It's Friday which means it's time for the Mailbag. 

Congrats, you can pretend to work while reading in advance of the Memorial Day weekend.  

Our beaver pelt trader of the week is Kevin Durant. He's included in a mailbag question as well, but his decision to donate a million dollars to the tornado victims is worthy of the award. 

And much more. 

Okay, let's dive into the mailbag.

LSU at Alabama (8 ET/CBS) – College Football Armageddon is upon us. Alabama-LSU has provided us with several memorable games over the past quarter-century. This year, it provides us "The Game." There are too many storylines here to count. It's Saban Bowl V. It's No. 1 vs No. 2. It could, and should, be a de facto play-in game for the BCS National Title. A potential - albeit highly unlikely - rematch could loom in January in that title game if things fall perfectly into place. Both teams are coming off bye weeks. With the decision to move this matchup to prime time two weeks ago, the final piece was added to the puzzle setting the stage for the most hyped regular season game of perhaps the past 20 years (if not ever.) Rumors abound on message boards about celebrities who may be in attendance. In addition to 102,000 inside the stadium and millions watching at home, tens of thousands of others are expected to show up for the party without a ticket. With the extra time to get ready and the number of future NFL stars set to be showcased, it's the closest thing the college football regular season has to a Super Bowl. But can it possibly live up to the expectations that the fans and media have set? What needs to happen for this game to live up to the hype? And what will happen?

Late Thursday night Outkick the Coverage broke the story of pending press releases inadvertently visible on the SEC website that announced the arrival of Missouri as the SEC's 14th member. One of those releases featured CBS Sports columnist and CBS TV host and analyst Tony Barnhart analyzing the benefits of Missouri as the 14th member of the SEC. Barnhart's analysis was solid -- he's very good at what he does -- but there was only one problem -- Barnhart is also employed by CBS as both a columnist, TV reporter, and host which means he had access to major expansion news and didn't break it at CBS.

In his defense Barnhart told Paul Finebaum on Friday:  "I was asked about Missouri in a what if? No one gave me inside information."

Reached by OKTC Barnhart reiterated those comments adding that since he was asked about Missouri in a hypothetical context he never had any direct knowledge of Missouri to the SEC. Barnhart told us that if he'd had that knowledge he would have reported it.  

That's a defense, but is it a persuasive one? Finebaum didn't press Barnhart on the issue -- and when asked he told OKTC he didn't want to comment further -- but the next question that begs to be asked is this one, did you provide analysis for other schools in a hypothetical fashion?  

Happy Halloween.

This year y'all killed it with SEC related costumes. If you haven't already seen the best costumes that we put up on OKTC, you need to click here now. Sarah Palin and Glen Rice, Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth, A.J. McCarron's chest tattoo, the LSU Honey Badger, Harvey Updyke and a tree, and Barbara Dooley? These were all genius costumes. Every single one. Most impressive of all was that you're all readers of OKTC. Which confirms something that I've been feeling for a while now, OKTC readers are, by and large, some of the smartest and funniest on the Internet. 

Notwithstanding the occasional, "your gay," I love checking my email and Twitter feed just to see what you guys are passing along. 

I don't say it enough, but an awful lot of this site's success is thanks to y'all. In fact, the numbers reflect it. Sixty percent of our site traffic is shared content. That is, you guys are passing along our links to your friends. Whether that's on Twitter, Facebook, or via email, that's incredibly gratifying. There are an awful lot of sites out there that rely almost exclusively on Google search to drive most of their site traffic. This isn't one of them.    

The NBA lockout is still dragging on and players are doing whatever they can to stay in shape. Including, evidently, playing a little intramural flag football with Oklahoma State's Sigma Nu team. I know lots of you are a bit hungover -- or at least saddened -- by Halloween's passing. So why not watch the best young player in the NBA run around with frat guys? Be sure and listen to the Twitter story that made all this happen too. My favorite part is Durant picking up his teammates at their house.

In the meantime, the Starting 11 will be up in a little while.

But until then, enjoy.

Anyone else halfway expect Durant to play with the backpack on?

You're either a Nick Saban guy or a Les Miles guy.

As the Grass Bowl inches closer and the biggest regular season game in SEC history nears, it's become an incontrovertible fact, you're riding with Les or you're rolling with Saban. The single most fascinating aspect to this game is the extreme differences beetween the two men helming their respective teams. One man coaches based on rigroous gameplanning and data points, the other believes in football karma, the gods of the sod.   

