Our weekly tailgating guide takes its show to the Iron Bowl for the second Thanksgiving in a row, a new location but the same old hate.

The Lowdown.
Take a look back at our Tuscaloosa Iron Bowl preview from last year to remind you what makes this game special:

The thing about this rivalry is the lack of geographical boundaries involved. Tide and Tigers live, work and worship side by side all across the state. They have every opportunity to get their hate on every other day of the year. But come Iron Bowl Saturday, it's still got to ratchet up somehow.

Auburn is a family town. Auburn games are a great place to take your kids, even given their practice of loosing a predatory bird in the stadium 20 minutes prior to kickoff. Just not this Auburn game, at least not until the little tykes can throw a decent right cross. The Loveliest Village on the Plains will, for one weekend, be transformed into the maw of hell. (We mean this in a good way. Seriously. If you've never seen an Iron Bowl, pack up the leftovers tomorrow and hit the road.)

The Auburn-Alabama game lived for many years at the ostensibly neutral site of Birmingham's Legion Field, but we vastly prefer the heightened tensions of the home-and-home series. Make no mistake, Auburn takes its relatively newfound homefield advantage seriously. Very, very seriously:

"It is difficult, even impossible, for Auburn people in this generation to understand what Dec. 2, 1989, meant to Auburn people in that day," said Housel, the foremost historian on the subject. "And it's a good thing they don’t understand because that's what Dec. 2, 1989 was all about - so they wouldn’t have to understand, be forced to go to Birmingham, be forced to play your biggest game of the year on your opponent’s home field, be forced to go to a place where you weren’t really wanted. ..."These kids don’t know," he added. "Thank god they don’t know.”

Getting the Tide to actually come to Auburn for the first time was the Tigers' Berlin Wall.

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May all your turkeys be fat and your naps be peaceful. And when your hated rivals arrive in town for the weekend, remember to keep repeating to yourself: "These savages are our guests."

Between trips back to the lizard planet, our great and indefatigable leaders at the BCS will spend the rest of this alarmingly uneventful season anointing Texas and the winner of the SEC Championship game, looking for reasons to justify snubbing Boise State from one of the big-money soirees and hoping no one notices that Boise, TCU and Cincinnati all remain just slightly undefeated. Amidst the last-minute preparations and jockeying for position for this January's games, though, the Series' offseason strategy is becoming very clear: This year, with Congress, a new lobby and a playoff-stumping president breathing down its neck, it's going on the offensive.

Flanked by the Series' somewhat ham-fisted forays into social media and big shot Washington PR firm, the propaganda attack will apparently be led by a new Web site, PlayoffProblem.com, launched by the BCS Wednesday to educate "the millions of us who love college football" on just how much "more controversial and contentious" a playoff would be. Playoff Problem is here to answer the hard-hitting questions, such as "Is the current BCS system successful?" ("Yes ... The BCS is the best format ever ...") and "Why would a playoff diminish the regular season?" while keeping fans up to date with the latest "news & notes," such as these critical headlines:

• "If BCS not completely broken, don't fix it." We like our championship systems in that sweet spot between roughly 83 and 96.4 percent broken, anyway.

• "BCS is a friend to the Mountain West." And real friends always hang together to summarily dismiss one another's bids for equality and denounce each other to Congress. It's not like those wannabes would know what to do with all that money, anyway. It's for their own good.

• "Would a college football playoff be fair?" If you were intelligent enough to employ the "Fairness Index" instead of an irrelevant, abstract measure like "actual results of head-to-head competition," you would see clearly that no, no it would not be.

Look, when it comes down to it, these are the facts: a) The BCS is successful. b) The BCS is fair. c) Fans and players love the BCS. These are the facts, people -- they're on the "Facts" page! So that settles it, right?

Before the season, Colorado head football coach Dan Hawkins famously made a vow of "10 wins or bust." Instead, it's been three wins, eight losses, with a ninth entirely likely this weekend versus Nebraska -- by which time we should know whether Hawkins's CU career is included in the "bust" part:

Mike Bohn will leave here tonight having already decided the fate of football coach Dan Hawkins at Colorado.

CU's athletic director would not reveal his decision during an interview with the Camera following the men's basketball team's 73-58 victory over Chaminade in the EA Sports Maui Invitational at the Lahaina Civic Center.

Bohn said an official announcement about the football coaching situation will come Thursday.

Intriguingly, Sports by Brooks says Hawkins met with CU Chancellor Phil DiStefano to make his case for a fifth season -- while athletic director Mike Bohn was in Hawaii for the EA Sports Maui Invitational basketball tournament. No idea what this means with respect to the announcement -- are they really gonna can the guy on Thanksgiving Day? -- but we'll know tomorrow.Perhaps the bigger question is, if Hawkins does get the boot, does his son Cody stay the backup QB? Stay tuned.

