NCAA Football colorado Buffaloes

Colorado head coach Dan Hawkins announced a few moves on his staff this week, the biggest being that he will add the role of receivers coach to his duties this upcoming season.

Hawkins will coach the Buffaloes as he prepares 13-year NFL defensive back Ashley Ambrose to take over the wide receivers position for the 2010 season. Ambrose, who is carrying the title of defensive technical intern this season, will be able to observe Hawkins but is prohibited from coaching the players until after the season when he will be named a full-time assistant.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Rap, Rap, Rapping At The Door -- Bad news is best delivered on Friday, so no surprise when it was discovered that in the new BCS contract the Rose Bowl must fill one of its slots to a non-BCS team (think Boise State or Utah) if it loses either the Big 10 or Pac-10 champion to the BCS championship game.

There are the Rose Bowl haters out there snarking away on this, but I think its another sad day for college football. Everyone bemoans the USC/Illinois type matchups in Pasadena, but I still find it fresh and what the Rose Bowl is all about. The various Miami/Nebraka, Texas/Michigan, USC/Texas type matchups were all enjoyable, but something has never felt right about them.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Mr. BCS Goes To Washington -- Except I have a feeling Jimmy Stewart would find some way to rail against the BCS, however wrongheadedly. You see, the big word in the halls of Congress on Friday was "fair" but don't let that confuse you. While the Mountain West and certain members of Congress are using the fairness term to stoke public support, their real concern is about money.

College Football Spring Storylines 2009 looks at the key developments and big news from spring ball.

The Big 12 stood up and challenged the SEC for the title of One Conference to Rule Them All in 2008. They didn't exactly succeed, but the conference gave us a lot of great football last season.

However, that was then and this is now. The postseason was not entirely successful for the conference, with a 4-3 overall record in bowl games. How will that carry over into this fall? Who's on the rise? Who's hitting the skids? We'll talk about the big stories after the jump.

FanHouse runs its spread offense with a regular feature of aggregated links and interesting news items.

Tim Tebow as George Gipp -- Florida, taking a page from Notre Dame, is deeply interested in building its own myth machine. So interested, in fact, they've dedicated a plaque immortalizing senior-to-be quarterback Tim Tebow's speech after losing to Ole Miss last year. It is titled, simply, "The Promise." You may remember it for the line, "you will never see a team play harder than we will the rest of the season. God bless."

Get a grip guys, he's not dead yet. He's not even out of college. Nor can we enlist this generation's Ronald Reagan, whoever that might be, to play him although at this point we have to assume Florida's scouring the independent film festivals looking for him.

FanHouse's lead-up to college football's signing day makes like Charles Dickens and looks at the Ghosts of Recruiting -- past, present and future. In the Ghosts of Recruiting Past we note 10 recruiting powers who have hit a dry spell

Big 12 also-rans Colorado and Texas A&M get first draw in this series. Both programs are not longstanding national powers, but did find tremendous success in the '80s and '90s, recruiting and producing great athletes. That success is now long gone, however. Let's look at their recruiting decline after the jump.

It's okay if you forgot the Big 12 had two divisions. Ever since Missouri lost to Oklahoma State and Texas on successive weekends, both the Tigers and the division they call home have been nearly invisible.

Since you forgot about the Big 12 North, you probably also thought that Missouri had locked up the division title a couple weeks ago. In fact, the Tigers needed Kansas to lose to Texas today to make it possible for them to clinch. All they had to do was beat Iowa State, who came into the game 2-8 and winless since September 6.

No problem on both counts. Texas made it look easy, beating the Jayhawks 35-7 in a game that wasn't even that close. The Tigers knew this before their game kicked off and knocked the Cyclones all the way from Ames to Keokuk, winning 52-20.

So the Tigers win the division no matter what happens against Kansas in two weeks. They'll face whoever survives the South, but whoever it is, Mizzou will be the underdog, and probably a sizable one. Given the strength of the South, the Tigers could slip all the way to the Holiday Bowl. And as for the rest of the division?

Florida State vs. Colorado ... were it the early '90s, we might be talking Sugar Bowl or somesuch. Were it a couple of years ago, we might be talking more along the lines of, like the Music City Bowl. This year ... well, even with Colorado coming off a rousing victory over West Virginia and their hilariously overmatched head coach and a neutral site to appease fans of both stripes (ok, not really, but more on this later), it looks like Jacksonville's caught a case of ACC Championship fever months in advance. Meaning that these two above-average (maybe?) squads are going to play in front of thousands and thousands of empty seats/uninterested fans.

Maybe it isn't news, other than that Florida State seems downright surprised by the fact that it hasn't been the same draw as last year's tilt in JAX with Alabama. I know both schools tend to have reputations that would lead one to believe that any excuse to take a long weekend would be taken advantage of, but that's before you factor in an economic crisis that has Bobby Bowden-aged politician running to the hills, Florida State suffering a 12-3 defeat at home to Wake Forest that was somehow more deflating than the 30-0 loss two years previous and, oh yeah, it's in September against a school that's thousands of miles away. Hopefully, this won't discourage BCS vs. BCS in-season matchups, but between Cal sleepwalking their way through the Maryland game and Tennessee doing the same vs. UCLA, it's easy to see squads being a little gunshy in the future.

I've got a very special College Football Songbook for you this week. I went out to the West Virginia vs. Colorado game last Thursday and joined up with some friends I met through Songpull.com to do some songs about the game. Songpull is a grassroots organization designed to showcase songwriters and develop songwriting communities. Special thanks to them for helping to make this happen, and to Jiffer Harriman for organizing everything at the tailgate.

It's painful that none of my predictions in the song came true, and that water made it hard to remember the words. But here's Rocky Mountain Low.

More videos after the jump.

With West Virginia's 17-14 OT loss to Colorado, they fall to 1-2 in Pat White's senior year. Late in the game, West Virginia permitted the clock to run twice; once this made sense because they were holding the ball for a fourth-down Hail Mary. The first time, though... yeesh.

Erin Andrews described the scene between regulation as chaotic, but the West Virginia sideline has nothing on the West Virginia Scout message board. Sometimes a screencap says a thousand words:



Uh, yeah, This Week In Schadenfreude might mention this.