The FanHouse Walk: Giving Football the Old College Handshake

Every week during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Good Cop Bad Cop -- The American Football Coaches Association is trying to inject some sportsmanship into an opening week pregame near you. The AFCA has put forth a non-binding proposal that teams shake hands en masse before each Week 1 game, roughly four minutes before spending the next four hours in violent, competitive, collision-heavy contact.

Kudos, I guess. It's well-meaning and doesn't necessarily do any harm, but this seems more for show than sincerity given the necessarily violent nature of the game. As AFCA honcho Grant Teaff says, "It is symbolic, but it is, we think, a very important initiative." Meanwhile, the NCAA rules committee has cooked up its own, much more dangerous plan to counter unsportsmanlike play.

Remember this play (1:19 in)?

If a proposal eventually gets its way through the committee, such on-field taunts might be considered a live penalty, effectively erasing a touchdown that was otherwise unaided by any other penalty. As it is, such actions warrant an easy unsportsmanlike conduct, docking the offending team after the conclusion of the play. That is the way it should be.

On-field taunts are unfortunate but there are already procedures in place to punish such actions. The rules committee is clearly trying to take things a step further and pre-empt any further incidents. Says Southeastern Conference coordinator of football officials Rogers Redding, "I think the sense is it would stop it in a heartbeat."

No doy.

Regardless, if a touchdown is accomplished without the aid of a hold or any other assisting penalties, it needs to stand. Period. Slippery slopes and such. See Redding again, telling USA Today: "The line gets crossed when there's taunting and inciting."

The endless on-field banter is in itself its own form of taunting and inciting that often leads to more visible taunts like the one above. Either everything gets thrown in that boat or almost nothing does. The rules in place work, occasional crossing of the lines is going to happen and there's more than a few repercussions from the dead ball penalty to the player getting chewed out or benched by his coach, team conduct penalties during the week that we don't see, and so on.

Taking away the most exciting and difficult to execute plays in football is asinine, backwards and counterproductive in erasing only a handful of the most egregious transgressions while also taking away the element of the game most fans and competitors are there for. Stop the madness.

We've Got Plenty -- Heather Dinich and the ESPN college football blog crew have been busy today listing their top villains in college football. No. 3 on her list and certainly near the top of mine: Congress. I love Dinich because she speaks her mind efficiently and brutally. Quoth the ACC writer:

It doesn't belong in college football. It wasted taxpayers' money -- twice. And it doesn't understand the BCS. But give Utah's biggest fan a national stage, and Sen. Orrin Hatch suddenly has his own column on SI.com.

Heh.

The NCAA rules committee is inching up my list after the above plus their horrendous cave-in to broadcast networks with rule 3-2-5-e from a few years back. The NCAA is like the reverse Midas, where everything it touches turns something on the opposite end of the spectrum from gold.

History -- Florida is the second team of this decade to attempt to corner three championships in a brief span.

Everyone's obviously pointing to the 2005 USC team that gave out just 19 seconds from history. Regardless Florida deserves high marks for getting this far, it ain't easy and the pressure builds with each game. Their schedule is relatively light but math, science and the season-wrecking Gods of college football will do their darndest to align against the Gators this year.

Now wouldn't be ironic if USC was the team to put the brakes on the Gators' own charge at history? Ask me again in a few weeks but that's actually my view of how this season will play out as we cruise through the middle of August.

Stereotypin' -- Vegas Insider checks in with the returning offensive and defensive starters for each FBS college football team. Make note that seven SEC teams have eight or more returning defensive starters. Contrast that with the Pac-10 and its five teams with eight or more returning offensive starters.

Stereotypes are stereotypes but sometimes there's a bit of truth behind them.

In The Age of Political Correctness -- Nicholls State retired an offensive 'white-bearded, gray-uniformed mascot' in 2004 that conjured up Civil War images. In its place a new mascot has finally arrived, and folks are rightly not taking to it.

I'll let the people do the talking:

"Menacing."

'"'It looked like a Nazi soldier -- a very angry Nazi soldier"

" The new image seems evil, faceless and inhuman."

"It comes down to one word: propaganda."

See where this is going? I'm trying to understand what they were trying to do, but the logo came out wrong. The propaganda thing is dead-on, it looks like the 'Colonel' jumped out of a Stalin-era propaganda poster (although some of that same imagery revived itself with those creepy two-tone Obama posters in the recent election) and into a Louisiana university. If we're going to be snarky, it actually strongly reminded me of the M. Bison character from the 'Street Fighter' video games.

Folks have set up some Facebook pages in protest, but so far the University is sticking with its logo. It's so strange as to maybe work in a few years once people figure out to not take it seriously and it becomes a running joke among the student body. Maybe.

Beer Isn't The Only Thing Brewing In Madison -- Wisconsin recently suspended two players indefinitely for violating team rules. This stuff happens all the time but things are about to get real ugly as both players' fathers are now involved claiming the program mishandled the situation as they attempt to clear their sons' names.

Transfers have to be imminent when stuff like this from Aubrey Pleasant's father hits the papers:

"I hate to say this, but you just can't treat people any old way. I think that is what he is used to doing. Maybe this is how they do things at Iowa.

"And I hate to say that... but I hope the guy comes to his senses. Lawyers have been contacted, and we just want the kids' names cleared."

After a smooth start, it's been downhill for Badgers' coach Bret Bielema. This only adds to the trouble after athletic director and legendary Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez didn't exactly give him the ringingest of endorsements recently.

Overtime, Ball on the 25

-- Former Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer has signed on to be a studio analyst for CBS College Sports. He'll do great there, and I'm shocked ESPN didn't swoop in and grab him as a potential centerpiece to their growing SEC coverage. The man is still obviously itching to coach, but I'd have taken the risk of having him for only a year as an informed and surprisingly gregarious broadcast voice.

-- Speaking of unsportsmanlike, Washington is unabashedly coaching its linemen to cut block this season under first-year coach Steve Sarkisian. Judging by the quotes the players don't much have the stomach for it but are following orders

-- Phil Steele projects Cal a big winner over Maryland this year and looks at the sneaky good Illinois/Missouri rivalry game as well.

-- A UCLA football commit and brother of USC defensive end Malik Jackson wore a UCLA shirt and matching socks to a recent USC football practice. He'll pay for that, on the field of course.

-- Football Outsiders looks at college football's best defensive lines from 2008. Not much mention of USC's defensive line, which was part of one of the better defenses of this era last year. Either the numbers need some work or those linebackers and secondary did a surprising amount of the heavy lifting in last year. On defense, success is usually heavily linked to the trenches, so the work the linebackers did behind USC's front four last season was, according to these rankings, all the more impressive.

-- Interesting stance the NCAA is taking on new media as it relates to injury reports and coaches' general efforts to obscure team health matters.