NCAA Football utah Runnin' Utes

What was left of BYU's season sat just above the cast on Dekoda Watson's left arm, a paperback-sized chunk of manicured grass that looked like a divot from Goliath's back nine.

The Florida State linebacker the turf trophy around in front of a small crowd of Seminole supporters in LaVell Edwards Stadium, beaming like an oversized 5-year-old at his first show and tell. Florida State had arrived a seemingly fragile program, looking at a 1-2 start following a heartbreaking loss to Miami in Week 1 and a vague impersonation of a win against Jacksonville State last Saturday.

But over 60 minutes of a 54-28 rout of Brigham Young that likely proved even Utah friendly has its limits, the Seminoles hadn't just ripped their heart out. They'd ripped their turf out, too.

By the time Watson finished his parade, they had literally taken the ground out from under the Mountain West Conference. The Cougars lost the battle, the MWC lost the turf war.

College football is B - A - C - K so grab a seat, pop on ESPN or some other network if you're watching one of the undercard games (Coastal Carolina at Kent State, perhaps?), and lets talk college football's opening night starting at 7 PM Eastern.

A team of FanHouse writers will be your hosts and we'll have updated Twitter feeds from various sources related to the involved teams updating within the chat software. See it all ... after the jump!

---

---

After an offseason of tumult, the preseason USA Today coaches' poll has arrived, proclaiming Tim Tebow's Florida Gators the early favorites as college football's top team. No surprise there, as the defending BCS Champion Gators return the rhino-QB and the bulk of their offense, plus the entire two deep from a top-five 2008 defense.

That choice is the most obvious and uncontested since the much-hyped start of USC's 2005 run. There's a lesson there, of course, for both the Gators and for fans. Its not like USC was a bad team, but the still-impressive results didn't quite match the hype. So what about the rest of the poll? We report, we decide, after the jump.

The Mountain West Conference has been dissatisfied with the Bowl Championship Series system for years and their disdain hit the pinnacle when Utah finished the 2008 regular season undefeated and did not rank in the top 2, preventing the Utes from playing in the BCS National Championship Game.

Utah soundly beat Alabama and finished as the lone undefeated team in America, and the MVC lobbied for an automatic bid in the BCS system. But negotiations with the MVC and the Western Athletic Conference never advanced, and both conferences signed an agreement to retain their same role in the BCS -- reluctantly.

"Today, the Mountain West Conference has executed the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) agreement and the attendant rights agreement with ESPN," the conference said in a statement on their Web site. "While the Mountain West has expressed serious concerns with the various fundamental flaws in the current BCS system, our various good faith initiatives to generate reform have thus far not been accepted."

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.

There's an unnerving, repetitive theme to the first four items in this week's FanHouse Walk -- lawyers. Maybe its just the offseason or an odd week, but they seem to be everywhere related to college football right now. Today's headliner finds Florida's Attorney General Bill McCollum threatening the NCAA and its president Myles Brand with a $1,000 fine or even jail time if it doesn't make public documents related to its confidential investigation into Florida State athletics.

The federal government's opposition to the Bowl Championship Series is well established: President Obama favors a college football playoff, and last week a member of Congress compared the BCS to Communism. And now the attorney general of Utah is saying that if the feds don't go after the BCS, he will.

Don't get U.S. Rep. Joe Barton wrong: He doesn't think Tim Tebow is a Communist. He just thinks the process by which Tebow and the Florida Gators became national champions is reminiscent of Communism.

The Sugar Bowl was a great night for those not in love with the college football establishment. Unbeaten Utah, getting no consideration for the national championship, blitzed former title favorite Alabama on a neutral field in New Orleans.

It wasn't cheap. It wasn't just dumb luck. The Utes whipped the Crimson Tide, and earned every bit of credit for a sound victory. Of course, if you're Alabama coach Nick Saban, it's easier to blame others than it is to give that credit.

In several decades of public service, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch has been reliably conservative. However, when it comes to discussing matters of college football the Senator walks and talks like a member of the other party. Since 2003 Hatch has been complaining about the BCS and its unfairness, accusing the major conference commissioners of being 'elitists' and threatening to haul the entire show before Congress.

In an interview with CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd, Orrin Hatch Senate Republican appears to be playing a hand from the Democratic playbook railing against unfairness, threatening congressional intervention into a private entity and a radical change in how wealth is earned and distributed among the involved parties.

You can't blame the Mountain West Conference for wanting a college football playoff. In two of the last five seasons, Mountain West champion Utah went undefeated but wasn't allowed to compete for the national championship. That's just not the way sports should work.

But the Mountain West's idea for an eight-team playoff is a badly written, badly conceived proposal that will be dead on arrival in the college football world.