It's coach eat coach as NFL gets interesting

America at Large:The New England Patriots stand alone atop the NFL this weekend, but they aren't the only undefeated football team in the nation. With but a few weeks remaining in the collegiate season, three major NCAA teams also boast perfect records - Ohio State, Hawaii and (gulp!) Kansas.

When the list of 2007 fixtures arrived in the mail last summer, most of my fellow University of Kansas alumni shared my apprehension.

Some lunkhead in my alma mater had designated the November 3rd date against Nebraska as the Homecoming Game. Asking thousands of KU grads to return to Lawrence for what had become an annual drubbing looked like an exercise in masochism. The Jayhawks had won just once in the last 41 meetings between the teams, and between 1971 and 2002 Nebraska's margin of victory averaged 52-7. That included 1986, when Nebraska won 70-0.

But two months ago few could have foreseen how the fortunes of both college programmes would change by the time they collided last weekend. Nebraska, a perennial powerhouse, are 4-6 after Saturday's game, while Kansas are 9-0 for the first time since 1908.

Nebraska coach Bill Callahan is hanging onto his job by a thread, while the Jayhawks are improbably mentored by Mark Mangino, a foul-mouthed, 450-pound-plus behemoth in his first head coaching job. When we returned to the Kansas campus for our first Homecoming game in 40 years, we discovered a stadium full of KU students wearing T-shirts bearing the legend "Our coach can eat your coach." (Earlier in the week, Lawrence poet and artist Wayne Propst had distributed hand-printed cards proclaiming: "Kansas wins! Mangino 456, Callahan 188.)

While NFL teams can at least point to the tie-breaking procedures when they run up obscene scores, NCAA coaches have no such excuse, other than to impress the voters in the weekly polls. In Saturday's game in Lawrence, Mangino left his starters on the field until the Jayhawks had run up 76 points, but not a soul at Memorial Stadium questioned his wisdom. It was payback for four decades of humiliation.

Ah, schadenfreude! KU quarterback Todd Reesing threw for six touchdown passes, Brandon McAnderson ran for four more; by the third quarter Nebraska fans were streaming from the stadium. As a group nearby joined the exodus, one lady smiled sweetly and waved "Bye, now! Y'all have a nice drive back to Lincoln."

After dinner in Lawrence Saturday night, my son and I made our way to Kansas City, caught an early morning flight, and were back in New York in good time to watch the telecast of the Patriots-Colts game on Sunday afternoon.

While cruising to their NFL-best 9-0 record this season, the Patriots have been the subject of much disapprobation. After a Patriots operative was caught videotaping the New York Jets' defensive signals during a September game at the Meadowlands, the league fined coach Bill Belichick a record $500,000 and owner Robert Kraft $250,000 and ordered the forfeiture of the Pats' number one pick in next spring's NFL draft.

The episode continues to cast a pall over what has been a dramatically successful New England march through the schedule. With seven games to play, the Patriots are 9-0 and would appear to have a reasonable chance of posting the second perfect record in NFL history. But some, including Don Shula, the Hall of Fame coach whose 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 to set the standard, have suggested that were this year's New England team to top that feat, the achievement would be so tainted by "Cameragate" it should be marked with an asterisk, like Barry Bonds's home-run record.

While Shula's intimations of "cheating" were widely circulated, it might be noted that the legendary coach offered no criticism of Belichick's refusal to call off the dogs in the Redskins game. After all, those 17 Miami wins in 1972 included a 52-0 victory over the Patriots.

Last Sunday, however, the tables were turned. It was not Belichick, but Tony Dungy, the straight-arrow, Bible-quoting Indianapolis coach, and the defending world champion Colts who stood accused of playing fast and loose with the rules - first by jamming the transmission of the coach-to-quarterback signal to Tom Brady's helmet, and then by ratcheting up the already-deafening crowd noise at Indianapolis's RCA Dome by electronically pumping in artificial crowd noise. "I can tell you that from a functional standpoint, the coach-to-quarterback (transmission) was basically useless," groused Belichick after the game. "We had to use hand signals to send in the plays."

In what was advertised as the most hotly anticipated regular-season game in NFL history, Brady rallied the Patriots from a 10-point deficit to a 24-20 win, but at the beginning of the fourth quarter television viewers were jolted out of their seats when the boisterous voice of the crowd abruptly segued into a whirring noise that would be familiar to anyone whose CD player has skipped. It seemed plain the home team had been caught enhancing the volume.

Since the RCA Dome is generally considered one of the more hostile environments in the nation, many wondered why the Colts had bothered. As with the Patriots' sideline camera, it was not as if they needed help.

The Patriots lodged a protest with NFL security. But a day later the league absolved the Colts, suggesting the glitch had been the result of a malfunction in the CBS television truck.

Readers can judge for themselves. The "unusual audio moment" is available at http://ballhype.com/story/indy_cheats/. It promises to be the most-viewed sporting YouTube moment since a sideline cameraman caught Mark Mangino using the F-word more than a dozen times in a sideline tirade directed at one of his players two months ago.