ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And to put his story in some perspective, five Florida statewide receivers have been suspended from the school's next game for their roles in the campus brawl this week. So the sublime and the sadly predictable sides of big time college football lead us straight to sports and Stefan Fatsis. Hi, Stefan.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Robert.
SIEGEL: And to football in a moment, Rhodes scholars first. Some famous ones in the annals of sports.
FATSIS: Absolutely. A Supreme Court justice, an early football star Byron Whizzer White, a former NBA player and Congressman Tom McMillan, and is a current Rhodes scholar, Reed Doucette who played basketball at USC.
SIEGEL: Well, back to football now. Myron Rolle's team Florida States good but they're ranked 19th, they're not likely to play for the national championship in January. So which teams are likely to play for it?
FATSIS: Well, the most likely scenario right now is the champions of the SCC and the big 12 conferences meeting. Right now, that's number one Alabama, number two Texas Tech. They're the only two major conference undefeated teams. Alabama's 10 and 0. Their head coach Nick Saban and he's in his second year, he got a $32 million contract to revive the Bear Bryant tradition. Two games left for them against mediocre opponents, then the SCC championship game which is already set. It'll be against number four Florida, and if both teams win their lead up games to that game this will effectively be a national championship semi-final.
SIEGEL: And the Cinderella team of college football this year, Texas Tech.
FATSIS: Number three school in its own state behind Texas and Texas A&M, and they don't even get the top recruits, which means credit to head coach Mike Leech. He is a risk-taking offensive innovator, an intellectual polymath. This guy went to law school. He quotes Churchill way more than Lombardi. He creates havoc for opponents with unfamiliar formations on offense, and he's got a bombs-away style. Their last two wins have been over top-ranked Texas and number nine Oklahoma State. Texas Tech is off this weekend, and then they play number five Oklahoma and then Baylor and then their conference championship.
SIEGEL: OK. If Alabama and Texas Tech both slip up, if both lose one of their remaining games, what happens in that case?
FATSIS: Well Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, USC, they all have a shot at the championship game, which is January 8th in Miami, and then you could have three non-major schools finish unbeaten and not get to play in the title game. Utah, Ball State, Boise State and that'll mean we'll have the usual national debate on whether college football should have a playoff.
SIEGEL: And joining that debate surprisingly, a new voice, the President-elect.
FATSIS: Yeah, on the night before the election, Barack Obama said during Monday night football during an interview that he was fed up with these computer rankings and this and that and the other. He said, take the top eight teams and have a playoff, but not even a president-elect riding a tide of national good feelings has much pull when it comes to college sports. University of Oregon's President David Frohnmayer replied that we have the most compelling regular season in all of sports, and I'm sure that contributes to Senator Obama's enjoyment of our great game.
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FATSIS: You know, Putin's going to look easy compared to these guys.
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SIEGEL: OK. One last note, there was a report bemoaning the - it's very small number of minority head coaches in college football, just tell us briefly about that.
FATSIS: Yeah. The group, Black Coaches and Administrators reported that just four of 119 head coaches in the upper tier of college football are black, a little over three percent. We started the season with six, but two have been fired in recent weeks, Tyron Willingham at Washington, Ron Prince of Kansas State, and the numbers are shocking when you consider that more than half of the players are minorities and more than a quarter of the assistant coaches are African-American.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Stefan.
FATSIS: Thanks, Robert.
SIEGEL: Stefan Fatsis, who joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and the business of sports, is the author of "A Few Seconds of Panic," a five foot eight, 170 pounds sportswriter plays in the NFL. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.