ESPN College Football

• An SI.com fan survey rates West Virginia as having the rudest fans and UConn as being the most polite.

• Jordan Todman continues to take on a heavier load for UConn, Chip Malafronte writes in the New Haven Register.

• South Florida big-play receiver Carlton Mitchell is now probable to play against Louisville, Gregg Becnel reports in the Tampa Tribune.

• Louisville quarterback Adam Froman is trying to shake off some rust, Jody Demling writes in The Courier-Journal.

• Marcus Waugh has gone from star to role player and is loving it, Bill Koch writes in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

• Rutgers' linebackers are a competitive bunch, Keith Sargeant says in the Home News Tribune.

• The Syracuse Post-Standard's Dave Rahme looks at three Syracuse seniors who have stuck it out through thick and thin -- with a lot of thin.

• Young Pitt cornerback Antwaun Reed got some valuable experience against Notre Dame under fire, Paul Zeise writes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

• Robert Sands nearly ended up at Pitt but is thriving at safety for West Virginia, Bob Hertzel says in the Times West Virginian.

Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly had no problem saying what everybody knew about the Big East last year: the conference title goes through West Virginia.

The Mountaineers had proven to be the bully of the Big East with their league titles in 2005 and 2007, and Kelly knew his program had to knock them off to get to the top. Which the Bearcats did, with a 26-23 overtime win in Morgantown that propelled them to a league championship.

"Confidence-wise, that helped a lot," Cincinnati linebacker Marcus Waugh said. "It kind of told ourselves, 'Hey, we can compete with anybody in this league.' It was a confidence booster, and I think it was a stepping stone."

And now, the big dogs are suddenly the underdogs. The Big East race goes through Cincinnati and/or Pittsburgh, not Morgantown this year.

West Virginia coach Bill Stewart acknowledged as much this week when he talked about the challenges his team will face Friday night in Nippert Stadium against the No. 5 Bearcats.

"Cincinnati is powerful; I don’t know what we are going to do," Stewart said. "They are just potent. I look at their scores -- they are averaging 40 points a game. We can’t cancel it, so we are going to have to go do the best we can.

"There are probably a lot of people that aren’t going to give us a chance, so this is going to be another game that we are going to have to fight our way through. We are going to have to find some way to win."

To say no one is giving the 25th-ranked Mountaineers a chance to win this game is hyperbole, as were Stewart's later comments about Cincinnati being a 20- or 30-point favorite. But it's clear that West Virginia, for the first time since the Big East reformulated five seasons ago, is no longer seen as the absolute cream of the conference crop at this point in the year.

Quarterback Jarrett Brown said that, in a way, it's a refreshing feeling.

"We're not going to play on egg shells," he said. "We're going to go fly around and have fun because nobody is expecting us to win. It's kind of like the feeling we had going against Oklahoma a couple of years ago (in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl), when the whole United States didn't expect us to win."

Of course, the Mountaineers easily beat the Sooners in that BCS bowl, the first game of Stewart's tenure as head coach. They were razor-sharp offensively and played a complete game that night in Arizona, a situation which hasn't occurred for this year's team since the Oct. 10 win over Syracuse. Reports out of Morgantown this week, though, suggest the team has had some of its best practices of the year.

"I'm expecting us to click this week," Brown said. "I really am."

If West Virginia plays up to its potential, it doesn't have to look up to anybody in the Big East. That just hasn't happened of late.

"I don't really buy into the whole underdog thing," receiver Alric Arnett said. "The best team is going to win."

The Mountaineers must be at their best against a Cincinnati team that rarely makes mistakes and applies tons of pressure on defenses with its quick-strike attack. If they can't match the Bearcats' precision, the road to the Big East title won't go through Morgantown. It will bypass West Virginia entirely.

Posted by ESPN.com's Brian Bennett

Aberration or Achilles' heel? Fluky or fatally flawed?

Those are the questions surrounding Cincinnati's defensive performance last week against Connecticut. The Bearcats entered the game with one of the best defenses, statistically speaking, in the nation. They left bruised, battered and barely hanging on after giving up 462 yards in a 47-45 escape.

Friday's game against No. 25 West Virginia is not just a critical conference game for No. 5 Cincinnati, but also a chance to atone for last week's lapses.

"It's a great feeling to be able to redeem ourselves," linebacker Marcus Waugh said. "Everything that happened can be fixed. It was just one guy out of position here, two guys out of position there. We just need to get everybody back on the same page and tighten the screws, as [defensive coordinator Bob] Diaco tells us."

West Virginia's offense has sputtered of late but is capable of exploding at any time with its abundance of speed, including Noel Devine and Jock Sanders. The Mountaineers, though, have a totally different attack and philosophy than the power-minded UConn; Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly called this week's matchup "a race for space."

