Jersey facing a major budget crisis, donations running way behind projections, layoffs on the academic side of the university, tuition hikes and even cutting some sports from the athletic department the expansion of Rutgers Stadium was suddenly limited to expanding the seating.

There's always an endless fascination with finding programs that can be considered "sleeping giants." Those are the schools where it seems that with a little work and the right coach, the program could go from bottom feeder to ranked and respectability.

Rutgers is the most recent example of a football program that had the natural recruiting territory and finally made the move from historical laughing stock to good program. The mistake is assuming that it all related to simply hiring and retaining the right coach to recruit, coach and change the culture. There's no denying the importance of that. The other component, though, is just as important: a competent and committed athletic department. Without the latter, no real change will happen -- no matter who is hired.

On the West Coast, San Diego State holds the distinction as the program most commonly considered a "sleeping giant." Often just slightly below .500 and occasionally competent there was much working for them.

Virtually every college athlete in the country is on Facebook now. This makes sense, it's hard not to be on Facebook if you're under 35, impossible if you're under 25. But Facebook has become a public relations minefield for major athletic programs across the country. Whether it's players being kicked out of school for making a threat in their status message (Wake Forest), posting racist comments about the newly elected President (Texas), setting off an internet firestorm over whether or not you actually posted messages on another person's wall (Georgia) or just having your idiotic responses to quizzes posted all over for others to enjoy (Michigan). This is just the tip of the Facebook iceberg, every program is in danger at every moment of every day. All of this attention and all of this danger raises an intriguing question: Is it time for athletic departments to ban their athletes from having social media profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and the like?

Fresno State has just received the largest pledged donation in its history, $10 million dollars for the athletic department. Exactly how this pledge will be honored still seems shrouded in mystery.

The money is coming through a former Fresno State football player, Alphonso Bigelow, who played linebacker in the mid-90s. He got his MBA at Fresno State, and still lives in the city. He is also the CEO of a company called Nykel Bam International, LLC. That's where the mystery comes in, because what the company does seems purposefully vague.