So to hear that NFLN will have a 13-game slate, starting the second week of the season, taking only Week 16 off among weeks NBC doesn’t already have and that the NFL would be willing to schedule a Thursday night game on, effectively going to a full-season slate already… should that shock us into realizing that the plan the NFL seemed to be floating during the lockout is off the table?

When you combine it with NBC’s Thanksgiving night game, and NFLN seemingly abandoning Saturdays, which would mean that there are now, at most, 14 games to go around where before there were 16, it certainly should look like a distinct possibility. The NFL could very conceivably maintain this schedule indefinitely if they really wanted to. If you really wanted to engage in wishful thinking, you could say that NFLN is only serving as a placeholder because the NFL didn’t sell the Thursday night package this year, and they’ll have a package in place for next year… but there’s only so long you can maintain that notion. (And I don’t even want to dignify the notion of selling a Saturday night package.) The best chance for the NFL to eventually sell half of its Thursday night slate is if they administer an even bigger poison pill: an 18-game schedule, which the owners clearly still want.

At this late stage, it’s not as though losing that contract would be a disaster, at least not for the media companies. This year will see a number of high-stakes rights battles go down, including MLB, NASCAR, and the BCS, and I wonder if part of the reason the NFL is doing this is because several media companies have lost interest and intend on scaling back their bids in the near term. As much as Comcast, the company with probably the most interest, would love to use NFL programming to grow its NBC Sports Network, they could do the same thing with an MLB or NASCAR contract, possibly (I haven’t looked up the numbers) for cheaper, and attract a smaller but broader audience more days of the year and possibly get some big events on top of it. ESPN, which I had ranked third-most likely, was probably only really in it to keep Comcast from getting it. That leaves Turner and Fox; as much as Turner would love to get back into the NFL, they’re in a strong enough position as it is that they don’t really need it (unless they intended to put games on truTV), while Fox continues to be hamstrung by its inability to raise subscriber fees for FX.

The NFL would be leaving a lot of money on the table if they didn’t sell off those games, but they already extorted a lot more money out of their broadcast partners, and it’s apparent they’re more pissed that there are still some big-time holdouts for NFLN distribution even after the RedZone offer – although color me skeptical that throwing more third-tier primetime games on the pile is really going to bring Time Warner Cable around at this point if they weren’t brought around already. (This may be why Roger Goodell talks about putting every team in primetime… but the games will be shown on broadcast in the local markets, so those people won’t be motivated to call their cable provider, and showing every team means you’re going to be putting on some pretty crappy teams with apathetic fanbases, which may underline the cable companies’ point and, considering apparently every team will play a Thursday game following a Sunday game, might even further devalue the half of the package you sell because the scheduling ends up being so restrictive.)

On another note, did the NFL just kill Thursday as a viable college football night?

So seeing my recent post on the Breeder’s Cup’s move to NBC get linked to on the Fang’s Bites blog gave me pause. Not merely because Fang’s Bites is a vaguely prominent blog in sports media circles, one I personally follow (sometimes), run by someone I’ve had… interesting run-ins with on Twitter, who nonetheless never links to my posts despite almost recommending the site to people two years ago (if only I wasn’t trying to move to MorganWick.com at the time). But clearly he felt the post was accessible enough to his audience, though to be fair the only obtuse terminology I use in that post is a single, easily-missed reference to “wars”.

So I’m wondering… should I keep doing what I’m doing (and maybe work harder on the Wars posts to make them more worthy of such links)? Cut down on the obtuse references to my own personal concepts so I can put them on B/R? Or perhaps my Wars posts are accessible enough to put on B/R as is? Would people understand them on B/R if I just did a little introductory post to get them acclimated?

The floor is open for your opinion on this sensitive topic.

Four years later, they meet again. The last time these teams did this it resulted in one of the best Super Bowls of all time, and quite possibly the best game of the entire last decade. Can the rematch live up to the original?