The Bearcats have fared quite well against the two true spread teams they've played this year. In a 28-18 win at Oregon State, they limited the Devine-esque Jacquizz Rodgers to just 73 yards on 20 carries. They frustrated B.J. Daniels and South Florida in a 34-17 win last month.

Matching speed for speed doesn't seem like a problem for the Cincinnati defense.

"We go against our offense every day, and it's the definition of a spread team," Waugh said. "It's nice to have that kind of electric offense to practice against."

The two teams that gave the Bearcats the most trouble this year -- the only opponents, in fact, to stay within 10 points of the Big East juggernaut -- are Fresno State and UConn. And both employed similar philosophies: heavy doses of running between the tackles, augmented by play-action passing. Fresno's Ryan Mathews ran for 145 yards against Cincinnati, while UConn's Jordan Todman had 162 rushing yards and four touchdowns.

Those games led some to wonder if a big, physical offensive line and power running game are the way to beat the Bearcats. After all, Kelly made the switch to a 3-4 defensive scheme this year because he said he wanted to defend the spread better.

All of which means that maybe Cincinnati is well suited to stopping West Virginia on Friday but could be in trouble in the regular-season finale at Pitt, which loves to pound the ball on the ground. Or maybe we're just reading too much into a bad second half last week.

"I think it's an overreaction to a couple of things that have happened," Waugh said of that line of thinking. "We have a big, strong defensive line that's fast as well. It's all about game planning and stopping the players who make big plays."

There will be plenty of those types of players on the field Friday from West Virginia. Cincinnati can begin to show whether its defensive flaws last week were a hiccup or a sign of a defect.

Posted by ESPN.com's Brian Bennett

With the start of practice just around the corner, I'll be offering three preseason predictions for each Big East team over the next few days. As usual, we'll go in alphabetical order, starting with Cincinnati:

1. Tony Pike will lead the league with more than 3,200 passing yards.
Pike threw for 2,407 yards last year as a junior despite not taking over the job until Week 3 and missing time later with a broken arm. If he can stay healthy as a senior, the big-armed Pike should have a monster year. Though he no longer has Dominick Goodman around, he's still got Mardy Gilyard, D.J. Woods and junior-college transfer Jamar Howard as targets. And with a rebuilt defense, Brian Kelly will probably look for his offense to carry more of the load in '09. Remember that Ben Mauk threw for 3,121 yards two years ago in Kelly's system.

2. The defense will be better than everybody expects.
Sure, there are 10 starters missing from last season. But the coaching staff liked what they saw from the new guys in the spring, for the most part. The Bearcats still have senior playmakers like Curtis Young, Marcus Waugh, Ricardo Matthews and Aaron Webster. While the defense won't be as strong as last year's, it will prove competent enough for Cincinnati to compete every week in a mediocre league.

3. Cincinnati won't repeat as Big East champs but will go to a good bowl.
The schedule, which includes road trips to Rutgers, South Florida and Pittsburgh, will keep the Bearcats from winning the league title again. But seven wins should be a minimum for this team, and a nine-win season is reasonably attainable. That means a bowl victory would give Kelly three straight seasons of double-digit victories at Cincinnati, which would be a remarkable feat.

Posted by ESPN.com's Brian Bennett

It's almost beach time for the Cincinnati Bearcats.

No, there's no relaxing summer vacation planned for the defending Big East champs. The time between spring practice and fall camp is reserved for conditioning work, and that's where Paul Longo takes over.

Every year, the Bearcats' strength coach sets up an 80-yard long, 10-foot wide sand pit inside of Nippert Stadium for players to run sprints through. It saves some pounding on the knees, but of course sand is harder to run on than turf. He dubs his creation "Longo Beach."

"I'm sure our guys would tell you that it's no day at the beach," Longo says with a laugh.

Longo also constructs a 30-yard hill inside Nippert during the summer for sprint work. Peek inside some of the Cincinnati summer workouts, and you might think you're watching a taping of the "World's Strongest Man" competition. Longo has been known to ask his guys to lift unusual items like tires and perform what's called a Farmer's Walk, where you walk while carrying a heavy object in each hand.

"Our linemen will carry up to 200 pounds in each hand for 100 yards," Longo said. "Don't you think that's a better test of strength than a bench press?"

Football players don't just pound the iron in sweaty gyms anymore. Strength and conditioning coaches continue to seek new and improved ways of building muscles and skills that translate onto actual gameday activities instead of creating a team full of power lifters. Like Longo -- who's in his sixth year working for Brian Kelly and his 23rd year overall as a strength coach -- many try to get creative with their methods.

Most of Cincinnati's weight work is done with chains, not traditional weights. Bearcats players are asked to do reverse running -- not backpedaling, but running backward -- as a change of pace. Longo has some other techniques he'd prefer not to share with the competition.

"It's 50 percent science and 50 percent art," said Longo, who spent 11 seasons under Hayden Fry at Iowa. "Twenty-five years ago, it was about how much can you lift and powerlifting-type things. That's maybe 20 percent of our entire program now. It used to be the meat and potatoes, and now it's not even close."

