FanHouse ChrisPetersen

LeGarrette Blount has been suspended for the remainder of Oregon's football season for punching Boise State's Byron Hout in an ugly post-game incident that has been played over and over again on ESPN and YouTube. But in all those re-playings of the incident, we still haven't learned what Hout said to Blount to provoke such an act. And there's speculation that Hout said something every bit as ugly as Blount's reaction.

Oregon football player LeGarrette Blount punched Boise State football player Byron Hout after Thursday night's game, and Blount is, rightly, getting a lot of criticism in the sports media this morning. But Hout deserves a share of criticism, too: He's the one who provoked the incident.

Just minutes after UCLA announced that it would have a head coaching vacancy in its football program, its leading candidate turned down the job.

Boise State head coach Chris Petersen, identified this morning by the Los Angeles Times as the Bruins' top pick, told the Idaho Statesman that he is not interested in Karl Dorrell's old job.

Peterson told the paper that he has been contacted by one school--but was not interested--and would not say whether that was in addition to the interest from Westwood.

The difference in cost of living should be enough to make someone like Petersen want to stay in Boise, where a $850,000 salary would be the equivalent of more than $1.5 million in Los Angeles.

Spurning the advances of former Bruin Rick Neuheisel, UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero has narrowed his list of candidates for the football head coaching job to three.

According to both local papers, the next football coach in Westwood will be Boise State's Chris Petersen, Texas Tech's Mike Leach or the NFL Network's Steve Mariucci. Petersen is said to be the favorite, but the notoriously stingy University may opt for Mariucci, as he has no contract that needs to be bought out.

There's only one little problem: Guerrero has yet to dump current head coach Karl Dorrell. In fact, Dorrell is quoted in the University's official press release regarding the Las Vegas Bowl, saying, "UCLA is extremely happy to be playing in the Pioneer Las Vegas Bowl." I guess he has a point, because the way this season went, Dorrell should be happy to be in a bowl at all!

Given his 5-1 record against Dorrell, it should come as little surprise that USC coach Pete Carroll is coming across as Karl's greatest fan, imploring fans and the University to, "Give him a friggin' break."

Thanks to all the fancy trickeration and general lack of offensive conformity, many people have this idea of the Boise State offensive playbook being something like a ten-volume monster best consumed by robotic players not unlike how world champion eater Kobayashi attacks hot dogs.

Fear not friends, as Broncos coach Chris Petersen sets the record straight:

[O]ne of the things that we kind of pride ourselves on going into a game is not having a big playbook. We do a good job of game planning and narrowing things down and not having too much overage so these kids have to learn so many things that we're not even going to call in the game. And so I know a lot of people kind of pride themselves on having this humongous playbook, having all these plays going into a game. We don't - we narrow it down so these kids can manage it and learn it and execute it.

Ok so this isn't alllll that surprising, but Boise's earned a rep as being one of the most difficult teams to prepare for. Sometimes it isn't so much about the number of plays but the overall design of a few ones. There's a zen lesson here but it's way too late to get into all of that.

What we do know is that this means more killer, less filler for those blue turfed warriors from the land of potato.

I encourage you to consume - not-so-Kobayashi-style - the rest of Petersen's interview with CSTV. Es bueno.