Tuesday 07/21 Quickie: Big Ben,Favre, Halladay, Magic, CFB Media Days

Huge thanks to everyone who emailed about or retweeted or commented on yesterday's post about ESPN's push into local.

So on the eve of SEC Media Day(s) -- 800 credentialed media attending! -- my SN colleague Dave Curtis pulled out something from the old Dan Shanoff playbook:

This year's BCS mess will be... more than 2 unbeaten teams. That's the doomsday scenario that I've been projecting every year for many, many years, so naturally I took the bait and led today's SN column with it.

This season that could be Florida, the Oklahoma-Texas winner and USC. Well, probably not USC, if history holds. Maybe Penn State (cough-Iowa!-cough). Maybe VA Tech or GA Tech? Not out of the ACC, where losing when you shouldn't is part of the league charter.

Where Curtis goes a little overboard is in insisting that SIX teams would go unbeaten. Including Notre Dame! (Notre Dame?!?!)

I actually think we'll end with three: Florida, the Oklahoma-Texas winner and Boise State, which will gripe but head for the Fiesta Bowl. (As I said in the column: I'm sure Boise is a good team, but 20 teams could go unbeaten if they played Boise's schedule.)

This season seems to size up much like 2005, when a seemingly unbeatable, where-do-they-rank-all-time unbeaten USC (played this year by Florida) collided with a ridiculously good (and motivated) unbeaten champ from the Big 12 (reprising its 2005 role, Texas).

The glory that is the college football regular season is that no matter how sure I am in July that multiple teams will go unbeaten -- or how sure we all are that multiple teams will go unbeaten once we get into October -- something ALWAYS happens to obliterate our expectations.

How amazing. Just weeks away.

Meanwhile:
*Big Ben? This will quickly become a non-story.
*Favre by Friday? Let it be Friday afternoon, so I can ignore it all weekend.
*Magic rule NBA offseason: Barnes another great piece.
*Nash back in PHX: Bet he's in NYC by All-Star Break 2011.
*Will the Dodgers drop Halladay chase since Jason Schmidt won a game? (That may set a new bar for me for shallow analysis -- and that's saying something.)

Complete SN column here. More later.

-- D.S.