[UPDATE, 7:22 a.m. ET] Against every indication over the course of the season, morning buzz out of Boulder according to multiple sources is that the Buffs will bring Hawkins back for a fifth season; Hawkins himself is reportedly telling assistants he has another year., which would be more than a little optimistic even for a "glass half full" kind of guy like Hawk if not true. Stay tuned for today's official word. -- Matt Hinton

With no national championships, conference titles or BCS bowls on the line for staggering USC, a .500 season already secured for quietly humming UCLA and the usual 13-point spread warding off upset chatter, there's been some buzz out of L.A. that this just doesn't quite feel like a rivalry week. I suspect that's less of a problem today ...

Just to clarify, the paint-wielding SC fans aren't protesting the Bruin's fashion fur: This one's for Tommy Trojan. As prank wars go, it's no Bayside-Valley, but it will do in a pinch. Game on, fellows!

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See another angle here. Hat tip: Sportress of Blogitude.

Tebow gazing with the proprietor of Tim Teblog.

Why is ESPN's GameDay crew breaking for Gainesville Saturday? There have to be more important games than Florida-Florida State in a weekend full of consequential rivalry matches, and certainly there should be more engaging affairs -- the Gators are three-touchdown favorites.

But the appeal is obvious: The pulse of America's Saturday smorgasbord will be there because it's Tim Tebow's final home game. (That it could plausibly be Bobby Bowden's final regular-season game at FSU is a schadenfreudian bonus for Gator fans, who could have the rare opportunity to see off their hero and their nemesis at the same time.) Superlatives are cheap -- the debate about Tebow's place among the greatest college players ever has been largely tabled by his mediocre senior numbers -- but he could still be the most popular player ever. If nothing else, there's no debate that Tebow is the most popular player in Florida history, and that makes his Swamp finale a must-see spectacle.

It's hard to imagine how fans are going react after four steady, mostly spectacular years: If allowed to, the ovation for Tebow could last 10 minutes or more. There is already a clever grassroots campaign underway to get fans to show up for the game wearing eye-black in tribute. And if the game is out of reach early, what will Urban Meyer do to celebrate Tebow's final Swamp snap? (Probably call time-out, if only to allow for a few more minutes of uninterrupted crowd applause. With all his other school records, maybe Tebow can break the mark for adulation, too.)

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Now in its fifth year, the Blog Poll is a weekly effort of dozens of college football-centric Web sites representing a wide array of schools under the oversight of founder/manager/guru Brian Cook at MGoBlog, and now appears on CBS Sportsline. It’s an effort to provide a more rigorous check on the mainstream polls that actually, like, count toward the mythical championship, and enthusiastically shines a light on its voters' biases. But mainly, it’s fun. 

Functional byes and actual byes throughout the top 10 last weekend means static in the upper reaches, and nefarious scheming for the sake of keeping things interesting. With three wins over ranked teams and seven over opponents currently sporting a winning record, Alabama remains the clear-cut No. 1, albeit not by a wide margin. I was tempted to move TCU into the No. 2 slot this week, though, just to shake things up a little, and because the Frogs have made a pretty good case for themselves -- about as good as Texas and Florida, anyway, which have one win apiece over a ranked team (TCU has three) and even nearly identical strengths of schedule according to Jeff Sagarin (see resumé chart below the jump). It would be a bold, provocative and largely defensible move.

It would also be fairly arbitrary. Two of TCU's three wins over ranked teams are against conference-mates BYU and Utah, which have won the games they should win against the lesser reaches of the MWC and not much else outside of getting their heads handed to them by the Frogs; beating he Cougars and Utes certainly doesn't seem much more valuable than Texas' second and third-best wins behind Oklahoma State (Texas Tech and Missouri, respectively) or even Florida's wins over Arkansas and Kentucky with both teams moving to 7-4 last week. With awful New Mexico destined to drag down the strength of schedule in this weekend's finale, the Frogs won't be leaping anyone barring an extreme calamity in front of them.

Going Coastal. The ACC and Pac-10 account for 11 of this week's top 25, as many as the other four "Big Six" conferences combined, and hold down the second half of the poll with gusto, represented in nine of the bottom dozen slots. That's what you get when you have a solid cluster of similar teams that all play one another and no truly dominating frontrunners like the teams out in front of the SEC, Big 12 and Big East. Of course, you have no powerhouse poster child to wave the league's championship flag, either, but those are the sacrifices one must make for depth. Respect the depth. 

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Once again we're gobsmacked by the routine passage of time: Ten years has passed like that, and to commemorate the artificially grouped events therein, the Doc Sat team is counting down the best of 2000-09. Today's category: Best Teams.

1. Miami (2001) and Texas (2005). Take your pick.

As you might expect, Doc Saturday's usual four-man panel turned in top-10 ballots that generally disagreed on every point, with one notable exception: All of us agreed that the two best teams of the decade, without question, came out of Miami in '01 and Texas in '05, two dominant, balanced, undefeated BCS champions that ran roughshod over tough schedules and have stocked NFL rosters for years hence. We did not agree on which team to put on top.

