Tuesday Tidbits: Preseason Sugar Bowl Picks And the 'Tiger Prowl'

• It’s as though we’ve landed in some kind of bizarro world. College Football News offers the following Sugar Bowl projection: West Virginia vs. Ole Miss. I’m just waiting for Kevin, Gene, Feldman, and Vargas to show up.

"Assuming the SEC champion is No. 1 and off to the national championship, the Sugar Bowl will get the first choice of teams and it'll most certainly take the second best SEC team. Ole Miss, Alabama, LSU, Georgia or even Florida; throw a dart and you might have the right SEC representative. Boise State might be the call if the Fiesta doesn't have an interest, but geographically is makes more sense for the Broncos to go to Glendale and the Big East champion, possibly West Virginia, to go to New Orleans. The Mountaineers stunned Georgia the last time they were in the Sugar, played in Atlanta in 2006."

• Shiny-headed blowhard Paul Finebaum has high praise for Gene Chizik’s "Tiger Prowl." While Finebaum admits it was a gimmick, it seems he’s putting way too much stock in it.

"There was another important aspect to Tiger Prowl as well—stoking the home fires. In politics, you garner votes by exciting your base. You toss them red meat and hear them roar. The Auburn fan base was spitting fire last week. However, I think the most important message of the week was that Auburn is going to make Alabama fight for every acre of real estate in the state."

To me, this is exactly like John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate last year. Sure it got the fan base rowdy for a while, but once the novelty wore off, it was a gimmick with little to no substance.

I somehow doubt Nick Saban is overly concerned about Chizik and his limo rides.

• The Quad, the New York Times' college sports blog, has started its annual countdown of the best teams in America No. 120-No. 1.

Western Kentucky brings up the rear for a second straight year.

While it’ll be early July before any of our SEC brethren show up, it’ll be fairly quickly when UAB and Memphis show up.

And then there’s the other half of the non-conference schedule—Northern Arizona and SELA—which won’t show up at all, as they’re both 1AA.

So we’ve got that going for us.