Our Gainesville correspondent, Stranko Montana, writes in with his submission on the superiority of Saturdays. I had to post it for the Don Francisco reference alone:

Much as the cast of Seinfeld pointed out a decade ago, everyday has a feel… although I think there may have been some disagreement over whether Tuesday had a feel or not. (more…)

Tommy Tuberville loves him some Kroger-the perpetually dirty, poorly lit grocery store we in the SE have come to know and tolerate ’til other, better grocery stores move in. Specifically, Tuberville loved Kroger to the tune of a hundred grand a year, which is a lot of crappy frozen pizzas and Big K cola to take home in rural, cheap Auburn, Alabama.

Tommy’s not alone. Phil Fulmer used to do this hilarious commercial for Volunteer State Bank where he just walked around an empty field while he intoned Neyland’s commandments in a tacky voiceover. The effect was supposed to be monumental-like when James Earl Jones screams “NO!” in slow motion in Best of the Best, when Tommy is about to kill the guy who killed his brother-but didn’t quite work. The voice echoed just a little too much, like the guy on your local Clear Channel classic rock station or a tractor pull announcer. You know, the SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY voice (heretofore referred in this column as the “Tampa Bay Voiceover.”) Phil just waddled dejectedly off the frame at the end of what could have been a really subversive UT student’s video art project.

The best were Steve Spurrier’s, which were done with all of the enthusiasm of a death row inmate. When he said Bryan Hot Dogs were “the flavor of the
South,” it sounded like he meant slavery, malaria, and hot asphalt, not belles and bourbon.

(Can you name a more successful, more joyless man than Steve Spurrier? Besides David Letterman? Can’t you see both punching out their own reflections in the mirror in a drunken late-night haze? Just asking.)

The point being: help the crack editorial staff at EDSBS.com come up with a few more local coach commercials of infamous note. As a reward, we’ll give you all the mad credit that fifty visitors a day can give you.

We hear a lot about Notre Dame’s Ivy League status as an institute of higher learning. From personal experience, I think I was smarter than the only person I knew he went there. even though she could lift her leg over her head while standing, a talent that should not be overlooked at any age. This is especially true if you’re in high school, and you’re a guy looking at aforementioned flexible girl.

Yet this tidbit from Weis’ six a.m. meet-and-greet with obviously desperate, undersexed football fans makes us wonder about that whole “whoa, skool heer is so harrrdd” thing.

Weis spent 40 minutes telling students what he expects of them – cheer loud when the Irish play defense and tone it down when they play offense.

Sound smart to you? Let us know if they put corks on the tines of the forks in the student cafeteria, and maybe we’ll get ourselves a good conspiracy theory goin’ here. Someone call Dan Brown! The Pope had Willingham fired ’cause he knew too much about the secret underground labs at Notre Dame! Hrmmpphh…(sounds of struggle…)

Notre Dame fans: smart? And voluntarily living in Indiana? Or secretly part of a Vatican clone army? Hmm…

Panic on the streets of London…panic of the streets of Birmingham…it’s time to think about the Sun Belt, at least according to Pete Fiutak, who has one of our favorite names in the sportswriting world.

We also give you the link because we know how Pete’s day must have been. relaxing drive into work in light traffic, very little static from the old lady, a nice mellow piece of agreeable white music on the stereo (I’m betting Pete Fiutak is a Maroon 5 guy. That’s just my opinion.) Pete was thinking it would be a pretty good day, all in all.

Then he walked into his office, checked his email, and he found out he had to write a whole article on the Sun Belt conference. I imagine Pete’s latte went sour right there and then.

But hey, Pete suffers so that we all may learn. For example, did you know that the University of North Texas has a football team? Did you know their nickname is “Mean Green”? Did you know I hung 91 points on them once in a game of NCAA 2004 with the MTSU Blue Raiders? Did you know that I’m, yes again, still married to the woman who knows I spent 45 minutes doing this?

A website needs columns, right? Here we believe in competition. Here’s Doctor Pedro, our first audition for weekly columnist. He typed it from an airport in Minneapolis, and it’s my guess that he’s mainlining some of Seattle’s Best as he writes. Let us know what you think and we’ll have him installed as a regular or destroyed by our legion of four armed assasin robots.

The Everyday Life: Love and Sports
by: Pedro ?El doctor del Amor?

The Everyday Life:
Peace of mind?can you really find it in a white gum ball machine at the Mall. Eat Flies, Date Pigs, Live your dreams pass it on. What kind of slogan is this? (more…)

Shouts out to the good people at VolTalk, who have quantified the meaningless of life by installing a clock ticking off the seconds to kickoff. Just don’t let go of the controller, console people…that’s when the ice weasels come…

A bizarre story from Deion Branch, who appears to have attended the Jose Canseco school of autobiography construction. (Did he make out with Madonna, too? Or can we get a better one, like, “Pepa had my baby and Treach was all up in my grill before she knocked him out with a bottle of Cristal.”