Whatever Longo is doing, it seems to be working. The Bearcats have won 22 games in the past two years and made the 2008 Orange Bowl with players who were mostly unheralded on the recruiting trail. Six players were drafted by the NFL last month, including defensive end Connor Barwin, who was one of the top performers at the NFL combine in several categories. He parlayed that performance into becoming a second-rounder.

Barwin was barely on the radar this time last year, when he switched from tight end to pass rushing specialist. Who will be the next breakout Bearcats? Testing numbers suggest that Adrien Robinson is a strong candidate.

Robinson earned an honorable mention in colleague Bruce Feldman's Top 10 national workout warriors list even though the redshirt sophomore was lightly recruited and has played only sparingly so far. But it's hard to ignore the 6-foot-4, 244-pound Robinson's numbers in Cincinnati's weight-room files.

He cleared 11 feet, five inches in the standing broad jump. That performance would have been the best of any NFL combine participant this year. In fact, only three players jumped as far as 11 feet, and they were all defensive backs who weighed about 40-50 pounds less than Robinson.

He also posted a 37.5 inch vertical, to go along with a 4.55-second 40-yard dash.

"He's a big, rangy kid with shoulders wide as the door," Longo said. "You kind of look at him and go, 'Oh, jeez, who's that?' When we first got him, I thought this kid could be something special.

"The potential's there, and now it's up to us to turn that potential into production on the field. With those kinds of numbers, he could be a really good one."

A different kind of athlete who also has freakish numbers is senior linebacker Marcus Waugh. The 5-foot-11, 270-pounder benches 515 pounds and finished 37 repetitions of 225 pounds. The top performing linebackers in the NFL combine did 30 reps, and only player in the entire combine did more than 37.

"He's a beast," Longo said. "He's a rolling ball of butcher knives."

Longo said Waugh could easily bench twice his own weight or more if he wanted. But Longo doesn't want his players lifting more than what is necessary to be successful in football.

Waugh has played fullback, tight end, nose guard and on special teams so far in his career and was being used as a starting inside linebacker this spring. His father, Tom, was a captain on Ohio State's 1979 Rose Bowl team.

"I think he's going to translate it onto the field and be one of those surprise kids," Longo said. "He's not just a weightlifter."

No, he's also a frequent visitor to Longo Beach.

Posted by ESPN.com's Brian Bennett

CINCINNATI -- Saturday's spring game will mostly serve as a fan-friendly showcase and a cap to a busy weekend of events around campus, Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly said this morning. The serious evaluating of players is just about over.

So with just one real spring practice left, how does Kelly evaluate his defending Big East champions?

"I think we've done a very good job of implementing a system of defense that fits the personnel we have," Kelly said after Tuesday's practice in unseasonably chilly temperatures and occasional hail.

"I think we've got some very good depth in certain areas, particularly the defensive line. I feel much better about where we are at the cornerback position. On the offensive side of the ball, our offensive line is better and the ability to run the ball -- we've got five running backs that are in play right now with (John) Goebel, (Jacob) Ramsey, (Darrin) Williams, (Isaiah) Pead and (Scott) Johnson. So there are some things we can take away from the last three weeks that are pretty positive."

Among Kelly's remaining concerns this spring are depth at middle linebacker and safety and consistency at the tight end spot. But he likes the way Marcus Waugh, a senior who used to play fullback and tight end, has taken to the middle linebacker position. And converted wide receiver Marcus Barnett "has shown that he can be a Big East starting cornerback."

The defense, of course, was the biggest question mark heading into this spring after losing 10 senior starters and changing coordinators and scheme. In recent practices, though, the defense has outplayed the far more veteran offense. On Tuesday, the offense struck back, hitting several long pass plays in the first 11-on-11 drills. The defense rebounded near the end of practice during red-zone situations.

The Bearcats haven't released a depth chart this spring and won't until either just before or after Saturday's spring game. But the first-team defense on Tuesday was Derek Wolfe, Ricardo Matthews and Curtis Young up front, John Hughes, Robby Armstrong, J.K. Shafer, and Waugh at linebacker, Barnett and Brad Jones at corner and Aaron Webster and Drew Frey playing safety. Frey showed some toughness by having a dislocated finger popped back into place on the sidelines early in practice.

The offense has very few questions with Tony Pike clearly established as the starting quarterback. Wide receiver Vidal Hazelton is still trying to win clearance from the NCAA so he can play this year after transferring from USC; Cincinnati recently submitted his paperwork and is hoping for a ruling soon.

The punting game could use some more work, if Tuesday is any indication. While there were some boomers in the bunch, there were plenty of ugly ducklings mixed in. Kevin Huber isn't walking through that door.

Mostly, though, Kelly said the Bearcats know what they have now going into fall.

"If you're using the spring game to evaluate, then you probably didn't do a very good job leading up to it," he said.