Probably not. Last time, the Patriots were trying to become the second team in NFL history to go completely undefeated in the regular season and postseason, while the Giants were the scrappy underdogs that just barely squeaked into the playoffs and shocked the world in the Super Bowl. This year, the Giants made another Cinderella run, but they aren’t quite shocking the world the way they did four years ago; they actually won their division, more than a few people noted how hot they were playing down the stretch, and they’ve already beaten the team that tried to go unbeaten this year. Meanwhile, the Patriots were the class of a rather inferior AFC, hardly showing the dominance of four years ago and showing a decided weakness on defense, admittedly like most of the league’s best teams. Both teams needed miscues from their championship game opponents to get here, and we already saw this year’s sports movie. None of the context that went into the game four years ago is there, and that alone will probably keep it from living up to that level.

That the Giants are playing as well as they are does throw in a few storylines of its own, however. Probably one of the bigger ones involves Eli Manning. Four years ago, no one thought he would ever be anywhere near as good as his brother. He’s since become one of the league’s better quarterbacks, but still raised eyebrows in the preseason when he claimed that he should be considered an elite quarterback on par with Tom Brady. While he didn’t put up the gaudy numbers Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, or Brady put up this year, he still managed to silence the critics and prove that he really is that good a quarterback, being named the NFC’s #3 quarterback in the Pro Bowl behind Rodgers and Brees. Now he has a chance to actually double his brother’s Super Bowl count, possibly for all time. And who does he have a chance to beat to do it? Why, Tom Brady, of course.

Brady has already cemented a Hall of Fame resume, but it’s still interesting how another Super Bowl would impact his legacy. For the past few years, we thought that night in Glendale was the last night of the Patriots dynasty, as, while the Patriots remained one of the league’s elite teams, injuries and underperforming teams kept them out of even the conference championship game. It’s been something like seven years since Brady’s last Super Bowl, and at his age it’s fair to wonder how many more seasons he has left in him. Seeing Drew Bledsoe, the man whose injury set the stage for his entire career, handing out the Lamar Hunt Trophy, you had to wonder if it was a fitting bookend to his career. How would one last postscript Super Bowl to tie Joe Montana be seen when we look back on Brady’s storied career?

Throw in the game being played in Indianapolis, home of Eli’s brother and the Patriots’ main rival over the past decade, and it’s easy to see why Peyton Manning’s shadow hangs over the game, and why there are still plenty of storylines for Giants-Patriots II.

I have to say, I’m not a fan of NBC’s new post-relaunch graphics package, which looks really bulky and amateur. It almost looks more designed for Comcast SportsNet’s purposes than anything else. The text is off-center enough that it actually looks like some of my PowerPoint mockups.

On the plus side, NBC learned their lesson from their last change to their timeout indicators and this is some of the best I’ve seen from a graphic designed for them.

Also, NBC, ESPN, and Turner are all now using two-line boxes for the display of player info, leaving only the NFL’s main partners, CBS and Fox.

On the NBA front, ESPN continues to tweak old graphics to fit them into the new graphics package, continuing to make me wonder what the point is because aesthetically, it looks worse than the old one. And the NBA package continues to use the two-line format for whatever reason. On the other hand, there appears to be some sort of weird drop-shadow effect, and the specific graphics used for player info is the same as for college basketball.

Oddly, FSN went to spelling out team names for its new NBA graphics. I call it odd because if there’s any version of basketball (or really any sport) where the use of full names over abbreviations is justified, it’s college basketball. So why did FSN decide to continue wasting space for the college game but fill the space for the NBA? I could see if the NBA graphic was redesigned later, because the NBA season started later, but does that mean FSN will change its college graphics to match?

Also, ESPN deciding to indicate when teams are in the bonus may be becoming a trend, because FSN’s new NBA graphics do the same thing… in one of the most awful ways I’ve seen. If you’re going to have such a space hog you might as well at least put timeout indicators on it. We’re going to be in for some awful graphics for the next couple years. Be afraid… be very afraid.

I forgot to mention the Big Ten Network on my last roundup, perhaps because I blocked out the hideous way they showed the down and distance the first week of the season. Who thought this was a good idea? WHO?!?

If they wanted to preserve the shape, shouldn’t they have designed it to begin with to shrink neatly like Fox’s graphics? Thankfully, they eventually came to their senses. Beyond that mess, the BTN’s new graphics mostly serve the purpose of bringing them closer to the rest of the Fox stable, without quite being the same thing.

This next video will mean we don’t have an all-YouTube graphics roundup, but thank god, because YouTube in Chrome coming from Google Video Search, which should be a harmonious homogenous experience, was a complete nightmare, and you can read my tweeter for the full carnage…

And with that, I expect us to be done until baseball season starts.

So I have to say I like the Breeder’s Cup’s new deal with NBC that will put the Cup on NBC and NBC Sports Network starting this year. After the Cup Classic was relegated to cable the past few years, the main NBC network will now put the Classic on in primetime. Don’t get too excited – we’re talking about Saturday, also known as “the night that doesn’t exist as far as the networks are concerned”, which nonetheless is being increasingly colonized by sports like ABC’s “Saturday Night Football” college football franchise – but it should still help the Cup’s aura as the championship of horse racing. Anything that focuses the masses’ attention more on the Cup and less on the Triple Crown can only be good for the sport – as does building a strong identity of being on NBC, which will now have both.

ESPN is pulling a “they didn’t fire us, we quit” card, and may now be out of the horse racing business. But this deal is very, very good for NBC and NBC Sports Network, especially since the non-Classic races may be up there with some of the biggest non-hockey programming on NBCSN. With NBC now being so strongly attached to horse racing, it’s easy to see them loading up even more on the sport, especially to fill time on NBCSN, which could use all the events it can get. NBC and NBCSN already have this past summer’s “Summer at Saratoga” series (highlighted by the famed Travers Stakes) and have signed up to show many of the Derby prep races this spring. I could see NBCSN loading up on as many relatively top-notch horse races as it can on Saturday afternoons outside college football season, especially on weekends when NBC has golf commitments, which can certainly only be good for the sport in the long term.

Only one other sporting event has moved from ESPN to NBC since the wars started – and the Belmont Stakes had actually reached an agreement before the NBC/Comcast merger became final. Fox has so far been more successful at taking events away from ESPN, highlighted by the World Cup, and ESPN has been more successful to this point at taking events from NBC than the reverse, highlighted by Wimbledon. To pick up a real win over ESPN, even a small one, has to feel huge inside the NBC Sports offices, and goes a long way towards proving that smaller events can have a home on NBC Sports Network. No wonder ESPN’s denying it was a real “win”. If they were interested, they have to have legitimate concerns right now.

					Sport-Specific Networks
6	6.5	4.5	2.5	0	1.5

First, I found out I’d deleted the plugin I’d used when first setting up Da Blog to hide it from public view, and couldn’t find it again. Then I downloaded a plugin that just coughed up a 503 error whenever I went to a WordPress-powered page – even my admin section, meaning I wound up having to disable all my plugins in my database administration just to undo the damage. Then, after finding a working plugin, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, only to discover too late that the plugin I was counting on to pick up the slack for the old one didn’t actually work that way.

So now we’re back on the road, and the Sports and Webcomics subsites are running on the last developmental version of the old plugin until I can find a longer-term solution. There are a few quirks, most notably that the main pages of both sites are currently serving up all my posts instead of just the ones in those categories, but it should still be functional. If you see any other problems, give me a holler in the comments.

However, now I have a new problem: the power went out at our house this morning and might not be back until partway through the weekend. As such, I’m going to queue up a quick post to go out tomorrow to continue the streak and won’t be able to do any more work on Da Blog or the site until Monday at the latest (and I really hope it can be sooner). I know I promised a full-fledged preview of the conference championship games, but the MXSes will have to suffice: Ravens 21½-28½ Patriots, Giants 19¾-22¼ 49ers.

More to come on Monday, including – hopefully – the much-delayed launch of the forum.

Perhaps if LSU had kept it closer, they might have an argument for a split title. Perhaps if Oklahoma State didn’t need overtime to beat an overrated Stanford team, they might have an argument for a split title. But Alabama did what they need to, and now they’re the national champions.

Frankly, this is one of those years where the best solution might be no national champion. None of the teams involved are all that attractive. One good thing about a potential playoff system is that at least any potential champion has spent time building an aura of “champion-ness” by winning the games we consider to have the most value. Perhaps Alabama, or Oklahoma State, or even LSU would seem more legitimate by beating some number of teams along the way.

How the C Ratings are tabulated: First, A Ratings are tabulated by multiplying the total score ratio, which is expressed by (points-opponents’ points)/points, by the winning percentage. Score ratio minimizes the effect of running up the score. Next, B Points for each game are tabulated by (margin of victory)/(opponent’s A rating)+/-1 for wins, and -(margin of loss)/(1-opponent’s A Rating)+/-1 for losses. The “+/-” is + for road games and – for home ones. The total number of B Points is multiplied by the A Rating to get the B Rating. Finally, the C Rating is tabulated by taking one-tenth the difference between the team’s B Rating and the average of his opponents’ B Ratings and taking the result off the B Rating. The three ratings go A, B, C across. Click here to see the complete ratings.