We can only hope. In the meantime, Dooley says Spurrier has the “memory of an elephant.” This will come as a surprise even to those who would lick the sweat off his visor, since we remember him forgetting about Warrick Dunn out of the backfield every time they played FSU. Nevertheless, does Spurrier display other elephantine behaviors? Getting loaded off eating rotten Amarula fruit straight from the tree? Aggressive, nearly homicidal behavior during a yearly mating season? Will Spurrier charge a ref during the Clemson game next year, scattering innocent bystanders and he takes to the stands like Ron Artest on acid?

Note to SC officials: keep tranq darts just in case.

In case anyone doubted why college football is so fucking important-it’s branding, reader, and we are buying into the whole hog here at everydayshouldbesaturday-one should consider the fabulous names you get to work with as both a fan and an announcer.

The theory really stretches back to Gene Stallings’ Alabama teams of the early ’90s. In addition to an ability to knock the tight fade out of an opponent’s hair, a player on a Stallings’ team had to have a great name and the ability to understand the phrase “assets listed in your mother’s name.” The prototype? Prince Wimbley.

Prince Wimbley? I’m still not sure if he was real, but watching my dad have conniptions fits while screaming his name that season was enough to convince me that college football players weren’t born, necessarily: they were named.

What makes a singularly great college football player’s name so great? It helps if the name had a few essential qualities:

1. Having a name that sounds completely and totally unreal. As in, so stunning you naturally assume the person is lying to you. Like an alias Fletch would have used. Like a porn star’s name. Like a really bad CIA agent’s worst cover. Like the name of an obscure town in Eastern Arkansas. A good litmus test is to insert the name into the main character’s spot in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

Grizzled colonel: “We’ve got to get Dr. Maung out of that base. He’s the only man with those missile plans, and we can’t let them fall into the hands of the Chinese. Who’s the best man for the job?”

STL: “True, sir. But he’s our only chance.”

If you can’t insert the guy’s name into the formula, it just doesn’t work. Try it with Hines Ward-it just doesn’t have the same zing to it, does it?
That’s why we call it science, people.

2. Having a completely fabricated first name. We’ll call this the Plaxico factor, since Plaxico Burress…well, you couldn’t really say you honestly know anyone else named Plaxico, can you?

What the hell does Plaxico mean, anyway? I googled it and came up with this.
It doesn’t even have an etymology, for pete’s sake. What could it mean? I have a few suggestions:

Plaxico definitions:

-A revolutionary new polymer that will enhance your quality of life in ways you couldn’t possibly imagine

-A troubled corner of the third world, filled with intrigue and run by the iron fist of a eyepatch wearing tyrant, where a lone journalist tries to uncover the ugly truth…

-A traditional dance of the Hopi people performed to mark the first kinda-glary, overcast, and dreary day of the year.

The point being: Plaxico could mean any of these things, really, since it’s completely made up. The same goes for Earthwind Moreland and Daccus Turman. (Although Daccus is the Genus name of the olive fly, which I would bet you five billion dollars Daccus Turman does not know.)

And yes, it helps to be black to be in this category. But that’s not racist-you don’t see a whole lot of white players named Dontarrious, just like you won’t see a whole lot of black wide receivers from Lousiana flocking to Notre Dame to “wake up the alumni-I mean, the echoes.” BECAUSE NOTRE DAME IS A PREDOMINANTLY WHITE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY IN A COLD PLACE WHERE THEY JUST FIRED A BLACK COACH WITH A WINNING RECORD.

It just so happens that some white kids get names that mean “please kick me in the face for the first eighteen years of my life”-Darwin, Trevor, Ethan-and some black kids get named Finesse or Taurean.

3. Having a name of Polynesian or Asian descent.

Brandon Manumaleuna
Chris Fuamatu-Ma’afala
Timmy Chang
Herman Ho-Ching
Dat Nguyen

‘Nuff said.

So we’ll be working on the all name team in order to kill the time between now and August. Please leave your suggestions in the comments, since we’ve been too drunk lately to figure out our webmail yet.

TROJANS STRETCHED THIN!

Ventre muses on Chow vs. Carroll. We post suggestive header and wonder: will Jeff Fisher finally trim mini-mullet with infusion of West Coast style from seifu Chow? And how many porn seekers will mysteriously end up here thanks to header?

HAL MUMME SIGHTING! SCREEN! SCREEN!

New Mexico is home to Roswell, the alien sighting capital of the world. What better place to host a comeback for resident alien and onetime Kentucky coach Hal Mumme?

We love Hal, and evidently so does Fox Sports’ Pete Fiutak, which puts him way up on the list of coaches who’ll have the biggest impact in their first year.

We don’t doubt this, since in his first year in Kentucky Hal embraced Kentucky’s tradition of “football as freaky performance art” and took it to soaring new heights. We expect this of aliens, but Hal made leaving his homeworld worth it in ways that exceeded predecessor Bill Curry’s attempts at running an option offense with Tim “The Flash” Couch.

