Remember those rumors, way back in the fall, about the Jacksonville Jaguars setting their sights on hometown hero Tim Tebow before he'd even played his senior season? That owner Wayne Weaver was said to be considering plucking the Tebow Child early in the draft as a sales-boosting gambit? Lately, the scorn of the scouts and his obvious struggles in the Senior Bowl haven't tempered local enthusiasm for Tebow as the draft draws nigh, but at least one member of the franchise isn't afraid to express his, let's say ... misgivings about adding Tebow to the roster, according to the Florida Times-Union:

[Offensive lineman Uche] Nwaneri posted on the Jaguars’ Web site that, while cashing a check, a bank teller started talking about how Tebow will save the Jaguars.

So Nwaneri posted his five points on Tebow, with capital letters:

"1. He can't throw, PERIOD.

2. He can't read any coverage other than probably cover 2 or man.

3. The QB Wildcat WILL NOT WORK IN THIS LEAGUE. PERIOD.

4. He doesn’t know how to take a snap from center.

5. HE CAN’T THROW, and that’s really something you either have or not."

I guess that settles it, then. Obviously, there's nothing the kid can do to help the team. Oh, and one more thing:

Nwaneri then urged fans to buy tickets because he doesn’t want to come out "for pregame warmups to a COMPLETELY EMPTY STADIUM ANYMORE."

Let's talk business, Uche: Whether or not the Tebow Child can make a successful transition to the pro game on the field, putting warm bodies in seats is obviously among the greatest of his many other talents. Give the people what they want. And even if Nwaneri and the legions of critics are right that Tebow is bound for NFL flopdom, I guarantee thousands of Georgia fans would be willing to make the drive down to the site of so many Cocktail Party aggravations for the sole purpose of watching their former tormenter operate behind a line that might not feel much like blocking for him.

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Holly welcomes your adulation and veiled threats at nastinchka-at-yahoo, etc.

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Wonder of wonders, the Brett Favrening of Tim Tebow continues apace. That's not to imply that the great Favre cares about anything but himself, but to point out that wherever Tebow goes, whatever he gets into, he's immmediately and automatically bigger than any other element in the story. He is the story, just by being himself. He's even beginning to win Peter King's heart before taking his first NFL snap.

The latest and greatest roil comes to us courtesy of the Tebow anti-abortion ad, sponsored by the Christian group Focus on the Family and already approved in script form by CBS to run during the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, which is -- brace yourself for the shock -- running into some opposition from prominent women's groups:

NEW YORK (AP)—A national coalition of women’s groups called on CBS on Monday to scrap its plan to broadcast an ad during the Super Bowl featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, which critics say is likely to convey an anti-abortion message.

"An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year—an event designed to bring Americans together," said Jemhu Greene, president of the New York-based Women’s Media Center.
[...]
[Focus on the Family spokesman Gary] Schneeberger said he and his colleagues "were a little surprised" at the furor over the ad."

"There's nothing political and controversial about it," he said.

Would a Focus on the Family ad be getting any attention outside the close-circle political blogosphere without the involvement of the Tebow Child? Doubtful, making this a stroke of marketing inspiration. Of all the divisions this episode's bound to spark, however, none are as bizarre as the alliances it has the potential to create:

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The Doc's Bowl Blitz collapses just short of the finish line, then crawls to the oasis of that hallowed BCS Championship Eve tradition, the GMAC Bowl. This year's GMAC stands as the only non-BCS game pitting a pair of conference champions in the MAC's Central Michigan Chippewas and the rather obviously-named Trojans of Troy, perpetual conquerers of the Sun Belt. We have anticipated any questions you might have, and have answered them in the order recieved:

• It's a nebulously defined financial services company.
• Mobile, Ala.
• We don't know how or why they're allowed to play this week, but find it an honor fitting Central Michigan's record-breaking philosopher-king/quarterback, Dan LeFevour.
• Of course Charles Barkley is prominently involved.
• "G-Mack."

