The Wiz of Odds

Reporters Notebooks

Paul Tenorio, Orlando Sentinel: The Fiesta Bowl is shaping up to be a financial nightmare for Central Florida. The team has sold only 5,000 of its required 17,500 tickets. Officials say the Knights will have to sell 13,000 tickets to break even financially. No wonder officials were cheering for Northern Illinois to get a Bowl Championship Series bid and trip to the Fiesta, which would have pushed Central Florida to a bowl closer to home. School president John Hitt has taken the unusual move of urging fans to buy Fiesta tickets.

Mike Hlas, Cedar Rapids Gazette: A look at bowl ticket sales on the secondary market. Cheapest ticket to the Bowl Championship title game is $850 on Stubhub. The Rose ($650) is also doing well. On the other end of the spectrum: Las Vegas ($9), Chick-fil-A ($9), AdvoCare V100 ($6.66), Idaho Potato ($5.75) and Texas ($4).

Richard Piersol, Lincoln Journal Star: Nebraska fans apparently do not have a lot of interest in the Gator Bowl. Only 2,759 tickets have been sold by the team. Nebraska is contracted to purchase 12,750. Georgia has sold about 7,000. It is contracted to purchase 15,000. Jacksonville is about a six-hour drive from Athens.

Scott Wolf, Inside USC: Sluggish ticket sales for the Las Vegas Bowl. USC has sold only 5,000 and Fresno State 7,000. Each team is contracted to purchase 11,000.

Stefanie Loh, U-T San Diego: San Diego State has sold more than 1,200 tickets to the Potato Bowl. The team is contracted to purchase 8,000 tickets.

Mark Anderson, Las Vegas Review-Journal: Nevada Las Vegas officials are already acknowledging a likely $200,000 deficit resulting from the team's trip to the Heart of Dallas Bowl.

Reporters Notebooks

John U. Bacon: Michigan's athletic budget, which stands at $137 million and is without faculty control, has nearly doubled in eight years. It now costs $6,000 for a one-hour wedding reception on the 50-yard line of Michigan Stadium and school kids are charged for tours that used to be free. Where does the money go? Staff salaries have grown from $34 million to $49 million, including a 62% increase in administrator compensation.

Case Keefer, Las Vegas Sun: Las Vegas Hilton Superbook Executive Jay Kornegay said he wasn't completely comfortable making Florida State a 7-point favorite in the Bowl Championship Series title game, but many offshore books posted a line as high as -10, forcing Hilton to push up its number. "I think it should certainly be less than a touchdown. I think the underdog has the advantage right now," he said.

Jon Solomon, AL.com: Birmingham's love affair with college football continues. The city was ESPN's most-viewed market for the 13th consecutive season. Greenville was second, followed by Knoxville, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis and Columbus. And an audit by the NCAA shows that every Division I-A conference received more money from 2012-13 bowl payouts than their schools paid on bowl expenses.

Pete Thamel, SI.com: The story behind the story at Texas. There's an ongoing feud between Governor Rick Perry and Texas President Bill Powers, and Perry has loaded Texas' board of regents with his cronies. Powers could be out as early as Thursday, meaning the replacement for Mack Brown could walk into a job and not know who is boss is.

Do-Hyoung Park, Stanford Daily: Stanford has already sold out its allotment of tickets to the Rose Bowl. Suspicions are that Michigan State fans may have played a part in the quick sale.

Todd D. Milewski, Capital Times: An average of 13,420 tickets went unused for Wisconsin's seven home games, the highest number of no-shows since 2008. That's 17% of the announced attendance, up from 14.5% in 2012.

Reporters Notebooks

David Jones, PennLive.com: He's fed up with the Southeastern Conference. He's tired of Southerners who don't care about anything but football, who can't take care of their poor, fat, litter-strewn, illiterate states, telling him the way it should be — about anything. And he's tired of them crowing about their seven consecutive Bowl Championship Series titles. He wants to see them suffer a little.

Jon Solomon, AL.com: Alabama universities spend money at a faster rate on athletics than academics. What is your school spending? Here's the link to the Knight Commission database.

Douglas Smith, Washtenaw Watchdogs: The coverup of the arrest of Michigan kicker Brendan Gibbons.

Eric Chemi, Business Week: The odds of Auburn returning a missed field goal for a touchdown were 0.0007 percent. Consider this grim reality: A college player is more likely to die in a game than ever see a missed field goal returned for a touchdown.

Bud Withers, Seattle Times: USC, a storied football colossus that uses national championship and Heisman trophies for doorstops and paperweights, hired a guy (Steve Sarkisian) whose conference head-coaching record at a highly respected school (Washington) was exactly 24-21.

