The Sun Belt Conference is holding its annual media day today, which The Sun Belt Conference is holding its annual media day today, which
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Links at Lunch: Favoring FIU, Ring Repo, Dealing With Success

By Kyle Kensing

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The Sun Belt Conference is holding its annual media day today, which College Football Examiner Kevin McGuire is all over. Among the big news is Little Caesars Pizza Bowl champion and 2010 breakout team Florida International is the media choice to win this year’s league title. The Golden Panthers finished 7-6, but could have easily won 10 games, having dropped games to Rutgers, Texas A&M and MTSU by a combined 13 points.

Mark Cristobal’s job as FIU head coach is nothing short of miraculous. He took over a program that went 0-12 in 2006, and in five short years has it looking like not only a legitimate conference championship contender, but a potential top 25 team at some point. Think that’s a stretch? It may be, considering the Sun Belt has never produced a ranked team, but FIU showed its meddle against BCS conference competition last season, and returns a majority of its key contributors. Wideout and special teams dynamo TY Hilton heads the corps. Hilton’s among the initial nominees for the SaturdayBlitz.com Detmer Award.

FIU will certainly get its chances to roar, drawing Louisville in Week 2 and saying bienvenido to UCF in Miami for a Week 3 tilt.

More links after the jump.

  • College football has a well-documented glass ceiling. This season, there are those programs that appear capable of smashing it, but that’s been the case many times previously. Ole Miss in 2009, anyone? (via Matt Zemek, OnsideKick.com)

    • The NCAA may need to send former WWF wrestler The Repo Man after Georgia Tech center Sean Bedford. Bedford wrote an open letter to the NCAA inviting it to try and take away his 2009 ACC Championship ring. Bedford has a legitimate point, especially considering how innocuous the charges against Georgia Tech read on the surface. Punishing all for the mistakes of one makes sense. It didn’t when the whole third grade class lost recess over one student’s misbehavior, and it doesn’t now

    (via

    Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing Bedford and the below individual tussle.

  • Oregon’s high octane offense gets a considerable amount of its mojo via Darron Thomas going vertical off the play action (via AutzenZoo.com)
  • Georgia Hall of Fame coach Jim Donnan was reportedly mixed up in some Ponzi scheme. The New York Mets were not involved (that we know, anyway) (via Matt Hinton, Yahoo! Sports)
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