Did we miss anyone? Onward then:

• Sandlot champs! This is the game you probably best remember as the site of that 64-61, double-overtime epic between Byron Leftwich-led Marshall and East Carolina in 2001, still the highest-scoring game in bowl history. This year, it's serving a more sinister mission as the kid brother to Boise State and TCU's "Separate But Equal" tilt in the Fiesta Bowl: If you thought of the Fiesta as the kiddies' table, where the Mountain West and WAC tykes were kept neatly out of the way so as not to interfere with the grown-ups in the remaining BCS games, tonight's GMAC matchup is like the playpen in the corner where the unruly infants are kept.

Troy, 9-3, has won or shared a conference title four years in a row. But the real indignity here is dealt to the Chippewas, who are 11-2 with losses only to Arizona and Boston College, upset Michigan State in East Lansing, and hammered their nine MAC opponents by an average of three touchdowns apiece en route to their third conference title in four years. For their troubles, they were dealt a token slot at the bottom of the Associated Press poll and a total snub by the BCS standings. With the departure of head coach Butch Jones to succeed another former CMU boss, Brian Kelly, at Cincinnati and LeFevour's impending move to the NFL, this may be the swan song of one of the most productive eras in Chippewa history.

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The Doc's bowl blitz sends its rigs barrelling into the Northwest for Idaho and Bowling Green in the always popular Humanitarian Bowl, where the field is blue, the elements are unforgiving and the perpetually under-attended soiree finally has itself two bowl-thirsty outfits just happy to be playing anywhere this time of year. Join us, won't you?

BYOBowl. Welcome, travelers, to Boise's famous blue turf and to the Roady's Truck Stops Humanitarian Bowl, the full name of which is tragically shortened for television, with the consequences that many viewers in non-Roady's-saturated states will continue to have no idea what the company is/does. (Would the game's original sponsor, Crucial.com, have stood for this? Have the cherished marketing values of the dot-com bubble already eroded?) The Humanitarian is also the second of two bowls this week once sponsored by the mighty MicronPC company, title sponsor here from 2004-06 and permanent victim of last fall's stock market catastrophe.

With all the economic turmoil forcing travelers to the ground, you'd think truck stops would be flush with ready cash, but it ain't so: The Humanitarian Bowl remains a potluck organization, with each team actually required to provide its own corporate sponsor. (It's a provision that's cost the game participants in the past, but on they go.) And as of last year, the trophy actually resembles a boring old golden football, but we vastly prefer the men's lavatory edition hoisted by Fresno State in 2007.

Checkered pasts. Bowling Green ended the regular season on a four-game win streak to finish 7-5 after a 1-4 start, but the Falcons haven't fared well against any of the quality teams they've faced since upsetting eventual Sun Belt champion Troy in the opener. They lost to both eventual MAC division champs, Ohio and Central Michigan, as well as the only two ranked teams on the schedule, Missouri and Boise State. None of the Falcons' six victims in conference play finished with a winning record.

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The Doc's Bowl Blitz swings to the Sunshine State for the elusive top-25 showdown between Miami and Wisconsin, each seeking that equally elusive ten-win season, in (what for now is called) the Champs Sports Bowl.

A proud history of ... something. Stay with us here, because we're bound to get at least one aspect of this wrong, but it's a tricky thicket, the Champs Sports (A Division Of Foot Locker) Bowl. Known previously as, among other things, the Blockbuster Bowl, Carquest Bowl, the MicronPC Bowl, the Mazda Bowl and the Tangerine Bowl (but not the Tangerine Bowl that's now the Capital One Bowl, which was also at one point the Citrus Bowl), this is one of those games where Florida Citrus Sports just sticks a descriptor in and puts on a game in Orlando and counts on people to show up on account of it being Orlando in December. (Also, it's played at the Citrus Bowl, the stadium, which is just no help at all if you're still trying to keep any of this straight.)

If you're the kind of person who needs a mnemonic device, just remember this is an honorable contest that once saw fit to name infamously awful Georgia Tech quarterback Reggie Ball its Most Valuable Player, and more recently bestowed the only postseason MVP award to ever go to a punter, Florida State's Graham Gano.

