FanHouse Olin Buchanan

Interesting find in Olin Buchanan's Mailbag this week at Rivals.com: a trend has emerged in college football whereby teams winning a title ending in any year ending in an 8 experience a long, painful championship drought.

Recent victims: Notre Dame has not won a title since 1988. USC waited until 2003 after claiming the 1978 crown. Ohio State endured a more than 30-year wait between their 1968 and 2002 crowns. Scary stuff here.

Everyone wants a championship, but maybe it's a devil's bargain in reaching for this year's title?

Other victims of years ending in "8":

TCU was named the Associated Press national champion in 1938 – the third year of the poll – and even though players such as Bob Lilly and LaDainian Tomlinson have since come through Fort Worth, the Horned Frogs have not won another crown.

Michigan won in 1948 and did not win another national title until 1997, and that one was split with Nebraska. The '58 champion was LSU, which waited 45 years before celebrating another national championship.

Ok so maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing for TCU to win a championship this year. They've waited long enough, maybe another drought is worth the price of ending the current agony.

Last year, Tulsa became the only college football program in history to have a 1,000 yard back, a 5,000 yard passer and three 1,000 yard receivers. A while back I mentioned that one of those 1,000 yard receivers was fullback John Clay.

He led his team with eights catches for 92 yards that day and closed the season with 69 receptions for 1024 yards (14.8 average) and seven touchdowns. Clay was also third on the team in rushing with 304 yards (5.3 average).

Not bad for a guy who by many accounts was only modestly recruited by the school he signed with, a class-filler type recruit.

The Tulsa story continues to get better. Heavily overlooked is the fact that one of their receivers set an NCAA reception average record.

[Brennan] Marion last season averaged an astounding 31.9 yards per catch on 39 receptions, breaking the 39-year-old Division I-A mark set by Houston's Elmo Wright, who averaged 27.9 yards on 43 receptions in 1968. That's an amazing accomplishment, especially considering Marion was in his first season at Tulsa.

Not bad. Read the story by Rivals writer Olin Buchanan for details on Marion's vagabond existence, attending six high schools and two junior colleges, at times without a place to live.

There will be 23 new head coaches this year in college football. With 119 teams in DIA, my shaky math tells me that means nearly one in every five schools has a new head coach. I don't have numbers from previous years but that's an incredible turnover rate and will mark 2007 as a year of transition in college football.

So what goes along with the whole "year of transition" tag? Well, sloppy play perhaps. Obviously not every coach will fall on his face in his first year, but many teams are bound to take an early performance hit as they reshuffle their lineups, learn a new system and compete against more cohesive opponents.

It also effectively eliminates these 23 teams from a legitimate chance to win the national championship. I simply don't see a Larry Coker type situation where a coach inherited a team at Miami's mini-dynasty level who could simply pilot the goodship S.S. Championship for a year and then put his stamp on things later.

However, we do have a few championship type coaches now in the ranks. The splashiest and most controversial hire this offseason was Dolphins (and former LSU) coach Nick Saban to Alabama. Butch Davis, who created the Miami monster that Larry Coker so capably led to a championship has found a home at North Carolina. And then there's Dennis Erickson who led Miami to a pair of titles and has traveled to the desert to revive Arizona State.

For more on these 23 coaches, I recommend taking a look at this article by Olin Buchanan at Rivals.com. It lists all 23 coaches with short bios and a blackjack theme on whether to double down, hit, or stay with the various coaches.