Monkey,
Gotta love Texas! Used to live there in the 70's, in the heart of the University. KLBJ was the rock station of choice then, is it still around?
Here's a little guide from Google themsleves - pretty helpful if you ask me:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
One highlighted item though:
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
.
There is a need to interpret the statements here.
Don't create doesn't mean don't do it at all - jsut if you are going to do it, make sure it is not "with substantially duplicate" content.
Inotherwords, a subdomain should stand on it's own in terms of content and should not mimic any other part of your main site or upper domain.
If you create the subdomains, and your site is already listed with Google, there more and likely is no need to go through the painstaking task of resubmitting your subdomains with them.
The page goes on to say, just build a heirarchy of the site that is easily navigatible by the spider as well as your visitors. This is to say, just make sure your links jump from one center of attention to the other with relative ease and that their spider can follow it without hitting many dead links.
As far as the 100 links rule/guide goes, well it doesn't seem to matter much to Google where LL's are concerned. It then proceeds to discuss a site map.
It can be on any page really, but if you have a page already listed with them and you do not have the links to the entire site on it, then build a site map page and link to it or if the site map is small, add it to the page(s) you already have listed with Google.
But that is my interpretation of it and honestly, you have to do the reading and interpreting for yourself, then make your final decision.
Nick
P.S. Edited: There seems to be a quite movement going on with SE's and how they favor subdomains - many hosts are now offering unlimited subs, as a basic/standard part of their hosting packages lately - something to keep an eye on.