Grading the season's head-coaching hires.

Wednesday, we took a critical glance at the veterans assuming reins at a new locale in 2010; Thursday we turned our red marker on the up-and-comers taking over their first I-A job after years as marked men. Today, we close the book with a review of the more obscure, surprising and straight-up baffling choices of the last two months:

• East Carolina: Ruffin McNeill.
Named Texas Tech's interim coach in the wake of Mike Leach's sudden departure, defensive coordinator McNeill inherited one of college football's weirdest recent soap operas, yet led the Red Raiders to a double-digit win in the Alamo Bowl just the same, making him the sentimental choice for the top job in Lubbock. That honor went to Tommy Tuberville instead, so McNeill returns to Greenville, where he played defensive back for the Pirates from 1976-80. He brings with him a quarter-century of experience on the defensive side of the ball, and engineered an impressive defensive turnaround at TTU in 2007, when the Raider D went from seventh in the Big 12 against the pass, ninth in total defense and 10th in scoring defense under previous coordinator Lyle Setencich to first, first and fourth, respectively. Between that and his record training underdog boxers to become heavyweight champions, ECU -- the last program in the country searching for a head coach as of Thursday -- scored a minor coup in bringing McNeill home. Grade: B+

• Memphis: Larry Porter.
If nothing else, the Tigers ought to have a pretty good running game under Porter's watch: He ranks seventh on Memphis' all-time rushing list, having lettered all four years, and was a successful running backs coach at Arkansas State, Oklahoma State and most recently LSU. He's never been a coordinator, but Porter did hold the title of assistant head coach and chief recruiter under Les Miles at LSU, so the Tigers should have a fighting chance at re-energizing their foundering program with some choice players from their talent-rich backyard. Grade: B

• San Jose State: Mike MacIntyre.
MacIntyre has experience at both the college and pro levels. At the latter, he spent five years as yet another in a long line of Bill Parcells acolytes, coaching DBs with the Cowboys and Jets; at the former, he helped David Cutcliffe breathe new life into the Duke program as defensive coordinator (a feat that made him an early message-board candidate for Georgia's vacant DC position). What he hasn't done is work for a college program west of the Mississippi, and given how many times the SJSU program has come close to being euthanized over the past few years, some recruiting inroads on the West Coast might have been nice. Grade: C+

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Grading the season's head-coaching hires.

Wednesday, we took a critical glance at the veterans assuming reins at a new locale in 2010. Today, we look at the risers taking over their first I-A job after years as marked men:

• Louisville: Charlie Strong.
The annual rite of sportswriters wondering "When is somebody going to hire this guy?" will be missed, but there's a reason they kept asking: Not only did Strong direct top-10 defenses in four of his five years as Florida's defensive coordinator under Urban Meyer, but he's also regarded as an outstanding recruiter, having already lured one blue-chip recruit away from Georgia and another from Florida since moving to the 'Ville, with both players specifically citing Strong as the incentive for their switch. With Cincinnati entering rebuilding mode, the Big East is wide-open for the Cardinals' return to dominance. Grade: A

• Marshall: John "Doc" Holliday.
Another career assistant with solid recruiting chops, Holliday -- an assistant head coach, tight ends coach and fullbacks coach under Bill Stewart at West Virginia -- knows the Mountain State like the back of his hand. He was born and raised there, played at WVU, spent two decades as an assistant under Don Nehlen and was nearly hired to replace Rich Rodriguez in 2007, before the top job went to Stewart a day after the Mountaineers' emotional Fiesta Bowl win over Oklahoma. However, he also brings valuable recruiting inroads in Florida from his days as the Gators' safeties coach and recruiting coordinator from 2005-07. Grade: B+

• Louisiana Tech: Sonny Dykes.
La. Tech's previous head coach was the up-and-coming son of a coaching legend. That worked out OK, all things considered, so the Bulldogs replaced Derek Dooley with the up-and-coming son of another coaching legend, in this case former Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes. After seven years of seasoning under his dad's successor, Mike Leach, at Texas Tech, Sonny transformed Arizona's moribund offense into an attack that averaged more than 30 points a game over his three-year tenure as offensive coordinator and helped propel the Wildcats to their first bowl bids in a decade. All in all, a solid get for a relatively obscure program that was one of the last two in the country still searching for a head coach. Grade: B+

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Grading the season's head-coaching hires.