If you're a Saban guy you don't believe in karma or ghosts or anything outside the realm of game film. You're a process guy, a rigorous applier of logic to a game or your own life. Nick Saban is very smart like lots of men are very smart. I guarantee you Saban was good at math, he coaches football like it's a difficult equation to solve. Input the right weight at linebacker, the mammoth defensive tackle and the corners with loose hips and the result is the stifling of movement. Football to Nick Saban is a process, but it's also an equation that he's solved.

Please excuse my dear Uncle Nick. (It's algebra, stupid!)    

There's a debate right now in the Indianapolis Colts organization about whether or not the team should draft Andrew Luck. Some are worried about angering Peyton Manning -- who should, by the way, be NFL MVP this year without playing -- if the team drafts his replacement. Others feel that the time is right to groom a successor. Right now the Colts are 0-7 and in a dead heat race with the Miami Dolphins in the Suck for Luck sweepstakes. (I know the Rams suck too, but they've already given Sam Bradford 450 million). Well, it appears that even Colts fans who are willing to follow their winless team on the road in Nashville are in favor of sucking for Luck.

By halftime it was 20-0 Titans and the Colts had been outscored a robust 82-7 in their past six quarters.

During these six quarters it's altogether possible that head coach Jim Caldwell has not spoken on the sideline.

But this group of six fans -- the other three guys are wearing the same jersey -- are ready for Andrew Luck. (So are a lot of other fans who watched Luck last night in primetime against USC).

Last night we threw a Halloween Party. There were lots of good costumes, but there was only one truly great costume. Ben Johnson, a West Virginia fan who has previously written for the site and blames me for WVU not getting the SEC bid, showed up in a costume to rival all costumes. He and his girlfriend, a doctor at Vanderbilt, brought down the house when they rolled in dressed as Glen Rice and Sarah Palin. She clearly looks a bit like Palin, especially when winking as she does in the photo, and he bought the Glen Rice jersey and modified it with both their last names on the back.

Let's not kid ourselves, this is pure genius.

I know there are lots of other great costumes out there for this year's Halloween so get them to me if you can. I've got the contact information below. In the meantime, bow down before the greatest personalized jersey since before the NFL stopped blocking Ron Mexico on Mike Vick jerseys.

Meet the throwback Palin Rice Michigan basketball jersey.

Arkansas's Marquel Wade delivered one of the dirtiest hits of the college football season against Vanderbilt punt returner Jonathan Krause. As if this hit -- which knocked Krause from the game -- wasn't bad enough, Wade then stood and celebrated the hit. He continued his celebration on the sideline. Wade was ejected from the game for the hit and as he left the field he taunted opposing Vanderbilt fans. Wade may very well end up with further suspension from the league. In the meantime, in the height of homerism, Arkansas's radio broadcast referred to this hit as "inadvertent contact."

Inadvertent?

Judge for yourself.

For many cigar smoke is a reminder of a wedding consummation amongst groomsmen or some chubby man trolling around the neighborhood with a dog that's much too small for him, but for me it's the nosebleed section of Sanford Stadium where my dad and I once had season tickets to UGA games and sat on aluminum bleachers that got so hot in the sun that if your shorts weren't long enough, the bottoms of your thighs would start to burn like pieces of white chicken meat tossed on top of a grill, and the man who sat in front of us in those seats had a face like Mr. Edwards from Little House on the Prairie and puffed away from the first sick 'em to the final second of every home game.

He puffed through cupcakes like the Western Carolina Catamounts and powerhouses like Clemson and Auburn, and no matter what the temperatures hit in late August and September, he kept blowing heat out of that sun baked roll of tobacco leaves that sat in his mouth like a thumb with no hand; and with every game, we breathed in the smoke like it was good for us. The year was 1991, the start of the Ray Goff era and the descent of Georgia football.

Today the Big 12 officially announced West Virginia as the conference's tenth member. You can read the Big 12's release here. (Yes, this one was intentionally released). While the Big East remains insistent that the 27 month exit will govern, West Virginia, as OKTC has told you multiple times, is effectively calling the Big East's bluff. The Big 12 release specifically says West Virginia will commence play in 2012. "The Big 12 Conference Board of Directors have voted unanimously to accept West Virginia University as a full conference member effective July 1, 2012. The Mountaineers will begin competing in the Big 12 beginning with the 2012-13 athletic season."  

The Big 12 release also informs you of something OKTC has been saying for over a month, the Big 12 will be playing with ten members. Which school is absent from the ten school conference list in the West Virginia release? Missouri. Which means, as we've been telling you for two months, Missouri will be the SEC's 14th team and commence play in 2012. All that remains now is legal wrangling over exactly what the penalties will be for leaving conference members. If the Big East is smart, it will seek the outcome I laid out yesterday in the Travis Compromise (many of you also suggested Mizzou Compromise).