COLLEGE, THE NEW HIGH SCHOOL. A Northern Star columnist discovers a twist on weeknight football.

Heck, at Virginia Tech, to get attendance up for weekday games, it cancels afternoon and night classes.

So if you want to play weekday games to make money, do so. But don’t try to sell it as a way to showcase the university and the program when in order to do so you have to endanger the mission of the university.

Endanger the mission? Redefine the mission perhaps: high schools, after all, turn the last class period on Friday into a pep rally. We're doing the high schools' work in remedial classes already, why not reproduce the social structure of high school too.

On Thursday night, Northern Illinois became bowl-eligible. That's a mixed blessing. Last year, the incremental return from the Independence Bowl was a negative $154K. Ball State, which lost $67K at the Motor City Bowl, defended its loss because it was smaller than Northern Illinois's. This year, Ball State stands to lose precisely nothing at a bowl.