Working for the weekend and thinking the Bengals season is over if they don't beat the Dolphins Sunday at PBS....

Fire Brian Kelly for the death of a Notre Dame student videographer? That's the position of the always engaging Jason Whitlock from foxsports.com in this article. The student videographer, if you haven't heard, was killed Wednesday when a crane he was atop tumbled over in gale force winds.

Among other things, ND has a giant PR problem on its hands. Most important, is the death of a young student, who according to his facebook postings, was concerned about his safety long before climbing onto a lift that took him 50 feet in the air.

Kelly won't be fired and he won't quit. Notre Dame is far too arrogant to do or accept that. But if that was my kid and the investigation ultimately pointed to athletic department officials who were responsible, there wouldn't be enough money left at ND to field a football team. And the turnover in the athletic department would be enormous.

This blog may not be reproduced, reprinted or repurposed in whole or in part or in any manner without the written consent of Ken Broo

I've got my latest Broo View Podcast posted to my web site: www.kenbroo.com. In episode 240, I'm joined by Tom Deinhart from rivals.com. We talk about the Big 10's expansion plans and how that may affect the total landscape of college football. Tom has some interesting thoughts on how things may play out for the University of Cincinnati. Here's a quick link to the show. Plenty of cool interviews and past Broo View Podcasts episodes can be found in the "Podcast & More" sections of www.kenbroo.com.

Just posted a new Broo View Podcast on the front page of my web site, www.kenbroo.com. Episode 236 is all about the NFL draft with the editor and publisher of Pro Football Weekly, Hub Arkush. If you're in a hurry, you can download it here.

Just posted to the front page of my web site, www.kenbroo.com are two new interviews. From the National Football Post, Wes Bunting the site's college football guhru, joins me to talk about the upcoming NFL draft.

And I caught up with former Cincinnati Reds relief pitcher, Wayne Granger. We visit about the final game and the final pitch (which Granger threw) at Crosley Field some 40 years ago this summer.

A new Broo View Podcast, featuring Hub Arkush, the editor and publisher of Pro Football Weekly will be posted midday Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday!

Charlie Weiss, coaching Zombie had his last appearance as a head coach Saturday night. Great game to watch. Sorry Charlie, hate to see you go. Here’s a version of the home game.

Internet reports percolating since late last week about who the next head coach would be Actually, there’s been plenty of speculation about who the next head coach would be all the way back to last season. Here’s the latest: there’s a plane apparently on the way to Norman, Oklahoma today with the Notre Dame athletic director on board, hauling a brief case full of wadded money to entice the head Sooner to jump to South Bend.

The fact that the Notre Dame athletic director was denying it as late as last night (as well as Stoops)? Just a mere detail.

And of course, there’s the Brian Kelly rumors that have a zombie like life themselves. Bob Griese fanned those flames Friday on ABC, who gave us either the scoop of the season or another indication that he’s in serious ned of a hearing test.

If it’s Kelly going to South Bend, so be it. It’s not like they’re going to stop playing football in Clifton if he goes. By the way, my gut feeling all along on this is that Kelly isn’t going to Notre Dame. And if UC fans really want to worry about their coach going anywhere, it should be to a team like Florida, Oklahoma or anyplace where a national title can be won instantly. If you think you can win a national title instantly or at any point in the next four years at Notre Dame, you haven’t been paying attention.

But if Kelly wants it, and they want him, he should go for it. And every UC fan everywhere should send Kelly a letter thanking him for what he’s done.
And if he leaves, here’s what I would do if I was UC athletic director, Mike Thomas. You’re going to laugh. You’re going to say I’m crazy. You’re going to call me naive. It’s OK, not like it hasn’t happened before.

If I’m Mike Thomas, my first phone call is to Urban Meyer. You’re laughing, I can hear you. Hang on a second. I know that’s out there. I know the chances of getting Urban Meyer to think about leaving there for here is something like one in a million. But why not take the shot? If you’re Thomas, here’s what you say. You say, Urban, you’re a Cincinnati boy. If I’m not mistaken you went to our school right? A lot of your family still lives here, right? Your up here for some of the holidays, you’ve stopped by to watch Brian Kelly coach in practice, am I right here Urban? Urban, I hear you snickering. It’s OK, don’t blame you. But who’s your quarterback next season? If I’m not mistaken his name isn’t Tim Tebow. You’re probably going to win another national title this year. You’re probably going to get by Alabama. Texas? You’ve got a month to get ready for Colt McCoy, you’ll figure something out. You’re probably going to win another national title this year. What’s that make? Three in the last four years? What else have you got to prove down there?

