As we thought, it appears Sam Keller is headed to Nebraska.

It’s an amazing set of circumstances, especially considering that the Cornhuskers themselves lost their backup quarterback when Harrison Beck suddenly quit the team.

Now, Nebraska will be able to replace one senior (Zach Taylor) in 2007 with another very experienced senior (Keller).

Should make that home opener with USC a bit easier to swallow.

Could Keller be the next Vince Ferragamo?

Want to win two (2) free tickets to the 2007 Rose Bowl?

Want to showcase your knowledge of college football and have fun while competing with others?

Then join the Heismanpundit Fantasy Challenge.

The Basics:

Each participant will be issued the same 12-member team consisting of the players Heismanpundit.com considers to be the leading candidates for the most prestigious award in sports.

In addition, each participant will be allowed one wildcard player of his choice to add to his team, making a total of 13 players per squad.

How To Play:

Each week of the season, pick one (and only one) candidate from your team to play. His stats will produce your points for that week. However, he can’t be used again for the rest of the season.

You must think ahead and study the schedules and matchups to decide which player to play on which week. Should you play Brady Quinn against a weak team and risk him being pulled early in a blowout, or wait until he plays a tougher team and has to throw more? What if Chris Leak emerges as a running threat by mid-season? Will Ted Ginn or Troy Smith be the Buckeye to play against Texas?

Injuries are a part of the game and if a player is hurt, then there is no replacement for him.

At the end of the regular season, the points will be totaled up and a winner declared. If there is a tie, then the tie will be broken by whoever comes closest (before the season begins) to predicting the vote total (out of 923) of the eventual winner of the Trophy awarded on Dec. 9. If that somehow also results in a tie, then the tiebreaker will be solved with whomever comes closest to picking the correct runner up in the final vote.

How It Is Scored

Quarterbacks (QB), Running Backs (RB), Multi-Purpose (MP)

General Scoring
6 pts per rushing or receiving TD
6 pts for player returning kick/punt for TD
4 pts per passing TD
2 pts per rushing or receiving 2 pt conversion (note: teams do not receive points for yardage gained during the conversion)
2 pts per passing 2 pt conversion
1 pt per 10 yards rushing or receiving
1 pt per 25 yards passing

Bonus Points
2 pts per rushing or receiving TD of 40 yards or more
2 pts per passing TD of 40 yards or more
(note: the player must score a touchdown to score the points)

Penalty Points
-2 pts per intercepted pass
-2 pts per fumble lost

The points will be totaled on a weekly basis and posted on Heismanpundit.com.

The Heismanpundit Fantasy Challenge Team

Brady Quinn, QB, Notre Dame
Adrian Peterson, RB, Oklahoma
Troy Smith, QB, Ohio State
Steve Slaton, RB, West Virginia
Brian Brohm, QB, Louisville
Marshawn Lynch, RB, California
Chris Leak, QB, Florida
Kenny Irons, RB, Auburn
Drew Stanton, QB, Michigan State
Michael Hart, RB, Michigan
Kyle Wright, QB, Miami
Ted Ginn, MP, Ohio State

Each participant must choose a ‘wildcard’ player before the season begins. It must be a quarterback, a running back or a multi-purpose player (no pure receivers). It must be from a Div. 1-A team.

Each week’s entry must be emailed in by 6 p.m. PT the day BEFORE that player’s game is scheduled (so by Friday at 6 p.m. PT for a Saturday game, Thursday at 6 p.m. PT for a Friday, Wednesday at 6 p.m. PT for a Thursday game and so on)

The scoring for the contest starts with the games on Thursday, Aug. 31 and ends with the games on Saturday, Dec. 2. The players can be entered in any games including and between those two dates. Late entries will be taken up until Sept. 8.

The winner will be announced on Dec. 4th, unless a tie breaker contingent on the award ceremony is in effect. Then, it will be announced on Dec. 9.