Expect the expected. Miami is 8-1 in the state of Florida this season and undefeated in two previous appearances in whatever this bowl is. Wisconsin, not so much: The Badgers lost to Florida State 42-13 on this very spot a year ago in one of the most lopsided games of the postseason. They represent the Big Ten's last hope to reverse a three-game losing streak since signing on to the Citrus Champerine Classic in 2006 -- next year the Big East will take over the Big Ten's tie-in on a four-year contract.

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The Doc's Bowl Blitz wishes a happy holiday weekend to all, and along with visions of sugarplums presents this hasty but good-hearted (like our Christmas shopping) preview of the 2009 Hawaii Bowl. The combatants: Nevada and SMU. The stakes: A festive shirt and a trophy born of a perverse genetic experiment. Make us proud, boys!

The desert raises 'em fast. Lordamercy, but Nevada can run: This year's edition of the Wolf Pack is the first in NCAA history to produce three different 1,000-yard rushers in the same season. Backs Vai Taua and Luke Lippincott and quarterback Colin Kaepernick have done all right by their fleet feet -- after a rocky 0-3 start, the Pack reeled off eight straight wins and went over 50 points five times before dropping a winner-take-all trip to Boise State for the WAC title in the regular season finale. Nevada leads the nation in rushing with the highest per-game and per-carry averages on the ground of any team this decade, and ranks second in total offense behind only the Case Keenum show in Houston.

One slight wrinkle, though, before you go lunging for the over: For this one, the Kaepernick stands alone. Lippincott and Taua are both sidelined against the Mustangs, thanks to an injured toe and a failure to put the "student" in "student-athlete," respectively.

Daddy's home. Run 'n shoot guru June Jones, former head honcho and folk hero in the islands for directing Hawaii to an undefeated regular season and Sugar Bowl berth in 2007 (a fact you're sure to hear repeated ad nauseam this evening), has wrought another minor miracle in his second year at SMU, in that the 7-5 Mustangs are no longer a-molderin' at the bottom of the Conference USA standings after back-to-back 1-11 campaigns in 2007-08. Instead, they upset eventual conference champ East Carolina in October, won four of their last five down the stretch and were just a field goal against Marshall away from winning the conference's West Division. They make their first bowl appearance here since the infamous Death Penalty shuttered the program for two years in 1987-88, and can sew up the program's first winning record since 1997.

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The Doc's Bowl Blitz settles into the meaty middle of the postseason with the Poinsettia Bowl, pitting California against No. 23 Utah in a game we'd sell a kidney to see just to be able to spend Christmas in San Diego, where the forecast does not call for freezing rain.

Like The Holiday Bowl, but without all those disco whale commercials. The San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl is the second-most prestigious bowl named for a flower and the only one named for an ostensibly poisonous plant (unless you count Little Caesar's pizza toppings). Although the Poinsettia Bowl (established in 2005) is a relative toddler in bowl years, it has enjoyed an unchallenged reign of terror as the most unwieldily-named college football contest until the spectacular emergence of the St. Petersburg Bowl Presented By Beef O'Brady's last weekend.

Poinsettia organizers responded to the onomatological challenge by pulling out all the stops in terms of material goods, presenting Cal and Utah players with a hoodies and hats to ward off the notorious Southern California chill; the testosterone-pumping warriors also get to pay a visit to the San Diego Zoo, notable for the seemingly-constant presence of adorable baby pandas. (Know how to instantly knock the Poinsettia Bowl up a few notches in prestige? Get the zoo to sponsor this shindig. Nothing sells like the combination of cute baby animals and killer flora.)

Key matchup: Cal's overrated coaching versus Utah's overrated everything. The Bears are making their seventh straight bowl appearance, and it comes at the end of a season that wasn't altogether as disappointing as critics are making it out to be. Yes, they're rightfully tagged as underacheievers for fading to 8-4 after another September foray into the top 10, and yes, we're pretty sure coach Jeff Tedford actually is a bona fide genius (just not necessarily at coaching football), but Cal's losses came at the hands of Oregon, Southern Cal, Oregon State and Washington. No slouches in that bunch. All of the losses, however, were at best decisive (31-12 at the hands of the Beavers) and at worst miserable blowouts (42-3 against the Ducks and 42-10 in the regular season finale in Seattle).

