• Onward, Muncie soliders. On the tiny shoulders of mighty mouse tailback MiQuale Lewis and his 177 yards, Ball State cleared its biggest hurdle to a perfect season Wednesday night, coming from a touchdown back in the fourth quarter to take down Central Michigan, home of Dan "The Fever" LeFevour, winner of the last two MAC championships and probably the best team on the Cardinals' schedule. We can't say that for sure until next week: BSU can still blow everything on Tuesday against 9-2, Illini-felling Western Michigan, who's out to create a three-way logjam at the top of the MAC West with an upset in Muncie, thereby activating some inscrutable tiebreaker to determine which of the three moves on to the MAC Championship.

Ball State has virtually no shot at the BCS, but still needs this stretch games right now: Coming in, BSU was the only team in the country whose opponents to date had a collective winning percentage under .300, which is just sort of embarrassing. At least Central and Western have looked good against other MAC teams, and should justify moving the Cardinals onto the more skeptical top-25 ballots (like mine, for example).

• Soon it turned out he was a quarterback of glass. If you can remember all the way back to August, when UCLA quarterback Ben Olson first re-aggravated the broken foot he suffered in the spring, he was only supposed to miss about half the season. With two games to go, he hasn't taken a snap, and won't down the stretch, after a scan Tuesday revealed Olson's foot still hasn't healed properly.

Thus ends the career of the top pro-style quarterback prospect of 2002, after almost as many travails over the last seven years -- a transfer from BYU following his Mormon mission, two knee injuries, a concussion, a pair of foot injuries -- as eventual starts (10). When he started and finished the game, UCLA was 6-1, with wins over a couple teams (BYU and Oregon State in 2007) that finished in the final polls. But that almost never happened.

• Opening doors for mediocrity. Neither the Cotton nor Gator bowls has ever taken a five-loss team -- as a matter of fact, any five-loss team playing in January is pretty much unheard of -- but even if Notre Dame loses its fifth game as expected at USC in three weeks, that wouldn't necessarily eliminate the Irish. You know, these things aren't written in stone:

"I don’t think we necessarily look just at the records," Baker said. "We’re going to look at the matchup and the history that we have with the programs that we’re considering. That’s not a policy that we don’t take a 7-5 team, that’s just the way that it’s happened."

The Cotton Bowl usually pits a Big 12 team vs. a Southeastern Conference team. But the Cotton Bowl can select Notre Dame over an SEC team once in the next two years.

Never mind the Irish are 1-17 since the start of the 2006 season against teams that finished with a winning record, and famously 0-9 since their last bowl win in 1993. No, really, never mind: This will be the perfect year to get away with an old-school attendance grab, if LSU and Georgia wind up in the Outback Bowl and the Bowl Formerly Known as the Citrus, leaving mediocre South Carolina as the next-best option from the SEC. Between Pitt, Cincinnati and West Virginia, whoever winds up No. 2 in the Big East isn't going to be particularly attractive to the Gator Bowl. If ND can just keep the margin down in L.A., now is the time to break down that "good team" barrier to the New Year.

Quickly ... Despite East Carolina's descent into obscurity since the barn-burning start to the season, Syracuse is apparently targeting Skip Holtz to be its next coach. ... Notre Dame offensive coordinator Mike Haywood has interviewed for the Washington job. ... Tennessee's coaching search could come to an end in early to mid-December. ... Colorado linebacker Nate Vaiomounga was booted from the team after a misdemeanor arrest for purse-snatching, which uncovered a couple past transgressions. ... The USC-Stanford game was the first to draw a million viewers on Versus. ... UCLA's Chinonso Anyanwu has been diagnosed with Crohn's disease. ... USC's Allen Bradford will miss the rest of the season after surgery for a torn labrum. ... Auburn tight end Tommy Trott has a torn ACL and will miss the Iron Bowl (and a bowl game, if that's somehow still on the table). ... An aggressive fourth down policy has been paying off for Pittsburgh, as it usually does. ... Inside the politics of Will Muschamp's new deal with Texas, from a Clemson perspective. ... And the Cotton Bowl will remained consigned to second half status outside the BCS until at least 2015.