How To Join The League

Since there will be considerable administrative costs involved in keeping track of the league, I’m charging a small one-time fee of just $7.50 to join the HP Fantasy Challenge.

The prize for winning the HP Fantasy Challenge is two (2) tickets to the 2007 Rose Bowl.

You can join the league by credit card or paypal account by clicking on the button at the top of this page or by going to the button on the upper right of the website (underneath the caricature).

Once you have received your Transaction ID from Paypal confirming payment, you must send in an email that should include:

–Your Team Name
–Your Transaction ID from Paypal confirming payment
–Your Wildcard Player
–Two tie breaker picks: Your prediction of the vote total for the winner of the trophy awarded on Dec. 9 (out of 923 votes); and your pick for the eventual runner up in the race.

EMail these items and later your weekly player pick to HPfantasychallenge@gmail.com.

I will send you a confirmation email and you will be all set to go.

THE DEADLINE FOR SIGNING UP IS SEPT. 8th!

So, join in and have fun. The Rose Bowl awaits!

A couple years ago I had a discussion with some friends and colleagues of mine over the future of NCAA television coverage.

I maintained that the networks would eventually be cut out of the product and that, as real broadband technology hit the mainstream, the schools themselves would provide games to fans over the internet.

The result would be that schools would get the bulk of the advertising dollars and could charge fans directly for viewing the game. Every game would be available on line and on demand. And with the digital age cutting production costs to heretofore unheard-of levels, any school could afford it.

Imagine being able to watch ANY game on line, from any angle.

My friends and colleagues were skeptical, but the first step toward this happening for major conferences occurred over the summer with the birth of the Big Ten Channel.

I wrote at the time that:

..the natural evolution will then be to create individual team channels, which will eventually render the networks obsolete. Athletic departments will hire their own announcers and use their own crews to produce a game telecast geared toward the fans of the program.

Why have a Gary Danielson or a Kirk Herbstreit fly in and pretend to be an expert of the school they are covering (usually based on items they had to hurriedly crib from a weekly press release) when a school can use someone who really knows the program? The advent of the digital age has made the production process less expensive and schools are already heading that way with ‘All-Access’ video on official websites anyway. Networks beware!

So when I read this story from USA Today on the increasing number of webcasts in college football, it seemed like the future was arriving a whole lot faster than I had previously thought.

The big TV networks simply aren’t interested in the little Ivy League.

But the Ivy League and other small conferences may have found a way around that — the Internet.

Many schools, and now some conferences, have begun showing football and other sports on their websites.

“We can produce our own television and reach, literally, the entire world on the Web, without having to go through the issues of, is there cable availability? Is there satellite availability? Is there advertising support?” said Jeff Orleans, commissioner of the Ivy League.

He expects most of the league’s sporting events will be online within seven years.

Big Sky Conference’s Northern Arizona offered webcasts of home football games last year. Using the four cameras already set up to provide replays on the stadium scoreboard, the school added audio from their radio broadcasts along with continually updated statistics.

“Our fans love it,” said Steven Shaff, a spokesman for the school’s athletic department. “We had people in Alaska, parents of students in Canada, watching our games last year.”

Read the entirety of that story and you can see the direction that sports coverage is heading.

It’s inevitable.

To survive, print journalists have been forced to wade waist-deep in the muck of the internet.

Soon, TV will follow or risk becoming endangered.

QUARTERBACK

Brady Quinn, Notre Dame–He’s the best quarterback in the country and the Heisman front runner. His numbers should be as good–or better–than last year’s 3,919 yards and 32 touchdowns.

Second Team: Troy Smith, Ohio State
Third Team: Drew Stanton, Michigan State

All the best QBs are in the Midwest, it seems

RUNNING BACK

Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma–Okay, so OU’s quarterback situation is a question mark, but he’s the most dominant running back in college football when he gets some decent blocking.