• Notre Dame: Brian Kelly.
As protracted and embarrassing as Charlie Weis' final untergang was in South Bend, ND did pull off the most efficient -- and successful -- coaching transition in the country. The Irish let Weis go on Nov. 30, and 10 days later they were introducing the hottest name on the market as their new top guy. Kelly's coaching bona fides are fairly unassailable: He won two national championships at Division II Grand Valley State, a conference title at formerly moribund Central Michigan and back-to-back Big East crowns during a 34-6 run at Cincinnati that included the first top-25, top-20 and top-10 finishes in school history in consecutive seasons.

Kelly also maintained a 75 percent graduation rate in his final year in Cincinnati, which surely endeared him to image-conscious ND admins. He broke some hearts (and a few eggs) in Cincy by bailing before the Bearcats' date with Florida in the Sugar Bowl, but that's the only aspect of the process that might be worth quibbling over. Grade: A

• Cincinnati: Butch Jones
It worked like gangbusters the first time, so when it came time to replace Kelly, the Bearcats went right back to the Central Michigan well. Jones steered Kelly's ship into even richer waters at CMU, delivering a 27-13 record and two MAC titles in three years while helping groom quarterback Dan LeFevour into one of the most prolific players in NCAA history. The only knock on Jones is that he, too, might be a bit of a flight risk: In 2007, he was reportedly flirting with a return to the top spot in West Virginia, where he coached wide receivers under Rich Rodriguez, after just one year at Central Michigan. Grade: A-

• South Florida: Skip Holtz
Holtz will forever be known as Lou's son, but he has achieved enough to be considered a success in his own right -- first by leading Connecticut to a conference title in its penultimate year in Division I-AA in the late nineties, and more recently by reviving an East Carolina program that had flatlined under John Thompson. From those depths, the Pirates have rebounded under Holtz to four straight bowl bids and back-to-back Conference USA titles, introducing the football world to budding NFL superstar Chris Johnson along the way. Considering USF waited until Jan. 8 to unload his embattled predecessor, Jim Leavitt -- and that Leavitt apparently still doesn't plan on going anywhere -- Lou's boy is a pretty good get. Grade: B+

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The Doc's Bowl Blitz gets an adrenaline shot from one of the few games that actually started before the institution of the BCS: The Holiday Bowl, pitting No. 20 Arizona against 22nd-ranked Nebraska, familiar Holiday Bowl foes that were a single overtime against Oregon and a single second against Texas, respectively, from crashing the BCS as unlikely conference champions. Beautiful San Diego (or neighboring Tijuana, depending on what you demand from a vacation) has never been a bad consolation.

Ndamukong-ratulations. There are any number of reasons a Husker-Wildcat showdown might carry national interest -- it's a legitimately competitive matchup of ranked major-conference teams, an endangered species in non-BCS games -- but first and foremost is the curtain call for Nebraska defensive tackle, Cinderella Heisman hopeful and all-world quarterback-slayer Ndamukong Suh. If you've seen this year's "Star Trek" reboot, then think of Suh as "red matter" to opposing offenses: One tiny drop is all it takes to make them implode upon themselves into a dark void of nothingness.

As mind-boggling as it was, Suh's spectacular performance against Texas in the Big 12 title game (10 solo tackles, seven for loss, two QB hurries, and four and-a-half sacks against Colt McCoy) was just the cherry on top of an individual performance that put some entire defensive lines to shame all season. Arizona's offensive line is not exactly chopped liver -- the 'Cats have allowed fewer than one sack per game, one of the best numbers in the country -- but then neither was the Longhorns' front before Suh and Friends repeatedly blew through them like the Kool-Aid Man through a helpless wall. Suh didn't hear his name at the Heisman ceremony, but he's still got a chance to leave New York next time as the first name called in at the 2010 NFL Draft in April, and a big performance in a relatively high profile bowl game would go a long way toward securing that honor.

