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.

Every day should be Saturday.

This is true for a few reasons: First off, we don’t do anything with the rest of the week. To wit:

Mondays: hung over.

Tuesdays: thinking about dinner. Hmm…dinner

Wednesdays: weeping softly.

Thursdays: Scattergories, anyone?

Friday: caught thinking about Saturday.

Sunday: Meet the Press, followed by Bourbon Pancakes. Later we ditch the pancakes altogether.

Second, we really like Saturday because that’s the day most college football games occur. People who don’t get paid for their work (unless you’re a Buckeye) running around in coordinated, team-based schemes attempting to work for the length of one hour to outscore the other. It’s so wholesome, passionate, and supremely American, isn’t it?

Actually, it would sound like some serious Bolshie shit to me, pardner, if I didn’t know how damn good it actually was. And in all seriousness, if we didn’t have it, half of us would be left with the porn, gin, and weekend trips to Biloxi that get us through the rest of the year.
Third, Saturday is the truly a balanced day. No set time to wake up by, since you’re off…and no real time to wake up, either, since you’ve got Sunday ahead of you.

(I know, some of you go to church. And some of us sit at home, so stick it, Flanders. When I’m roasting you can talk. ‘Till then I’m watching the Sports Reporters, silently willing Mike Lupica’s head to explode and nursing a Bloody Mary.)

And there’s the best reason to watch college football: lunacy. Fans root for teams named after animals that would, in the wild, devour them and hang their limbs from trees as garland. The alcohol content at games would make a Scottish soccer fan wince, and the weather could be anything from steambath monsoon in Gainesville to howling wintry hell in…wherever they have that snow crap. No matter the weather, they play.

(Apologies: I’m an SEC guy. Totally clueless on snow. I’d run screaming, fly my American flag upside down, and set my house on fire if I ever saw more than three inches of it.)

And did I mention the traditions? The run down the hill at Clemson…the kickass USC Trojan Band, complete with armor-clad drum major and giggle-inducing phallic symbol…waking up the ghosts (and the fans) at Notre Dame…the festive pregame stoning of the infidel at Knoxville…it’s all too much for a single nation, really.

It’s also too much for a single forum, too. So don’t expect serious news, credible sources, or detailed analysis. Expect juvenile humor-seriously, there aren’t enough jokes about the USC Trojans-and plenty of cheap shots at those who deserve it, the editors and writers included. Go somewhere else for the prime rib-we’re strictly Chee-tos and Miller High Life for the time-killing set stuck at work.

And in conclusion, let me say: welcome.

-The Editor, 2.10.05