Second Team: Marshawn Lynch, Cal
Third Team: Steve Slaton, West Virginia

Marshawn Lynch could be the first running back taken in the 2007 draft

FULLBACK

Brian Leonard, Rutgers–In keeping with HP tradition, we choose an All-American fullback. He’s simply the best at the position since Mike Alstott.

Second Team: Peyton Hillis, Arkansas
Third Team: Owen Schmitt, West Virginia

Owen Schmitt is one tough dude

WIDE RECEIVER

Dwayne Jarrett, USC–He’s a touchdown machine, with 29 TDs in 26 games.

Calvin Johnson, Georgia Tech–He can dominate games despite having an erratic quarterback throwing him the ball.

Second Team: Jeff Samardzija, Notre Dame; Sidney Rice, South Carolina

Third Team: Mario Urrutia, Louisville; DeSean Jackson, California

Sidney Rice was incredible as a freshman in 2005

TIGHT END

Zach Miller, ASU–He’s a big talent and ASU’s high-powered attack loves to feed him the ball.

Second Team: Joe Newton, Oregon State
Third Team: Greg Olsen, Miami

No Keller, but Carpenter will still get him the ball

OFFENSIVE LINE

Per HP tradition, we will not choose individual All-Americans on the offensive line.

We refuse to do so because, unlike other people who pick All-Americans, we admit that we have no idea who really is the best offensive linemen.

There are no individual stats to go by. Highlights rarely show what they do. We could go off of hearsay, but wouldn’t that be dishonest? What’s more, there are 585 starting offensive linemen in Division One. It’s almost impossible to have seen enough of them to know who is the best. So, while other All-American teams choose linemen almost solely based on reputation, we will not.

However, we will choose the best line unit in the country. That honor we see as a tie right now between USC and Texas.

The Longhorns return three starters, including All-American candidate Justin Blalock plus Kasey Studdard and Lyle Sendlein. The guys replacing the graduated Jonathan Scott and Will Allen are potentially great players.

USC returns just two starters, but they are both All-American candidates in Sam Baker and Ryan Kalil. The Trojans also bring back a former starter in Jeff Byers, the former national player of the year in high school.

These units will play a huge role in assuring that these two teams stay in the title hunt all season.

How to block

PLACEKICKER

Alexis Serna, Oregon State–He’s the defending Groza Award winner and should repeat.

Second Team: Mason Crosby, Colorado
Third Team: Sam Swank, Wake Forest

Kickers can get a little excitable

I am planning on putting together a cool Heismanpundit Fantasy Game, with the prize for the winner being a pair (2) of tickets to the 2007 Rose Bowl.

The idea is to create a team of 12 pre-set Heisman candidates, plus one wild card player that the game participant can choose on his own.

As the season progesses, you decide which candidate to play for a particular week. But you can only play a candidate once during the season. So, for instance, if you decide to use Brady Quinn in week three, you don’t get to play him again. The game encourages you to use strategy and knowledge of college football to get the most out of your team.

Whoever has the most total points at the end of the season wins the Rose Bowl tickets. There will also be a couple tie breakers if we get deadlocked. More information on scoring to come later, but that’s the basic gist of it.

What I am asking is this: Since this will likely be a heavy administrative undertaking to keep track of, how much would you guys be willing to chip in (if at all) to be part of the league and to have a chance at the tickets?

Five dollars? Ten? $6.49?

Sound off below so I can get a good gauge.

Lately, some have been saying that Oklahoma won’t be as bad as people think, thanks to the presence of Paul Thompson in the lineup.

Most of the talk has been along the lines of “Those close to the program have been whispering that Thompson is the best guy for the job and Bomar wasn’t a team leader anyway, etc.” and so on.

That may be true, but it seems like a bit of spin and backtracking to say so now.

I thought back and realized that no one–not those close to the program or anyone in the media–thought to say that Thompson was the right guy until after the scandal occurred that forced Bomar out.

Then I remembered that someone had said it.

Me. Last August.

Woo-wee, there is a of stuff on the docket today: