[Note: Click on the scores for game stories via the universities' web sites. Memphis-Ole Miss game will be added when available]

Tulsa 37, Tulane 13 (Friday; New Orleans; 27,638 [yeah, right...]). Hurricane cruises after jumping ahead 17-0 in the opening 9 minutes. For Tulsa, Demaris Johnson 252 all-purpose yards including a 66-yard punt return for TD; G.J. Kinne 15-for-20, 211 yards, 1 TD, no INTs.

UCF 28, Samford 24 (Orlando; 34,486). 7-7 at halftime, UCF trailed 24-21 until scoring on a TD pass with just under 6 minutes left in the game. Samford outgained the Knights 286 yards to 282, UCF’s Brynn Harvey 111 yard on 31 carries and 2 TDs.

East Carolina 29, Appalachian State 24 (Greenville; 43,279). 320 yards for the Pirates, with only 58 in the 2^nd half. Appy State had 17 unanswered points in the 4^th quarter. For ECU, Pinkney 12-for-27 for 131 yards, 1 TD and 1 INT. Dominique Lindsay 111 yards on 15 carries with 1 TD.

Marshall 31, Southern Illinois 28 (Huntington; 24,012). Southern Illinois cut the lead to 3 with 1:40 left, then held Marshall to a 3 and out to get the ball back with 26 seconds left to no avail. The teams combined for 5 turnovers. For MU, Brian Anderson 27-for-36 for 316 yards and 3 TDs. Chuck Walker 10 rec for 119 yards in his debut.

UAB 44, Rice 24 (Birmingham; 14,316). UAB’s Joe Webb set a CUSA QB record with 194 yards rushing, passed for another 221, and had a hand in four TDs. The rest of the team contributed another 98 yards.

Houston 55, Northwestern (La.) St. 7 (Houston; 22,043). 538 yards of offense for UH. Case Keenum 23-for-30 for 359 yards and 4 TDs in a little over a half of work.

SMU 31, Stephen F. Austin 23 (Dallas; 34,749 [a new stadium record as 19 supporters bought and distributed 1,000 tickets each]). Mustangs rally from 9 down in the 4^th. SFA piled up 460 yards of offense, 391 passing. For SMU, Shawnbrey McNeal 158 yards on 19 carries.

Buffalo 23, UTEP 17 (El Paso; 35,213). UTEP fell behind 23-7 and had their comeback fall short. Miners hit with 101 penalty yards. UTEP’s Trevor Vittatoe 27-for-45 passing for 233 yards, Donald Buckram 108 yards rushing. Buffalo averaged 34 yards per kickoff return.

[As you can see, it's been light blogging (well, non-blogging) for a while here at FTF. There are various reasons for this, including a stomach flu I wouldn't wish on anyone that hit the week of the Memphis game. Hopefully, this entry will mark a return to more regular updates for the rest of the season.]

U.A.B. (2-6, 1-3) at Southern Miss (2-6, 0-4)

Thursday’s line: USM -9

First meeting: 2000 in Birmingham

Last meeting: 2007 in Birmingham (USM won 37-7.)

Southern Miss leads the series 8-0

Last week: Memphis def. Southern Miss 36-30; UAB def. Marshall 23-21

In what doesn’t exactly shape up as a battle of the titans, UAB arrives in Hattiesburg this weekend as the Golden Eagles’ homecoming guest. Both teams come in looking to break significant losing streaks: USM trying to halt a 5-game mid-season skid, and UAB looking to end both an 8-game losing streak—the entirety of the series—to USM and an 18-game losing streak on the road. Coming off their own homecoming win over East-leading Marshall, surely the Blazers can smell the blood as the Golden Eagles look to stop the bleeding.

Unfortunately for Golden Eagle fans, it doesn’t get a whole lot easier for the woeful Southern Miss defense this week. UAB is led on offense by versatile junior QB Joe Webb, who accounted for 352 yards vs. Marshall and set a single-season Conference USA record for rushing yards by a quarterback in the process. Webb enters Saturday having completed 57% of his passes for 1726 yards and having produced 723 yards on the ground for the team lead. Webb’s favorite target when throwing the ball is sophomore WR Frantrell Forrest, who has almost twice as many catches (33) as the next person on UAB’s list, compiling 419 yards and 2 TDs along the way. The aforementioned next person on the list is sophomore TE Jeffery Anderson, but he also leads the Blazers in TD catches with 3. UAB’s second-leading rusher is junior Rashaud Slaughter (who’s actually listed on the roster as a wide receiver) with 332 yards. The UAB offense operates behind a somewhat young but experienced line, personified by RT Terrence Edge who will be starting his 16th game despite being a sophomore.

