There were a number of big winners and big losers over the Labor Day weekend. Here are some of them:

Winner: Big Ten football teams won every game they played, going 10-0. (Purdue was idle.) They outscored their opponents by a nasty 386-167.

Loser: Rutgers still must be reeling over the ridiculous way it wasted a fat 27-7 second-half lead against Illinois. What in the world accounted for the number of incomplete passes when it should have been running out the clock?

Winner: Charlie Weis had a few of Notre Dame’s fans (and foes?) foreseeing a worst-case 0-8 start because of a wicked schedule that began with Pittsburgh, Michigan, Michigan State, Washington, Purdue, USC, Brigham Young and Tennessee. Now, however, it’s Pitt, Washington and BYU that are off to 0-1 starts.

Loser: Dave Wannstedt’s debut at Pitt went pretty much the way so many of his NFL games did.

Winner: Utah (1-0) is off to a good start after a 2004 in which the university produced the No. 1 pick in both the NFL and NBA drafts.

Loser: Auburn (0-1) already has lost more games than it did all of last season.

Winner: Tulane doesn’t even have a school at the moment – all classes have been called off at the New Orleans school – but the football team still intends to play its games.

Loser: Boise State, ranked 18th and finally given the respect it so craved, traveled from Idaho to play its season opener at Georgia. It promptly got mashed like a potato 48-13.

Winner: Louisiana State’s football players stocked an 18-foot trailer with clothes and shoes and personally delivered it to the Salvation Army’s headquarters in Baton Rouge, La., asking that the apparel be distributed to hurricane evacuees.

Loser: In Jerry Glanville’s first game as Hawaii’s defensive coordinator, his defense held No. 1-ranked USC to 63 points : only 42 in the second half.

Winner: Kyle Busch, 20, won the Nextel Cup’s Sony HD 500 auto race at California Speedway, then – though he never had won a first-place purse on the NASCAR circuit – volunteered to donate all of his $241,065 prize money to hurricane relief.

Loser: Serena Williams lost to her sister Venus at the U.S. Open in a remarkably bad match that included 59 unforced errors.

Winner: Serena announced that she would auction a pair of the earrings she wore at the Open, valued at $40,000, and donate the proceeds to hurricane relief.

Loser: David Letterman’s alma mater pulled some stupid human tricks, with 13 of Ball State’s football players being suspended in a textbook scam and the rest of the team paying the price at Iowa 56-0.

Winner: Laughing off a sky-is-falling attitude from Chicago’s more skeptical fans, the White Sox swept a four-game series from the Detroit Tigers, then got on a plane for a Labor Day morning game in Boston and did a 5-3 number on the Red Sox.

Loser: In the division race, the Kansas City Royals fell 40 games out of first place.

In five months of baseball, the Royals have won 17 games on the road.