The Hurricanes, assembled by Butch Davis and fully resurgent in their first year under his successor, Larry Coker, led the nation in scoring defense behind an insane depth chart that included an incredible nine future first-round draft picks -- Phillip Buchanon, Ed Reed, Mike Rumph, William Joseph, Jerome McDougal, Sean Taylor, Jonathan Vilma, D.J. Williams and Vince Wilfork -- opposite an offense led by stars Andre Johnson, Jeremy Shockey, Clinton Portis and four future NFL offensive linemen in front of the Big East Player of the Year, quarterback Ken Dorsey. We won't get into embarrassment of riches further down the depth chart, in the name of brevity.

Man for man, those 'Canes may be the most monolithically talented outfit ever assembled, and played like it en route to a perfect regular season, a 37-14 Rose Bowl rout over Nebraska and possibly the most undisputed national championship in the history of the sport. And yet Texas, the only national champion of the decade to average 50 points per game, matched the '01 Hurricanes note for dominant note just four years later behind the most electric individual athlete of the era, Vince Young:

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Making the morning rounds.

• It was a busy day in South Bend, where Jimmy Clausen practiced in a shaded visor Tuesday to hide the alleged black eye(s) he reportedly suffered in a scuffle outside a bar early Sunday morning and the tea leaves were twitchin' up a storm: ND athletic director Jack Swarbrick informed reporters that Charlie Weis would return to Indiana with the team after Saturday's regular season finale at Stanford rather than stay behind to make the crucial California recruiting rounds, and that Swarbrick and Weis will meet to discuss Weis' future (i.e. officially hand him his long-expected pink slip) early next week. In the meantime, the Clausen family's South Bend home went on the market, fueling speculation that Jimmy will be following his coach into the NFL in the spring. [South Bend Tribune]

• There's no official word on the student newspaper's report out of East Lansing Monday that unidentified Michigan State football players were part of a group of 15 to 20 men -- some wearing masks -- who allegedly stormed a dormitory Sunday night in some sort of rumble with an MSU fraternity, reportedly injuring a few female students in the process. But MSU summarily dismissed two players, safety Roderick Jenrette and running back Glenn Winston, hours after the report surfaced Tuesday afternoon. Draw your own conclusions. [Detroit Free Press]

• Oregon's winning touchdown in double overtime at Arizona sent the Ducks to their section of the crowd in celebration Saturday night, at which point (to quote the Simpsons), heeeere came the pretzels -- and soda bottles, and water bottles, and whatever else was on hand, from the looks of it:

That might be a fairly innocuous clip if one of the projectiles -- a full water bottle -- hadn't knocked a Duck cheerleader unconscious, landing her in the hospital overnight with a concussion. She says she's fine now, and hopes Arizonans take her ordeal to heart and learn to be nice from now on. [Oregonian]

Quickly ... A day after having armed robbery charges dropped, Tennessee safety Janzen Jackson is back with the team and expects to play Saturday against Kentucky. ... USC receiver Damian Williams surprisingly returned to practice Tuesday and is likely to play Saturday against UCLA. ... And just in time for his team's crucial dates in the Iron Bowl and SEC Championship game, Alabama's Mark Ingram is Sports Illustrated's latest cover boy.

The sudden death of beloved Georgia mascot Uga VII to an apparent heart attack last week opened the floodgates to an outpouring of goodwill for one of the shorter-lived (and least successful, frankly, in terms of the team's on-field performance) reigns in Uga history, including a private memorial service and burial in Sanford Stadium before last Saturday's sobering loss to Kentucky. It also opened up a window for the capable opportunists at PETA, who suggested the Bulldogs forego the eighth in a line of mascots from a family of English bulldogs and turn instead to our old friend, technology, in the form of college football's -- and perhaps the world's -- first robot mascot:

In the wake of the untimely death of the University of Georgia's (UGA) bulldog mascot, Uga VII, PETA has asked the school's athletic director, Damon M. Evans, to replace the mascot with an animatronic dog -- or to rely solely on a costumed mascot -- instead of using another real bulldog. Bulldogs are prone to breathing difficulties, hip dysplasia, heart disorders, and other congenital ailments, and acquiring a dog from a breeder perpetuates the animal overpopulation crisis while causing another dog waiting in an animal shelter to be condemned to death.

Say what you will about PETA: They know how to use a headline as a hook: Click to read about the Robot Dog, stay to read about hip dysplasia.

And it's hard to argue with the point, frankly, if your first priority in is to add another drip to the vast tide of the issue, "animal welfare," although their point seems to depend at least in part on the dodgy ethicality of existing as a bulldog in the first place. Obviously, flesh and blood will reign in Georgia for the foreseeable future, but the times, they change: If the animal rights lobby comes back in 50 or 60 years with a hunk of barking metal that occasionally attacks unwitting Auburn players who wander too close, they may have a shot with Uga XXIV.

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Hat tip: AJC, via EDSBS.

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