Other well-known coaches who have assumed prominent roles in Republican Party politics through the years include:

* Bud Wilkinson - Led the Oklahoma Sooners to three national titles and 145 victories - including a 47-game winning streak between 1953 and 1957 - before seeking to parlay his in-state popularity into a 1964 U.S. Senate bid. After losing that race to Democrat Fred Harris (who went on to run for president in 1976), Wilkinson became a college football commentator on television and briefly returned to coaching in a disastrous two-year stint with the St. Louis Cardinals in the late ‘70s.

* Tom Osborne - Racked up 13 Big-8/Big-12 conference titles and three national titles in a 25-year-run as coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Osborne emerged from his surprise retirement after the 1997 season to run for Congress from Nebraska's sprawling 3^rd District. He was elected with nearly unanimous support, and re-elected with ease in 2002 and 2004. When Mike Johanns quit his job as Nebraska's governor to accept a cabinet post in 2005, Osborne entered the race to succeed him - and initially led interim Governor Dave Heinemann by nearly 80 percent in G.O.P. primary polls. But Heinemann used his incumbency skillfully and positioned himself to the right of Osborne and won the May 2006 primary. A year later, Osborne returned to the University of Nebraska as athletic director.

* Joe Paterno - The legendary Penn State football coach, who won national titles in 1982 and 1986 and coached several unbeaten-but-uncrowned teams, resisted several entreaties through the years to enter politics and run for governor or U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. A close friend of the Bush family, he appeared at late-October rallies for George H.W. Bush in 1992 and for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 in State College, though his endorsement failed to swing the state to the G.O.P. in any of those years. His son Scott ran for Congress as a Republican in 2004 in a central Pennsylvania district but was handily defeated.

* Lou Holtz - The famous Notre Dame (and five other schools) coach is an avowed Republican who delivered a pep talk at the House G.O.P.'s annual retreat last year, their first such gathering after losing control of the House. He's contributed extensively to Republican candidates - including John McCain, John Boehner, and Dan Quayle - and got in some hot water 25 years ago, when he filmed a television ad (as the head coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks) for Jesse Helms. At the time, Holtz characterized his endorsement as personal, and not political. He has donated to some Democrats, most notably Hillary Clinton - presumably a thank-you for the assistance that Bill Clinton provided him when, as Arkansas' attorney general in 1977, he worked on Holtz's behalf when the coach suspended three Razorback players just before the Orange Bowl.

* Mike Ditka: The famous Bears coach nearly entered the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois, when state Republican leaders asked him to replace Jack Ryan, who had been forced from the race in scandal, as their nominee against Barack Obama. Ditka, enjoying a successful run as a television commentator and movie star, ultimately declined, and the G.O.P. nomination was finally handed to Alan Keyes. Ditka has given more than $12,000 to G.O.P. candidates and committees this decade.

* Bobby Bowden: The aging Florida State mentor, whose teams have succumbed to mediocrity in recent years after dominating the college football world for 15 years, is an outspoken Republican who, when his teams were vying for national titles, was fond of likening his sport's poll system to presidential politics - and to pointing out that he had voted for the Republican candidate in the most recent election.

By comparison, the Democrats don't really boast any outspoken loyalists from the ranks of prominent football coaches - although Bill Belichick has (with his typical lack of enthusiasm and elaboration) identified himself as a Democrat.

They do slightly better - again, for whatever reason - when it comes to basketball coaches. Dean Smith is an avowed Democrat whose name was frequently invoked by Elizabeth Edwards, his fellow North Carolinian, on the campaign trail this year. And Rick Majerus, the well-fed former Utah coach who is now with the St. Louis Billikens, suffered a public rebuke from his Archbishop for endorsing and appearing at a rally for Hillary Clinton earlier this year. He is also known to send handwritten letters of protest to the governor of any state that executes a prisoner.

Maybe there’s another reason Barack Obama decided to deliver his convention acceptance speech in a football stadium. As Howard Mortman points out this morning, Obama’s August 28 address will coincide with the start of the college football season, with at least four nationally televised games on the docket.

Sure, most of the games scheduled are of regional interest at best, involving middling Division I-A schools and even I-AA teams, and the kickoff times for most of the televised games are early enough to allow viewers to flip over to Obama’ speech (which will probably start around (10 p.m.) without missing any of the gridiron action.