If I’m Thomas I say, yeah I heard your making decent coin down there. Read all about that six year, 24-million dollar deal you signed back in August. Highest paid coach in the SEC, if I’m not mistaken. I also see your buyout remained just a half million dollars. Sounds to me like you’re a man who wants to keep his options open. Urban, you still there? You haven’t hung up on me, have you? Good.

Let me tell you what we can do here, besides bring you home. First, you can build off what we’ve already got. Great athletic facility, cozy stadium, fan base that hasn’t been this energized since Huggins had that Final 4 team.
Brian Kelly? Great coach, great motivator. Guy also gives a great speech. Yeah, we wanted to keep him. But think about what you can do. You got the pipeline to Florida. You got Ohio. You got that other school in Columbus on the run. You got a new school president here who’s sports crazy, loves football, wants a national title himself. Best of all, you don’t have your own legacy you have to trump every season.

Look, Urban, I can’t pay you four mil a year. I could go two, maybe two and a half. Bring any assistant coach you want with you. I’ll send the jet. Heck, I bet if you want your own jet, we got someone up here who’ll get you one. We’ll even throw in Kerry Coombs. You heard of him, right? He’s in more living rooms than Jay Leno.

So what do you say Urban? You wanna come home. You want to continue to build this thing? You want a chance to write a new legacy? What do you want? Just tell me, you got it.

Urban…Urban? Hello? Urban, you there?

Good Monday Morning!

I watched the Notre Dame-Connecticut game Saturday. The Notre Dame defense is pathetically bad. Bad angles to tackles, bad tackling, poor pass coverage. It’s amazing, really, how awful that team is defensively. The Irish lost. They got a life line at the end of regulation when the Uconn kicker missed a very makeable field goal. But you know it was just a matter of time.

But what struck me more than the game itself, is how NBC laid out the sad saga of Charlie Weiss.. I think it was late fourth quarter when they ran a piece of tape…sound btie we call it in the biz, of Weiss on the day he was named the Notre Dame head coach. He said the reason why he was standing there, that day, was because the team went 6-5 that season. And if they were looking to go 6-5, he was the wrong man for the job.

Notre Dame of course, is now 6-5 with a game to play. There’s always bad news for UC fans when Notre Dame loses, but here’s a piece of good news. If the Bearcats don’t beat Pitt and don’t get to play in the Sugar Bowl or some other BCS bowl, the Gator Bowl just came into the picture. I don’t care how well Notre Dame fans travel, would you want a 10-1 UC team or a possible (but improbale) 7-6 Notre Dame team representing the Big East in Jacksonville?

But that’s a story for another day.

I don’t know whether or not Brian Kelly is on Notre Dame’s radar. There are reports this week he’s not the first choice, that he’s not on their short list. Reportedly, the Irish will make a full scale charge at Urban Meyer or Bob Stoops. As much as we like Kelly, Meyer and Stoops are bigger names. And the only thing Notre Dame likes more than firing a head football coach is hiring one with a big name.

But what any coach who’s approached by Notre Dame needs to do is this: play the tape from the news conference introducing Weiss on that December day in 2005. And then, play the tape of him crying his eyes out after Uconn beat Notre Dame in overtime Saturday. Or the tape of his post game news conference Saturday night.

Then make sure you get as much money as you can going in….and even more going out. You’ll need it, because you won’t have your dignity when you depart from Touchdown Jesus. Like Weiss in 2005, the new coach will come in roaring. Like Weiss today, the next coach will leave sounding like a squeaking gerbil, ground to a ‘nub’. Notre Dame’s problems go far deeper than a head coach. It is a bad football paradigm. Buyer beware. Wake up the echoes? Better to let ‘em sleep.

This is why Brian Kelly is one of the best football coaches in the country. He doesn’t worry a whole lot about what he doesn’t have. He just takes what he has to work with and wins.

