Monday afternoon I opened my online Heisman Trophy ballot with no idea whose name I was going to put on top.

I wanted to type "Manti Te'o."

Instead I typed "Johnny Manziel."

It might have been the toughest Heisman decision I've had in my two decades as a voter. Either player would be a deserving winner. But you can only vote for one.

I wanted to vote for Te'o because I love everything about the guy: a senior with extraordinary leadership ability and charisma; a guy who has elevated his team to a new level of success; a defensive star in a sport that always favors the offensive stars; a young man with a heart-tugging backstory; and – this is important – a brilliant football player who has had a dominant season.

I would be quite happy to see him win Saturday night.

Yet in the end, after scrutinizing the statistics, I believe Manziel had the better season and deserved the vote. Barely.

The hardest part of this Heisman procedure was comparing a quarterback to a

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – On a day when media reports identified Charlie Strong as the leading candidate for the vacant Tennessee job, there was a quiet confidence here that the third-year head coach will remain with the Cardinals.

Charlie Strong guided Louisville to a 10-2 record and a berth in the Sugar Bowl. (AP)A decision from Strong on his future could come as soon as Wednesday, sources told Yahoo! Sports.

Multiple sources who spoke with Strong on campus Tuesday said he seemed committed to staying with the Cardinals – through the Sugar Bowl and beyond. They expect him to coach Louisville in 2013.

"Unless he's the greatest poker player of all time, I don't think he’s going anywhere," one Louisville source told Yahoo! Sports.

[Also: SEC shocker: Arkansas Hires Bret Bielema away from Wisconsin]

However, Louisville sources said they were taking nothing for granted and would wait to hear a definitive public declaration from Strong to be sure. The school has been burned by football coaches in the past, particularly Bobby Petrino, when it came to commitments to

In a stunning coup, Arkansas will hire Wisconsin's Bret Bielema as its next football coach, Yahoo! Sports has learned.

Bret Bielema had been head coach at Wisconsin since 2006. (AP)Bielema, who has taken the Badgers to three straight Rose Bowls, was nowhere on the radar amid months of speculation over who Arkansas would hire.

An announcement will come Tuesday, sources told Y! Sports, but Bielema is not expected to be introduced until Wednesday.

Details of Bielema's contract at Arkansas are not yet known, but the school was said to have a major war chest for this coaching search.

Bielema was making $2.5 million at Wisconsin.

The Badgers will now be scrambling to fill a vacancy they likely never saw coming. Pittsburgh coach Paul Chryst, a former offensive coordinator at Wisconsin under Bielema, could be a leading candidate to come back – a development that would truly be disastrous for the Panthers, who already have had three head coaches in the past three seasons. Another potential candidate and former Badgers assistant would have been

And now the best regular season in sports gives way to the worst postseason in sports.

Bowl season is upon us. And it is a mess of unprecedented proportion.

Mark Richt and the Bulldogs are headed to the Capital One Bowl to face Nebraska. (AP)Yeah, the BCS championship game is awesome. Notre Dame vs. Alabama is a sports fan's dream. And a sports writer’s dream. And a TV executive’s dream, too. The ratings will be absurd.

The Fiesta Bowl is great, too. If not for the night of Nov. 17, Oregon-Kansas State might have been the national championship game.

But after that? It’s a joke.

Bowl season is always a mess because the bowl system is a ridiculous, unsatisfying conclusion to the college football season. Bad matchups, long layoffs, too many 6-6 teams, coaching turnover and decisions designed to make money, not sense, shortchange the fans.

[Related: Ranking all the bowl games: 1-35]

But this year the charade has outdone itself. This is what college football has foisted off on the viewing (and paying) public:

Three teams in BCS bowls that aren’t

ATLANTA – Barrett Jones hobbled through the Alabama locker room with a crutch supporting him, his left foot injured.

Alabama center Barrett Jones and quarterback AJ McCarron celebrate after their win. (AP)The Crimson Tide center hurt it during the first quarter of the Southeastern Conference championship game but never missed an offensive snap. This was no time to be injured – not with a trip to the BCS championship game on the line and 'Bama being pushed to the brink by inspired Georgia. So he played through the pain for 60 minutes, then smiled through it when the game was won.

"Feel great," he said. "Couldn't be better."

The fifth-year senior has been part of two national champions and will play for a third title next month, against Notre Dame, in one of the juiciest matchups in recent history. But Jones called Alabama's 32-28 victory over the Bulldogs "my favorite win I've ever had. We might have to extend the 24-hour [celebration] rule to 48 for this one."

Even The Celebration Grinch himself, Nick Saban, might agree with that. The game was that good,

ATLANTA – Conference championship games, a key building block in the massive Greed Pyramid of college football, have largely been a bust.

Except for here. Like most aspects of the sport, the Southeastern Conference has been several steps ahead of its peers when it comes to staging a compelling, competitive and relevant title game.

In its eight-year existence, the Atlantic Coast Conference game has never had an impact on the national championship. Not once. Title game No. 9 won't matter, either, with 6-6 Georgia Tech stumbling into Charlotte to play Florida State while two other members of the Coastal Division (North Carolina and Miami) are ineligible. Attendance figures to be abysmal, as it has been several times previously.

The Pac-12's first title game was last year, and it also featured a 6-6 impostor in place of a power team on probation. That was UCLA, which lost to Oregon on its way to becoming the first team in college football history to go 6-8. This time

Athletic director Tom Jurich has overseen Louisville's move to the ACC.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – To appreciate the giddy place where the Louisville Cardinals are today as the newest members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, you must understand where they were 15 years ago.

When Tom Jurich came to town as the new athletic director in October 1997, he inherited a department that was collapsing at an alarming rate.

The basketball program was on NCAA probation and under sanctions. The glory days of the 1980s, when the Cardinals won two national championships, were fading quickly as Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum aged.

The football program was playing its games in a minor-league baseball stadium, although a new football stadium was scheduled to open the following season. But before getting into that new facility, Jurich had to watch Louisville finish a 1-10 train wreck of a season – then he had to fire its young African-American coach.

The non-revenue sports were uniformly underfunded, and most of them were unsuccessful. Their facilities were

Louisville is leaving the Big East to join the ACC. (Getty Images)

An intense lobbying effort has helped land Louisville a spot in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Yahoo! Sports has learned.

The latest Big East evacuee was chosen as the 14th member of the ACC Wednesday after a vote by the league's school presidents, multiple sources said. Louisville will replace Maryland, a founding ACC member which abruptly left for the Big Ten last week along with Rutgers of the Big East.

When Maryland's spot in the league came open, several Big East members made clear their interest in moving to the ACC. Sources said Louisville outmaneuvered the perceived early favorite, Connecticut, in large part because of the school's overall athletic commitment, the health of its football program and the issues Jim Calhoun left behind in the Huskies' basketball program. Cincinnati also made a spirited 11th-hour push, sources said.

According to a Sports Business Journal story in 2011, Louisville's total athletic budget of $68.8 million was bigger than every public