MTSU will host Minnesota to start its 2010 college football season

Middle Tennessee State University will host the Minnesota Golden Gophers of the Big Ten conference to open its 2010 football season, according to a recent report in The Tennessean. The game will be played on Thursday, Sept. 2.

This continues the recent success the program has enjoyed when it comes to scheduling home games with teams from BCS conferences. This year, the Blue Raiders host Mississippi State from the Southeastern Conference. In recent years, they have hosted Maryland and Virginia from the Atlantic Coast Conference.

It is interesting that this game will be played on a Thursday. As we saw last week, teams playing on Thursday of the opening week of the season get more exposure. Even unsexy match ups like the South Carolina/North Carolina State game got a lot of attention.

Nice work MTSU.

Now, let's improve those special teams.

Prediction: MTSU will upset Mississippi State in football on Oct. 17

For college football fans, a fun way to kill time during the heat of the summer is to look at the upcoming schedules of teams and try to pick upsets. An upset I see coming is when the SEC's Mississippi State Bulldogs travel to Murfreesboro to play the Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders on October 17.

First of all, kudos to the Blue Raiders schedule maker for continuing to make progress when it comes to getting teams from big name conferences to visit Murfreesboro. Home field advantage means a lot as we saw when the Blue Raiders knocked off Maryland from the ACC last year.

MTSU has a ton of experience returning from last year's 5-7 team, including 10 starters on offense. True, the only non-starter returning is quarterback Dwight Dasher, but he has the supporting cast to put points on the board.

Mississippi State was one of several SEC teams that had big problems scoring last year. Former Florida assistant Dan Mullen has been brought in as new head coach. He will be installing Florida's spread offense, but as we have seen, it is difficult to be successful in that scheme if a team does not have the talent to run it. Even Urban Meyer struggled when implementing it at Florida in his first year. Therefore, expect the Bulldogs to have problems scoring again this year.

While the Bulldogs defense will be good this year, the Blue Raiders should be able to squeeze out enough points to win.