The Bottom Ten/Preseason Q&A
By Gaylon Kent – America’s Funniest Guy™
Admit it, you’re breathing again. The Bottom Ten is back.
As usual, with the colleges starting before the Week 1 poll moves, we start with that American classic, the Preseason Q&A, where your Bottom Ten pollsters will answer the questions you’ve spent the entire offseason asking yourself.
The Week 1 columns will start next week and despite the usual warnings from the Accounting Office, the first two or three weeks will be with our compliments.
Has the name trophy issued to Bottom Ten NCAA champions been changed in order to commemorate FOX Sports’ completely taking over college football and destroying the Pac-12?
Indeed it has. Previously, and honorably, known as the ESPNCup – and before that the Walmart Trophy Presented by Motel 6 – your Bottom Ten pollsters have succumbed to the inevitable and, in honor of their role in completely ruining college football, have renamed the trophy issued to the collegiate Bottom Ten champion the FOX Golden Checkbook.
Q: Which of your tired, old lines will you be trotting out this year
All of them. Your B-10 pollsters “strongly suspect” all the usual cliches will be trotted out left and right. Vanderbilt will continue to smart from their turn-of-century merging of Athletic and Student Affairs departments and B-10 pollsters are “pretty sure” the service academies will be hampered by assorted pregame department secretary rulings and it is expected our Conference of the Week laureates will level up for .500 conference play marks. B-10 TitleTrak Radar predicts it will be steady as she goes.
Is your patented TitleTrak Radar showing any good opening week matchups?
Oh yeah. Don’t even start. The quest for the FOX Golden Checkbook gets underway this week with a match-up that has had B-10 fans everywhere salivating all summer: perennial B-10 contenders UMess at usual B-10 stalwarts New Mexico State…Now, the Aggies are actually coming off a bowl win last season, but have finished 2-10 the previous three (3) seasons.
Also, Navy will show whether they’re the team to beat, literally, for the Sgt Bilko Trophy – symbolic of service academy lousiness – when they open against Notre Dame. Also, perennial B-10 darlings UTEP and Florida International also open this week, though unfortunately not against each other.
How will the Northwestern hazing scandal affect the Wildcats’ chances at repeating as B-10 Champions?
The Bottom Ten pollsters feel that it can only help because once you get the pussies who can’t handle a little hazing out of the program, you’re left with the tough ones who can handle the rigors of a(nother) B-10 title run.
Can the Chicago Bears repeat, or will the AFC South – which produced the other two-thirds of the final 2022 NFL medal stand – take charge?
With all deference due the AFC South – who won the coveted Pete Rozelle Award last year, issued to the NFL’s worst division – the Bears will be tough to beat – er, easy to beat, depending on your feelings on the matter – in their quest for another Dan Henning Memorial Trophy, symbolic of NFL Bottom Ten supremacy. The Bears lost their final ten (10) games last season, and Bottom Ten fan(s) everywhere know that kind of momentum that tends to lead straight to Bottom Ten glory.
Will Don Criqui be back for the “This Is Don Criqui Reporting” lead line, which heralds the NFL’s second-lousiest matchup of the week?
Of course he will. Criqui, now 82 and long retired, has always been a favorite of B-10 pollsters, who always felt he never got the big games he deserved, and his inclusion in our hack column is pure homage and not an indictment of the immense talents that got him inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Editor’s Note: The NCAA Bottom Ten moves on Tuesdays, the NFL Bottom Ten on Wednesdays.