A lot of coaches like to say they don’t spend a lot of time worrying about who’s hurt, who’s holding out, who’s ineligible. About 95 percent of them are lying when they say that. You bet coaches break a sweat in the middle of the night when they know they’re going into a game without a key player. I love it when coaches say, we’re not going to talk about who’s not here, we’re going to talk about who IS here. Then, of course, he wanders back to his strategy room and groans about to whatever assistant coach, secretary or owner will listen to him.

I’m sure Kelly moans about the same thing in private. And I’m pretty sure at some point in his dealings with the media, somewhere, he’s uttered the same line about who’s he not worrying about. But I know this: with the system he runs, Kelly can plug just about any quarterback with a modicum of talent and win. That’s why he’s one of the best football coaches in America.

Like yesterday. He know on the flight home from South Florida he wasn’t going to have Tony Pike. On the day Pike had his arm surgery, which was Tuesday of this week I believe, Kelly was floating the ruse that Pike might play against Louisville. If his game was to make Louisville coach, Steve Kragthorpe stop and think about it, only for a minute, maybe it was good strategy. But Kelly knew all along that you had a better shot at quarterbacking his team against Louisville than Tony Pike did. Yet he didn’t just find a way to replace the most important player on his team. He found a way to drop a keg of nails on the Cardinals heads.

Good coaches do that. They always have an end game. When I worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma years ago, we had four major college football teams in my station’s coverage area. In Norman, there was Barry Switzer and the Sooners. Switzer was larger than life, knew it, played it and won by running the ball a lot. If his quarterback threw the ball 20 times a season, it was a bad season. At Oklahoma State, Jimmy Johnson was coaching the Cowboys. He was from Switzer’s coaching tree, had an upstart and talented coaching staff. He could never beat Oklahoma. But Jimmy Jump Up, as Switzer used to call him breathed new life into what was the doormat of the then Big Eight.

At Tulsa, there was John Cooper. This is long before Cooper landed at Ohio State, long before the ‘boys in downtown Columbus’ picked him apart for sport. Cooper pieced together some nice teams. Had a running back by the name of Ricky Watts, who went onto some success in the NFL.

But the smartest of the bunch may have been another coach who ran a big time program within the scope of our television signal. It was Lou Holtz, the head hog in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Holtz had landed there, after flaming out in less than one season coaching the New York Jets. By 1977, he had the Razorbacks roaring again and in the January first, 1978 Orange Bowl against the Oklahoma Sooners. Arkansas was a big, big underdog. More than 18 poins, as I recall. And to make matters worse, Holtz had suspended his star running back, Ben Cowins.

Now the 1977 Razorbacks were no slouch. They came into the game number six in the country. But with Cowins, and three other starters for that matter, suspended, Holtz had to find a way to handle the Sooners blistering offense and score some points of his own. He found a way, in giving the football to a running back who wasn’t a household name, even in his own household. His name was Roland Sales. Sales had run up a modest 399 yards all season. His best game was 71 yards. But Holtz knew Sales slashing style would be the perfect way to not only attack Oklahoma’s defense, it would control the clock and keep the Sooners offense off the field. Sales rushed 23-times that night for 205 yards. Arkansas beat Oklahoma, 31-6. I was there. And I saw Holtz find a way to get his team a win.

This is what Brian Kelly does. This is why he’s one of the hottest coach in America. This is why in a month or so, his name will be bandied about like tennis ball when better paying jobs come open at bigger schools. Ben Mauk gets hurt, there’s always Dustin Grutza. Mauk is denied another year of eligibility, there’s Tony Pike. Pike hurts his arm, here comes Zach Collaros who tosses the ball 17 times Saturday against Louisville and completes 15 passes.

Maybe it’s Kelly’s system, maybe its over recruiting at key positions, maybe it’s luck. Maybe it’s all of that. Roland Sales hasn’t been mentioned in any sportscast anywhere in 25 years. But he was all I could think about Saturday watching Collaros do his thing. Kelly looks nothing like Lou Holtz. Kelly coaches nothing like Lou Holtz did. Kelly’s teams throw so many passes, the control tower at CVG diverts jets. Holtz would rather dine on nuclear waste than throw a pass. But they both have a lot in common. Let’s hope that stops before the conversation turns to Notre Dame.

