Kiss good-bye to pairings of undefeated teams. Perhaps two undefeated college teams will meet in a bowl game, or in the SEC championship game, but don't be surprised if there is no such contest left in the major-college season. In the NFL, Indianapolis and New Orleans are still standing, and could meet as undefeateds in the Super Bowl. That would require both to go 18-0. Only one NFL team has ever reached 18-0 -- two teams won't achieve that in the same season. Imagine if the Colts and Saints have both locked up top seeds at 13-0 when the sun sets on Dec. 13 -- both would have considerable trouble staying motivated until the divisional round a full month later.

But we get ahead of ourselves! New Orleans first must get fired up for its next three opponents: Carolina, St. Louis and City of Tampa, with a combined record of 4-18. Indianapolis has a slightly tougher assignment with its next three opponents: Houston, New England and Baltimore, with a combined record of 14-8.

The Saints have emerged as this season's most fun team to watch. They're zany and emotional; the Colts are cool and efficient. The two would make a fabulous Super Bowl pairing, owing to their contrasting styles and lack of negative storylines. But the Colts and Saints have one thing in common -- lots of nobodies playing well.

Indianapolis starts numerous players who were undrafted (Gary Brackett, Ryan Lilja, Daniel Muir, Gijon Robinson, future Hall of Famer Jeff Saturday) or who came out of nowhere (Pierre Garcon, from Division III Mount Union College). The New Orleans lineup is heavy on out-of-nowhere players, or those unwanted by previous teams. Starting Monday night were undrafted players Mike Bell, Jo-Lonn Dunbar and Jabari Greer, while the undrafted Pierre Thomas came off the bench to rush for 91 yards and catch the game-winning touchdown pass. Jahri Evans of Bloomsburg University, a Division II school, started on the offensive line with Jermon Bushrod of Towson University, a Division I-AA college. Jonathan Goodwin, Anthony Hargrove, Scott Shanle and David Thomas, all let go by other teams, started for the NFC's only undefeated club. New Orleans standouts Drew Brees, Darren Sharper and Jonathan Vilma were players other teams actively wanted to unload. Brees, the best quarterback in the NFC, was shown the door by San Diego, then rejected when he offered to sign with Miami; Green Bay let Sharper walk as "washed-up" five years ago! Scan around the NFL and behold team after team stacked with big-money first-round draft choices who don't perform. Give me motivated castoffs any day.

In other football news, it would be weird to wake up and find your team has the league's leading rusher, plus the No. 1 rushing attack in terms of average gain -- a spectacular 5.5 yards per carry -- yet also find your team is 1-6. That's how the Tennessee Titans find themselves after hosting the Jacksonville Jaguars in a game that produced a combined 522 yards rushing and 238 yards passing. It would be weird to wake up and realize you had rushed for 177 yards on just eight carries Sunday, yet only touched the ball once in the fourth quarter. That's how Maurice Jones-Drew finds himself right now.

Those 522 combined rushing yards did not come from power sets; on nearly every big run in the Jax-Flaming Thumbtacks contest, the offense was in a spread formation and the action was a draw play. Good blocking and sloppy tackling were the reasons for rushes of 89, 80, 79 and 52 yards. But tactical evolution was a reason, too. Not long ago, many coaches would have said the reason quarterbacks aren't always in the shotgun -- it's easier to throw if you're scanning the field from the snap rather than wasting time dropping back -- is that teams can't run from a shotgun formation. Increasingly the reverse is true -- teams run better from the shotgun than from conventional sets. Linemen have gotten so much bigger that there simply isn't room to run from a conventional set against a defense putting seven players in the box. Spread formations make it impossible to load seven defenders into the box, thereby creating running room. They also distract the defense into worrying so much about the pass that the rush becomes an afterthought. Chris Johnson's 89-yard touchdown run came on third-and-4, with the defense expecting a pass; Johnson was just 15 yards downfield when he'd already gotten by all but one Jacksonville defender! Sunday's Jacksonville at Tennessee game meant nothing to the standings, but may have been a preview of the next big fad in football: the rush-oriented spread offense.

The Crabtree Curse continues. San Francisco was 3-1, with its only defeat a fluky last-play loss; then the 49ers signed Michael Crabtree, and are 0-3 since. All that work Mike Singletary did building team spirit on the Niners went out the window when management decided a player could jerk the team around all he wanted and still get a $17 million reward. On the key down of San Francisco's loss at Indianapolis -- third-and-10 for the 49ers with six minutes remaining -- Alex Smith fell on a "coverage sack" when no one was open. Megabucks me-first diva Crabtree was nicely handled by undrafted free agent cornerback Jacob Lacey.

In television news, the big-budget remake of the kitschy 1980s sci-fi series "V" begins Tuesday night. Word is the special effects are movie-quality, while the amusingly tacky tone has been replaced by somber and serious. The space-alien mega-babe who is the invaders' sinister leader is played by Morena Baccarin, who also played a space-alien mega-babe who was the sinister leader of aliens attacking Earth in the SyFy Channel series "Stargate SG-1." Baccarin is the first actress ever to be typecast as a sinister space-alien mega-babe scheming to rule Earth! On "Stargate," she wore a revealing outfit that looked like a bondage harness -- after all, who can say what norms of personal appearance may be on other planets? -- though in the new series, she is modestly attired. Must be the difference between cable and network TV. TMQ warned two years ago, "Spacemen of the future: Should you ever encounter on an alien world a gorgeous mega-babe wearing nothing but strap-up heels and a bondage harness, run! She's a sinister superbeing!"

In the kitschy "V" of the 1980s, the aliens' ultimate plan was to steal Earth's water. Since water is a common substance in the universe -- comets are mainly water-ice -- this made little sense. The Oort Cloud on the boundary of our solar system contains orders of magnitude more water than Earth's oceans, right there for the taking. Reptilian aliens wouldn't need to engage in complex conspiracies, let alone dress in latex masks, to get that water -- they could have all they want. What will be the aliens' sinister purpose in the new "V"? Please don't tell me they've come to steal our resources. The Milky Way offers essentially infinite...