college football

A consensus seems to be building, finally, in college football that more is needed.

I'd like to think that after nearly a generation of determining the national championship with a Bowl Championship Series formula of pitting No. 1 against No. 2 that the powerful people who run the sport just felt it was time for a change.

No.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Every funereal shade of gray in nature's catalog draped Penn State for the occasion of Joe Paterno's public memorial service, a perfectly lachrymose contrast to the brilliant colors of so many festive autumn Saturdays.

What would young Joe Paterno have said about old Joe Paterno?

What would young Joe, intent on his "Grand Experiment," in which athletic excellence and intellectual rigor entwined as the Greeks intended, have said about JoePa, the legend who waved cheerfully to doting fans after being revealed as an enabler of child rape?

This goes back to late November 2007, only days before Penn State coach Joe Paterno's enshrinement in the College Football Hall of Fame. During a revealing 90-minute session with journalists, he was asked how he would like to go out. He did not hesitate.

Tom Bradley finished packing up his office in the now-notorious Lasch Football Building last week, and walked away from the Penn State football program that had been his life for most of four decades.

Minnesota football coach Jerry Kill is no different than most college football coaches when it comes to receiving advice in recruiting. He wants to make his own evaluations, see things with his own eyes, form his own opinions.

"I'm going to make my own assessment of who I think is good and not good," he said.

When word recently drifted out that the University of Utah possibly is considering getting a new logo and a new nickname for its sports teams, traditionalists went berserk.

You can make a lot of money betting against conventional wisdom.

All these years the thought went that it would be the Boise States of the college-football world that would dramatically change the sport. The sentiment was, "If only the Broncos could get into the national-championship game, then we would have a playoff in college football."

After a suffocating defensive performance in the BCS championship game, Alabama is the top team once again in the final Scripps Legends Poll.

The legendary voting panel was high on Alabama all year. The Crimson Tide held the No. 1 spot for six consecutive weeks, before being unseated after LSU beat them, 9-6, in overtime on Nov. 5.

Penn State University's alumni magazine, showing up in nearly 130,000 mailboxes this month, has dedicated its latest issue to the Jerry Sandusky scandal, from a funereal all-black cover lamenting "our darkest days" to several photo montages to 38 pages examining the most traumatic event in school history.