As for the offense ... uh, can we talk about Suh some more? As the loss to Texas proved once again, the defense isn't the Cornhuskers' problem: Nebraska finished in the top 10 nationally in yards and points allowed, as well as pass efficiency D and sacks, and was 11th against the run. The issue from the word "go" has been the 'Husker offense, which scored more like the Nebraska softball team against respectable opponents.

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You might think that a two-year-old bowl kicking off in sub-freezing weather in a crumbling, half-century-old stadium in a town that couldn't care less about college football except when grandstanding for cheap votes would be easy to dismiss, but we know better than to do anything that might invoke the wrath of diehard Temple alum Bill Cosby. So crack open a traditional holiday pudding pop and join the Doc's Bowl Blitz as we tread as lightly as possible on Temple and UCLA in Washington, D.C.'s EagleBank Bowl, which at the very least will be more entertaining than the health-care debate.

Westwood to Washington: 2,684 miles. Facing a MAC team to finish 7-6: Priceless. On the surface, the Who's More Excited To Be Here Award may be a slightly closer race than you think: The Owls come into RFK Stadium off its first winning season since 1990 and its first postseason bid since the 1979 Garden State Bowl, staged when current head coach Al Golden was 10 years old. UCLA, meanwhile, was the very last team in Division I-A to receive a bowl invite: The Bruins spent the last Saturday of the regular season sweating the result of the Army-Navy game, which would have left them at home in L.A. for the second year in a row with an Army upset.

Then again, maybe the Bruins aren't all that jazzed about being in D.C., or the East Coast in general -- their 19-15 victory at Tennessee in September was UCLA's first win in the Eastern time zone since 1980. And whereas the weather in Beverly Hills this afternoon will be mid-sixties and mildly cloudy, it will be hovering slightly below freezing at kickoff in D.C. Instead of palm trees, the Bruins will be treated to large mounds of filthy, unmelted snow from the storm that nearly brought the capital to a standstill last week. If the legendary model train setup at Union Station didn't warm their hearts, it's going to be a cold, cold sunset -- that is, if there was any signs of the sun.

Grab the rubbing alcohol, you're about to get Pierced. UCLA defensive back Rahim Moore leads the nation with nine interceptions, but the best candidate for a breakout afternoon might be wearing cherry and white: Temple's true freshman running back, Bernard Pierce, the MAC's leading rusher by far at 119 yards per game -- a number that shortchanges him a bit, because it includes his one-carry effort against Kent State on Nov. 21, when he was injured on the first play, as a "game." Pierce's absence didn't hurt in a blowout win over Kent, but the offense was held to its worst point total in MAC play in the season-ending loss at Ohio, which snapped a stunning nine-game winning streak and kept the Owls out of the conference championship game.

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We're not naive: The overwhelming share of attention today will be on the NFL playoff picture. But you won't see anything as remotely interesting from the pros as the duel in Nashville between all-purpose dynamos C.J. Spiler and Randall Cobb -- the Doc's Bowl Blitz heads to the Music City in a vain attempt to guess which DIY star is going to come up with the most creative way to score a touchdown.

• OK, so one team is excited to be here, at least. Kentucky is returning to the Music City for the third time in four years, and while you'd think that Wildcat fans would've exhausted every last thing there is to do in Nashville, apparently they haven't: The Kentucky faithful are snapping up tickets just as rapidly as they did when they were here in 2006 and 2007 for the first back-to-back bowl bids in school history. Perhaps they have a reason to be jazzed -- the 'Cats rebounded from an 0-3 start in conference games to win five out of their last seven, including road upsets over Auburn and Georgia, and nearly halted a 24-year losing streak to rival Tennessee before falling in overtime.

UK fans are also highly attuned to the long-running subplot of the season, the fate of coach Rich Brooks, who at 68 could be planning to hand the keys to the most successful era at Kentucky in a half-century to offensive coordinator/coach-in-waiting Joker Phillips any minute now. Brooks has consistently sworn off retirement talk, but he does opt for retirement after tonight, a win in his last game would leave the league's reigning Coach of the Year with 31 victories since 2006, two shy of Bear Bryant's school record over a four-year span from 1948-51.