The story gets a little better when examining the UAB defense, which has been a bit below the median vs. the run (allowing 160 yards and change per game) but 118th (3rd from the bottom) nationally vs. the pass. The latter stat is pretty disappointing to the Blazers, as the secondary was expected to be a strength in 2008. Expect senior Kevin Sanders to be given the assignment of covering DeAndre Brown, and keep your eye on LB Joe Henderson, the team’s leading tackler (with 61) , and FS Will Dunbar, who led the conference in tackles in 2007 and has 43 on the year despite missing a game earlier in the season. On the line, UAB is basically one year removed from the situation USM finds itself in this year: entering the season, 3 of the Blazers’ returning starters at end and tackle were sophomores. One of them is end Turner Bryant, who leads the team with 4 sacks, matching the combined total of the rest of the line.

Once again, Southern Miss faces a team against which it should be able to move the ball, and once again, the million-dollar question is whether or not the Golden Eagle defense will be at all able to slow down the opponent. With Webb under center for UAB, the prospect is not encouraging, especially considering the 146 yards racked up by the last running QB to visit The Rock. Granted, that was also the last victory posted in the friendly confines of Roberts Stadium, but with the additional threat of Webb’s arm, it becomes a scary proposition.

Marshall (2-1, 0-0) at Southern Miss (2-1, 0-0)

Thursday’s line: Southern Miss -7

First meeting: 2005 in Huntington

Last meeting: 2007 in Huntington (USM won 33-24)

Southern Miss leads the series 3-0

Last week: USM def. Arkansas St. 27-24; MU def. Memphis 17-16

With Marshall falling on hard times right around the time they joined Conference USA, and Southern Miss suffering something of a slide of its own in recent years, some of the anticipated luster has faded on this young conference rivalry between two of the more respected programs outside of the BCS automatic qualifier conference pool. The games themselves, however, have lived up the billing for the most part, as the first meeting resulted in USM hanging on for an overtime win, and last year’s contest featured a furious Marshall comeback that put a scare into the hearts of Golden Eagle fans everywhere. Only the 2006 meeting, a 42-7 thumping of the Herd in Hattiesburg featured a runaway. Will the 2008 edition be another tight one, or will one of these programs—both seemingly on the rise—make a statement? As the teams mirror each other in a lot of ways, it could go any number of directions.

Marshall’s offense, much like Southern Miss’, features a workhorse running back in Darius Marshall, and a go-to tight end in Cody Slate. Marshall (the player), made the CUSA All-Freshman team in 2007 after posting 631 yards and an average of 5.1 per carry. In 2008, he’s picked up right where he left off, currently ranking 23rd in the FBS and 2nd in CUSA (only to Southern Miss’ own Damion Fletcher) in rushing yards per game at a hair under 102. In Slate, Marshall (the school) has a counterpart to Southern Miss’ Shawn Nelson: a tall tight end with speed and good hands. Slate has missed the past two games to a knee injury but will play Saturday. The two players’ stats over the past few years are eerily similar, but it’s worth noting—as Marshall Coach Mark Snyder recently did—that Nelson is a considerably bigger factor in USM’s offense these days than has been in the past.

The pilot of Marshall offense is redshirt freshman quarterback Mark Cann, who delivered an otherwise pretty good effort (20 for 39, 211 yards) marred by 2 interceptions in his second game, a blowout at the hands of Wisconsin and a cleaner one (14 for 28, 224 yards, 1 TD, no INTs) in a close win vs. Memphis. Cann and the rest of the backfield operate behind a fairly experienced (3 returning starters out of 5) but not wholly aged (2 seniors and a sophomore among those 3) line that amazingly has yet to allow a sack in 2008.

The Herd’s defense is centered around junior outside linebacker Albert McClellan, who was named CUSA Defensive Player of the Year in 2006, and is back in ’08 after missing ’07 due to injury. McClellan has 2 sacks in the young season. Other players to watch include senior inside linebacker Maurice Kitchens, who leads the team in total tackles with 26 including 1 sack, and senior free safety C.J. Spillman, who leads the team in solo tackles with 11. As a unit, Marshall’s defense is pretty average (55th in the FBS) against the run, yielding 117 yards per game, but rather atrocious (112th) against the pass, allowing nearly 309 yards per game (and that’s not skewed by the Wisconsin blowout; they gave up a whopping 368 to Memphis). As with most units at this point in the season, it’s tough to read a pattern from the game-by-game sample since, as was alluded to previously, the schedule so far has included not only a 51-14 blowout at the hands of a Top 15 Wisconsin and a low-scoring 17-16 squeaker over Memphis, but also an obligatory alumni-assuring home pounding of a lower-division opponent.

