It seems like only yesterday that I was addressing, with somewhat of a bemused detachment, the rumored interest Florida State was purported to have in joining the Big 12.

OK, it wasn't quite yesterday: it was a whole five days ago. Since then, a seismic shift in college football has occurred. I think it's difficult to overstate the significance of the announcement that the champions of the Big 12 and SEC will be meeting annually in a new, conference-controlled bowl game beginning with the 2014 season. (The current BCS contracts run through the 2013 season.)

I think aloud and ramble on for several thousand words about what I think this all means, and where we're heading, after the jump.

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It's nice being the hunter rather than the hunted for a change, no?

As most BON readers have no doubt heard about by now, rumors have been flying fast and furious the last few days about Florida State having a serious interest in moving to the Big 12. Or, more precisely, the comments of certain prominent figures connected with the university (Wes Haggard, the head of the Board of Trustees) and its football program (head coach Jimbo Fisher), and the subsequent reaction by many of the school's supporters and alums, have ripped open the facade of the ACC being one big happy family.

Never mind the fact that Haggard has walked back his comments a bit and that FSU's president is attempting to disavow any interest. As we witnessed from A&M's move to the SEC, once key individuals, egged on by their alumni and fanbase (go take a look at this 600+ comment discussion on Tomahawk Nation and get a sense on how vigorously pro-Big 12 a strong majority of its readers seem to be), start considering greener pastures (whether real or illusory) elsewhere, events might unfold with such a momentum that moving becomes the only option.

There's not much I can add substantively which hasn't been reported up already. (Read this Andy Staples piece from today if you want a good summary of how this has gone down.) And it's way too early to get a good feel on how this will play out. Forget about what course of action FSU may or may not eventually choose to pursue: we have very little public indication about whether DeLoss Dodds the Big 12 would like to expand back to a descriptively-correct number of teams even if it had a big fish like FSU there for the taking.* (And who knows what if anything ESPN, which just signed the contract -- which had Haggard [seemingly erroneously] up in arms -- with the ACC, making the conference its biggest content provider around, is doing behind the scenes to keep FSU in place.)

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I live in the northern suburbs of Dallas, so I've had a great opportunity to watch the Everton U-19 team compete in this weeks' Dallas Cup, arguably the most prestigious youth football tournament in the word.

The Everton squad features Ross Barkley, who has of course already played several games at the EPL level this year. On several occasions watching Barkley this week, I marveled at the skills of one who truly seemed to be a man amongst boys.

I can't really provide too much of an in-depth analysis of the players I saw this week, as I'm just a silly Yank and since I had my two-year-old with me one game (which meant my eyes were just as frequently on him as the game) and, as evidenced below, I had my camera with me for the other, as, being a professional photographer, I wanted to take advantage of the incredible access -- the same as one would have at any youth soccer game -- to these amazing athletes.

I have a gallery of some of my favorite images from today's (Wednesday's) game, in which Everton defeated Club Bolivar (of Bolivia) 6-0. Unfortunately, it appears as though I can't insert images directly into a FanPost, so I'll link directly to a few in particular below to share with my fellow RBM readers.

Ross Barkley battles the Bolivian keeper.

Hallam Hope prepares to pass to Barkley, who scores.

Hope, again.

Conor Grant takes a corner.

Anton Forrester (also very impressive today) battles for the ball.

And, finally, an unhappy Barkley reacts to being fouled.

Enjoy!

(And as a nice PS, it appears that Everton FC will be using some of my photos on its website!)

Despite last night's loss to Mizzou, it seems as though most of of us are pretty confident that we'll qualify for the NCAA tournament for the 14th consecutive year, much to the chagrin of the handful of Barnes-haters out there, and for an amazing 22nd time in 24 season. For those of us old enough to remember the Bob Weltlich era, "22 out of 24" is completely unfathomable.

For the purposes of this discussion, let's assume we're in, as every neutral bracketologist I've seen has the Horns in as well. There remains a pretty good chance, though, that we'll be one of the last four at-large teams selected, consequently leading us to be assigned to one of the play-in games.