If UC head football coach, Brian Kelly is doing what I think he's doing, we're watching a giant game of 'cat and mouse'. Kelly said Tuesday that quarterback Tony Pike may play this Saturday against Louisville. That was quite a statement, as Pike was just shaking off the wooziness of anesthesia. The senior QB had early morning surgery Tuesday to reattached a plate on his left forearm, initially put there after Pike broke his arm last season. The plate came loose after Pike took a hit in the Bearcats win over South Florida last Thursday night.

Kelly says Pike could be back at practice Thursday. Unless he went to a tent revival after surgery, I don't see how Pike can. But Kelly is floating this, I think, to keep the 'Ville on its toes. When you don't know whom you have to prepare for, it tends to chew up a lot of practice time.

UC is a prohibitive favorite, something like 17 points this week. The Bearcats are playing at home. And their back-up QB, Zach Collaros was terrific in relief of the injured Pike in Tampa last week. It makes no sense to play Pike this week. But for Kelly to say that this early in the week would be making Louisville's job easier. So we get 'cat and mouse' for awhile.

Happy New Year's to you and yours. To get you off to the right start in 2009, you can download my latest Broo View Podcast here. Then, head on over to my web site: www.kenbroo.com and you can catch back episodes of the Broo View Podcast. In this final episode of 2009, we hear comments from Bengals head coach, Marvin Lewis and Chris Crocker, Dhani Jones and defensive coordinator, Mike Zimmer.

Just booked for my Sunday Morning Sportstalk Show on 700 WLW: USA Today national baseball writer, Bob Nightengale. He'll be 'on' in the eleven o'clock hour.

Orange Bowl prediction: UC 27 Va Tech 17. USC wins the Rose Bowl, too fast and too strong for Penn State.

Less than a couple of hours until midnight here in the east coast. How about a little "Guy".

2009 has to be better than 2008, doesn't it?

Happy New Year!

Good Afternoon! (At least in the EST part of the world)

To get us going today here's a link to my latest Broo View Podcast. This episode, we chat with espn.com's national college football writer, Ivan Maisel. But for more great audio and the latest in sports, head on over to my web site: www.kenbroo.com.

Just posted on my web site www.kenbroo.com is the latest Bengals Report Podcast. This week, Bengals Report executive editor, Mark Hardin and I have a rare thing to talk about: a Bengals win!
You'll hear comments from Marvin Lewis, TJ Houshmandzadeh and Cedric Benson. If you're in a hurry, you can dowload the latest Bengals Report Podcast here. But check out my web site anyway for past episodes of Bengals Report Podcast and The Broo View Podcast.

Another huge weekend of football is upon us. Big regular season finales in high school football in the greater Cincinnati area, including Ryle at Boone County where tonight, we make our latest stop with the now, seemingly mythical High School Playbook Tailgate Party.

Saturday, I think UC wins on the road at Connecticut and Ohio State beats Penn State in Columbus. And Sunday? Well check out my latest Broo View Video Podcast below!

The latest edition of Bengals Report Podcast is posted. Mark Hardin and I preview the Bengals vs Steelers game this Sunday in Cincinnati. You can find the podcast on my web site: www.kenbroo.com. If you're in a hurry, it's here.

Random thoughts as we head into what looks to be a beautiful fall weekend in southwestern Ohio....I'm sick of campaign ads. You can't escape them, even when watching college and pro football. Here's an idea: ban all of them and make the candidates actually campaign. Have a minimum of ten debates. It worked for Lincoln and Douglas. Actually, it worked for Lincoln a lot better than Douglas.....I've got this hunch that Michigan State beats Ohio State Saturday. It wouldn't be an upset. The game is in East Lansing, both teams are 6-1, 3-0 in the Big 10....I wouldn't want to be Kansas Saturday. I've got another feeling that says Oklahoma will take out its wrath, from losing to Texas last weekend.....That 'ooops' you heard Thursday was from BYU....I think the Big East will be the best conference in college basketball this season. UC will do well to crack the top eight. If Xavier gets Jordan Crawford eligible, I don't see a team in the Atlantic 10 that beats them....If I'm Mike Brown, I'm shutting Carson Palmer down for the balance of this season. At 0-6, the Bengals are just playing out the string. Palmer is under contract for the next six seasons, through 2014. If he needs surgery, and it appears that has at least been discussed, why not have it now and be ready for a fresh start in '09? By the way, I'm holding to my contention that the Bengals will NOT go 0-16. Remember, the Chiefs are coming to town in December....So let me get this straight, you think enough of Jerome Simpson and Andre Caldwell to draft them in the second and third rounds respectively and you don't even DRESS them for games? Really? When you KNEW you needed help along your offensive line and defensive line? I don't want to hear about all of Chad Ocho Cinco's off season trade demands and TJ Houshmandzadeh's contract being up after this season. You have Chad under contract through 2010 (and he wasn't going to sit out) and you can always slap the franchise tag on Houshmandzadeh. This is another classic example of a team with no plan. It simply caroms from one crisis to another.

