By David KalanThe Daily Northwestern

It’s a big weekend in college football. Ohio State and Michigan are meeting in what may well be the greatest game ever played. Florida is trying to maintain supremacy in the SEC. Cinderella is pushing back her curfew in Piscataway.

And of course there is USC.

The Trojans always seem to be in the thick of the National Championship race. They’ve won two titles recently, and had Vince Young and God not switched places for an evening they likely would have a third.

To boot, USC, which is tied with Notre Dame for the most Heisman trophy winners all time, has produced three Heisman winners in the last five years.

However, the Trojans have one problem they may want to be wary of: One of their older Heisman winners is making the rounds in the news again.

One of the greatest running backs of all time, and a pretty amusing actor (especially his Oscar-worthy turns as Nordberg in “The Naked Gun” movies), he visited practice unannounced two years ago, which caused some strife.

Apparently he had been in some legal trouble.

In 2001, he had been on trial for burglary and battery stemming from a road rage incident and had his house searched in relation to a drug case.

What bothered most people probably wasn’t the burglary or the battery. It probably had something to do with him being put on trial in connection with the brutal murder of his ex-wife and a friend of hers 10 years earlier.

But then again, O.J. Simpson has been known to cause a ruckus from time to time.

Of course, his visit to practice a while ago shouldn’t really have been a concern since he was found not guilty of killing his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman by a jury of his peers. And while he was found liable in their slayings in a civil suit, and ordered to pay a still unfulfilled $35 million to the victims’ families, that not guilty verdict in his criminal trial gives him carte blanche to come out and say anything about the murders that he wants.

Good thing, too.

Because otherwise he might arouse quite a bit of suspicion after announcing his new book this week, which will be tactfully titled, “If I Did It.”

While his publisher says she considers this a confession, O.J. hasn’t explicitly admitted to committing the murders. But he does raise the question of whether or not he is a total moron or just has the largest cojones in the world after Chuck Norris.

The book explains, not that he did kill his ex-wife, but that if he had, this is how he would have done it.

Wow.

I knew he made a living out of taking defenses to school, but I didn’t realize he had this much class.

Maybe I should have figured it out a few years ago when he did a pay-per-view show in which he tried to sell his white Ford Bronco, informing potential buyers that it was good for him because, “It helped me get away.”

My assumption is that he developed the idea for this book during his intensive search for the real killers. But he was nice enough to take time off from the hunt to write for us and to talk to Fox about his troubles.

Fox, apparently thinking Trading Spouses and My Big Fat Obnoxious Fianc