Remember when NFL-caliber offensive talent ruled the Big 12? Guys like Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy and Michael Crabtree were smashing offensive records left and right in college before graduating on to the big leagues.

Those days are over. In 2009, the conference was home to three of the top 10 defenses in the nation. This year should be no different, as teams such as Nebraska and Texas field some of the strongest D you'll find in college football.

So, not surprisingly, the Big 12's top 12 pro prospects mainly reside on the defensive side of the ball this year.

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In a strange 2009 season for the Oklahoma Sooners, the strangest game took place on November 21.

OU arrived in Lubbock as a healthy seven-point favorite over a decidedly average Texas Tech team. The Sooners left the humiliated victims of a 28-point drubbing, looking like a shadow of the team that had played for a national championship just a year earlier.

As tumultuous as last season was for OU, most of the individual results were understandable, even if the final sum was disappointing. A drubbing from the Red Raiders? Just didn't compute.

With a new season quickly approaching, there are plenty of reasons for optimism in Sooner Nation. Still, the Tech debacle sticks out like a sore thumb among the memories of '09.

Looking back, a host of the major issues that plagued the Sooners last season came to a head in this game. As painful as it may be to re-visit it, let's look back to see what we can learn from the whole sordid affair.

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Let's say you're new Florida State defensive coordinator Mark Stoops.

You've inherited a unit that is a shadow of the nasty bunch that used to terrorize opponents back in the days of Peter Boulware and Marvin Jones. Now, you're looking at a D that gave up 6.7 yards per play last year, 115th in the country. That represents a 43 percent increase from 2008, when the Seminoles allowed 4.7 yards per snap.

Newly installed head coach Jimbo Fisher didn't hire you to maintain the status quo. Thankfully, it can't get much worse. The real question: How much better can it get?

Fans in places such as Tallahassee and Champaign are counting on purported saviors like Stoops and first-year Illinois offensive coordinator Paul Petrino to instantly upgrade their sides of the ball. If 2009 is any indication, they better temper their expectations.

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After all the expansion drama, the college football world has settled into its usual summer malaise. Here are some tidbits to tide you over.

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My original title for this week-by-week rundown of the best games of the 2010 season was going to be "The Ultimate College Football Road Trip."

Let's get real, though. Joe Six-Pack is going to have a tough game making an ESPN GameDay-like junket around the nation every week. And, while the prospect of riding in that tour bus with the likes of Desmond Howard and Kirk Herbstreit for four months may sound cool, something tells me it's not all that it's cracked up to be.

(You've seen the promos with Lee Corso lounging around in his bath robe, right?)

However, for the low price of your favorite recliner, a bowl of RO*TEL dip and your cable provider's college football package, you can catch the best games every week from the comfort of your own living room. I've even mapped out each week's must-see game for you, along with a few good alternatives.

So kick back and set the DVR now.

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Gonna be out of commission until Monday. Enjoy the weekend, suckas, and don't worry -- you'll figure out a way to make it a couple days without me.

College football's most storied conference got even more storied this offseason with the addition of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Marc Morehouse of The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the blog On Iowa joins Blatant Homerism to talk about the fallout from conference expansion and preview the upcoming season in the Big Ten.

Marc and I cover:

• the potential for even more poaching on the part of the Big Ten;
• Iowa's efforts to rebuild its offensive line;
• the keys to a potential national championship run for the Ohio State Buckeyes;
• Wisconsin's prospects for progressing from good to great;
• Penn State's status as a fringe contender for the conference crown;
• possible sleepers: Michigan, Michigan State and Northwestern; and
• my ramblings on the maneuverings behind the Big 12 chaos.

We're getting closer to the season, y'all. The bookies have released the early odds on this year's Heisman Trophy winner.

Blatant Homerism's official 2010 Heisman dark horse campaign will probably kick off within the week. Until then, here are some quick thoughts:

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OK, I've analyzed the expansion drama every which way in my brain and am thoroughly worn down. So let's go out with a real bang and commingle conference expansion and the BCS.

With the college world finally settling down, I reached out to our favorite forecaster, Zach "Blue Horseshoe" Rosenfield of AccuScore.com, for his read on how the rearrangement of the conference deck chairs will impact the annual BCS jockeying.

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A number of questions came to mind today while I was reading Chip Brown's spin on how the Big 12 rose from the dead. There was one passage that in particular that stuck out like a sore thumb.

"And (Larry) Scott and (Kevin) Weiberg made one critical mistake in the courtship of the Big 12. Other than its somewhat foggy math that a 16-team Pac-10 could readily get to $20 million in TV revenue per school, they wanted to substitute Kansas for Oklahoma State late in the process, according to multiple sources in the Big 12... Scott was looking to add new TV markets, not stick to the deal that was agreed upon a few days earlier... Now they were dealing with a wheeler-dealer Pac-10 commissioner who wanted to sub out Boone Pickens' Cowboys for the chance to grab new households in Kansas, Missouri and middle America... (DeLoss) Dodds had given Oklahoma State his word they would be part of the group headed west. Now, the Pac-10 wanted to do some late rearranging. Dodds didn't feel good about it, sources said Tuesday."

I have plenty of issues with how Brown has reported this story, but let's go ahead and grant that this somewhat approximates how this small part of all the chaos went down.

Here's a question: Given all the double-crossing and back-biting going down, why does Texas' athletic director care about Oklahoma State's plight in all this?

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