Ohio State 37, Michigan 7. in almost all the big ways, Michigan was clearly a better team in 2010 than it was a year ago, and certainly than it was in 2008. The Wolverines staved off another second half collapse with wins over Illinois and Purdue, must-win games they lost in '08-09, securing a winning record in the process. The offense found a cornerstone in prolific quarterback Denard Robinson, the spark for the No. 1 total offense in the Big Ten and the highest-scoring attack at Michigan in more than a decade. They'll be in a bowl game next month for the first time in three years, with a lineup set to return 18 starters in 2011. This is a better team that should be better still in nine months.

But again today, on the biggest stage of the season, against the most important measuring stick, the Wolverines came up woefully short. The losing streak against Ohio State – now at seven years, and nine of ten since Jim Tressel arrived in Columbus in 2001 – is torture enough. The gnawing part at this point, years after the losing became an ingrained reality, is that the gap shows no signs of closing.

This beating was worse than last year's in Ann Arbor, and on par with the rout in Columbus in '08. The Buckeyes won the yardage battle by 128 yards. The Michigan offense was plagued by dropped passes. Three more giveaways today pushed it past Purdue for the worst turnover margin in the conference. With a chance to sustain a bit of momentum in the second quarter, the kickoff team followed a touchdown to cut the Ohio State lead to 10-7 by allowing an 85-yard return that immediately restored the Buckeyes' advantage to ten. A pair of shanked punts set up the OSU offense in Michigan territory for two more scores. Robinson channeled his worst tendencies, fumbling away an early scoring chance in the red zone and later exiting the lineup with a hand injury just before the half, leaving the offense to be shut out in his absence the rest of the way. In three hours, the only hint of progress is that it took the Buckeyes an entire quarter to formally begin the onslaught.

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Nike was obviously very proud of the retro "Pro Combat" look it dreamed up for Ohio State to wear in today's rivalry match with Michigan, in honor of the Buckeyes' 1942 national championship team. Part of that look included lightweight "Vapor Jet" gloves featuring "premium Magnigrip CL technology" and custom art specifically designed to display a block 'O' when the palms are brought together. Nike has put a similar design on the gloves for every team in the Pro Combat line, including a script 'A' for Alabama in last year's BCS Championship Game.

The only problem? When Ohio State receiver DeVier Posey brought the gloves together to form the 'O' after taking in a touchdown pass from Terrelle Pryor to put the Buckeyes up 24-7 in the second quarter, he was hit with a 15-yard unsportsmanlike penalty. OSU was subsequently forced to kick off to the Wolverines from its own 15-yard line instead of its own 30. Later, when offensive lineman Mike Adams flashed the 'O' to the crowd to celebrate a 32-yard touchdown run by Boom Herron that extended the OSU lead to 31-7 in the third quarter, he was flagged for an unsportsmanlike penalty, too.

Fortunately for the Buckeyes, the score was too lopsided by the middle of the second quarter for the extra yardage to matter. (It didn't matter, either, when a 98-yard touchdown run by Herron in the third quarter – the longest play in the history of Ohio Stadium – was negated by a lame holding penalty at the end of the play, slashing the gain to 89 yards and forcing OSU to eventually settle for a field goal instead.) Next time, maybe they'll get the novel handwear approved by the Big Ten officiating office before signing off on it.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Well, that didn't last long: Barely four months after being hastily assigned as Bobby Johnson's successor at Vanderbilt – and subsequently charming the pants off reporters with his down-home turn at SEC media days – Robbie Caldwell is out as the Commodores' head coach. Tonight's finale against fellow 2-10 bottom dweller will be his official going-away party.

The timing isn't the only surprise. The university dropped the "interim" tag from Caldwell's title in August, and the title of head coach at Vanderbilt has tended to come with a certain degree of job security, as long as there's some sign of an intermittent pulse on the field. The Commodores are 2-10 with six straight losses by an average of 27 points, but they did manage to upset Ole Miss on the road in the SEC opener, and it's never been about winning at Vanderbilt, anyway. Johnson lasted eight years, only two of them ending outside of the SEC East cellar, and probably could have kept going as long as he wanted.

More likely, a career assistant who openly basks in his turkey-inseminating roots just isn't the best fit as a the face of the SEC's answer to the Ivy League. When he also struggles to keep the team within two touchdowns of almost anyone else in the conference, well, you've got yourself a mutual divorce in less than six months.

