Strap On a Seat Belt for Wild Ride Ahead

If the second half of this season is anything like the first, well, Nebraska fans can only shudder at that thought.

What we know at the midpoint:

Fourteen unbeaten teams remain among major colleges, and this list does not include Florida State, Georgia, Michigan or Texas but does include Navy, Louisville and Southern Mississippi.

In other words, this has already been a strange year and the real fun starts now.

The first bowl championship series standings will be released Monday, and they will go a long way toward proving ... very little.

Since the inception of the BCS in 1998, the top two teams in the first standings have never gone on to meet for the national title.

Although the possibility exists for chaos to reign should several teams remain unbeaten at season’s end, don’t count on it.

Never in the six-year history of the BCS has there been a season in which the three top teams have finished with no losses.

See, they play games to settle these issues, and, thankfully, they also have overtime to settle ties.

This weekend, for instance, the number of unbeaten teams is guaranteed to be reduced when three sets of undefeated teams square off: USC and Arizona State, Wisconsin and Purdue, Louisville and Miami.

One must also understand some of these unbeaten teams are not really in contention for the national title no matter what they do: Utah, Boise State, Southern Mississippi, Navy. Louisville is, at best, only a bubble team even if it beats Miami tonight.

What we also know:

* USC is still No. 1 but about as shaky as Barney Fife with a gun in his hand. The Trojans have escaped with narrow victories against Virginia Tech, Stanford and California, and poll voters, frankly, are losing faith in them.

Another close-call victory, against No. 15 Arizona State, could knock USC from its No. 1 high horse, not that it matters so long as the Trojans are No. 2 in the BCS standings.

And you can book this: Arizona State quarterback Andrew Walter, unlike Cal’s Aaron Rodgers, will not complete his first 23 passes against USC. Walter, instead, will trade accuracy for a few completed heaves deep into the Trojan secondary.

“Aaron Rodgers showed everyone how efficient you can be,” Walter said this week, “ ... but they didn’t capitalize when they got in the red zone, and that hurt them a lot.”

* Kansas State was the most overrated team. The Wildcats, fresh off their first conference title since 1934, started the season at No. 12 in the Associated Press poll but have lost to Fresno State, Texas A&M; and Kansas. Second-most overrated team: Ohio State, No. 9 in preseason but now sinking like a stone in the Olentangy River.

* Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville is the half-season coach of the year. Hard to believe that late last year the school president made a clandestine excursion to see whether Louisville’s Bobby Petrino would be interested in Tuberville’s job. Bad back-stabbing form, really, considering Tuberville was under contract and, little did we know, maybe less than a year from delivering Auburn a national title that the school’s knee-jerk hierarchy would not deserve.

* UCLA won’t finish eighth in the Pacific 10 Conference standings, as the pundits (but not this one) predicted. All you had to do was look at the talent the Bruins had returning and quick-glance the Pac-10 pocket schedule to know a winning season was certainly within the reach.

* The best player in the country may be a freshman. The emergence of tailback Adrian Peterson is the reason many think Oklahoma, not USC, is the best team in the country.

Independents Day

A week after Army ended a 19-game losing streak with a victory against Cincinnati, Navy stares down its demons when it plays Notre Dame at the Meadowlands.

Notre Dame (4-2) holds an incredible NCAA-record 40-game winning streak against Navy, which is 5-0 for the first time since 1979.

If not now, deck lads, when?

The Midshipmen’s fate of late in this series has bordered on cruel.

Last year, D.J. Fitzpatrick made a 40-yard field goal as time expired to lift the Irish to a three-point win.

In 2002, 1-7 Navy led 8-1 Notre Dame by eight points with five minutes left before Notre Dame scored 15 consecutive points to win by a touchdown.

In 1999, Navy fans lamented a questionable officials’ spot that gave Notre Dame a first down in the final two minutes and led to the game-winning touchdown.

In 1997, Navy’s Patrick McGrew fell short of the game-winning touchdown when Notre Dame’s Allen Rossum knocked McGrew out of bounds at the two-yard line with no time left.