(Seriously: we saw it in person, and Estelle Getty could give Couch a decent challenge at time it took to get around tackle. Estelle might give Tim a decent run on toughness, too, and that’s no knock on Tim. She bossed Bea Arthur around, a man’s man if we’ve ever seen one, and seemed to have Sylvester Stallone under control in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. And in case you’ve avoided picturing Bea Arthur naked up to this point in life, you just imagined it. You’re welcome.)

First, there’s the matter of hair: Hal was going bald in a Benedictine tonsure kind of way, so rather than man up and shave it-the Jordan approach to avoiding questions of hair loss-he took the combover route.

No shame there: plenty of good men have embraced the combover, and some-Gene Keady-have created real art with theirs. The key is growing out one side and combing it over the other. Hal, who would set up triple screens if he could, insisted on innovating where no innovation was needed and grew both sides out. The result, as the picture clearly shows, was a man who looked like he has three midget hairpieces fighting for territory on a single head. Pair that with the wraparound Oakleys, and he went from being merely “silly-looking” to “hold my drink I’m going to piss myself” funny on game day.

The other reason we love Hal Mumme: he created the Cirque de Soleil of football offenses. Strategy and winning took a backseat to showmanship and flair, and as a huge fan of coaches playing like they’re gambling with your wallet, we couldn’t have loved him more. In his short but momentous tenure at Kentucky Mumme performed the following masterpieces:

1. Ensuring his team would give up long yards on special teams by punting out of bounds every single time their offense stalled. Shanked fifteen yard punts alternated with sixty yard returns, and the game resembled the old Sega “College Football National Championship” game where a single juke to the left sent the whole coverage team one way, leaving your teeny cursor of a guy free to eat a Hot Pocket while waltzing to a TD. But it’s exciting!

2. Calling twenty screens a game. I’ve never seen anyone call the onslaught of screens Mumme called. Never. He would make Mike Leach blush with the number of screens he called.(Wait, strike that. Leach coached under Mumme. They’re basically the same coach with different hair.) When they played Florida, Spurrier looked sensible next to Mumme’s fiending for the screening, which made him seem…exciting! This sometimes resulted in twenty yard gains, but mostly dug them into second and longs they never dug out of, leading to the inevitable draw on third down, which leads us to…

3. Goin’ for broke, Mumme-style! In case this sounds a lot like the way you call Madden or NCAA games when you’re playing your brother-in-law…well, it is! Punting is for the weak, so no matter what the numbers on the sidelines say, go for it on fourth down. The fans love it when you do that. Makes ‘em all excited. Or gives them strokes. Either way, it’s exciting! Especially if you call a double reverse QB screen! Wouldn’t it be fun if it worked! Of course it would!

Of course it usually didn’t work, which is why Mumme pounded the SE Louisianas of the world while losing shootouts to Tennessee and Florida. The numbers looked great, but after a few years the artsy crowd at Lexington tired of the going-for-it from your own five and forced him out, though Mumme did complete the performance by leaving a mess of violations behind him to coach at…SE Lousiana.

This leads us to conclude only what we can from the evidence: Hal Mumme taught himself to coach from video games. The aforementioned evidence aside, remember who succeeded Tim Couch: Jared Lorenzen, the 280 lb. QB who resembled…wait…wait…the invincible mega-QB you could create in the “create-a-player” segment of many games, including NCAA2K. I laughed my ass off holding down the controller as my QB expanded to the size of a Kodiak bear and tossed passes like they were Tomahawk missiles. Evidently, so did Hal, which brought us the Round Mound of Touchdown, a.k.a. The Pillsbury Throwboy, who unfortunately could not unlock life’s secret “cheat code” to get the 99 speed we always gave our Leviathan signal-caller.

(Nothing was more fun than running the shotgun QB option with that guy, by the way. Watching a 7 foot tall, 300 lb. computerized behemoth flatten a linebacker with the NCAA 2K “Jet Li boneshattering stiff arm” before outracing the corners to the endzone in a 72-0 game in the second quarter may have been one of the highlights of my early twenties. If translated to the real world, he could bench 800 lbs. and run a 3.9, the illegitimate spawn of Mike Vick and Larry Allen with the accuracy of Steve Young. He was Death Incarnate with a single-bar facemask. And yes, my marriage survived this.)

So here’s to New Mexico State: vive la difference! And good luck cleaning up the mess you’ll be left with when it’s over. It will be a lot like Cirque de Soleil: a clown, people running everywhere, and some special effects. There won’t be fire like Cirque, thought there will eventually be a fire-ing. And like going to Cirque de Soleil, you’ll probably come out of there feeling slightly dazzled as well as slightly cheated.

Oh, and don’t be surprised if Hal asks you to install jacks under the field to make it shake when the other team has the ball. It’s a feature of the “Homefield Advantage” on NCAA 2005, and if he’s still a console-playing guy, I bet Hal’s already wondering how to make it all work.