1	Alabama					SEC #1		’06 Boise St.
	12-1	LW: #3	A Rat: .796	B Rating:	67.874	C Rating:	59.634	AP: 1	BCS: 1
	Say what you will about the BCS system, it is true what the Tide fans are saying: they won the one that counted.
2	LSU					SEC #2		SEC Champ.
	13-1	LW: #1	A Rat: .720	B Rating:	64.064	C Rating:	56.912	AP: 2	BCS: 2
	On the plus side, Les Miles proved this year that his first national championship wasn’t just the result of inheriting Nick Saban’s players.
3	Oklahoma State					B12 #1		Fiesta Bowl
	12-1	LW: #2	A Rat: .651	B Rating:	55.805	C Rating:	47.798	AP: 3	BCS: 3
	Sorry, but national championship teams don’t need overtime to beat teams that didn’t win their conference. Can I seriously expect you to have beaten Alabama?
4	Boise State					MWC #1		Maaco Bowl
	12-1	LW: #5	A Rat: .717	B Rating:	47.456	C Rating:	38.482	AP: 8	Coaches: 6
	Kellen Moore ended his college career with a bang, blowing out an Arizona State team that looked like the third-best team in the Pac-10 at one point this season.
5	Wisconsin					B10 #1		Big 10 Champ.
	11-3	LW: #4	A Rat: .594	B Rating:	36.909	C Rating:	29.645	AP: 10		Coaches: 11
	The Badgers kept it close enough against the Ducks that they don’t move below them.
6	Houston					USA #1		TicketCity
	13-1	LW: #8	A Rat: .695	B Rating:	38.024	C Rating:	29.006	AP: 18	Coaches: 14
	Houston proved their season wasn’t a fluke in demolishing a good Penn State team.
7	Oregon					P12 #1		Rose Bowl
	12-2	LW: #6	A Rat: .611	B Rating:	34.317	C Rating:	28.226	AP: 4	Coaches: 4
	The win over Wisconsin wasn’t impressive and the Pac-12 didn’t do that great in the bowls, but it took Stanford losing to a top-3 team for people to realize, “Wait, Oregon won this conference and Stanford didn’t for a reason.”
8	Oklahoma					B12 #2		Insight Bowl
	10-3	LW: #7	A Rat: .534	B Rating:	31.655	C Rating:	26.064	AP: 16	Coaches: 15
	Big win over Iowa didn’t do much to impress the voters in the final standings.
9	Michigan					B10 #2		Sugar Bowl
	11-2	LW: #10	A Rat: .586	B Rating:	22.677	C Rating:	18.480	AP: 12	Coaches: 9
	Yes, it was Virginia Tech. Yes, it took overtime. But Michigan did their darndest to prove how deserving of a BCS bowl they really were.
10	Stanford					P12 #2		Fiesta Bowl
	11-2	LW: #9	A Rat: .617	B Rating:	23.190	C Rating:	17.428	AP: 7	Coaches: 7
	Luck and the Cardinal gave all they could, but Oklahoma State, in the end, was the better team, even if marginally so.
11	Southern Miss					USA #2		Hawaii Bowl
	12-2	LW: #11	A Rat: .586	B Rating:	21.956	C Rating:	14.893	AP: 20	Coaches: 19
	The win over Nevada did move them up a couple of spots in the polls, even though it was by only a touchdown.
12	South Carolina					SEC #3		Capital One
	11-2	LW: #13	A Rat: .576	B Rating:	15.962	C Rating:	12.501	AP: 9	Coaches: 8
	Big win over a good Huskers team isn’t enough to put the Cocks in the top ten, but Spurrier has definitely built an elite program.
13	Arkansas					SEC #4		Cotton Bowl
	11-2	LW: #14	A Rat: .557	B Rating:	16.227	C Rating:	11.767	AP: 5	Coaches: 5
	Arkansas didn’t quite blow K-State out of the water, and South Carolina is still ahead of them, but they do move up across the board even if they were overrated already.
14	TCU					MWC #2		MWC Champ.
	11-2	LW: #12	A Rat: .606	B Rating:	17.332	C Rating:	11.036	AP: 14	Coaches: 13
	Sorry, but I’m not going to give TCU the benefit of the doubt when they needed a fourth-quarter comeback to beat Louisiana Tech.
15	USC					P12 #3		’09 Boise St.
	10-2	LW: #15	A Rat: .559	B Rating:	11.199	C Rating:	6.697	AP: 6	SBNBlog: 12
	As I expected, with almost everyone back and the team off probation people are talking up USC as a preseason national championship favorite… so why am I hearing about so many transfers leaving?
16	Florida State					ACC #1		Chmps Sprts
	9-4	LW: #20	A Rat: .483	B Rating:	9.244	C Rating:	5.335	AP: 23	Coaches: 23
	It was a low-scoring, tight game, but it was over a very good team, ranked ahead of them in the rankings, so a big move for the Seminoles.
17	Toledo					MAC #1		Military Bowl
	9-4	LW: #19	A Rat: .422	B Rating:	8.725	C Rating:	5.136	–	–
	Bit too close for comfort against a 7-6 team to justify ranking them for half the year, but at least they won, which teams below them can’t say.
18	Georgia							SEC #5
	10-4	LW: #16	A Rat: .462	B Rating:	7.658	C Rating:	4.876	AP: 19	Coaches: 20
	Georgia fought valiantly for three overtimes before falling to a very good Spartans team.
19	Notre Dame
	8-5	LW: #17	A Rat: .361	B Rating:	6.954	C Rating:	4.242	–	–
	The Golden Domers should have mixed feelings about their season. On one hand, they’re 8-5. On the other, their losses were like their Champs Sports bowl: they fought hard to the end.
20	Texas A&M					B12 #3		Meineke C. C.
	6-6	LW: #23	A Rat: .336	B Rating:	6.519	C Rating:	2.957	–	–
	A&M not only showed Northwestern how good they’ve really been, they did so in a big way, albeit close to home. But still no one is noticing.
21	Virginia Tech							ACC #2
	11-3	LW: #18	A Rat: .502	B Rating:	5.976	C Rating:	2.893	AP: 21	Coaches: 17
	Virginia Tech fought hard to prove they belonged in a BCS bowl, but the only reason it went to overtime was that people had doubts about their opponent too.
22	West Virginia*					BST #1		Prncton/Yale
	10-3	LW: #29	A Rat: .470	B Rating:	4.565	C Rating:	1.812	AP: 17	Coaches: 18
	What an embarrassment for the ACC. What a statement by the Mountaineers.
23	Northern Illinois					MAC #2		GoDaddy.com
	11-3	LW: #27	A Rat: .473	B Rating:	4.414	C Rating:	-.614	–	–
	One of the Huskies’ strongest seasons during their recent run even earned them quite a few poll votes.
24	Missouri*					B12 #4		Independence
	8-5	LW: #31	A Rat: .380	B Rating:	.432	C Rating:	-1.991	–	–
	The Tigers say goodbye to the Big 12 on a high note with a big win over North Carolina.
25	Rutgers (9-4, .428, -.361, -2.804)					BST #2		Pinstripe

