More Mandel, Steltz' helmet hit, LSU recruiting

SI's Stewart Mandel weighs in further on the Miles play call. Snippet:

Of course, the way our first halves have gone the past four weeks, we're seem to frequently be in a position of needing to play to win.

Thanks to reader MW for the heads up.

There was some discussion on here the other day about the Craig Steltz personal foul helmet-to-helmet hit. I'd forgotten about it and needed to rewatch it. Well, God bless You Tube:

I guess it looks fairly clear to me that Steltz hit him with his helmet, whether or not it was intentional. So it has to be called. Doesn't remotely compare to Mr. Chaz Ramsey's dirty play on Dorsey which didn't get flagged, but so be it. Thoughts?

I don't pay for a Rivals subscription, but recruiting has been going fairly well lately in the aftermath of two of the better LSU home games in memory over the past three weeks. Richard Pittman at the blog Geaux Tuscaloosa gives his rundown of our recent success there. Also, if you're heading to Tuscaloosa, he's posted a rundown of the good spots to hit up while you're in enemy territory.

If you enjoyed the movie "We Are Marshall," or actually happened to read the book "The Marshall Story" - on which the movie was based - head over to our fellow SBN blog Corn Nation as he's got an interview up today with one of the book's authors. If you haven't watched the movie but want to, be warned there is some spoiler material involved.

Lastly, in case you guys are curious, note that USC is actually an underdog this week at Oregon, the first time in 57 games they haven't been favored. I read that latter stat elsewhere today and can't recall the link. There's a drift of it here, so you can do the manual counting back to 2003 to get to 57.

We'll call that second-to-lastly. This is my "lastly..." point. Do you realize that with BC an underdog at Va Tech, and Ohio State only favored by 4 at Penn State (again, odds here), there's a nontrivial chance we could get bumped up to #1 again during our BYE WEEK? Lordy, that would make for an interesting 'Bama week. I kinda don't want that to happen. I mean, I'm rooting like hell for Va Tech, but I'm ok with it if Ohio State wins this week. Am I blaspheming?