A trip to the TicketCity Bowl will help the wounded psyche of the Penn State football faithful, and a number one ranking in both major polls is providing respite for fans of Syracuse basketball.

The 2011 Kentucky football season ended in a way that nobody – NOBODY – saw coming, especially before the season began, when your faithful correspondent included this missive within his predictions:

A note to suffering Big Blue football fans – When in doubt, turn to The Marx Brothers.

It’s inaccurate to say the honeymoon is over for Joker Phillips. That’s because he never had one.

It’s a term thrown around almost too cavalierly these days: “Future Hall of Famer.”

I said it prior to Saturday and I’ll say it again: Kentucky is the best team of the Final Four. It’s even more apparent after watching whatever it was that passed for basketball Monday night, in the championship game between Connecticut and Butler at Reliant Arena in Houston.

Admit it. You wanted DeAndre Liggins gone. On that November, 2008 night in Las Vegas, when he refused Billy Gillispie’s order to check into the Kansas State game, choosing instead to sit on the bench and pout, you threw up your hands in exasperation and demanded that the freshman be kicked off the team.

Everybody take a breath. You howled over Kentucky’s NCAA tournament draw the moment it flashed across the screen, and likely you’ve been thrashing about ever since. The conspiracy theorists are at full throttle and the Big Blue Nation is tweeting, posting, messaging and bashing.

Watching from afar as the Knicks, Nuggets and, to a lesser extent, the Timberwolves conducted their recent NBA trade business, I couldn’t help but think of the day Chauncey Billups got paid. I was there to see it.

Once again, the fans have spoken. And, once again, they aren’t exactly sure of what they want.

Their philosophies could be as diverse as snowflakes, but coaches have so many things in common, including one trait that drives all the great ones: Their desire exceeds their grasp.

It was going to be either Aaron Rodgers or Jay Cutler in the Super Bowl. Only one quarterback would be packing for Arlington; the other would be heading off to the suburb where 30 of 32 NFL teams currently reside: Waiting Until Next Year.

Can we stop now? Can we stop with the comparisons to last year’s team? And the laughable notion that this year’s Kentucky team is better? If a second straight road loss, to an Alabama team that lost to St. Peter’s, isn’t evidence enough to the contrary, what is?

No college football team can know the pain and misery suffered last night by the Oregon Ducks.

DeQuin Evans, then a grocery bagger in Compton, California, went to the movies. The film? “The Gridiron Gang,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a probation officer at Camp Kilpatrick, a juvenile detention center in Malibu.

I stand by my pre-season prediction that this year’s Kentucky football team will win eight regular-season games – even though it’s impossible.

Whether you’re sitting in your recliner at home, chowing down on wings at your favorite establishment, or watching in sweaty Gainesville, it’s a pretty good bet we’ll know more about the football Wildcats by the end of the night than we do right now.

In 2009 the football Wildcats finally pulled off the kind of victories their fans have been waiting to see since, well, since the ‘70s in one case and the ‘60s in another.

There may be just as many questions surrounding the 2010 season opener at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium as there are fans sitting in a stadium expanded by about half as many seats.

The Southeastern Conference would seem to be, once again, an inverted Weeble – lots of power at the top, winnowing into a pool of teams that won’t compete for anything beyond the mid-level bowl games.

Realizing full-well that UK basketball recruiting, the NCAA and Eric Bledsoe are by FAR the most pertinent topics out there right now, let’s take time to talk about just that – time. The clock. The pitch clock, that is.

Tubby Smith, an ex-assistant, had coached here before. Billy Gillispie, a self-styled basketball junkie, knew all about the storied tradition of the program. Neither one of them was ready for what hit them.

The basketball Wildcats were busy wrapping up their 44th Southeastern Conference championship; the UK women were throwing a scare into top-seeded Tennessee in the finals of the SEC Women's Basketball Tournament outside of Atlanta, and I was nowhere to be found.

It has to be a bittersweet thought to any Kentucky fan: There’s a chance, maybe a good one, that the first two players chosen in the NBA Draft will be Wildcats. And BOTH are freshmen.

The recent headlines, whispers and gossip concerning freshman phenom John Wall’s state of mind prompted the following multiple-choice query: UK basketball hasn’t undergone this much intense scrutiny since...