2010 TCU Title: #31 Baylor (10-3), .447, -1.730, -4.030

Best game of year: LSU @ Alabama / BCS Championship Game: Alabama v. LSU (tie)

Saints 25½-21½ 49ers
Fox, Saturday 4:30pm ET, announcers: Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnston, Tony Siragusa
Most people still haven’t seen enough of the Niners to trust them enough, but the Saints are playing better than they have been all season. Then again, they’ve always been a different team at home than on the road; only time will tell if the Niners have the defense to stop Drew Brees and Co.

Broncos 18½-32 Patriots
CBS, Saturday 8pm ET, announcers: Jim Nantz, Phil Simms
If I was a betting man, I’d put good money on the Broncos, and maybe put a little on the under as well. Forget about Tebow for a second. The Pats’ defense… isn’t that great, while the Broncos have been winning with their defense. Even if you don’t think the Broncos are going to win, that MXS doesn’t make much sense to me, especially if you think what we saw last week from Tebow is a sign he’s becoming an actual quarterback.

Texans 14¼-21¾ Ravens
CBS, Sunday 1pm ET, announcers: Greg Gumbel, Dan Dierdorf
That’s one of the lower MXS scores I’ve seen all season (though not the lowest of the playoffs – Denver had an MXS of 13 for their game with the Steelers). I know the Ravens have a vaunted defense, but the Texans offense isn’t chopped liver, even with T.J. Yates as their quarterback. Despite how well the Texans played all year, this game has the feel of the Texans being the sacrificial lamb to allow the Ravens to move on in a game no one will watch, but if I was a betting man, I’d split the Texans with the over, with more money on the over.

Giants 22¾-30¼ Packers
Fox, Sunday 4:30pm ET, announcers: Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Pam Oliver, Chris Myers
The Giants are on such a winning streak, looked so dominant against the Falcons, and looked so good against the Packers that people have forgotten that they needed to beat the Cowboys the last week of the regular season to make the playoffs at 9-7 and are talking about them maybe possibly giving the Packers a hard time if not upsetting them. Actually, people have kind of forgotten that the Packers almost went undefeated. Really, people tend to forget everything about the regular season once the playoffs start.

Previously, the New York City Marathon had aired on Universal Sports, a network most people probably haven’t heard of, and WNBC-TV in New York, with NBC airing edited highlights later. It’s quite understandable that the Marathon would want a network that could give it a truly national audience (especially with Universal Sports losing a lot of households at the start of the year as it transitioned away from airing on NBC stations’ digital feeds), but that didn’t necessarily mean leaving NBC, now that NBC has the NBC Sports Network in the fold.

I don’t know if NBCSN had other plans for that day, but it still shows that NBC has a long way to go to prove that it’s a viable platform for smaller events on par with even ESPN2.

					Sport-Specific Networks
6	5.5	4.5	2.5	0	1.5

The MXS for the game is Alabama 21¾-19¾. No, I have no idea why Alabama is favored when LSU won the first game on Alabama’s home turf and is playing closer to home.

Final college football rankings coming Tuesday, hopefully, though I wouldn’t bet on it.