News-Record.com

A few random notes from the first -- and longest -- week in college football, which, according to the NCAA, includes games on five days. It began this past Thursday -- or don't you remember ESPN's "25 Hours of Football" countdown to the thrilling LSU-Mississippi State game? -- and continues into the Bowden Bowl.
** Wake Forest completed 45 passes -- the fifth-highest total in ACC history -- and lost at Boston College. That's no surprise. ACC teams are now 0-12-1 when completing 40 or more attempts in a game. Wake's got four of the top five on that list.
** N.C. A&T coach Lee Fobbs said his game film was inconclusive on the interception-incompletion call in the end zone that effectively aborted the Aggies' comeback bid at Winston-Salem State. Three photographers said they saw Herb Miller's tipped pass hit the ground before winding up in the arms of a Ram defender. The play was ruled an interception.
** The crowd of 22,000 in Bowman Gray Stadium set a record for a WSSU home game, and it was the fourth-largest for a Division I-AA game in the land.
** The current state of the SMU program explains why the NCAA doesn't really whack anybody anymore when it comes to rules infractions. A full 20 years after unprecedented and never repeated "death penalty" to the program, the Mustangs still aren't competitive. Having seen what the sanctions did to SMU, the infractions committee isn't going to shut anybody else down.
The other factor in play is TV, which was still in its infancy in the 1980s as far as college football was concerned. (Only three years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the NCAA's firm control of schools' access to TV.) With so many contracts involving so much cash in 2007, the powerhouses -- which SMU once was -- don't have to worry about being shut down. That's bad for business.