The first name of the lips of the rumor mill to fill Caldwell's seat: Auburn offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn, who's successfully renovated the pass-happy spread that led the nation in total offense at Tulsa two years in a row in 2007-08 into more run-heavy version to suit the unparalleled strengths of his quarterback, Cam Newton. Malzahn isn't going to find another talent like that anywhere else, but he is almost certain to get more attractive overtures than Vanderbilt – unless, of course, he's just waiting for the perfect opportunity to take his show to a school with no formal athletic department and virtually no talent at all relative to the teams it plays on a weekly basis. Once Vandy gets its hands on a guy willing to embrace that challenge, it should hold on for dear life, no matter who he is.

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Scroll down or click here to join the Doc's game day live blog, covering every game, all day long.
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Today is a proxy war for the Big Ten championship, but really, it's all very simple. If Wisconsin beats Northwestern, the Badgers go to the Rose Bowl. Unless, that is, Ohio State somehow loses to Michigan, in which case Michigan State would go to the Rose Bowl. Unless the Spartans also lose to Penn State, in which case we're back to the Badgers – you know, probably. But if Wisconsin loses, it's the Buckeyes all the way. Unless of course their patented slow-down strategy leaves the door open for Michigan State to leap them in the polls with a surprising blowout in Happy Valley. A close shave for Wisconsin could also leave room for Ohio State to make a move if things get ugly in Columbus.

See? Simple.

Essentially, it's this: If everything happens the way we think it's going to happen, Wisconsin is going to Pasadena via a) Its position in the BCS standings, and/or b) Its head-to-head win over Ohio State in October. And we're always right when it comes to this sort of thing, aren't we?

• What: Game day live blog, all games in play, all day long. All comments welcome.
• When: First kickoffs are at noon; blog kicks simultaneously, running through at least the colossal primetime tilts in Athens, Los Angeles and Stillwater. Come as you please.
• Who: You, of course. And your arch nemesis, just to get into the spirit.
• How: Hit "Watch Now," enter comments into the available box and do your part to accelerate the slow, agonizing death of conventional journalism.
• Why: It is the final regular season Saturday of 2010, blessed be its soul. Get your kicks in while you still can.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

You can preach "never say never," and you can argue that every championship team has to "steal" a game or two against long odds to survive the grueling season. This is true. But there are long odds, and there's a 24-0 deficit against the defending national champion, on the road. By storming out of that hole for a thrilling, 28-27 win Friday over hated Alabama to complete a 12-0 regular season, Auburn established itself as a steel-hearted, icy-veined survivor even among the steeliest and iciest in recent memory.

The comeback in Tuscaloosa was the Tigers' fourth this year in a game they trailed at some point in the second half, and the third in which they rallied from behind in the fourth quarter – a number that doesn't include their overtime escape against Clemson, or their 19-play, 86-yard march for the game-winning field goal on the last snap at Kentucky, an epic journey that drained the final 7:25 from the clock with the game tied at 31 apiece. They trailed entering the fourth quarter against South Carolina, and won, 35-27. They fell behind early in the fourth quarter against Arkansas, and won, 65-43. This time, they trailed Alabama at the start of the fourth, 27-21, and won again.

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Nevada 34, Boise State 31 (Overtime). The concentric circles radiating outward from the Broncos' second half collapse affect the college football landscape on every level, on up to the national championship game, and we will get to them all. But at the center, there is a kicker: Kyle Brotzman, a senior with 65 successful field goals to his name over four years as Boise State's primary kicker, who will be forever linked to the two he missed tonight in Reno.

The first was a 26-yard chip shot with one second on the clock at the end of regulation, immediately on the heels of arguably the diving catch of the year by Titus Young to save a game the Broncos had nearly let slip away twice. Instead, wide right and overtime. The second came in OT, when Boise failed to make a first down on offense, and Brotzman pulled the go-ahead attempt wide from 29 yards, setting up a successful boot for the win by Nevada's Anthony Martinez. Within minutes, "Brotzman" was a trending topic on Twitter, where he was gleefully – and with painful accuracy – dubbed the new Ray Finkle.

Before there was Brotzman, though, there was the most consistent, bankable outfit in America blowing a 24-7 halftime lead. The high-octane Boise offense, good for at least 48 points in seven straight games coming in, scored a mere seven in the second half. The Boise defense, dominant throughout the season and throughout the first half, was reduced to a pile of ribbons in the second, when it yielded 24 points on nearly 400 Nevada yards. The entire operation, a decade in the making, seemed to seize and topple over in a matter of minutes.

With the Broncos' fall comes a hail of broken winning streaks: Twenty-five straight in all games, 37 straight in the regular season, 22 straight in the WAC. With the head-to-head tiebreaker in the Wolf Pack's favor, the conference championship will go to a team other than Boise State for just the second time in nine years. It's the first time the Broncos have ever lost a WAC game they were favored to win. Their hopes for a fifth perfect season in seven years are finished.