Who was happier on Thursday: the Red Sox for extending the ALCS for one more game, or Fox Sports, for extending the possibility of a Boston vs Philadelphia World Series? Tampa Bay vs Boston in the World Series might be a ratings disaster for Rupert's Network.

I'm talking sports Sunday on 700 WLW. Among my guest on Sunday Morning Sports Talk is NBC-Sports Illustrated's Peter King. I'm on from 9am-11:30am. You can catch me 'over the air', on line or on XM Channel 173.

Have a great weekend!

Oklahoma wins, Ohio State is in. West Virgina loses, LSU is in. If you’re a Buckeye fan, I’m happy for you. If you’re a college football fan, someone who loves the sport, not the individual team, I feel for you.

This whole thing is a joke.

There is no way on God’s green earth that a team should go from fifth, to third to championship game without playing a game. But that’s exactly what Ohio State has done, since beating Michigan. LSU & Kansas lost last week, Ohio State moved up to third. Oklahoma beat Missouri Saturday night, Pitt beat West Virginia, and OSU moves up to the top spot and a berth in the national championship game. Excuse Jim Tressel if he’s saying today…this’d be a helluva job, if we didn’t have to play those damn games.

I’ve got nothing against Ohio State and if I did, I’d have the sense to keep my mouth shut about it. It’s not about Ohio State, it’s about the ‘state’ of division one college football. The whole thing is a joke, and you’re the butt end of it.

One-A football has a playoff, two-a, three-a, every level of NCAA basketball has a playoff except, of course, the one NCAA sport that the entire world follows, Division One football. Everybody follows it. People who don’t know if a football is blown up or stuffed follow NCAA Division One college football. On the grand scale of sports, it plays number two to the NFL’s number one.

People get geeked about the NCAA division one basketball tournament, but only because of the brackets. They want to win their office pool, be the only ones at work to correctly predict Princeton will knock off Washington State and have Villanova going all the way. That’s the allure of the NCAA tournament.

But college football? College football is a social event as much as a sport. It’s parking on the edge of campus and walking through the reds and yellows of autumn leaves on the way to the stadium. It’s your college band playing your college fight song. It’s taking your wife back to your school to watch


your team and running into your college sweetheart. Don’t think that hasn’t happened once or twice.

It’s stopping by the drive through on Friday night so you’ve got the brewskis in the fridge for at least 12 hours before kickoff. It’s inviting your friends over to watch your team play on your brand new 42-inch flat panel.

College football is high fives, groans, cheers and wondering exactly what drug the offensive coordinator is on when he calls an off tackle run on third and 14.

So why is Division One college football ‘not’ good enough for a playoff?

When the argument for one came up many years ago we first heard ‘well, we wouldn’t want to disrupt the sanctity of the bowl system. The bowls game operators would be compromised by a playoff system. (emphasis on the word operators). How could you have a national championship game in the Rose Bowl without offending the Orange Bowl and making the Cotton Bowl feel less important. Guess what? That’s exactly what we’ve got now, with no playoff. The Orange Bowl and the Rose Bowl and every other bowl game doesn’t get to host the national title game. And the Cotton Bowl hasn’t been a major New Year’s Day destination for years.

