If there is one man responsible for the sumptuous buffet of college football on the menu for this weekend, it would be Dave Brown, who has been to college football scheduling what LeBron James is to the Cleveland Cavaliers -- the one person indispensable to the subject at hand. Brown may have a low profile outside the business of the sport. But few people in intercollegiate athletics can get a phone call to an athletic director or head football coach returned faster than Brown.Brown for years was in charge of scheduling college football games for ABC and ESPN (he now is a consultant on college football scheduling with proprietary software that makes the complicated business much easier for his clients). As such, the remarkable array of nonconference games during Kickoff Week -- including Alabama-USC, LSU-Wisconsin, Texas A&M-UCLA, Georgia-North Carolina, Clemson at Auburn, Notre Dame at Texas and Florida State-Ole Miss -- are by and large the work of Brown and the staff with whom he worked at ESPN.People will always put themselves out there and play one really big game, Brown said. Thats it in a nutshell. Thats what happened.Well, thats not exactly what happened. Take LSU and Wisconsin playing Saturday at Lambeau Field (ABC, 3:30 p.m. ET), the home of the Green Bay Packers. They originally were scheduled to play next season. The Badgers had been scheduled to play Virginia Tech in Week 2. Virginia Tech agreed to move a home-and-home with Wisconsin to 2019-20, 11 years later than the two programs first agreed to play. By the way, that freed up the Hokies to play Tennessee in the Battle at Bristol in Week 2. Tennessee was supposed to play Nebraska on Sept. 10. However, that home-and-home is now scheduled for 2026-27.Your head starting to hurt yet?We had to move around a lot of things to get it done, Brown said.There are logistics and there is desire. A tip of the hat to the College Football Playoff is necessary here. The CFP selection committees emphasis on schedule strength has dissolved the objections of coaches against playing difficult nonconference opponents. It can be like feeding spinach to children -- not many of them ask for seconds.You cant ask people to do something thats over and above what everybody else is doing, Brown said. Everybody else is playing one tough nonconference game? Thats what you can ask people to do.You call and you ask, you listen and you call back, you propose and maybe you wheedle. You call and you ask again. Brown has earned the trust of coaches to the point that they would call him to complain when they didnt like ESPNs coverage, which was not at all his bailiwick and put him in an awkward position. But he is the first to recognize the limits of what he can achieve.They really want seven home games, Brown said. Out of 12 games, with four on the road in the league, you are dealing with a pretty fixed set of scheduling parameters. You cant call somebody up and say, Do you mind going down to five home games? You dont even ask those kinds of questions.So you figure out which buttons to push. Texas A&M wanted to showcase the newly expanded Kyle Field. UCLA is coming to College Station, the first time the teams will play in the regular season in 61 years.The Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, which lost its ACC-SEC matchup when it became part of the New Years Six bowls, wanted to bring the two leagues together in its Kickoff Game. Hello, North Carolina and Georgia this year (and Alabama and Florida State next year).And the Crimson Tide wanted to open against a nonconference opponent at a neutral site, and is doing so for the fifth consecutive year (Michigan, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Wisconsin, USC). Note that list of opponents completes the full set of other Power 5 conferences.You put the puzzle together, and sometimes you get a piece of art that hangs in a museum. Thats what Brown did for the opening week of the 2016 season. Bruce Bowen Jersey . The team said Saturday that Lopez was hurt during its 121-120 overtime loss at Philadelphia on Friday. The Nets said they would issue another update next week after consultation with their doctors. DeMar DeRozan Jersey . Its the second straight game Bell has scored in extra time for Kelowna, which beat the Brandon Wheat Kings 6-5 on Friday, and he now has four game-winning goals on the season. http://www.cheapspursjerseys.com/?tag=cheap-lonnie-walker-jersey . Malkin got tangled up with Detroits Luke Glendening early in the third period and his left skate took the brunt of collision with the boards behind Pittsburghs net. George Gervin Jersey . Badenhop was 2-3 with a 3.47 ERA in 63 relief appearances for Milwaukee this season. He is 18-20 in his career with three saves and a 3. Wholesale Spurs Jerseys . Didier Drogba gave away the penalty that put Senegal one goal away from a major upset, but the veteran striker will get another chance -- probably his last -- at the World Cup after Salomon Kalous injury-time strike sealed the Ivorians place in Brazil next year. Sri Lanka Cricket has announced it will invest heavily in the existing club-based domestic structure, although a provincial first-class tournament is also in the works. The board has promised a grant of 11 million Sri Lankan rupees (USD $74,000 approx) for each of the 14 clubs in the first-class tournament, and has also said it will beef up facilities by providing bowling machines, mechanised rollers and other groundskeeping equipment. Ten Tier B clubs will get a grant of nine million rupees as well.We have identified our clubs as the places that we promote, sustain and develop cricket in our country, and we will invest as much as possible in this area, SLC president Thilanga Sumathipala said. For Sri Lanka to make an indelible mark on the world arena we need to focus on strengthening and developing our domestic cricket - this will provide us with a world-class pool of players to select from. Our focus is on the quality of cricket and not just the quantity.The announcement of these grants comes weeks after SLC had reinstated domestic contracts, handing out 85 of them to cricketers from a variety of clubs. This was a repudiation of the pay-model devised by 2015s SLC interim committee, who sought to better incentivise players by paying out substantial match fees for games played, instead of handing out contracts that guarantee income through the season.ddddddddddddThe present board also rejected the 2015 interim committees vision for Sri Lankas domestic cricket, having also canned the provincial tournament devised by Mahela Jayawardene.Moreover, these latest grants suggest the board does not want to move away from a club-based domestic structure, despite growing criticism of the competition. Several former players have suggested the current first-class format does not encourage high-quality cricket, and have also voiced concerns that senior cricket has not meaningfully spread beyond Basnahira (western province) and Ruhuna (southern province).SLC is expected to announce the details of a new provincial tournament over the next few weeks. However, this tournament is expected to be much shorter than the club tournament, and is likely to feature just four teams.The Premier League Tournament - for now the main first-class competition in Sri Lanka - will be unchanged from the previous seasons format. Fourteen teams will be split into two groups, before the top sides progress to a Super Eight round-robin. ' ' '