FanHouse

It's the second week of the FedEx Cup, Vijay Singh is fresh off an moderately exciting overtime win over Sergio Garcia and that other guy (okay, it was Kevin Sutherland, but come on...) at the Barclays Championship, and there's another big name atop the leaderboard in Norton, Mass: Mike Weir.

And not only is he leading the tournament heading into the weekend, he's doing it in record-breaking fashion: Weir fired a 10-under 16 on Friday, the lowest round of his PGA career, and a TPC Boston course record. One problem: nobody saw it.

Sure, there were people in the gallery (I assume), but in terms of television viewers, the ratings have to be somewhere south of anything you might find on CW. I'm just hazarding a guess based on what I watched yesterday, but since I'll watch anything marginally related to golf, I'm probably a fair representation. (Plus, sample size = 1 is more than enough data to make broad, sweeping generalizations.)

Yes, this has everything to do with the latest iteration of Andy Richter (really, do I even have to mention his name?), and less to do with the rest of the tour's big names stepping up to fill the void. If a Vijay-Sergio sudden death (figuratively) at the Barclays doesn't move the ratings needle, it's more a testament to the power of Tiger than the quality of play when he's not around. That's hardly earth-shattering stuff, particularly since we've seen viewership nosedive since Woods called it a season back in June.

On the upside, the Deutsche Bank still has a $7,000,000 purse, even if nobody sees it.

Inflation in Zimbabwe is so stunningly high -- more than 11 million percent so far this year -- that a box of cereal costs more than 1,000 Zimbabwe dollars, while a teacher's monthly salary is 800 Zimbabwe dollars.

So with an economy that out of kilter, it seems more than a little perverse that President Robert Mugabe handed swimmer Kristy Coventry a suitcase full of $100,000 as a bonus for her performance in Beijing, where she won a gold medal and three silver medals.

"You have done well, daughter of Zimbabwe," Mugabe told Coventry. "We wish you well in life. We should praise her. She is our golden girl. Take care of her."

Coventry lives in the United States. Fortunately for Coventry, the cash she got was in American greenbacks.

College football season officially started Thursday night, and it really gets going today.

There are a ton of games on the docket, starting with LSU and Appalachian State at 11am Eastern. If you didn't hear, they moved that game up six hours because of the threat of Hurricane Gustav, which is rapidly strengthening in the Caribbean and causing evacuations in Louisiana.

We'll be covering that game, along with all the other early games, in a CiL chat that begins promptly at 11am Eastern time. That's 10am Central, and 7am Alaska time.

For future reference, we'll be chatting every Saturday throughout the season. Please do make a point of joining us for our first Saturday chat of the season, after the jump.

One of the best defensive players in the NFL will start the season on the sideline, and he suggested that he might be there for a lot longer than a week.

Ravens safety Ed Reed confirmed what most people suspected, that he doesn't expect to play in Baltimore's regular-season opener because of a nerve injury that is affecting his neck and shoulder.

Training camps are underway, the NFL season is a month off, and to get you ready for 2008, FanHouse previews all 32 teams, "heat index" style. We'll rate each club in 10 categories on a scale of 1 to 10, high score wins.

Quarterbacks: Listen, I'd love to believe in J.T. O'Sullivan. He's had a great pre-season, he's battled through a lot of adversity to earn this shot, and he seems to have the physical tools. However, the fact that he's failed in every NFL stop before this worries me. Is Mike Martz the magic potion that will cure O'Sullivan and turn him into a good NFL quarterback? Maybe. He's certainly made a lot of other quarterbacks look really good. At quick glance, O'Sullivan appears to be a perfect fit for the Martz offense. He's making good, quick decisions. He's got an arm that's plenty good enough. But the fact that he's never succeeded anywhere else in the NFL tells me that there is at least a part of his pre-season performance that's "mirage". There isn't much else to work with here. Alex Smith has been generally terrible, doesn't appear to get along well with coach Mike Nolan, and he's getting to the point in his career where San Francisco may just have to consider giving up on him. Shaun Hill, meanwhile, looked passable in a late-season audition last year before becoming virtually invisible in training camp. He doesn't appear to be much of a factor. Heat Index: 5

The best news that mixed martial arts fans could hear may soon be upon us. There are growing signs that Randy Couture will re-join the UFC for a multi-fight deal, and that his first fight would be against Brock Lesnar. There is even a chance that the second would be the long-awaited superfight against Fedor Emelianenko.

All indications are that Couture is making progress in talks about resolving his contract impasse with UFC, and that the first fight in a new three-fight deal would cone November 15 against Lesnar at UFC 91. We noted the possibility after an MMA Junkie report, and and BloodyElbow.com has confirmed the talks.