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There's no on-field action this week, but with Alabama fans at peak fervor there's never any shortage of drama. Exhibit A: Courtesy Friends of the Program, we submit an Alabama attorney's motion to delay a trial so he can watch his beloved Crimson Tide take on Texas for the national championship. Quoth one of the boldest legal documents ever drafted in the Yellowhammer State:

1. This case was set for trial several months ago before certain monumental events occurred that were beyond the anticipation of the attorneys and the clients.
[...]
3. Currently, one of the two great teams in this State are playing for a national championship and has enjoyed an undefeated season and clinched the SEC Title Game.
4. Most of the attorneys representing all of the named Defendants have tickets and reservations to be in Pasadena on the 6th day of January, 2010, which date would conflict with trial date as travel times and schedules for the game overlap the trial as currently set.
5. In fact, the Honorable Jim Lloyd has children that live in the area and is scheduled to be with them in California to celebrate the game and the Tide's success.

Elocution safari aside ... did our daring legal hero really describe 'Bama's run to the Rose Bowl as "beyond anticipation"? Careful, Counselor: That smacks strongly of betting against the Tide, and we all know where that'll get you.

This document was actually filed in a court of law, and readers may see the entire motion for themselves at FOTP. It gets even better -- naturally, Auburn partisans figure prominently as foils of any appeal to Bammer privilege, as does such venerable legal arcana as "Roll Tide!!" We understand John Grisham has already optioned the rights: Look for "Motion to Roll" in finer airport bookstores next fall.

• I followed up a 3-0 start, including a high-profile out-of-conference win, with a five-game conference losing streak.

• I was 1-6 against teams that finished with a winning record, but 4-0 against opponents that ended below .500.

• Despite ranking first in my conference and eighth nationally in tackles for loss, I managed to hold only two conference opponents under 20 points.

• One of my defensive backs led the nation in interceptions, but he doesn't get a lot of help-- I'm only No. 32 in scoring defense.

• I'm not known for being a hotbed of stable quarterbacking, and this season was no different -- thanks to injuries and general boneheadedness, I finished the regular season ranked 102nd in team pass efficiency, behind such offensive luminaries as Akron, San Jose State, UNLV and Syracuse.

• Even with my main rival's better-publicized struggles at quarterback and on defense, I still managed to lose by three touchdowns, finishing 0-3 against BCS schools in my state.

So ... am I a bowl team?

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The week in the undercards.

Well, that happened

Boise State finished off another perfect season; TCU is No. 4 in the final BCS standings, and all either team has to show for it is a rerun of last year's Poinsettia Bowl in this year's Fiesta.

It's a BCS bowl, one of the Big Five, to be sure, but Spencer Hall isn't wrong when he calls it the "kids' table." Rocky Top Talk wonders: "How much more success do Boise and the MWC have to bring to the table? Boise State has steamrolled teams for so long that it's a wonder they're not bored."

(Notably not boring: The lovingly assembled BSU Fiesta Bowl splash page, featuring what appear to be prominent Bronco players engaged in acts of rhythmic gymnastics.) 

Compartmentalized in the desert, these two wildly successful upstarts won't get any kind of mathematical love for a share of the national title, no matter who wins. That said, though, that game is still way more compelling than, say, the impending Iowa-Georgia Tech Orange Bowl.

Final conference countdown

Mid-Major Monday official show pony Dan LeFevour broke all kinds of records in the process of leading his team to victory in the MAC championship game, and favorite receiver Bryan Anderson burnished a national record of his own for most consecutive games with at least one reception in the Chippewas' otherwise dull win over Ohio U.

Over in Conference USA, Houston capped off an erratic season by falling at East Carolina, a team we'd written off as a shadow of last year's C-USA champions after a much slower start against non-conference heavies West Virginia and North Carolina. But ECU ultimately reprised its run through the conference and mastery over the nation's top-ranked offense in the title game -- the '08 Pirates held high-flying Tulsa to just 24 points, and the '09 edition held Houston to 32, a dozen below the Cougars' season average.

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