1. Nick Saban’s elaboration on putting Alabama’s BCS Championship hopes in the hands of sophomore quarterback AJ McCarron is a treatise on the peril of coaching young players. To beat LSU, Saban said, “We’re going to have to throw the ball. We’re going to have to trust the quarterback to do it. ... If the guy plays well, we’ll have an excellent chance of moving the ball. And if he doesn’t play well, we probably won’t have much of a chance to be successful offensively. But if we don’t do it, we may not have a chance, either.”

2. Sugar Bowl chief executive officer Paul Hoolahan said it’s no coincidence that New Orleans hosts the Allstate BCS Championship, the Final Four and the Super Bowl in the 13 months that began Monday. It’s the engine that drives post-Katrina New Orleans. “We’re a tourism city,” Hoolahan said. “We don’t have any Fortune 500 companies. We’re probably a population of 350,000 people. We play waaay over our head.”

3. After two tumultuous seasons in which the NCAA hammered USC for violations in the Reggie Bush case and the Trojans went 17-9, USC finished 2011 10-2 and No. 6. My colleague Mark Schlabach put them at No. 2 in the Way Too Early Top 25. That doesn’t mean the Trojans are over the worst. This is the eye of the hurricane. With a loss of 10 scholarships in each of the next three Februarys, coach Lane Kiffin’s margin of error will be shrinking to nothing.