Before we get to football today, I wouldn't be doing my job as a sportswriter if I didn't mention that today marks the 60th anniversary of one of the most significant days in American sports history: July 5, 1947, when Larry Doby broke the color barrier in the American League.

Doby, one of the most feared hitters in the American League in the late 40s and early 50s, probably fought through even more adversity than Jackie Robinson, but is unknown to most young people who aren't baseball junkies.

Jerry Izenberg has a great piece in today's Star Ledger about Doby, who grew up in Paterson and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1998.

. . .

Now, as promised, we'll take a look at the USA Today Sports Weekly college football preview, which, like several other publications, features Ray Rice on the cover.

The editors at Sports Weekly, who are adding college football to their baseball and pro football coverage for the first time this year, didn't include nearly as many sets of rankings as the editors of most other publications, including Athlon Sports, which we looked at yesterday.

But they do have some interesting content, including their projections for who will play in every BCS game.

Among the items regarding Rutgers and the Big East are the following:

• Rice is one of five players -- all running backs -- featured as potential Heisman winners. The other four are Arkansas' Darren McFadden (the presumed front-runner), West Virginia's Steve Slaton, Michigan's Mike Hart, and Boise State's Ian Johnson, who became an instant celebrity in January when he scored a two point conversion on the famous Statue of Liberty play to beat Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, then proposed to his girlfriend, a Broncos cheerleader. Most other lists have USC QB John David Booty and not Johnson, but Johnson is an interesting story because he played such a major role in what, for my two cents, may have been the best college football game ever played.
• USA Today didn't scoop anyone by including this -- its public information that you can get anywhere -- but they include a complete Bowl schedule. In case anyone is looking way ahead to potential season outcomes, here are the bowls and locations in which the Scarlet Knights could end up, starting in chronological order with non-BCS games: The Papajohns.com Bowl on Dec. 22 in Birmingham, Ala. against a C-USA team; The Meineke Car Care Bowl, Dec. 29 in Charlotte against an ACC team; the Brut Sun Bowl, New Year's Eve in El Paso, Texas against a Pac-10 team; the Gator Bowl, New Year's Day in Jacksonville, Fla. against an ACC team; and the International Bowl, Jan 6 in Toronto afgainst a MAC team. If they're in the BCS picture, they could end up in the Rose Bowl or Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day, the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2, the Orange Bowl on Jan. 3, or, in a dream situation, the BCS national championship game on Jan. 7 in New Orleans.
• If you flip to the Big East preview as I did and realize there are seven teams featured instead of eight, that's because West Virginia has its own page. Why? Because USA Today picked them to go to the BCS title game against USC. I'm not sure exactly how good that would be for the Big East. It'd be great to have a Big East team in the spotlight, but I think anyone who plays the Trojans in that game is going to lose in a rout of Reagan-Mondale proportions.
• Like Athlon Sports, USA Today picked the Scarlet Knights ahead of Louisville as the No. 2 team in the Big East. West Virginia, obviously, is No. 1. The rest of their projections are exactly the same as everyone else's: Louisville, South Florida, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, UConn, and Syracuse.
• Rice, OT Jeremy Zuttah, DT Eric Foster and S Courtney Greene are all on the All Big East team.

That's it for today. I've got a busy day on the copy desk here at The Trentonian, so I've got to turn my attention back to baseball for the rest of the night.

Look back tomorrow for some highlights from Phil Steele's preview, which has more information than every text book I read in college combined.

If there are any Sox fans out there, enjoy the Sox-Rays game, and hope Josh Beckett is back on top of his game after a mediocre start last time out.

- Ben