The No. 1 Concern Won’t Be Cleared Up

Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post: “You can’t take the argument out of college football. The administrators of the bowl championship series, those serious men in their very important blazers, keep trying.

“Each year, they attempt to legislate a clear-cut No. 1 team with that theorem they call a ranking system and their orderly bowl format, and each year there is the same droll slapstick result.

“You might as well try to legislate the barking of dogs, the crying of babies, electrical surges and the Leonid meteors.”

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Trivia time: Who holds the NCAA Division I-A record for rushing touchdowns scored in a game by a freshman?

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Shorts crisis: Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune, commenting on the raging controversy in the NBA, the plunging hemlines on basketball shorts: “The problem is so bad the NBA had to fine Los Angeles Clipper guard Eric Piatkowski for breaking the fashion rules. Piatkowski, who grew up in South Dakota, is about as far away from the hip-hop scene as Robert Goulet....

“Shaquille O’Neal was one of the players fined for illegal shorts. Can you imagine how much material it must take to make a pair of shorts for him?

“The fabric below the knee alone could clothe a family of five and have enough left over for a tummy sweater for the dog.”

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More on shorts: Skip Bayless in the San Jose Mercury News: “I’m all for enforcing the rule that says NBA shorts cannot hang lower than one inch below the knee. Uniforms were meant to be, well, uniform.

“Shorts were named for a reason. I don’t want to see some player wearing shorts so long they look like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”

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Sticks and stones: Ron Rapoport in the Chicago Sun-Times: “In Texas Tech’s first road game of the season, SMU fans were quite rude to Bob Knight, yelling: ‘Throw a chair, throw a chair.’

“They couldn’t get a rise out of Knight, though. ‘When you’ve been heckled as much as I have,’ he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, ‘it doesn’t bother you. I wouldn’t have lasted this long if it did.”’

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By the numbers: Jayson Stark on ESPN.com: “There has been plenty of talk about the way Mark McGwire walked away from baseball off the field. But he also had a better exit on the field than probably he realizes.

“Big Mac hit 29 home runs in only 299 at-bats this year. And the Elias Sports Bureau reports that only two other players in history ever finished a career of 15 years or longer with that many homers: Ted Williams, 29 in 1960, and Dave Kingman, 35, in 1986.”

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Trivia answer: Marshall Faulk of San Diego State, seven against Pacific on Sept. 14, 1991.

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And finally: Randy Galloway of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, commenting on the Cowboys losing, 26-24, to the Denver Broncos on Thanksgiving: “It was a lethal formula of football chemicals. Mix in a bad team having an awful afternoon against an ordinary opponent, one that was void of any killer instinct.

“The Cowboys were begging to be put out of their misery. Denver, however, seemed shocked to be up by 23 points in the fourth quarter.”