By all accounts, Couture is training as if he has a fight coming up within the next two or three months. If the Lesnar-Couture fight happens, it would probably be the UFC's most lucrative pay-per-view of the year.

While enduring the Big Ten Network's "Friday Night Tailgate" tonight, something interesting presented itself. They showed a clip of Joe Paterno at his finest, hosting Penn State's Friday night pep rally. He wasted little time in picking at an old scab. After singling out members of his '68 and '69 teams in attendance, the massive chip on his shoulder made itself known. After telling the crowd that the players were "screwed" out of a championship, he had this to say:

"We had kicked the devil out of a couple people in bowl games, and the President of the United States at that time went down into Texas with a Southern Strategy and announced that Texas was the national championship (boos).

I'm sitting in my house, the phone rings, it's the White House.

The President would like you come down and we're going to give you a trophy for the longest winning streak in the country. Oooohhhh nooo. Oooohhh nooo. I told them to shove it! And that's true!"

Keep in mind that particular President last held office in 1974 and has been dead more than a decade is dead and buried, and has been that way since 1973. It's now 2008 and Paterno's still miffed and ready to collar the guy.

I imagine the tenacity to hold that kind of grudge for that long and make it so fresh in the telling before thousands of people is part of what keeps Joe Paterno doing the near-impossible job of running a major college football program in his advanced age. He's irritating on his good days and much worse on others, but it's impossible not to respect the tenacity and occasionally get a good laugh at some of the history he's been a part of.

Seattle had very little remaining hope of a happy end to its battle with Clay Bennett and friends over the Sonics franchise. Moments before a judge was set to decide several weeks ago whether the Sonics would be forced to remain in the Emerald City for two more years, the city settled with Bennett for a package including some cash, maybe some more cash later, and a case of Lil' Smokies.

Only the lawsuit of Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO and former Sonics owners, remained in Bennett's way ... and only barely in play, at that. Schultz claimed Bennett broke a significant clause of his purchase agreement by not making "good faith efforts" to get a new arena built in Seattle. Schultz was almost surely right: all signs have pointed to the fact Bennett wanted out of Seattle from the day he began discussing a purchase of the team.

But Friday, according to The Oklahoman, Schultz dropped his suit, citing the belief his case would fail as a reason.

That seems plausible. Also plausible: Schultz heard David Stern's threats of making things very expensive if the lawsuit stayed alive, or the whole thing was a temporary face-saving, PR maneuver in the first place. Who knows? Honestly, who cares? The Un-Sonics are now the Thunder. Hopefully, Seattle gets the team it deserves soon. But the damage, as they say, has been done.

I wrote the other day about how much I disliked the new format NASCAR is going with for the season-opening Budweiser Shootout in 2009 at Daytona, mainly because of the qualification procedure.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. hates the new format for a completely different reason, though:

"I don't know what the extra five laps are for," he said Friday at Auto Club Speedway, site of Sunday's Pepsi 500 Sprint Cup race. "What the heck? They [NASCAR] don't get it. They messed up The Winston, the all-star race, and they're messing up the Shootout.

"They ought to line us up, make us run 10 laps. They want us to run around there for 25 first and have a 25-lap segment? That'd be cool. But 10 laps to go, all or nothing - that's what the fans want, that's what the drivers want.

"The last segment being 50 laps? We're just going to sit there for 30. I just don't get it. They don't get it. I don't understand. I don't know what the focus group is they're talking to to get these formats.

"It's frustrating because I want to like running those races. I don't want to dread them, but right now I'm dreading running them because the formats are no fun."

If Earnhardt Jr. was aiming for a scathing critique of the format, then he was spot on. And can you blame the guy?

The Minnesota Vikings won't have an easy go of it in the first month of the season, as their mammoth left tackle, Bryant McKinnie, has been suspended for four games.

The suspension was first reported early this month, a report the league said was premature. But today the NFL announced that the four-game suspension will, in fact, begin tomorrow and run through the Vikings' September 28 game at Tennessee.

McKinnie's suspension stems from repeated violations of the league's personal conduct policy. The most recent violation involved a fight with a nightclub bouncer; he was previously involved in the Vikings' infamous "love boat."

Having McKinnie out will make things particularly difficult for quarterback Tarvaris Jackson, an at times skittish passer who relies on McKinnie to protect his blind side. The Vikings want Jackson to learn to look to pass first and run only as a last resort, but that will be hard to do when he's got defensive ends bearing down on him for the first four games.