Here’s a quick breeze through some links to SEC scrimmage and practice news from the weekend.

Here are takes on Saturday's Ole Miss scrimmage from our Parrish Alford and ESPN's Chris Low, who got into town Friday night after a drive from Starkville via Houston.

Brad Locke was attending to a family matter on Saturday. Here's an alternate take on the Mississippi State scrimmage. And here's a two-part interview from late last week with Dan Mullen by ESPN's Low, Part 1 and Part 2.

Now, let's span the globe, or at least the SEC map:

Alabama worked out behind Nick Saban’s iron curtain. Here’s what one writer gleaned from the stats. Here's the official version of what happened.

LSU is finding all kinds of ways to get the ball into the hands of freshman Russell Shepard. (RB/KR Trindon Holliday is back at work, by the way.)

At Auburn, the buzz on Saturday was upbeat about the offense. Of course, it was going up against Auburn’s defense.

In Knoxville, the sense is that the Tennessee offense took a step back in the Vols’ second scrimmage.

Florida saw an outbreak of injuries in its Saturday workout. Tim Tebow’s tears could heal them all – but, despite what you may have heard, he never cries.

Georgia is still looking for a workhorse running back. Given the Dawgs’ history at the position, we suspect they’ll come up with something.

Ryan Mallett looked awesome for Arkansas. Wonder how we’ll do when some of those mighty SEC defenses take a mallet to his head?

Vanderbilt went no-huddle in its first full scrimmage and three freshman running backs looked good against a patchwork defense.

Not much news out of the Kentucky camp. Maybe they’re still laughing too hard about the Rick Pitino mess.

South Carolina will try again today after a scheduled scrimmage was rained out. Steve Spurrier took a moment to discuss his practice philosophy – which, if we might say, seems to have worked better at Florida. His comments may stem from this story, which ran in Saturday's paper.

Tony Dungy, the former Indianapolis Colts coach, has staked his reputation on ... Michael Vick. The Washington Post gets inside how the convicted felon got another chance. If Vick fails now, it'll probably do more damage to Dungy's reputation that to Vick's.

Our high school Football Journal will be published in newspapers of Friday, Aug. 21, so you can have it in hand for the games to be played that night. Next year, we'll probably return to the schedule where we get it into the Sunday paper the week before the season kicks off, but moving the first week of the season up a week -- a terrible idea -- pushed our writing deadlines this year.

Here's our tentative coverage plan for Friday, Aug. 21:

West Point at Shannon

Aberdeen at Columbus

Nettleton at Amory

TCPS at Mantachie

Mooreville at Saltillo

Booneville at New Albany

The high school calendar that night is a little light – Tupelo and some other teams aren't playing – so we have a little better chance to get things smoothed out the first night.

College teams are being encouraged to try a pregame handshake for the first week this season. We'dalso like to see a post-game handshake lineup, like in Little League and hockey.

Here's a list of coaches who're on the hot seat, the warm seat or the lukewarm seat this year. No real surprise, we suppose, that Charlie Weis of Notre Dame leads the list.

It's too early to set the DVR, but here's a rundown of some fine out-of-conference basketball matchups for next season.

By the morning of Jan. 3, Kentucky – ranked as high as No. 2 in a couple of early preseason polls we've seen – will have played UConn, North Carolina and Louisville. That's 3 of the top 5 games on this list.

Outside the top 25 on this list are a bunch of other games, including these: Mississippi State vs. UCLA in the Wooden Classic on Dec. 12 and Ole Miss at West Virginia on Dec. 23.

The game we'd most like to see? Kansas at Tennessee, to be played on either Jan. 9 or 10. The Jayhawks will likely start the season at No. 1.

It looks pretty certain that we'll have room to get a SWAC football preview (Jackson State, Alcorn State, Miss. Valley State) into Saturday's newspaper. Also, we had a nice lady caller back in the summer asking that we run the entire SWAC schedule sometime. Looks like we'll be able to hook that up on Saturday, also.

We ran the major-college football schedules in the paper today (Friday). We had previously published the schedule page on a Sunday (Aug. 2) and then on a Saturday (Aug. 8). Most people see the paper on at least once of those days. Another very popular day of the week for the Daily Journal is Wednesday (mainly because of our fine food section), and we have three more shots to get it in there before the season begins.

Christopher Walsh of the Tuscaloosa News is out today with his bowl projections. As with Chris Low's projection for ESPN.com, he sees a record 10 SEC teams playing in bowls. We think that's unlikely, as somebody (South Carolina?) will underachieve. But it's fine to dream.

After some behind-the-scenes wrangling, Eli Manning signed that contract extension that, depending on how you do the math, makes him the NFL's highest-paid player.

Here's the story.

It took nine days or so to seal the deal, largely because of haggling about what has been described as "marketing language" in the contract. Here's more on that issue.