University of Georgia has the #1 spot in college football rankings according to the preseason poll conducted by the Associated Press. The season hasn’t even started yet, but the Bulldogs must be feeling the pressure already.

Rounding out the top five on the list are Ohio State, USC, Oklahoma, and Florida. Last year’s top-ranked LSU has slipped to #7. In fact, the entire list is a bit of a shakeup from last year, with teams rising and falling in the rankings; only USC remains in the same spot for another year.

New to the list this year are South Florida, Penn State, Wake Forest, Alabama, and Pittsburgh.

What are your thoughts, football fans?

When it comes to college football, the answer is a resounding NO.

As another season approaches, fans are gearing up for some serious competition between teams with the longest-standing rivalries in history.

“It’s just a game,” you say? Not for diehard fans and alumni, who help guarantee stadium sellouts whenever the rival teams take the field. These are the folks that download fight songs as their cell phone ring tones, paint their family rooms in team colors, and don’t take kindly to suggestions that football is “just a game.”

All right, already. So which team matchups get everyone hot and bothered? Here’s just a sampling of the longest-standing feuds, with each set of rivals having played more than 100 cutthroat games over the past century:

Army vs. Navy
Ohio State vs. Michigan
Harvard vs. Yale
Lafayette vs. Lehigh
Kansas vs. Missouri
Oklahoma vs. Texas
Texas vs. Texas A & M
Auburn vs. Georgia
California vs. Stanford
Minnesota vs. Wisconsin
Washington vs. Washington State
Mississippi State vs. Ole Miss
Indiana vs. Purdue
Clemson vs. South Carolina
Georgia vs. Georgia Tech

Stay tuned this season to see how the rivalries grow!

The Olympics are over. Sigh. Eighteen months and counting until the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.

The Beijing Olympics were an overwhelming success for Team USA, who won more medals here than at any other non-boycotted Olympics. But according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, the elimination of many sports teams at colleges and universities across the country will threaten USA’s medal count in future Olympiads.

In the past, well-funded scholarship programs allowed colleges to recruit some of the best talent for their teams, but just as many other funding sources are being eliminated in this harsh economy, athletics departments have been forced to lose some of the very teams that have spawned Olympians in the past. Just last year, Rutgers University lost its fencing and rowing teams, along with four other sports that recruited Olympic hopefuls. In 2006, James Madison University said goodbye to ten teams, including its swim team.

For many athletes and their coaches, however, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Privately raised funds often keep programs going as club sports after they are officially cut from the school’s roster. After the men’s gymnastics team was cut from Arizona State University a few years ago, coach Scott Barclay took out a personal loan and built a personal gym for his team to continue training.

Some blame college football teams for hogging all the cash. Others say it’s due to more women competing; sports programs have had to recruit fewer men in order to be equitable with scholarships for female athletes. In any case, schools large and small have been forced to trim the fat in their athletics departments.

Is your academic future at the mercy of sports budget cuts? What are your alternatives to funding your degree if there are fewer sports scholarships available? Submit your comments and questions below.