On paper (or an electronic analog thereof), this should be a good one. You’ve got two teams with similar offenses still in the early stages of finding themselves, and on top of that, in many places on the roster, each team has a counterpart to the other’s key player. In the end, though, Southern Miss’ multiple offensive weapons will probably prove too much for Marshall’s heretofore generous defense. The only question is how much can the Golden Eagles’ young defense slow down Marshall (currently the winningest FBS team in West Virginia, by the way, much to the chagrin of my WVU-alum spouse) when they have the ball? There will probably be some scary moments in this one, but I doubt it’ll be quite the nail-biter we saw (or heard, no thanks to our supposed “play-by-play” announcer) last week at Arkansas State.

As I’m sure everyone reading this already knows, the AP’s pre-season poll came out Saturday with the obligatory fanfare and ado. Unfortunately, no Conference USA team was even close to cracking the Top 25. Tulsa was the conference’s lone representative in the “Others Receiving Votes” category with 7 total points. In contrast, in the USA Today coaches’ poll, UCF not only joined Tulsa in the ORV, but the Knights finished ahead of them 2 points to 1.

Obviously, this is not a good starting point for CUSA, who has yet place a team in the final Top 25 of either poll since the 2005 reconfiguration, but that’s hardly anything new or worthy of a blog entry. It does, however, fall pretty much in line with where the 2007 polls ended (see previous link), with Tulsa landing 4 points in the AP and 5 in the USAT and UCF picking up 4 points from the coaches.

That last tidbit begs the question: just how much thought goes into these polls, especially when it comes to teams not in the BCS-AQ conferences? Apparently, the coaches who included UCF in their rankings are pretty optimistic about UCF picking up right where they left off despite the Knights losing their top running back—as well as the nation’s—in Kevin Smith, and his understudies having to work behind an offensive line sans 3 of last year’s starters. That’s a lot to overcome and expect to not miss a beat.

In Tulsa’s case, it can be argued that the Golden Hurricane didn’t get the love it deserved in the first place, having finished last season at 10-3 and walloping Bowling Green in the GMAC Bowl, but it’s easy to understand the sentiment when Tulsa in turn got almost equally walloped by Oklahoma early in the season and failed to beat UCF in two attempts, including the CUSA Championship game. Less-than-impressive showings vs. 2007’s CUSA dregs didn’t help their case, either, so it really was a stretch to argue them a Top 25 team at the end of last year (especially after UCF’s boredom-inducing loss to Mississippi State in the Liberty Bowl). Nonetheless, it’s hard to explain how Tulsa gets nearly double the votes in the 2008 preseason poll than it did in the final 2007 poll when the ‘Cane is replacing not only its starting QB, but its CUSA Offensive Player of the Year starting QB in Paul Smith (who obviously had to beat out UCF’s Smith for the honor). Granted, for all we know Tulsa’s offense can make any decent QB a record-breaker (it seems like Smith had been there a decade), but still, that’s a big question mark when it comes to Tulsa being better than they were last season.

What FTF really doesn’t understand is the lack of love for East Carolina. Last year, the Pirates finished 7-5 (6-2 in-conference), started the season by playing Virginia Tech within 10 in Blacksburg, and ended it by stunning Top 25 Boise State in the Hawaii Bowl. They’re also easily one of the best-off CUSA teams (if not the best) in terms of returning personnel. While ECU does move into 2008 without Chris Johnson, who led the nation in all-purpose yards last year, the Pirates do return their leading passer and second-leading rusher in QB Patrick Pinkney, their leading receiver in Jamar Bryant, and also have a CUSA All-Freshman performer, Jonathan Williams, poised as the replacement for Johnson. They also return the vast majority of their defense. By all indications, if anyone in CUSA is in a position to make a run at the polls this year, it is East Carolina. That Tulsa and UCF are getting votes (which is reasonable in itself; don’t get me wrong) while the Pirates aren’t shows you just how much the pollsters actually do their “mid major” homework as opposed to just copying-and-pasting the previous season’s final standings and calling it a prediction.

Welcome one and all to Feeding the Fever, the newest blog dedicated to all things Golden Eagle. Special thanks go out to BaldEagle, the keeper of EaglePost for hosting this page and putting in the work to get it set up.

Though this is my first full plunge into the blogosphere, I fully expect this page to fall into a nice little rhythm over the coming weeks and months. I plan on adding a major update every week (preferably on a regularly scheduled day to be decided upon soon) with incidental blurbs posted in between as interesting items present themselves (there’s usually no shortage).

Though I have no specific plans for it, I’m sure some recurring features will also develop as time goes by. Obviously, as per the subtitle, the focus here will be Southern Miss, but I’ll be writing of other things around Conference USA and the more general realm of college sports, too. Don’t be surprised to see some palate-cleansing in the form of unrelated tidbits every now and then, too.

So once again, welcome! Sit back, enjoy the ride, and check back soon as we continue Feeding the Fever.

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