As fans, this raises an interesting question: do we want that?

Discussion and poll after the jump...

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Having an opportunity to play Cal later this month has surprisingly allowed us Longhorn followers to see that the wounds over 2004 haven't quite healed yet for our friends from the Golden State. Mack Brown's shameless advocacy on behalf of his players -- really, the absolutely most shameful thing a coach could ever do, despite reports to the contrary over the last month or so -- cost the Golden Bears their rightful place in the Rose Bowl in the slot traditionally reserved for the runners-up of the Pac 10.

What's saddened me the most, though, is the implication behind the sound and fury that Cal supporters really expect to have a Rose-Bowl caliber team only every half a century or so. Given that the Golden Bears' last appearance in the Rose Bowl was in 1959, it's entirely possible, given Mack Brown's stealing the Rose Bowl bid away from that once-in-a-half-century Rose Bowl-worthy 2004 Cal squad, that Cal won't be good enough again to earn a trip to the Rose Bowl until 2050 or so.

Think about it: because of Mack Brown, there might be some Cal fans who'll live to the ripe old age of 90 without ever seeing their team play in the Rose Bowl Game.

They'll have no idea what it's like to play in the Grandaddy Of Them All, in that magnificent setting in Pasadena. They'll have no idea what it's like to see your team win a thriller on a last-second play and to see your beloved coach walk off the field victorious.

That's why, BON readers, I thought we'd help our Golden Bear friends out.

Let's let them know, in excruciatingly minute detail, what it's like to watch your team play in -- and win -- the Rose Bowl Game. The sights, the smells, the feelings of exhilaration: let's recount for them what it's like to play in that game, since they'll probably never get there themselves.

Let's live them live vicariously through recounting our experiences in that game -- no, those games! -- that they have never enjoyed and likely will never enjoy in most of their lifetimes.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from those of you, like me, who were in the Rose Bowl on January 1, 2005. What was it like that day? How did it feel to watch your team win a thriller in the Rose Bowl Game?

Let's make it up to them by making it feel they were there with us that day. It will wind up having been the next best thing to being there in person themselves!

(Let's consider this our Selection Sunday Open Thread as well.)

This really shouldn't be a debate.

If Texas or Oklahoma had identical seasons to the one Oklahoma State just completed, there's no doubt the Big 12 champion would be advancing to New Orleans instead of the SEC West runner-up.

And if Mississippi State or Ole Miss were sitting in the place Alabama now resides in, there's little question that the runner-up of the SEC West would not be in contention for a rematch with the SEC Champion in place of the one-loss champion of the deepest conference in the nation, circa 2011.

Unfortunately, pedigree matters. A lot. How good your program was in 1992 or 1978 or 1966 seems to be just as relevant to determining which team advances to New Orleans as how good your program is in 2011.

(And I write this as a Texas alum who knows full well that it benefits from this unspoken preference for the blue bloods of the sport.)

I fear this will be the biggest determining factor as to who plays LSU. Oh, that, and the fact that Oklahoma State lost to Iowa State. Never mind the fact that Iowa State is actually decent (note to SEC boosters: I said "decent," not "good" or "great," but nevertheless they are far from your 1-11 Cyclones of yore). If an SEC team had lost, on the road, in double overtime, to a bowl-bound team (on the same day tragedy struck your school's athletic department to boost), all we'd hear would be that this would be proof about how deep the conference was. But since this was Iowa State instead of Kentucky or Mississippi State, it's an awful loss. A seemingly disqualifying loss.

That's wrong. The champions of the Big 12 have earned their right to be there.

The runners-up of the SEC West had their chance. They didn't take advantage.

So do the right thing, voters. Vote Pokes.

As usual, I'm looking to tap into the collective wisdom of most of the BON readership help a poor sap like me vote in this week's SBNation BlogPoll.  I say "poor sap" because work commitments kept me from watching all but five minutes of football yesterday.  (But the photos turned out great, thanks for asking.)

