Your first team to accept a bowl invite: Navy

Congrats to Navy for accepting a bid to the Poinsettia Bowl.

And thanks for beating Notre Dame — that was fun. I’ve always rooted for the service academies to beat up on the athletic powerhouse schools, not because I’m super-patriotic, but because they are the true underdogs — it’s not like they can recruit blue-chippers or people who want to go to school just to play football.

Paul Johnson, if you want to know what it would be like to coach a BCS school, please, come to UCLA. They’ll have a job opening in a couple of weeks.

Obscure Sports Quarterly: Your source for week-old analysis

It looks like I’m not the only one who has huge problem with all the off days in the MLB postseason schedule used this year.

In his Rumblings and Grumblings last week, Jayson Stark complained about all of the off days, pointing out that it disturbs the flow of the postseason and possibly makes it more likely for series to end in sweeps (or at the very least be shorter).

While I don’t entirely agree with the latter premise, I agree with his overall view on the postseason schedule — it needs to change. Stark (who is one of my favorite national baseball writers), made some suggestions on how to fix the problem, but missed the most obvious one of all:

Make the division series best-of-7, and that would eliminate two of the extra off days. It’s also harder to sweep a 7-game series than a 5-game series, and it could make some series more exciting — had the Indians/Red Sox ALCS been best-of-five, it would have ended after four games, but instead we got three more.

It’s good to see Stark taking notice of this, hopefully others do too.