FanHouse Florida Gators

What do you get when you combine the greatest college football player in the history of the game, Tim Tebow, with women's underwear? Tee-bows of course, cleverly designed underwear with the letter T and bows on them.

Already the University of Florida has forced the sales staff to take down an unauthorized picture of Tebow, and now the panties, which took these here Internets by storm last week, have to sell their product without the Great One's likeness.

But is anyone else troubled by the irony of the University of Florida, they of the Tim Tebow No. 15 jerseys that are available across the country, profiting off Tebow while Tebow himself can't?

The snubbed teams like St. Mary's, Creighton, San Diego State and Penn State will get their chance to make their argument that they were deserving of an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament over Arizona, Minnesota, and well... that's about it.

The top four seeds in the NIT are San Diego State, Auburn, Creighton and Florida. The SEC packed the second tier tournament with four teams.

March started days ago. The Madness started Wednesday night.

On an evening where bubble teams could've punched their ticket to the NCAA tournament and boosters could've started humming bars of "One Shining Moment," teams turned down invitations like they were to a wedding without an open bar or the People's Choice Awards.

A memo, fellows. This isn't an invitation to a candlelight dinner with Randy Johnson. "Big Dance" doesn't mean you're cutting a rug with Mark Madsen or waltzing cheek-to-cheek with Mike Tyson.

You actually want to go to this thing.

College basketball has gone past the halfway point of the conference season. Now every game takes on greater importance for the teams that are trying to make the NCAA Tournament. FanHouse will take a look at the teams that find somewhere between the NCAA or NIT.

Team: Florida Gators

Record: 21-7 (8-5 SEC)

Well, I mean aside from LSU which has run their record to 10-1 in the conference. Over in the SEC East it is a mess. Whether you want to call it parity, mediocrity or just plain suckitude, there are four teams pillow-fighting their way to see who can back into the top spot in the division.

Kentucky got humiliated by Vanderbilt yesterday. Florida, which had lost three of four got a win over a bad Alabama team. Tennessee got run out of Oxford by an injury-ravaged Ole Miss team. South Carolina has been overachieving, but they couldn't win in Starkville. That leaves all four with identical 7-4 conference records.

What began with an apology ended with a national title.

Fourteen and a half weeks after Tim Tebow fought back the tears and promised that that day's loss to Ole Miss was only a beginning, he fought back the Sooners and made sure that promise came true.

And, unless you lived under a rock that has yet to undergo the digital transition, you already know this. It's been unwillingly drilled in to your head like multiplication tables or that darn Saved by Zero commercial.

Again. And again. And again.

He's a missionary. An icon for our generation. A man who can perform a circumcision during an out route and can turn Gatorade into wine.

Or maybe we're confusing him with someone else.

But then again, it's hard to tell with more sugar poured on him than John Daly's breakfast cereal. You think you put on weight over the holidays? Chow down a couple high-calorie Tebow features and you'll be punching new holes in our belt for all those added pounds.

Welcome back, USC's national title hopes. Enjoy the pretzels. Try the dip. But don't get too comfortable.

Yes, as the Trojans paraded Penn State's corpse from end to end of the Rose Bowl Thursday night, Pete Carroll's team again entered the national title picture. Not in the BCS system, which will award its title to either Oklahoma or Florida even if the Sooners let Charles Barkley drive the bus to the game and the Gators put Matt Millen in charge of their personnel.

But AP voters are free to vote for any team and with the kind of no apologies beating the Beijing police for might be proud of, Troy roared yet again.

So exactly how many votes should USC's Rose Bowl victory account for?

Think the same number of votes Brett Favre will get for teammate of the year, the number of suits in Al Davis' wardrobe that don't require the adjective "jogging" or the same number of pairs of underwear women have ever hurled at Randy Johnson.

Think zero.

Or something close to it as we probably shouldn't rule anything out yet.

Maybe Florida and Oklahoma will play a game so horribly ugly in the BCS title tilt that if they made a movie of it, it'd have to start Kirsten Dunst and Amy Winehouse with a special guest appearance by Danny DeVito. And maybe Texas will pull a Buckeye of its own against Ohio State. But let's just say if the BCS title game plays out remotely within the realm of expectations, what the Trojans did against Penn State doesn't qualify as a national championship performance.

You beat a Big Ten team in a virtual home game in a BCS bowl. It isn't exactly curing the common cold and, statistically speaking, beating a Big Ten team in a BCS bowl game is exactly as likely as eventually catching a cold.

This is to take nothing away from the men of Troy. The Trojans had an excellent season, were champions of a solid league, became the first back-to-back-to-back Rose Bowl champions (and that there is Tom Emanski rarified air). They had a defense that could stand between John Daly and a Hooters or Pacman Jones and the opportunity to make a fool of himself, and were downright biblical in the way they went about business.

Heck, Joe Paterno called them them one of the best defensive teams he's ever seen and Paterno would know. It says here the man once recruited Moses to play middle linebacker.

But that's the beauty of college football. Its title is awarded for a season accomplishment, not the team that played best in the last game that was nationally televised.

Incoming Florida Freshman John Brantley attended the Gatorade High School All-American Athlete of the Year Awards this week in Hollywood and sat down with the FanHouse to talk about his future.

Watch the video to find out why Brantley decommitted from the Texas Longhorns, if he plans on red-shirting, whether Tim Tebow's father can be overbearing, what he thinks about Les Miles' comments on the Pac Ten, which team he would not want to play next year and, most important, whether he reads the #1 non-FanHouse Florida Gator blog, Every Day Should Be Saturday.

Kudos to Miss Gossip for the fancy camerawork!

Yes, Ohio's quest to surpass Alabama as the home of the nation's most sadly deranged college football fans continues apace:

"Tressel Hayes Huffines -- sounds as sweet as an OSU victory over Michigan," Brent Huffines, 27, said Sunday while cradling the 3-day-old boy in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ohio State University Medical Center.

But wait, there's more! Tressel Hayes Huffines is the sixth Ohio child in the past four years to be named "Tressel". All of them await a life wherein they seethe with impotent rage at their boss Meyer Spurrier Randomlastname but are powerless to do anything but watch as he runs off with their wives, adopts their children, and burns down their house Keyser Soze style. But Huffines alone will punch some random South Carolinian who wanders into the wrong McDonalds one fateful morning and intercepts an apple pie destined for one of his buddies.
(Disclaimer: Michigan fan, owned by Ohio State, you are my daddy, etc etc etc. At least I'm naming my hypothetical kids things like "Howard," which is a completely plausible first name, if one destined to get the poor thing's face kicked in on a regular basis.)

In the aftermath of Florida proving that it owns all of us, every one of us, especially me, I found this Urban Meyer quote humorous:

Florida is getting plenty of attention from its third major collegiate championship in as many tries, but football coach Urban Meyer doesn't think it's enough. "It was a weekend infomercial on the University of Florida," Meyer said. "You know what makes me upset? I still don't know how good a job we do marketing our school."

Presumably he intends to carve a giant "UF" on the moon, as that's about the only media outlet left that hasn't hit a Gator saturation point. File under instant karma: as Andy Katzer detailed last night, mere days after Meyer requested attention he got it:

Florida offensive lineman Ronnie Matthew Wilson was arrested Thursday, accused of firing a semiautomatic rifle in the air during a dispute with another man that started in a nightclub.

(Wait... a semiautomatic rifle? Who carries around a rifle? And how did Wilson get charged with, among other things, "use and display of a concealed weapon during the commission of a felony"? What kind of ninja rifle is this? This baffles me.)

"Whoops, nevermind," said Meyer during a fictional press conference in my mind.