Lately we’ve heard, ‘well, we couldn’t extend the season, the student-athletes would miss too much time in the class room. The can’t be playing football three weeks into January. Of course, these same academians, so far removed from the real world that they suffer panic attacks when leaving campus, have no trouble letting student-athletes play three weeks of basketball in March. Or look the other way when a senior football player stops going to class and starts going to draft camps after Christmas.

The whole thing is a joke.

But you know what? I’ve got a solution. It’s always better to be part of the solution, than part of the problem. So while I was watching Oklahoma beat Missouri Saturday night, I came up with a plan. Call it the Broo plan.


My wife, the first Mrs. Ken likes to tell me I’m long on plans and short on delivery. So let me deliver my plan for a Division One college football playoff.

First, no team plays more than eleven regular season games. Eliminate the conference championship games. You won’t need them. They simply exist as money makers for conferences. You’ll make so much money with this plan, believe me, everybody will be happy. Everybody.

My plan would call for the the top 12 teams, plus one, to play off for the national title. The 13 would be decided by the same folks who decided on the rankings up until this BCS nonsense began: the football writers, broadcasters and the coaches. One poll, 13 teams.

Each team would be seeded. The number one team would draw a bye until the semi-finals.

13 teams, 12 games in the first round of games. 12 teams, six games in the second. In round three, reseed the teams, the number ranked team would play the fourth seeded team. Two would play three.

On championship weekend, you would decide the national champion.

Now think about this. Most, if not all of college football’s regular season is done, as of last night. Most, if not all of colleges on the quarter system are finished for the holiday break by the end of this week. Most schools on semesters….most….are finished by December 20. When do the bowl games begin? Right….just about every year on December 20.

If the team ranked number one entering the playoffs wins the championship, it will play 13 games. The team it faces, if number one gets that far, would play a maximum of 15. Bowl eligible teams play 12 regular season games as it is now. And a lot of them have a lot of time off in between their regular season finale and their bowl game. Look at Ohio State.

What about the teams below the top 13? Well, remember, there are 32 bowl games. My system would need 12 bowls or sites to whittle down to one


champion. That leaves 20 other current bowl games that need teams. That’s 40 more team. That would mean the top 53-teams in the country would play in a post game season game. Do we really need more than that?

Think of the excitement, the hype. Number 11 Cincinnati gets to play number two Kansas in week one at the Holiday Bowl…or the Music City Bowl….winner moves onto the Capital One Bowl in Orlando.

UC fan tell me you wouldn’t want that, instead of what you got for your troubles this season.

Number one LSU, let’s say, lying in wait in Baton Rouge, watching all of this play out, the chatter on radio stations like this one all about whether or not the teams playing will be tired by the time LSU joins the party….or will LSU be rusty and primed for an upset when Ohio State gets ahold of them.

It’s be crazy. It’s be good. It makes too much sense not to do it. Bu that’s probably why the NCAA would never go for it. Probably why this time next year, somebody else who’s had a little too much to drink on a Saturday night will come up with another plan and talk about it on this radio station the next morning.

All I know is this: the NCAA’s BCS deal? The whole thing is a joke.

Right now, Ohio State and Boston College are unbeaten. But could we have a scenario this year where no major college football team plays for the national title unbeaten? There's a good chance. In fact, we may have a two loss team contending for the title in the national championship game.


Ohio State still has rough road games remaining at Penn State and Michigan. Boston College still has games on the schedule at Maryland and Clemson and dicey home tilts with Miami and Florida State.


Oklahoma, LSU and Oregon are the best of the one loss teams. But each faces choppy water between now and the end of the season. LSU's toughest test will be at Alabama. But that could be it for the Tigers, until the SEC Championship game. Oklahoma still has a dicey road trest at 6-2 Texas Tech and a home game against instate rival, Oklahoma State. West Virginia could be lurkiing at the end. But the Mountaineers have some tough Big East games coming up, including one at Cincinnati.

My guess is no team will be unbeaten come early December. And that is yet another compelling reason to have a playoff system. But I'm not holding my breath, waiting for one.

Just posted today the latest "Bengals Report Podcast". You can find it on my web site: www.kenbroo.com. It's on the front page, easy to find.

Sports Rock! rocks this Sunday night at 11:35p on Cincinnati's Channel 5 WLWT. My guess is, we'll have plenty to talk about in the wake of the Bengals vs Steelers game. Check out our 'internet only' version of Sports Rock! on www.wlwt.com.

