Granted, I’m a girl.  And I will more than likely never be a college football coach.  Heck, I went to a school that didn’t even have a college football team.  But there are a couple of things that I think that even I, a lowly girl who didn’t even go to a college with a football team, can say “Hey, that’s a mistake.”  Here are a few of them:

1) When you get named as a college head coach for the first time in the premier league, don’t trash talk the National Champions in your initial press conference.  It’s a few hours before the UT-UF kickoff, and poor ole Lane Kiffin has looked like a deer in headlights all week.  This is a stark contract to the cocky attitude he took in his first month as a first-time head coach at UT, where he called out Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, and whoever else he could think of as a coach who had superior skills to his.  I watched an interview with him on GameDay a few minutes ago, and Kiffin looked positively terrified.  Note to new head coaches: you run your mouth early, and you end up on the bottom of the cleats of the best team in the East.  Is it bad that I am relishing this game?

2) You might want to get your back up QBs some experience in case you lose your Heisman winner in the first half of the first game.  I feel soooooo bad for Sam Bradford.  I think he’s a kid with high character and amazing talent who did what many consider to be unthinkable by turning down a truckload of money to return to college for one more year.  (And kudos to the football players who do this, and decide to spend one more year just being a kid and enjoying the college experience before coming into all that money and pressure.)  And he goes down in the first game.  But you know who I felt worse for?  The kid on the sidelines who gets tapped to come in for Bradford.  Poor kid!  He’s probably back there on the bench getting  a head start on his weekend homework when he hears the unthinkable: “Bradford is down and is coming out of the game.”  I’m willing to bet that he threw up at some point during that game.  From what I can tell in my (extremely limited) research, he had not one bit of college playing experience before he went into the game–you know, the one where OK got beat by BYU.  Poor kid.  Granted, he had a great week last week, but he had a chance to get prepared.  So here’s the lesson: I know it’s great that your QB puts up 700 yards passing/game, but is it worth the team loss to get your QB1 those amazing stats?  Something to think about.

3) Don’t play to not lose the game.  Granted, I didn’t watch the OSU-USC game last week, but I did watch some highlights.  And when you put in a really conservative offense to attempt to protect the ball and run out the clock, you run the risk of having your opponent score lights out wiht a passing game and putting you in a bad spot.  So now people are calling for Coach Tressel’s firing/resignation because once again OSU played a high profile game and they just couldn’t keep up.  Should he go?  That’s not my call (besides, I’m not a fan of the Big 10.)  But as a fan, if my coach kept installing schemes to keep my team from losing rather than taking a chance from time to time to actually win the game, I’d be peeved, too.  There were several Bama games wherein the coach decided to go for 2 at the end of the game to go for the win rather than for the tie, and even when it didn’t work, I still admired the gutsy call of the coach for doing so.  Sometimes, even if you risk losing, your fans want to see you go for the win rather than trying to avoid the loss.  Just something to think about.