As usual, I'm looking for insights beyond what the final scores and boxscores (all I really have to rely upon) might have revealed.

I am going to go out on a limb and guess that LSU is pretty good, though.

Thanks in advance again for your assistance.  I really do look at these!

A thought occurred to me last night: with A&M moving into the SEC next season and, presumably, onto the schedule of Ole Miss, do the Rebels have an incentive to cancel its home-and-home with Texas?  We're scheduled to play in Oxford next season, with Ole Miss returning to Austin in 2013.

I think so.

Other SEC schools (most notably Tennessee squirreling its way out of a return trip to Oregon next year) seem to be adjusting their future OOC schedules recently -- perhaps because the handwriting is on the wall for a ninth OOC game? If so, Ole Miss might be looking to axe a game.

Even if not specifically looking to cancel a game a year, playing Texas is now pretty redundant for Ole Miss if they're already getting Texas exposure through their games with the Aggies.  (Forget thought about how we're different from the Aggies.  We know this.  Consider this from the eyes of Mississippi. Do they know this?)

And maybe, just maybe, they'll be doing their new conference-mates a favor by refusing to play us.

This is all purely conjecture. But it wouldn't surpise me in the least.

You heard it here first.

Since we're reasonably expecting a fair amount of breaking news throughout the day, let's use this as out realignment open thread.  As always, with this forum in which to discuss your opinions on realignment, please think twice about adding a separate and probably redundant FanPost or FanShot which will merely bump someone else's post off the front page.

And, please, UT, do the right thing.  Even if we're right and visionary about the LHN, if no one else wants to play ball with us, we have to face reality and compromise.  Don't let a month-old network be what keeps us from forming a conference affiliation for the decades to come with a group of elite schools, whether on the Pacific coast, Atlantic coast or in the Midwest.  Don't leave us slumming with Baylor and Houston over a damn television network.

As always, I'm looking to you for advice on how to vote in this week's SBNation blog poll. I really do take a look at this!

Please provide any insight into any games you watched this weekend in which the final score didn't necessarily provide the entire story (since, again, the final score and a cursory look at box scores are all I have to go on in many cases).

I'm particularly interested in impressions of teams outside the Top 5.  Yeah, we'll debate who should be No. 1 (I'm leaning towards an LSU-OU-Bama-Boise order this week, but it's only natural that any order I pick will have its critics), but, given those teams' proximity to the top of the poll, one naturally follows them more closely.  Not so much with the teams at the bottom of the poll, where this quickly becomes a game of guestamation.

Thanks again for your assistance!

(This will be your evening open thread as well, since these threads generally become one in the same anyway.)

In one of the more enjoyable and satisfying games we've had in a long time around these parts -- lowered expectations can do that for you, no? -- Texas thumps UCLA 49-20 in Vince Young Stadium, gathering a measure of payback for three brutal losses to the Bruins in a row.

I'm sure we have things we can nitpick, but before we do, let's celebrate below and prepare for and enjoy a fun slate of prime-time games.

No need for pics this week.  So far so good...

There's been increased speculation in the last few days that Texas might be eying the ACC as a landing spot should the Big 12 disintegrate.

With this particular outcome, I've also noticed a slight difference in perception in how this outcome has been discussed by those who regularly follow realignment: from outright dismissal to a "hmmm . . . now that I think about it, it's not such a bad idea after all."

Even with this increased speculation, though, I've noticed little contemplation of how a Texas move to the ACC would play out logistically.  We all know, more or less, how a Texas move to the Pac-Whatever would play out -- we'd go with Tech, OU and OSU as the conference expands to 16; we know what the divisions would probably look like; we can guess with reasonable confidence how scheduling would work -- but I've seen little similar speculation with the logistics of a theoretical Texas move to the ACC.

So let's crowdsource this one and figure it out.