• Under "Hometown," his team bio just lists "End Zone." Unlike the Oscar-winning Robert Altman film "Nashville," this game doesn't exactly feature an ensemble cast of fascinating characters, but there's no better headliner in town tonight than Clemson omniback C.J. Spiller, making his grand finale in Tiger orange. Spiller was inexplicably denied a chair at the Heisman ceremony despite racking up more than 2,500 all-purpose yards for the season and personally accounting for three of the country's 21 individual performances of 300 yards or better against Miami, Florida State and Georgia Tech. He scored touchdowns as a rusher, receiver, kick returner and punt returner, and even passed for a touchdown in the Tigers' win over N.C. State, just for good measure.

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A unicorn, a leprechaun with a pot of gold, USC in something other than a BCS bowl: At least one of those mythical sights you will be able to observe this afternoon, as the Trojans take on Boston College in the Emerald Bowl. The latest installment of the Doc's Bowl Blitz attempts to make sense of the madness while simultaneously adding to it.

• "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" Just to give you an idea of what a historic occasion this is (if not necessarily of the variety Trojan fans will want to remember): The last time USC played in something other than a January bowl with an eight-figure payout, Barack Obama was still a lowly Illinois state senator, Florida Atlantic and FIorida International had yet to play a single game of football, and the Trojans' current starting quarterback, Matt Barkley, was enjoying a nice long Christmas break away from the soul-crushing grind of fifth grade.

That year, 2001, was Carroll's first with the Trojans, a mostly forgettable campaign that ended with a 10-6 loss to Utah in the Las Vegas Bowl. Boston College comes in with an identical record as USC (8-4) but is probably much happier to be in San Francisco, having endured one of the offseason's weirdest firings, the loss of both its best player and its starting quarterback and a roller-coaster start to the '09 campaign to win three of the last four games and punch their ticket to another respectable postseason date -- and extend their streak of eight-win seasons to nine, one longer than the Trojans.

• Not appearing in your picture. Catching the general spirit of dejection heading into an unusually trivial bowl season, three SC players -- tight end Anthony McCoy, right tackle Tyron Smith and defensive tackle Averell Spicer --evidently decided it wasn't worth the effort to maintain eligibility for the game in the first place. McCoy and Smith are bith starters, with McCoy ranking second in the receiving corps with 457 yards and a team-best 21 yards per catch. That trio joins embattled running back Joe McKnight, who finally made the trip to San Francisco but still has not been cleared to play after being repeatedly spotted last week behind the wheel of a very nice Land Rover.

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It's the day after Christmas, and after making your mad last-minute shopping dashes and stuffing yourself full of turkey, all you want is to flop down on the couch and drift off into a blissful sleep. And what better bowl to do that in front of than the Little Caesar's Pizza Bowl? Take a load off and try to stay awake as the Doc's Bowl Blitz previews Marshall's showdown with Ohio U., the game pretty much everyone has dubbed the absolute least interesting of this year's 34-bowl lineup.

• You may remember me from such bowls as ... The Little Caesars Pizza Bowl is just a crass renaming of the semi-venerable Motor City Bowl under new, more financially solvent (and more delicious) corporate oversight, and even the new sponsor has a familiar ring to it: As an ex-Birminghamian who's now watched three Papajohns.com Bowls hold his adopted hometown in thrall for literally minutes at a time, I must say: Shame on you, Detroit, for trying to bogart our pizza-sponsored bowl steez. Please, we have so little. Leave us our pepperoni-based postseason monopoly.

The matchup, meanwhile, rehashes a rivalry played annually from 1997 to 2004 when both Marshall and Ohio were members of the MAC's East Division. Actually, "rivalry" may be a misuse of the term, as the Thundering Herd went 7-1 against the Bobcats during that stretch, but who knows, maybe Ohio will be looking to avenge some pent-up frustration against an outfit that's fallen far from its dominant heyday under Chad Pennington, Randy Moss and Byron Leftwich.