But this is a political blog, and there’s nothing the political media likes better than to hype specious factors and warn of the significant impact they could have on the presidential race. With that in mind, let’s look closer at the August 28 college football schedule and consider how each game could prove to be the Ralph Nader of 2008.

North Carolina State at South Carolina (7 p.m., ESPN): Sure, these two teams were a combined 11-13 last year and neither qualified for a bowl. But they’re both improving and it’s a border war, so expect high viewership in both states – potentially creating a problem for Obama, since he has hopes of snagging North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes. And what if Lou Holtz, who once coached both South Carolina and N.C. State, decides to deliver one of his famous pep talks to fire up one of his old teams a few days before the game? Surely, such an action would only enflame tensions between the schools, further ratcheting up the ratings.

Vanderbilt at Miami (Ohio) (6:30, ESPN-U): O.K., so almost no one gets ESPN-U in their homes, and neither Vandy, which last qualified for a bowl in 1982, nor Miami, which plays in the non-BCS Mid-American Conference, is a ratings magnet. But look closer. It’s almost unheard of for a team from the powerful SEC to agree to play on the road against a small conference school. This will be the athletic event of the year in the Greater Miami area – and the Greater Miami area just so happens to be smack in the middle of west-central Ohio, a pivotal region in one of the premier battleground states. Should this game go to three or four overtimes – thus pushing it past 10 p.m. – Red Hawk partisans will almost certainly shun Obama’s speech, thus severely complicating the Democrat’s efforts to win them over.

Wake Forest at Baylor (7, FSN): Yeah, yeah, FSN typically draws unappealing college football match-ups that attract paltry audiences, and this looks like another one of them. Baylor is a perennial Big-12 cellar dweller (and is only in the conference because of the insistence of then-Governor Ann Richards back in 1994), and Wake Forest, one of the ACC’s smallest schools, has a limited fan base. But on top of the N.C. State-South Carolina game (and the potential Lou Holtz pep talk!), is the presence of another North Carolina-based team on television just too much for Obama to overcome? After all, for Obama to win North Carolina, he’ll need to fare well in Winston-Salem, where Wake is based, and make inroads in the Republican areas that surround it. That task will be infinitely tougher if come 10 o'clock on August 28 those voters are instead focused on a nail-biter in Waco. Really, shouldn’t the Obama campaign, which can raise and spend unlimited money, have paid the N.C. State and Wake Forest athletic departments to reschedule these games?

Oregon State at Stanford (8, ESPN2): So far, the news out of Oregon has been mostly good for Obama, who has opened a solid lead in polls there. But can he survive this? Oregon State, a football doormat until coach Mike Riley arrived in the mid-90’s, has a rabid fan base and is poised to contend for the Pac-10 title and its first BCS bowl since 2000. Expect those fans to be glued to their sets for the season-opener against Jim Harbaugh’s Cardinal. A secondary factor: How many Beaver fans will make the not-too-long drive down to Palo Alto to watch the proceedings in person? And with an 8 p.m. kickoff, this one is guaranteed to run clear through Obama’s Denver speech. John McCain, by contrast, will have Oregon’s undivided attention the following Thursday when he delivers his own speech. Could Oregon be on its way back to swing-state status? Really, there’s no excuse for this scheduling conflict on Obama’s part: He has a connection in Oregon State’s athletic department.

This year, the bowls will have competition for the nation’s attention from politics, with the day after Christmas marking the start of a frenzied week-long run-up to the January 3 Iowa caucuses (which will actually convene just as the Orange Bowl kicks off).

It’s quite fitting. Both clunky and dysfunctional relics of an outdated era, the college bowl system and the presidential primary process have more in common than you might think:

* College football has the Hawaii Warriors, a scrappy bunch who did everything they could to earn a crack the national title (winning every game they played), only to be locked out of the big game because pundits and media members were dazzled by teams with more star power. The Presidential race has Bill Richardson.

* College football has the greedy Presidents of the major conference schools, who bitterly and successfully resist the post-season tournament that the game so badly needs merely because they will lose their guaranteed paydays from the marquee bowl games. The presidential race has Iowa and New Hampshire.

* College football has Lou Holtz, sporting a 15-year-old wardrobe and railing at a camera. The presidential race has Chris Matthews.

And so on.