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A little over a year ago, when I started participating discussing realignment theories and conspiracies with other realignment geeks on Frank The Tank's blog, one argument I would see fairly regularly was that Texas sought conference domination more than anything else.

Texas, these posters would argue, didn't care about seeking out a conference of fellow athletic or academic heavyweights. Instead, Texas sought to create and control what would be in essence a Texas & The Seven Dwarfs Conference, one which Texas could dominate not only on the field with regularity but in the conference boardroom as well. An ugly conference to pretty much any fan and supporter of the University but one which would guarantee that Texas, Inc. could continue to fill its coffers.

I usually dismissed these posters without so much as a counter-argument, since they always seems vehemently anti-Texas in their outlooks to begin with, and this theory simply fit in with their worldview of Texas being the center of All Things Evil in the world of college athletics.

But were they right after all? I'm beginning to wonder. Or, in the alternate, is a Seven Dwarf Conference what Texas will be stuck with if it continues to overplay its hand?

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Um, OK, so that 8 am Monday morning deadline is a hard deadline? Oh.  Even if I was delayed by coming back from a game?  Double oh.

So, anyway, here's how my ballot for the week would have worked had I been more timely with submitting it...

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Below is my ballot for the SBNation BlogPoll Top 25 after the completion of Week One, blissfully ignoring tonight's Miami-Maryland game.

Thanks to those who provided feedback in the "Help Me Vote" FanPost I threw up yesterday. Your feed back was quite helpful. What it did convince me to do was to keep Oklahoma and Alabama at #1 and #2, respectively, despite the fact that I had believed that my "wildly fluctuating" methodology would have dictated that I put either Boise State or LSU in the top spot, given their tough opponents. I realized that doing so, presumably to the benefit of Boise State, whom I almost ranked #1, would have been to do what I've critiqued Boise-bashers of doing in the past: penalizing a clearly superior group of athletes based solely on the mediocre set of opponents they've played.

That being said, I did my best to have the this week's rankings reflect, to the greatest extent possible, what we actually saw (or, much more frequently, read about) in Week One. I deliberately didn't have my Preseason Top 25 in front of me when I did this week's rankings, though of course I more or less remembered roughly where I had teams ranked previously, so it wasn't completely bias-free. Since lots of teams this week were playing less-than-stellar opposition, I tended to give the benefit of the doubt to teams which had defeated at least marginally-difficult competition.

As a result, I have teams like Northwestern, South Florida and BYU entering the Top 25 for going on the road and beating BCS teams. (And yes, I did see parts of the BYU game, and it was dreadful to watch, but they won in SEC territory at the end of the day, and that counts for something.) I wouldn't fret too much if I have particular teams overvalued or undervalued based on one week's results. I anticipate that this will be highly fluid over the next several weeks, and I fully anticipate teams like Mississippi State (which I don't anticipate to be where they are at the end of the season) to demonstrate where they really should be in short order.

And with that, your Top 25:

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This will be the first in what I anticipate to be a weekly series of posts in which I ask you, the BON readership, to help me our with my task of voting in SBNation's BlogPoll by sharing any observations of other games which you watched yesterday.

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Yes, we know that many of you are frustrated that you won't be able to watch the game today, at least through legitimate means, because of the carriage dispute between LHN/ESPN and most major cable and satellite providers.

And we know that some of you want to post frequent updates and FanPosts as to who is or, more likely, is not going to be carrying the network.

But please remember that, for every new FanPost on this subject which goes up, another one is bumped off the front page.  So I would ask you, our readers, to show greater discretion over whether we need yet another LHN-related FanPost.

Please rest assured that, if there is breaking news about a major, or even not-so-major, carriage agreement being reached, BON will pass that news along -- and if you don't see BON doing so, try to share the news in one of the existing game-day threads rather than start an entirely new thread or story.

Thanks, and hook 'em!

So I've drawn the long straw and will be casting BON's official ballot in this year's SBNation BlogPoll Top 25.

This could be dangerous.

My intended methodology and my preseason poll after the jump...

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