As are their hopes – shared by Cinderella lovers and BCS haters everywhere – of crashing the BCS title game. Given the comebacks by Auburn and Oregon earlier in the day, those odds were already much longer by kickoff than they'd been 12 hours before. But they won't be crashing the Rose Bowl, either, a coveted consolation prize that now falls to TCU, which won't be nudged out of the on-deck position, after all. The Frogs are shouldering the underdogs' burden alone. For Boise State, the debate is over. The dream is dead. The beast is taking its best hope for a breakthrough back to the Humanitarian Bowl.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Not since the newly minted Los Angeles Raiders won Super Bowl XV 30 years ago has a league felt quite as chilly toward a potential champion as the Big 12 does this year toward Big Ten-bound Nebraska, and even then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle saw fit to show up long enough to hand the trophy to his rival, Raiders owner Al Davis. Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, on the other hand, couldn't even make it as far as Lincoln today to congratulate the Cornhuskers on sealing their second straight North Division title with a 45-17 win over the conference's other outgoing member, Colorado.

In part, maybe, the snub had just a little something to do with the 'Huskers' pending departure next year, which very nearly destroyed the conference last summer. Mainly, though, it was because Beebe and his aides in Big 12 offices were flooded with "very, very vile, vulgar, disgusting messages" from irate Nebraska fans who sensed conspiracy in the lopsided penalty total in the 'Huskers' 9-6 loss at Texas A&M last week:

Big 12 Conference administrators did not send any representatives to Friday's Nebraska-Colorado football game in Lincoln because the league feared for their safety, commissioner Dan Beebe confirmed to the Journal Star on Friday night.

Nebraska fans flooded the Big 12 office with negative e-mails and voice messages this week, some of which Beebe said were threatening. Those messages will be turned over to authorities, he said.

Beebe himself received more than 2,000 e-mails from Nebraska fans after Saturday's game at Texas A&M, when fans and coaches were upset with the officiating in Nebraska's 9-6 loss.
[…]
"…we had to take this stuff seriously until we figure out what's going on," Beebe said. "It took us a long time – of course, it's a holiday week – to sort through all of those and figure out which ones were threatening, and we're going to turn them over to the authorities and contact the people who left the messages, if we can figure out who they are."

Among the not-so-well-wishers, according to Beebe, was a message suggesting he "should be packing a gun," another threatening to hit him on the head with a bottle and stab him in the street and at least one targeting his daughter's Facebook page. Another came in from someone impersonating an officer who called to say Beebe's daughter was "unresponsive" and had to be taken to the hospital. Shockingly, an NFL security consultant sized up the situation and recommended Beebe steer clear.

That was just as well with Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne, who swore off comment after the game. He's more concerned with accepting the big trophy from his nemesis after next week's Big 12 Championship Game in Dallas, anyway. But if Nebraska actually wins it, and departs for the Big Ten with the final championship game trophy for the foreseeable future under its arm, it's safe to say that coronation is going to be among the most awkward ever committed to film. And if by some one-in-a-million chance there is an anti-Nebraska conspiracy out of the conference office, they're going to feel the full brunt of it to keep that moment from happening.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Oregon 48, Arizona 29. We usually think of Oregon's offense as a finely tuned Ferrari built for maximum speed at all times. But the better analogy might be to a snowball gathering steam downhill, as Arizona discovered in short order when its five-point halftime lead turned into a 26-point hole early in the fourth quarter. The Ducks scored touchdowns on five straight possessions to open the half, the final three expanding their lead from 27-22 to 48-22 in a span of three-and-a-half minutes.

That may qualify as a "slow start," but it should be clear by now that slow starts that suddenly overwhelm opponents in a manic flurry of destruction is the Ducks' standard M.O. At Tennessee, Oregon trailed 13-3 well into the second quarter, before rallying to tie it just before the half. At Arizona State, the Ducks were down 24-14 late in the second quarter, before reclaiming the halftime lead with a pair of late touchdowns just ahead of the break. Stanford roared in for a touchdown on each of its first four possessions on Oct. 2 and still looked unstoppable on offense with the halftime lead. USC had a narrow lead midway through the second quarter, and regained it, 32-29, with two quick touchdowns out of the locker room to start the third.

Including tonight, Oregon has outscored the Vols, Devils, Cardinal, Trojans and Wildcats by a grand total of 135 to 32 in the second half, leaving each to limp away from seemingly competitive efforts with demoralizing tread marks down their backs. Through 11 games, the Ducks have now ripped off at least three straight touchdowns in the second half of nine of them.

