Big East Media Day is just 13 days away. The freshman football players report in 24 days, the upperclassmen arrive in 27 days, and in 28 days, Virginia Tech will hold their annual Football Media Day and team picture day. Practice begins in 29 days, and 50 days from today, Virginia Tech plays UConn in Lane Stadium.

It has been a pretty quiet week, but here's quick look at the news items that did cross our desk.

The BCS formula has had several more pieces of duct tape strapped onto its wheezing, clanking, smoking frame in an attempt to hold it together until some nameless day in the future when money (and ABC) will win out and force a playoff on college football.

The latest tweaks are aimed at rewarding teams for victories over Top-15 teams and reducing the impact of margin of victory, as well as reducing some of the fluctuation in computer rankings. Here's a rundown of the changes:

• Teams will be rewarded for victories over teams ranked in the top 15 of the BCS standings (for more details, see below).
• The New York Times and Dunkel Index power ratings will be dropped from the eight computer rankings that are used. They will be replaced by polls by Peter Wolfe of Los Angeles and MIT professor Wes Colley (whose undergraduate degree is from Virginia). The Massey rankings -- coded by VT student Kenneth Massey -- will remain. The changes reduce the effect of margin of victory, which becomes negligible after about 21 to 23 points.
• On a weekly basis, the high and low computer rankings for a team will be discarded (previously, it was just the low ranking).
• The first BCS rankings will be made public in the second week of October, two weeks earlier than last season.
• Any team ranked third or fourth in the BCS standings is guaranteed a spot in a BCS bowl (this was not previously true -- #3 Kansas State was passed over by the BCS bowls in 1998).

The reward for beating a Top 15 BCS team is somewhat complicated. First of all, since the BCS rankings are in inverse order (teams with the lowest point totals are ranked higher -- think golf), a victory over a Top 15 team will result in a reduction of a team's BCS points (which is a good thing).

A win over the #1 team will deduct 1.5 points from a team's BCS point total. A win over the #15 team will deduct 0.1 points, and the sliding scale is linear in between (a win over #2 deducts 1.4 points, a win over #3 deducts 1.3 points, etc.).

The Top-15 wins will be factored in each week, beginning with the first rankings in early October. As a team moves up and down the BCS standings, the points deducted for beating them will change. In other words, if VT beats #1 Miami on December 1st, and the Canes drop to #5 in the BCS rankings, the Hokies will get credit for a win over the #5 BCS team, not the #1 BCS team.

These points are called "quality-win points." If a team beats a Top-15 BCS team twice in a season (regular season and conference championship game), they only get the quality-win points once, not twice.

The new rule changes have Hokie fans scrambling for a look at VT's future schedules to figure out if any teams on them are going to be ranked in the Top 15 of the BCS. Miami is always a candidate of course, but other than that, pickings are slim. The only solid candidate appears to be LSU, whom the Hokies may play in 2002 and 2004.

Speaking of LSU, the very latest on that proposed football series has LSU Director of Athletics Bo Bahnsen telling the New Orleans Times-Picayune in a July 11th article, "We're 99 percent there. Everything is greased. It's just a matter of getting everybody off vacation."

The 2002 game in Blacksburg is tentatively set for Aug. 31st. LSU would like to play the 2004 game in Baton Rouge on September 4th, but Bahnsen says Virginia Tech has a conflict with its opposing team on Sep. 4, so the Hokies are trying to rearrange their schedule. It is unknown by TSL what Virginia Tech opponent is slated for Sep. 4, 2004.

Meanwhile, in a Roanoke Times article the same day, Tech Athletic Director Jim Weaver said about the LSU deal, "We've still got to dot some I's and cross some T's, that's about it." (Click the link -- the article is an excellent read with some refreshingly frank quotes from Weaver about the schedule.)

From the July 13th Roanoke Times comes the following news on Tech football games on TV:

• The Virginia game (Nov. 17) is headed for ESPN, time not set yet.
• The Rutgers game (Sep. 22) will be an ESPN+ Big East Regional TV telecast at noon (on WFXR in the Roanoke area).

Add this to the national ABC telecast of the Tech/Miami game on Dec. 1 (at 1 pm), and the Hokies so far have two national broadcasts and one regional broadcast. The TSL 2001 football schedule page has been updated with the new information.

The next issue of the TSL Extra is slated for release on Tuesday, July 17th. It will feature a recruiting profile to knock your socks off, as well as articles about Virginia Tech licensing, a point/counterpoint about college football playoffs, and a look back at the 1990 Tech-UVa game. Good stuff  -- see you Tuesday.

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