Navy Coach Paul Johnson doesn’t mind taking the underdog’s role into Saturday’s game.

“People talk about the last 40 years, but the all-time series record is 67-9-1, so it’s not like they were killing them before the 40,” Johnson told reporters after a practice this week. “There’s a reason, guys. We don’t have anybody on our team that Notre Dame recruited. I don’t know if we have anybody on our team that Notre Dame sent a letter to. They’re supposed to win.”

Should Navy prevail, there is a decent chance it could finish 11-0.

After Notre Dame, Navy plays Rice, Delaware, Tulane, Rutgers and Army.

Fran Can

Few can boast a track record quite like that of Texas A&M; Coach Dennis Franchione.

That Franchione has flip-flopped the Aggies from 4-8 to 4-1 should surprise no one.

In each of his seven coaching stops, Franchione’s teams have improved their record from the first year to the second:

Texas A&M;, 4-8 to 4-1;

Alabama, 7-5 to 10-3;

Texas Christian, 7-5 to 8-4;

New Mexico, 3-8 to 6-5;

Southwest Texas State, 6-5 to 7-4;

Pittsburg (Kan.) State, 8-2 to 11-1;

Southwestern (Kan.) State, 5-2-2 to 9-2.

Fran’s secret?

“I’ve done it enough times to know,” he said. “The first year is always the toughest in any program you take over. You have seniors who have been there a long time that have difficulty adapting to change, and maybe even your juniors to a certain degree, and they do change and it just takes a little bit of time to get on the same page and go through that transition and get comfortable.”

Hurry-Up Offense

A Louisville upset of No. 3 Miami tonight would give the Cardinals their 10th win over a BCS-conference school, more than any other non-BCS school. Louisville has a history of shocking high-powered Florida schools in midweek cable games, scoring a monumental 26-20 upset of No. 4 Florida State in 2002.

Pardon us if we don’t light a candle over Nebraska’s 70-10 defeat against Texas Tech, because the Cornhuskers have been dishing out beatings like this for years.

Examples: Nebraska sank Pacific, 70-21, in 1994; ran over Arizona State, 77-28, in 1995; and buried Iowa State, 73-14, also in 1995.

To put Nebraska’s 70-point Texas Tech giveaway in historical context, consider that Tom Osborne’s 1994 defense gave up a total of 72 points in its final seven games, plus the Orange Bowl.

Bob Knowles, president of the NU Touchdown Club, told the Omaha World-Herald this week, “I pray to God we win this weekend. I certainly think we will, but if we don’t, we may have to shut the state down next week.”

Nebraska, for the record, plays host to lowly Baylor.

Redemption tour update: George O’Leary, on the comeback trail after a phony resume cost him the Notre Dame job, is 0-5 in his first year at Central Florida.

Mike Price, fired at Alabama after a one-night drunken escapade, is having much more success at Texas El Paso. The 3-2 Miners have surpassed last year’s victory total of two and could win six or seven games.

“When I came here I said I had faith we could win,” said Price, whose team plays host to Hawaii on Saturday.

“Faith is belief without evidence. Well, now I think we have some evidence.”

You could say the Big 12 Conference is a tad bottom-heavy. The North Division has no teams ranked in this week’s AP top 25 and owns an aggregate record of 17-14.

The South Division has four teams ranked in the top 25 (Oklahoma, Texas, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M;) and boasts an aggregate record of 24-7.

Urban Meyer, coach of No. 11 Utah, might have enjoyed his team’s week off more had he not listened to ESPN analyst Trev Alberts, who criticized the Utes’ weak schedule (No. 95 in the latest NCAA rankings).

Meyer: “I just hear some of the comments from people wearing a tie behind a desk that really have absolutely no clue. And I can say it, because I do have a clue, because that’s my job.”

And then there’s 3-3 Syracuse, which has lost to the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-ranked teams in the nation (Purdue, Virginia and Florida State).

More disturbing signs at 2-4 Penn State, where Coach Joe Paterno refused to allow his players to speak to the media after last week’s loss to Purdue. Memo to Joe: If your players are old enough to vote, and old enough to fight in a war, aren’t they old enough to meet the press?