The speed of those assaults may be a result of defenses yielding to the same unrelenting tempo that compels them to buy time by faking injuries. It may be the Oregon staff taking its time to figure out the defense and adjust accordingly for a sudden outburst of big plays. It may be a switch going off when the Ducks feel themselves beginning to be backed into a corner. But for sheer, demoralizing firepower, it's unmatched by anything else in college football. And it's one victory away from taking the ambush to the biggest stage in Glendale, Ariz.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Auburn 28, Alabama 27. Remember those old "Nothing But Net" ads for McDonald's, in which Michael Jordan and Larry Bird continued heaping layers of impossible obstacles onto shots to force a miss that never came in a game of H-O-R-S-E? Cam Newton doesn't, because he was like four years old when those commercials came out. But today was his version of those spots as he makes his own bid for the sports pantheon.

Down three touchdowns. On the road. To the defending national champions. In front of a hostile, 100,000-strong crowd baying for your blood. Against a top five defense selling out on every play to neutralize your bread-and-butter. With the national championship on the line. Nothing but net.

The odds, after Alabama's first quarter barrage, were staggering. The Crimson Tide had two weeks to prepare for this game, and executed everything on the blueprint. Quarterback Greg McElroy and receiver Julio Jones lit up the suspect Auburn secondary for career highs. The defense consistently pressured and hit Newton. The Tigers' prolific spread attack finished with a season low in total offense, coming in more than 200 yards below its season average on the ground. If you can't beat them after racing out to a 24-0 lead, running up a 120-yard advantage in total offense, holding the soon-to-be Heisman winner to 1.8 yards per carry on a long gain of 12 and getting an ear-splitting effort from a demonic home crowd, my god, when can you beat them?

The answer may be that there is no blueprint for this guy. Alabama focused all of its defensive energy on penetrating the line of scrimmage to disrupt the running game, forcing Newton to make them pay through the air, and succeeded wildly. So he made them pay through the air. After a 1-of-4 start with three straight three-and-out series in the first quarter, Newton was 12 of 16 passing over the final three, with three touchdowns. He connected on three third down throws that kept eventual scoring drives alive and completed a critical 4th-and-3 pass in the fourth quarter that set up the eventual game-winning TD pass to Philip Lutzenkirchen (Bavarian for "scores in the clutch"). Faced with an obstacle as intimidating as the Crimson Tide front seven, Newton went over it to lead his fifth second half comeback of the year.

The Auburn defense had a lot to do with that, recovering from the initial shellshock of the first quarter to turn the Tide away on four red zone trips the rest of the way, which amounted to two 'Bama field goals and a pair of lost fumbles created by Tiger hustle. Auburn's offense, for all its struggles, scored a touchdown every time it crossed onto the Tide's side of the field. Sometimes, that level of opportunism is disappointing in a championship frontrunner, the lack of dominance a cause for concern. The Tigers still have a lot of work to do in the secondary, but today was not one of those times. It was the kind of day only a champion survives. With win No. 13 next week in Atlanta, the title will be official.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

West Virginia 35, Pittsburgh 10. Even if you were aware of it, you may not remember. But there was brief window there in October, after Pitt had hammered Syracuse, Rutgers and Louisville to open the Big East slate 3-0, that the Panthers looked like they may save the conference from complete humiliation when the BCS bowls dole out invitations next weekend. OK, it was very brief. And with its second conference loss today effectively eliminating Pitt from the equation, the league's big-money situation descends that much further into ignominy.

Three guesses now which unranked, uninspiring outfit inherits the pole position for the Big East's automatic bid to (in all likelihood) the Fiesta Bowl. Go ahead, guess. Yes, that's right: UConn. The same UConn that ranks 95th nationally in total offense, changed starting quarterbacks four times, struggled to score 10 points against the worst Michigan defense ever, lost to Temple by two touchdowns and opened the Big East schedule with back-to-back losses at Rutgers and Louisville, the latter by a final score of 26-0. At that point, mid-October, the Huskies were 3-4 and going nowhere.

One month on, and a three-game streak with skin-of-the-teeth wins over both Pitt and West Virginia has the very same Huskies in position to secure a big-money berth by extending the run against Cincinnati (Saturday) and South Florida (next week). The Big East: Where redemption lives!

The good news, such as it is, is that West Virginia seems poised to restore some measure of quasi-respectability to the position if UConn flubs the opportunity. The Mountaineers came into the day ranked in the top 10 nationally in every major defensive category and lived up to the numbers by holding the Panthers to 10 with four turnovers. At 8-3, WVU may even put the conference back in the top 25 this week for the first time since Oct. 17. That's not much, but compared to a conference champion that was shut out by Louisville, it's something.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.