Josh Bolander, Daily Iowan: A tale of two coaches. Fifteen years ago, Oklahoma hired Bob Stoops and Iowa hired Kirk Ferentz. But what happened? Wasn't Stoops the slamdunk choice to take over for Hayden Fry at Iowa?

Reporters Notebooks

Malia Wollan, New York Times: Fresno State loves its Bulldogs, but so does a violent gang, which at its height was responsible for 70% of the city's shootings. Three of four inmates in the Fresno County jail are members of the Bulldogs. Things have gotten so out of hand that school officials once considered dropping the Bulldog logo. "My advice was absolutely not. Do not touch the logo ...  If you change it, the gang wins," Jerry Dyer, Fresno’s police chief, said.

Matt Trogdon, Streaking The Lawn: Mike London might be close to losing his job, but is the Virginia coach to blame for a 2-8 record? There's evidence suggesting that the problems extend beyond the players and staff and into the athletic department, where an over-eager administrator has been making decisions that are out of his depth.

Keith Sargeant, Asbury Park Press: Rutgers announced a hike in ticket prices for next season, but an analysis of ticket distribution revealed complimentary tickets accounted for an average of more than 20% of the stadium capacity last season, even ballooning to one third of the announced attendance for one game.

Associated Press: Colorful comments by Evan Spencer suggesting that Ohio State would "wipe the field" with Alabama or Florida State have been twisted. Read his full exchange with a reporter by clicking here.

Geoff Liesik, Deseret News: Ute tribal officials and University of Utah administrators are scheduled to meet Nov. 22 to negotiate the conditions for the school's future use of the Ute name and the drum and feather logo worn by its sports teams.

Bob Wojnowski, Detroit News: What is Michigan made of? We will learn a lot in the next three games.

Sports Media Watch: CBS earned the second-largest college football overnight of the season for its telecast of the Louisiana State-Alabama game.

Reporters Notebooks

Campus Union, SI.com: Another bullying incident? A fight involving two California players resulted in freshman running back Fabiano Hale being taken to the hospital.

Stephen Tsai, Honolulu Advertiser: Hawaii's Norm Chow, in the second year of a five-year contract, says he has no intention of quitting. The Warriors are 0-8 this season and 3-17 overall under Chow.

Sports Media Watch: The Miami/Florida State "Saturday Night Football" game drew a 5.4 overnight rating on ABC, up 184% from Oklahoma State/Kansas State last year (5.4), up 157% from regional action in 2011 (2.1), and the third-highest of the season for college football on any network.

Associated Press: Some Missouri students are criticizing Tiger fans for booing a reference to President Barack Obama during a halftime ceremony last Saturday.

AL.com and Cedar Rapids Gazette: You can get tickets to the Louisiana State-Alabama game for as cheap as $144 on eBay. Meanwhile, tickets to the Iowa-Purdue game can be had for a mere $1.18.

Jon Solomon, AL.com: Faking injuries is a growing concern, says national coordinator of officiating Rogers Redding.

Curtis Eichelberger, Bloomberg.com and Brent Zwerneman, Houston Chronicle: Texas A&M said Johnny Manziel's Heisman Trophy brought only $20,000 into the university's coffers. But is the university just putting on the spin after an official earlier said the impact would be an eye-popping $250 million.

Mike Hlas, Cedar Rapids Gazette: Fifty teams are now eligible for bowl games, meaning there are only 20 slots that need to be filled by Selection Sunday on Dec. 8.

Reporters Notebooks

Mike Vorel, Casper Star-Tribune: Wyoming's Dave Christensen named Jamar Cain interim defensive coordinator after he fired Chris Tormey. Cain is the third defensive coordinator to serve under Christensen in his less than five seasons at Wyoming.

Dan Wolken and Rachel Axon, USA Today: New Mexico State and Idaho should be competing on the same level as Alabama and Florida State, according to NCAA Division I Board of Directors chairman Nathan Hatch. A faculty group has been lobbying for change.

John Canzano, Oregonian: A former Oregon player has a message for Duck fans: "Go (bleep) yourselves."

Joel A. Erickson, AL.com: Arkansas' Bret Bielema is raising a stink over the film exchange with Auburn.

Kurt Kragthorpe, Salt Lake Tribune: Instead of having his Wisconsin team in position for a strong finish and a BCS invitation, former Utah State coach Gary Andersen could be enduring a miserable season at Colorado or California. Or he could be in Logan, which is somewhere in between.

Zach Buchanan, Arizona Republic: Arizona State announcer Tim Healey is returning to the booth after he was diagnosed with transient global amnesia.