1. Kellen Moore, Boise State
This week's Rankonia throne-holder comes from blue-turf enthusiast Chuck Klosterman: "Has anyone ever gotten jammed so much in one week? Boise loses one game to TCU ... yet gets sent to the unseen MAACO Bowl to play totally irrelevant Arizona State. Moore ends his career as one of the five most successful college QBs ever and doesn't even get an invite to the Heisman ceremony in New York. It's almost like the NCAA is trying to erase them from existence."
For the past two Saturday nights, football fans have lived a charmed life. Last week, we got the Hail Mary Game. This week, there was a slice of triple-overtime insanity when undefeated Stanford survived a scare from USC. Those were the best games of the year, and the Musburger-Herbstreit duo were on the scene for both. There's a lot of season left, but it's hard to imagine a better back-to-back stretch. Somewhere in the world, a prime time TV programmer is dancing a jig. And so am I, because this was the most surprising week of the season.
When the most anticipated game of the weekend delivers the best finish, what more can you do than show the video? It's only Week 8, but I'm ready to ordain an official Play of the Year:
As French football fans say, MON DIEU. Here are some scattered thoughts for the Monday after:
They were waiting in line to buy train tickets, a cluster of genteel souls dressed in red, wrestling with the MARTA ticket machines in Buckhead as if performing some kind of advanced calculus. They wore halter tops and cocktail dresses and golf shirts and scarlet pants patterned with little English bulldogs, and they toted leaky Styrofoam coolers overflowing with domestic beer. They filed down the stairs in a long, sloppy line that just kept growing. Chants of “Go Dawgs” echoed through the station. “If this game had been in Boise instead of Atlanta, we would have bought out their whole stadium,” one of them said. “We could sell two-hundred thousand tickets a game if they’d let us.”
