The Wiz of Odds

Game of the Weak

Mike Hlas is an award-winning columnist with the Cedar Rapids Gazette and force behind The Hlog. Each week, he will break down the worst matchup in college football. Considering the increasing number of uncompetitive and uninteresting games, Mike's task is harder than digging out from the rubble at Florida State, Michigan, Notre Dame and USC.

Maybe if Charlie Weis had still been the New England Patriots’ offensive coordinator, he could have talked Bill Belichick out of going for a first-down Sunday night at Indianapolis on a fourth-and-two at the New England 30 late in the game with the Pats ahead, 34-28.

New England lost after that mystifying decision by Belichick that didn’t work. Weis knew what to do with Tom Brady and when to do it. If you’re hiring after the season, Coach Belichick, perhaps you’d consider Coach Weis to run your offense once more. He did pretty well with you before.

Crewcut Charlie looks like he’ll be unemployed before long. His fifth season at Notre Dame is ending badly. The Irish are 6-4, not what they or their vocal followers had in mind when this season began.

Most of the Irish faithful gave up the ship two weeks ago when Notre Dame lost at home to Navy. After not having lost to Navy since Theodore Roosevelt was president — or so it seemed — that marked two straight home defeats to the Midshipmen.

That was followed by a 27-22 defeat at Pittsburgh, the Irish’s second-straight loss to Dave Wannstedt’s Panthers. Notre Dame is no longer as good as Eastern programs it once dominated. The die is cast. It’s over for Weis in South Bend.

Game of the Weak

Mike Hlas is an award-winning columnist with the Cedar Rapids Gazette and force behind The Hlog. Each week, he will break down the worst matchup in college football. Considering the increasing number of uncompetitive and uninteresting games, Mike's task is more difficult than getting Carrie Prejean to stay on the set of "Larry King Live."

Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got till it's gone?

They didn’t pave paradise to put in a parking lot at Syracuse, because Syracuse was never paradise in the first place. But it was pretty darn good in football.

Until 2004, Syracuse's football team was known as the Orangemen. And the SU women’s teams were the Orangewomen. Then they all became the Orange.

It was a landmark decision.

Anyway, Syracuse football slipped on an orange peel after the 2004 season. Coach Paul Pasqualoni had one losing season in 14 years at the school, but new SU athletics director Daryl Gross must not have been taken with his coach. Especially after the Orange lost the Champs Sports Bowl in 2004 to Georgia Tech by the unseemly score of 51-14.

Game(s) of the Weak

Mike Hlas is an award-winning columnist with the Cedar Rapids Gazette and force behind The Hlog. Each week, he will break down the worst matchups in college football. Considering the increasing number of uncompetitive and uninteresting games, Mike's task is harder than getting Levi Johnston, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and anyone named Kardashian to just go away.

Here's how it is done in most major football conferences:

You play your nonconference games against designated victims in September, then you play your conference games after that. It's only logical. You wouldn't open a rock festival with U2, then bring out a bar band three-fourths of the way through the event.

The Southeastern Conference does things a little differently. Sure, the league has the marquee game of the week in Louisiana State at Alabama. But look at what else the conference is trotting out on the 10th Saturday of the season:

Tennessee Tech at Georgia
Furman at Auburn
Eastern Kentucky at Kentucky
Northern Arizona at Mississippi

That's right. Four — count 'em, four — games between SEC teams and Division I-AA teams. In November. That's just wrong. So each gets one quarter of this week’s Game of the Weak.

Game of the Weak

Mike Hlas is an award-winning columnist with the Cedar Rapids Gazette and force behind The Hlog. Each week, he will break down the worst matchup in college football. Considering the increasing number of uncompetitive and uninteresting games, Mike's task is harder than managing an Afghan election while knitting an afghan.

Halloween always brings its horrors, but this is going too far.

New Mexico State at Ohio State is all trick, no treat.

How in the name of Jack O'Lantern did this game get onto the Buckeyes' schedule this deep into the season?

For that matter, what's it doing on the schedule at all?

With two losses already before the arrival of November, Ohio State is happy to have a pumpkin to carve before it finishes the regular season at Penn State, at home against Iowa, and at Michigan.

New Mexico State brings a 3-5 record to OSU's Horseshoe, and is fresh off losses of 45-7 to Louisiana Tech and 34-3 to Fresno State. First-year Aggies coach DeWayne Walker has to be feeling bewitched.

If Buckeyes quarterback Terrelle Pryor and OSU coach Jim Tressel hear any booing today, it will probably just be kids warming up their scary voices before going door to door to pursue free sweets that will ruin their teeth and put them on the road to bad dietary habits for a lifetime. Their obesity will lead to increased health care costs for all of us and ...

Sorry, I briefly thought this was Blame the Weak, not Game of the Weak.

Game of the Weak

Mike Hlas is an award-winning columnist with the Cedar Rapids Gazette and force behind The Hlog. Each week, he will break down the worst matchup in college football. Considering the increasing number of uncompetitive and uninteresting games, Mike's task is harder than giving swine flu back to a pig.

It's an exciting weekend in the Mountain West Conference.

Texas Christian plays at Brigham Young on national television (well, Versus, anyway). Eighth-ranked TCU is unbeaten and trying to work its way into a BCS bowl. No. 16 BYU is 6-1 and trying become the boss of the MWC. Utah, which went unbeaten last season, will try to continue its climb in the national rankings when it plays host to Air Force.

But that's not our concern. No, we're looking at the bottom of the Mountain. Bottom-feeders Nevada Las Vegas and New Mexico meet in Albuquerque. Someone must win. We think.

After he left Iowa to become the basketball coach at New Mexico, Steve Alford called Iowa a "football school." Alford found himself a basketball school.

New Mexico is 0-6 this year under first-year coach Mike Locksley. The Lobos have dropped 10 straight dating to a 70-7 win over San Diego State last year that led to Chuck Long's undoing as the Aztecs' coach.

Game of the Weak

Mike Hlas is an award-winning columnist with the Cedar Rapids Gazette and force behind The Hlog. Each week, he will break down the biggest mismatch in college football. Considering the increasing number of uncompetitive games, Mike's task is more challenging than keeping the neighbor kids from taking the helium balloon for a spin.

Ron Zook pumped life into a dormant Illinois program. Then the air immediately seeped out of the tires, and things are right back where Zook found them.

The Fighting Illini were more like the Comatose Illini before Zook arrived and in his first two years in Champaign-Urbana.

Illinois was 1-11 in 2003 and 3-8 in 2004. Enter Zook, who somehow transformed Florida from a national power to a face in the SEC crowd.

Zook's first two Illini teams were 2-9 and 2-10, but the man recruited hither and yon to bring big-time talent to the eastern Illinois prairie. Everything came together nicely in 2007 with a dynamic sophomore quarterback named Isaiah "Juice" Williams.

Illinois won nine games and reached the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1983. Then the Illini played a team that really knows how to recruit. USC brutalized them, 49-17.

Juice is still in Champaign (Isn't that called a mimosa?), but the winning is long gone. Illinois went 5-7 last year, and things have only gotten worse.

The Illini are 1-4 this season, and 0-3 in the Big Ten. They got systematically destroyed by Missouri, Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan State.

But now Zook (career-record 42-48) faces a foe on his team's level. Illinois visits Indiana in the Game of the Weak.