The Sporting News has got to be one of my top places for sport news. I have been a subscriber to the print magazine for awhile now, but even their online presence has grown drastically over the past couple of years. They have done a great job of integrating the online with the print and they actually make you want to jump back and forth between the two versions to read all the latest info.

All right, got my compliments out of the way.

The Sporting News has recently released their College Football top 50 for 2008-9. Not many surprises here. The Top 5 were pretty much locks. Georgia takes #1, followed by Ohio State, USC, Oklahoma, and LSU. I am not going to sit here and run through the whole list, but I will mention one big surprise–

Ball State joins the list at #41, and they are picked as a guaranteed Bowl bid heading in to the season. Of course preseason rankings really don’t matter much, but it is nice to see a small school from Indiana showing the big dog’s whats up. They are listed higher than Texas A&M, Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech, and fellow Indiana college Purdue. It will be interesting to see if they keep that momentum once the season starts.

Speaking of Purdue, they are ranked 46th overall and are heading in to the final year of coaching for Head Coach Joe TIller. The Big Tenet blog recently touched on this a bit and mentioned that Coach Tiller’s last year is sparking a rise in sales for Purdue football tickets. Hopefully some success will follow. Ohio State and Illinois lead the Big 10, but every year it seems there is always a big surprise.

Go check out The Sporting News Top 50 College Teams, then head over to The Big Tenet for the inside scoop on Big 10 sports action.

Surprise for the Big 10? I might have to go with Indiana who recently reinstated Kellen Lewis their second team All Big 10 Quarterback.

Lewis, a junior, is the fifth Indiana quarterback to reach 5,000 career passing yards and the fourth player to collect 6,000 total yards. He joined Tim Tebow of Florida and Dan LeFevour of Central Michigan as the only quarterbacks in the nation to pass for 3,000 yards and rush for 700 yards last season.

I am not sure if one man can carry the whole team, though.