Ah, the month of October.

The beginning of fall. The end of another baseball season.

And for some reason (maybe it's just human nature), even if we haven't been paying attention to Major League Baseball for the past six months, we huddle around the TV this time every year and zone in on a month-long run of postseason action.

Of course, there are plenty of you out there who rather stick to their network-series dramas, Thursday night sitcoms and non-stop 2008 presidential election news (which, like the rest of the political junkies, has put me on a regular diet of MSNBC and CNN coverage for the past two months).

Yet after hours with Chris Matthews and Wolf Biltzer (and you can only take so much after awhile), I've managed to watch enough postseason action to realize once again that baseball in October is just that much more exciting than in April, May, June, July, August and September.

It's pretty simple. Because when the stakes are raised, there's something just a little bit more exciting about baseball.

Baseball fans hear it all the time: "Baseball? How can you watch that? It's so boring..."

That may be true for the first six months of the season, but in October, it all changes.

The same goes for the NBA playoffs and even the Stanley Cup finals (to a lesser degree).

Some years, admittedly, the postseason is better than others, and with no New York baseball in the playoffs this year, things probably seem a little out of place.

Even so, the defending champion Red Sox, who might as well be the new Yankees of baseball these days, are back in the hunt. So in the scheme of things, all is not completely out of wack this October.

But for the sake of TV ratings, no one here at FOX would be too thrilled about seeing Tampa Bay and Milwaukee square off in the World Series, and yet anything's possible.

Of course, now that many of us have transitioned into baseball mode for the next few weeks, we also forget that the college football season is almost halfway over.

Yes, believe it or not, it's Week 6 of the 2008 campaign and what have we learned so far?

Well, to be quite honest, after seeing three national champion contenders go down last weekend, I don't think we'll seeing anymore pundits consider any one team a favorite to win it all this year.

Yes, USC's loss to Oregon State was more shocking than Florida's heartbreaker to Ole Miss, but the display that Alabama put on last Saturday in Athens, Ga., has the Crimson Tide as a legitimate national title contender now.

And who would have thought that in Nick Saban's second year in Tuscaloosa?  

Not this guy.

For that, though, Saban has to be commended for turning things around so quickly.

I mean, we thought this would eventually happen, but this soon?

No way (Jos