The news is in. Not only was the entire offensive staff for the BYU football team released this afternoon by head coach Bronco Mendenhall and encouraged to search for job opportunities elsewhere, but my fellow colleagues here at Rhombus Magazine are starting a boy band. We plan to dedicate our first cover of the ground-breaking hit “Bye Bye Bye” from none other than ‘N Sync to BYU’s very own Robert Anae.

The news broke about 3:00 p.m. today from the Deseret News. Funny enough however, at 5:41 p.m. when I went to check the article before writing my thoughts here, the page that broke the news officially can “no longer be found” or “may not exist.”

Really? Is this going to be a major let-down to BYU football faithful everywhere? Let’s face it — Robert Anae has been a suspect (to say the least) play-caller for years. Thanks to a few questionable games he called this season without veteran quarterback Max Hall or running back Harvey Unga there to bail him out, Anae’s ineptitude was on full display and, thankfully for us, Bronco realized this… or so we thought.

Despite a very meaningful Thursday night NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Houston Texans, a college football rivalry game between Arizona St. and Arizona, and my intramural bowling league championship playoff that begins tonight on ESPN 8 (The Ocho), the game everyone will be watching in t-minus 45 minutes is going to be the NBA matchup between the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers.

The great return of Zydrunas Ilgauskas to Quicken Loans Arena. A possible Eastern Conference Finals match-up teaser between an 11-8 Miami Heat team and the 7-10 Cleveland Cavaliers. A heated rivalry that dates back to, well, just this past summer. Or, all my kidding aside, the significant return of the all-time leading scorer in Cleveland franchise history, Lebron James. (This is including former Cavalier greats such as Craig Ehlo, Brad Daugherty, Mark Price, and even the legendary Shawn Kemp.) I think it’s safe to say LeBron James was a big deal in Cleveland.

A delayed flight from LAX to Salt Lake City due to a blizzard, unable to locate my car in the airport parking lot due to the same blizzard, driving over an hour at 20-30 mph over the 20 miles from the airport to Sandy due to the same blizzard, having to pull off the road and stay in a Comfort Inn over night because I could not make it home due to the same blizzard, and an awful first day back at school after an infinitely better and warmer Thanksgiving break in Southern California later, I can now sit down to reminisce about the BYU-Utah football game that took place about 48 hours ago.

There is probably nothing I could have asked for more on a Black Friday following turkey day than seeing the #1, #2, and #4 teams in college football play on national television. Unfortunately for me, as the day has recently concluded, I am able to say with 100 percent certainty that this Black Friday, November 26th of the year 2010, will go down as the worst day in my college football history.

Before the day began, we saw a possibility for one of two non-automatic qualifying schools (#3 TCU or #4 Boise St.) to jump either #1 Oregon or #2 Auburn and have a shot at playing for the national title. Oregon found themselves facing a a tough Arizona opponent, but were expected to win the game without much of a problem despite their recent struggles against Cal Berkeley.

Auburn, though, was set to play the defending national champion Alabama Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa, and many analysts (including myself) predicted Alabama to pull the upset. If this were to have happened, the nation would have been looking at the likely chance of a non-automatic qualifying school like TCU or Boise St. would be given an opportunity to play in the national title game for the first time in the BCS era.

What did we all see instead? An early Christmas present given to the BCS and everything the flawed system stands for.

The new basketball season is here, the new basketball season is here! Special guest and Rhombus editor-in-chief Steve Pierce joins the PB&J Report crew for the podcast’s annual preview of the BYU men’s basketball season and the team’s prospects — both in the Mountain West Conference and beyond. Also, as always, a little football talk is thrown in for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

Is the new, competent-looking BYU football team for real — or was it just a one-time aberration against a sub-standard opponent? How will the Mountain West shake out — and does BYU actually have the potential to go to a respectable bowl game? Will Auburn stumble in the face of the latest allegations against star quarterback Cam Newton — and will that open up a slot in the title game for TCU? And what the heck is going on with the Utah Jazz? The answers to all these questions and more are in this week’s edition of The PB&J Report. Enjoy!

If you haven’t watched The Bachelor Pad yet, you’re missing out. It’s easily the greatest television show of the last 10 years, if not of all time. Is it dumb? Yes. Is it trashy? Certainly. But that’s what makes it so great!