And if you can locate the Colorado Rockies offense, please call the team. It's 'gone missing' and they need it badly.

Have a great weekend!

Just back from Oxford, watching one of the better college football games I've seen this season. Ohio beat Miami (Ohio) 34-24 in a game that meant little in the standings...but of course everything. Miami and Ohio are bitter rivals.

Glorious day to watch a game, full sun and temperatures hovering near 6o, unusual for this area of the country, this time of the year.

Yeager Stadium is one of the truly beautiful venues to watch a college game. So is Peden Stadium, in Athens for that matter.

There really is nothing quite like MAC football. It's offenses are generally varied, no two teams playing alike like you see in some conferences. And today's game featured big plays on both sides of the ball. Ohio's terrific running back, Kalvin McRae rushed for 180 yards and two long touchdowns. Miami's quarterback, Mike Kokal, on a fourth and one, tied the game at 24 with a 36 yard touchdown run. Ohio finally prevailed, despite dipping into the third string for its quarterback. Starter Austen Everson was held out, with a bad ankle. Back up Brad Bower fumbled on the Miami one, through the end zone for a touchback...then left later with an injury.

With the win, Ohio is now 9-3. It's been almost 40 years since it's been this good for the Bobcats. Now it's onto the MAC Championship game next Thursday night in Detroit against Central Michigan. A bowl trip, win or lose, awaits Ohio.

I realize, this may bore some of you. But what the hell, it's my blog isn't it? But if you're from Ohio, or attended either school, you should know the rivalry is strong again. Better days ahead for Miami. Rip 'em up, tear 'em up give 'em hell Ohio.

Ken

Just added to my web site today is the latest edition of The Broo View podcast. Log onto www.kenbroo.com and download it. I've got some thoughts on the state of the Bengals and you'll hear from some of the players about being 5-5 and their playoff chances.

Also just added today, the latest Bengals Report podcast. Bengals Report executive editor, Marc Hardin and I discuss the Bengals win in New Orleans last Sunday. We've got some comments from the players on this podcast as well.

Check it out at www.kenbroo.com. Or, if you'd prefer, click here for a quick download of The Broo View.

Ken

Chad Johnson says when he sees Brian Russell this Sunday, he'll say only "sorry". He said it with a laugh today. Russell is the player that knocked Chad senseless when the Bengals played the Browns here in Cincinnati back in September. Johnson was left with a bloodied chin that required stitches.

Chad might say "sorry" for another reason Sunday. The past two games, he's amassed 450-receiving yards, a new NFL record. If Chad torches Russell, the "sorry" will fit.

The Bengals are still banged up. Levi Jones, Rich Braham, Kelley Washington all listed as doubtful for Sunday. Safety Dexter Jackson practiced today. He missed Sunday's game in New Orleans with an achilles heel problem. He's officially listed as questionable, which meands it's "50-50" that he plays.

Carson Palmer, named today the FEDEX player of the week. Well deserved.

More as the evening progresses here in chilly Cincinnati!

Ken

105,708 the official attendance...largest crowd in Ohio Stadium history...Michigan's blitz has been realively ineffective today...left to single coverage, the OSU wide receivers have been open, a lot....

Huge call, dumb play by Michigan's Shawn Crable....late hit, helmet to helmet hit on Troy Smith...automatic first down and the Buckeyes live on....Oh what a catch by Brian Robiskie...an outstanding catch after Smith's adlib...11 plays, 83 yards and a five play scoring drive...42-31...73 points in this game? Are you kidding me?

Great call to start the 4th quarter...Steve Braeston with the end around....the Wolverines set it up in the third quarter with a hand off underneath....good call on replay, Braeston's knee was clearly down before the ball broke the plane...doesn't matter....Hart is in for his third of the day...why would Michigan line up for two...then kick it after the time out...makes no sense...now it's a four point lead....and the Wolverines will need a TD to grab the lead....makes no sense....

And another Ohio State turnover, third of the day. OSU center playing with a cast, apparently not a problem in games before this one...but it's been an issue today...

And another third down when Michigan throws, instead of runs....even though they've seemed to have figured out teh OSU run defense.