Loyal readers of the Cold, Hard Football Facts (Hi, cousin Jethro!) know that we often lie awake at night and count the cars passing overhead while contemplating the Big Issues of our time.

 

Who put the bob in the bob-she-bop? How do we score free ducats to the Merle Haggard concert? And who do we have to blow to get a drink around here?

Our deepest thoughts often turn to football, too, and to the most pressing issues facing Planet Pigskin. Here are the Icy Issues that have kept us awake in recent nights ... and our Icier Answers.

 

The Cold, Hard Football Facts track record speaks for itself. We're slow to paise teams and players, yet when we finally do, they can be counted on to perform. But it seems like only last week that we emphatically declared, "Charlie Weis is the balls."

 

Notre Dame then went out yesterday and laid a world-record ostrich egg at home on national TV, losing 47-21 to longtime rival Michigan. It was the most points the Wolverines have ever scored against the Irish and was eerily reminiscent of the losses Notre Dame suffered during the Ty Willingham Era – big, record-setting losses marked by pitiful defense. It's also one of the biggest beatings ever suffered by the No. 2 team in the country.

 

Clearly, Notre Dame's ranking was a bit premature. Most teams in football have to fight to earn a lofty ranking. Notre Dame has theirs handed to them each year, like a crown of royal lineage. Instead of using their royal status to stand for world peace or a No. 1 ranking in the AP Poll, Notre Dame goes out and blows their reputation on a coke-fueled orgy with hookers and soccer stars in a Monte Carlo casino.

 

Notre Dame has now suffered two humiliating losses in its last four games, including its 34-20 loss to Ohio State back on Jan. 2 in the Fiesta Bowl.

 

Jacksonville suffered through three straight losing seasons under Tom Coughlin before Jack Del Rio took over in 2003. He fought through a 5-11 rookie campaign with a quarterback (Byron Leftwich) who was a rookie, too.

 

Since then, the Jaguars have won 66.7 percent of their games (22-11) and Del Rio, with little fanfare, has quietly emerged as one of the game's bright young coaches.

 

The Jaguars do little to excite the "pundits." But if the Cold, Hard Football Facts have proven anything, it's that there's little correlation between the noise of the chattering classes and the actual quality of a team. The Jaguars play stout defense (Top 10 in most major defensive categories the last two seasons) and efficient football, as evidenced by their solid if unspectacular ranking in most major Quality Stats. Leftwich does not put up big numbers and has all the mobility of a crippled moose. But he does the most important thing well: He takes care of the ball. Leftwich has thrown just 16 INTs since the start of the 2004 season, a period of 26 games by Leftwich and 465 attempts (3.4 percent INT rate).

 

Jacksonville has a bellwether game Monday night as it hosts the defending Super Bowl champs. The Jaguars beat the Roethlisberger-less Steelers in Pittsburgh last season (in OT), and lost by a single point (17-16) when they hosted Pittsburgh in 2004, a season in which the Steelers went 15-1 and played for the AFC title. It was one of the most intense, hard-hitting games of the 2004 campaign.

 

Don't be surprised if Jacksonville knocks off the champs Monday night. At the very least, it should be a good, old-fashioned bloodbath – and possibly one in which Del Rio and his boys stake a claim to a place among the AFC elite.

 

The beauty of football is that you can win every statistical matchup that matters – and still lose the game. Some teams do everything right and then watch in horror as the oddly shaped ball takes an oddly perverse bounce into the hands of their opponents.

 

Then there are teams like Indy and New England, each of which won last week despite losing out on almost every Quality Stats category.

 

Buffalo beat New England in four of our five Quality Stats last week, including defensive passer rating, Bendability Index, Scoreability Index and passing yards per attempt. New England won, 19-17.

 

The N.Y. Giants beat Indy in three of five Quality Stats last week, including defensive passer rating, passing yards per attempt and the Hog Index. Indy won, 26-21.

 

They were the only statistical anomalies of the entire week. In fact, our Quality Stats generally nailed 14 of 16 games. If you won the category, you probably won the game.

 

Interestingly, though, it was two of the dominant teams in football that trumped even our Quality Stats with the only stat that ultimately matters: final score.

 

Icy Issue: Can a World War II veteran build a winning team in the 21st century?

We knew general manager Marv Levy was old. But it was only this summer, when researching a story about NFLers in wartime, that we realized that Levy is a World War II veteran.

 

Nobody has more respect for the veterans of World War II than the Cold, Hard Football Facts. These men and women saved the world and gave us the fat, cushy, football-filled lives we live today. Levy deserves all the respect accorded this generation.

