A few links to send you into the weekend:

--- The Blue Ribbon College Football Yearbook preview of Washington is now available on ESPN.com, though only if you have the Insider package (which I have due to the immense raise I've gotten for doing this blog!). It's an exhaustive preview, though for the die-hards it may not have a lot you don't know already. Most interesting in these things are the rankings and conclusions. Blue Ribbon gives UW's offense a B, the special teams a C-plus, the defense a C and the intangibles a C-plus. And in assessing Tyrone Willingham's future, the piece states "Bottom line: The Huskies probably have to win five home games to save Willingham's job, and that's a tough task. They should beat Washington State on the road, but after that, any road victory would be an upset.'' And it concludes with: "In the end, this team simply doesn't look much different than a year ago. The Huskies should be more competitive on a week-to-week basis, and the seven home games certainly help the cause, but wins could be hard to come by.''

--- Former UW beat colleague Ted Miller, now at ESPN, is adding posts to his blog more frequently than the Mariners lose. Among his latest entries is this one assessing the top five questions in the Pac-10 this season. Number two asks whether UW and Arizona can win enough to save the jobs of Willingham and Mike Stoops. Miller concludes that Arizona has a better chance, and that an 0-3 start --- UW won't be favored to win any of those games --- could doom the Huskies.

--- Miller also has his pre-season Pac-10 rankings with UW seventh. He also goes out on a limb with USC at No. 1.

--- Finally, Miller, who really should be working more on his golf game rather than doing all this darn blogging, has this look at what has happened to Washington "while you were on vacation.''

--- A Bleacher Report columnist (and boy are there a lot of those) says the Huskies could be one of the top five surprise teams in the country this season --- actually, he says they could be the third-biggest surprise. One minor glitch is that he writes UW could end up in the Independence Bowl., Thankfully for those of us who would get to attend UW's bowl game, the Pac-10 has no contract with the Independence Bowl and since it has deals with seven bowl games overall, the odds of a Pac-10 team ending up in something other than one affiliated with the conference are about as long as this sentence.

--- Jake Locker's appearance this week at a fund-raiser in Ferndale helped raise more than $7,000 for a children's organization.

--- Want more ammo that the Pac-10 really does schedule more manly than almost every other BCS conference? The Wizard of Odds supplies some good evidence with this breakdown of non-conference games sinice 1998 showing that the Pac-10 has played fewer home games than the other BCS conferences, and fewer games against I-AA foes (or whatever they are called these days by the NCAA) than any other conference in college football.

All for now.