• Big Mo belongs to the Bobcats. Ordinarily the MAC champion gets the conference's Motor City -- dangit, sorry: Little Caesar's Pizza Bowl -- bid, but with this year's champion, Central Michigan, poised for its fourth straight postseason drive to Detroit, the Chippewas elected to accept a bid from the GMAC Bowl in Mobile, Ala., instead. In all honesty, Ohio's not a bad substitute -- the Bobcats finished 7-2 in-conference, put up a decent showing in the MAC title game, by holding the explosive CMU offense to its lowest point total in conference play, and their only bad loss was a home upset at the hands of Kent State back in October.

Marshall, on the other hand, lost four of its last six games, and despite clawing their way to bowl eligibility for the first time since moving from the MAC to Conference USA in 2004, saw fit to fire coach Mark Snyder the day after closing out the regular season on the wrong end of a 52-21 blowout at the hands of lowly UTEP. So it's reasonable to guess Ohio might have a slightly more positive mindset heading into this one.

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You mean there's a New Mexico?! In fact, there is, and there's even a bowl there. The Doc's annual bowl blitz rolls on with the fourth annual New Mexico Bowl, which pits Fresno State (8-4) against Wyoming (6-6) in a game that's sure to captivate literally tens of fans.

Stoppable force meets entirely movable object. One of this bowl's contestants, Wyoming, got shut out in three games this season, one of them against 3-9 Colorado, and finished in the bottom 10 nationally in total offense. The other, Fresno State, got pegged for 50 or more points in three games this season, the last of them against 3-9 Illinois (in which the Bulldogs needed a two-point conversion from an offensive tackle to seal the victory), and finished 97th nationally in total D. Which one wins out? You won't know unless you watch -- and whether you admit it or not, you probably will, as your only other viable sports spectating options are the Duke-Gonzaga hoops game, the Ironman Triathlon on NBC, and some golf tournament in Las Vegas whose coverage will probably be 80 percent tut-tutting over the Tiger Woods scandal.

Actually, maybe everyone's going to run wild. Wyoming's defense isn't much better than its offense -- 91st in the nation against the run, handing over 170.5 yards per game -- and they have the misfortune of going up against the most productive rusher in Division I-A. Yes, the nation's leading rusher, Ryan Mathews, wears a Fresno State uniform, and has gone over 100 net yards in every single game this season except Nevada (in which he went down with an injury in the second quarter) and Louisiana Tech (in which he was on the bench recovering from said injury). His best game of the season, oddly enough, was a 234-yard, three-TD performance against the same Boise State team that had just shocked the world by holding Oregon's LeGarrette Blount to negative yardage. The all-time bowl record for rushing yards is 307, set by Georgia Tech's P.J. Daniels in a Humanitarian Bowl romp against Tulsa six years ago; do not be surprised to see Mathews make a strong bid to break this record.

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How is Saturday's Florida-Alabama showdown the game of the year? Let us count the ways: It matches the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the BCS standings, two of only four teams this decade to navigate the SEC gauntlet without a loss. It's a de facto play-in game for the national championship. It features a pair of top Heisman contenders, with the added drama of being Tim Tebow's final SEC game (or the penultimate gasp of the unconquerable Tebow hype machine, depending on your opinion of Florida's sainted quarterback). And it's not like any of the other conference championship games this weekend are going to be anywhere near as interesting, unless you're dying to see which 7-5 SEC team will be taunting its in-state rival Monday morning with claims to a transitive ACC championship.

The FloraBama tilt in the Georgia Dome also boasts the novelty of being the first ever conference championship game to pit a pair of undefeated teams against one another. Accordingly, their combined record of 24-0 is the best for any matchup in college football history outside of the bowls.

But that's where the firsts end, even if you restrict your memory to the last few years. Play-in game for the national title? Last year's Gator-Tide showdown obviously qualified, and in retrospect, their 1994 game in Atlanta might have qualified as well. Pitting No. 1 against No. 2? Last year's SEC title game lands in that category as well, according to the AP poll at the start of the game, as do two other games in the past five seasons.

In fact, one of those two games came at the end of the regular season, matched up a pair of undefeated (11-0) teams, served as a play-in for the national title, and, practically speaking, served as a conference-title game to boot: The 2006 Ohio State-Michigan extravaganza ended in a thrilling 42-39 win for the Buckeyes and punched OSU's ticket to the BCS title game in Arizona.

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