 

But we simply don't want the future of our team in the hands of a guy who's so old he could have had a drink with Winston Churchill.  

 

They say that World War II veterans die at a rate of more than 1,000 a day. Buffalo management has invested its future in this generation.

 

The ACC was touted as the new super conference in college football last year by everybody – including the Cold, Hard Football Facts. It stole Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College from the Big East and looked like it would muscle in on the power-conference territory inhabited by the Big 11 and SEC. The Big East looked dead and buried by comparison and attempted to backfill its ranks with second-rate programs.

 

But this week's games shattered all those impressions. West Virginia (Big East) destroyed Maryland (ACC), 45-24, Thursday night on national television, and then yesterday, Louisville (Big East) humiliated Miami (ACC), 31-7.

 

The rest of the month has been no better. Back on Sept. 2, Rutgers – yes, f'in Rutgers – beat North Carolina, 21-16. On the same day, Pittsburgh – a team led by Dave Wannstedt, one of the worst coaches in football – beat Virginia, 38-13.

 

The Big East on paper has no business competing with the ACC. But the Big East is 4-2 against the ACC this season and three of the victories were routs. The ACC's only salvation has been, of all teams, Wake Forest, which has bested both UConn and Syracuse.

 

The Cold, Hard Football Facts have not been kind to Bledsoe. He's certainly put up some big numbers over the course of his career and ranks in the Top 10 in many major passing categories (attempts, completions and yards).

 

But when it comes to efficiency categories, he simply does not stack up.

 

Bledsoe is No. 5 on the all-time attempts list (6,581) and No. 5 on the all-time completions list (3,765).

 

But he's No. 7 on the yardage list (43,693) and a mere 13th on the all-time TD list (245), which puts him in a tie with Peyton Manning – who joined the league five years after Bledsoe.

 

We saw a classic Bledsoe performance in the Week 1 loss to Jacksonville. Bledsoe completed a shade under 50 percent of his passes (16 for 33) and threw three costly – and just plain bad – interceptions. The Cowboys lost by a mere touchdown (24-17) and any one of those INTs might have been the difference in the game.

Yes, Bledsoe has put up big numbers in his career. But attempts are hardly the gauge of a quarterback's greatness. They are just a measurement of how often a coach is willing to let him step back and throw the ball.

 

Why Bledsoe has been allowed the ball to throw the ball so much remains a mystery.

 

Nebraska has been synonymous with a bone-crushing ground game since the dawn of time here on Planet Pigskin. Speedy tailbacks, electrifying option quarterbacks and beefy fullbacks with consonant-filled eastern European names so long that they barely fit on the back of the Nebraska jersey ran behind a collection of corn-fed, farm-boy behemoths year after year. The results were indisputable. Nebraska was one of the dominant programs in the history of college football and, as recently as the mid-1990s, fielded one of the greatest teams ever. From 1993 to 1997, they posted a 60-3 record and won three national titles.

 

The spirit of Nebraska football spread from one corner of the Cornhusker state to the other. Even at the rural programs that played 8-man football – at much of the state, in other words – programs preached the nobility of the ground game. The statewide feeder system sent one stud after another, indoctrinated with the culture of Nebraska football, to the Cornhuskers football program.

 

Nebraska meant two things in other words: running the football and winning football games.

 

And then they hired Bill Callahan.

 

He brought a wide-open pro-style offense to Nebraska, the kind of offense that earned him a 48-21 defeat in Super Bowl XXXVII, a 4-12 record the following season and a career record of 15-17 in the NFL.

 

It also earned him – inexplicably – a job at Nebraska.

 

The Cornhuskers have fallen on the hardest of hard times under Callahan. They're 15-11 in two-plus seasons, but the signature games of the Callahan Era have all been on the wrong side of the ledger. There was the 70-10 nationally televised loss to Texas Tech in 2004 and the three straight conference losses last year (Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas) that brought an abrupt end to a promising 5-1 start. (Of course, one of those games was a 25-7 victory over Maine – prompting the question that echoed across the Great Plains: "Maine has a football team?")

 

Last night's 28-10 loss to USC was just brutal to watch. The Huskers were praised for hanging tough for much of the game, but they clearly didn't have the studs to run with the Trojans.

 

It was a sad commentary: A program that once rolled over everything in its wake has been reduced to fighting for moral victories against the college football elite. It's an embarrassing day to be a Nebraska football fan.

 

If they had any sense of decency, they'd get rid of Callahan, get rid of the pro-style offense and return the program – and the state of Nebraska – to its rightful place as the heartland of the almighty ground game.