Screw pitchers and catchers-we’ll be looking at their HGH-swollen features for half of the next year. (For more information on HGH, the Library of Congress wouldn’t recommend the Enquirer, but we will.) The main attraction for us and our readers is spring practice, where the defenses always look fantastic, the offenses are unstoppable, and the fans sit with sweatshirts on and wonder why they came.

The biggies we’re watching for:

March 21: Oklahoma. Jason White and his two robotic knees are gone, which leaves everyone writing off the Sooners for rebuilding and a three-loss season. Do not count on it. We’ll put the Tee Martin Principle in play here: an unheralded qb (Rhett Bomar? Is that a real name?) who does not make mistakes comes from nowhere, safely herds the absurdly talented team to a great bowl game, and trumps expectations in Norman. Never hurts to lose White’s ability to implode at the worst moment imaginable, either. We predict the Sooners will be fine, even if they run most of their running plays out of the shotgun, which we hate like we hate Satan and those horrid Jared Diamonds commercials.

March 1(!): Auburn. Evidently Auburn doesn’t dedicate much time to basketball-the Tigers got cracking March 1, well before anyone else in the SEC with the exception of Alabama. (Think the rivalry isn’t important anymore? I’ll bet they moved the date up just to antagonize them. At this rate, spring practice will begin two days before their bowl games.)

Tommy Tuberville gets our respect for a number of reasons. When he couldn’t find a job coaching, he opened a catfish shack and worked the deep fryer for 12 hours a day until Jimmy Johnson called. If that ain’t country, you can kiss his ass. But a coaching genius he’s not, which is why we attribute most of the tactical prowess of last year’s team to his coordinators, Gene Chizik and Al Borges. (No relation to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer and critic.)

Tommy sees it in his nightmares.

We were shocked by Auburn’s newly found executioner’s hand in games last year, putting opponents out cold one cruelly aimed shot at a time. Borges seems to be getting most of the credit for this, but don’t forget Chizik, the defensive coordinator who built their Gigantor defense and taught Junior Rosegreen that if you hit a man hard enough, he’ll have to leave the game with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. (Fair shake to Reggie Brown of UGA: walking off the field after that hit was man-sized stuff, especially after a hit that would have made us shit our pants and die on the spot.)

While the coverage focuses on replacing the entire backfield, we’ll be watching the defense. With Chizik gone for Texas-Mack Brown, another non-genius like Tuberville, knows he needs all the help he can get-we’re forecasting a Tiger rebuild this year. Some of this comes from a perfectly reasoned estimate of the difficulties of replacing offensive talent on the field and defensive talent on the sidelines. Most of it comes from a gut feeling that life for Catfish Tommy can never, never be that easy.

March 16: Florida. Urban Warfare, Urban Sprawl, le epoque de l’urbanite, whatever the hell you call it…it’s here, and for the first week or so, we’re guessing Florida fans will be horrified. Balls will be all over the place. Wide receivers will carry the ball, and will likely drop the ball. A lot. We just encourage Florida fans to take ten seconds, breathe deep, and avoid shaking the baby. Meyer’s offense will take some time to build, leading to gripes from the Fire(InsertNameHere).com crowd, and will likely spark a qb controversy when Gavin Dickey busts a long run or two in the spring game.

Florida’s new offense: will it include “jazz hands down?”

Whatever happens, Chris Leak will be the staring qb in the fall, and things will be fine. Just remember, your new coach will not get into shouting matches at neighborhood frat houses, and he will not respond to every question with “we’ll just keep getting better and better” after his team blows another lead in the 4th quarter. Just a friendly reminder, Gator fans.

March 23:Iowa. Kirk Ferentz hath wrought a rough beast. Okay, two beasts: first, Robert Gallery, who’s in all those NFL network Raiders commercials with the spaceship and Al Davis.(Here’s the link, complete with the side-splitting Big Man Dance Challenge Ads.) Gallery, the Outland Trophy winner, awed us with his plowhorse blocks and his Conanesque locks.

The second rough beast Ferentz brought into the world is the Hawkeyes’ football program, the quietest upcoming dynasty around. They play with a cold efficiency taken straight from the NFL, and pump no-name talent into wins and primo bowl games. Ferentz has made the crush list for NFL vacancies for the past three years now, and Iowa now sits at the crux of its development as a program.

This year’s the tricky one, though; having compiled a 21-5 record in the last two years, Iowa now has the icky weight of expectations, which have killed better men that Ferentz and more talented teams than this year’s Iowa squad. They went to their fifth and sixth running backs last year, so a repeat of the mad injury bug seems highly unlikely. If it does happen again, we can assume that Ferentz is cursed, and is actually summoning the Children of the Corn with his canny tactics and winning ways. If not, Iowa has to nut up and beat ass like the beasts everyone thinks they are, including a game versus the Evil Sweatervest and Ohio State in Columbus. Or Ferentz has one more winning season with a few key disappointments and before jetting to the NFL. Either way, it’s going to be a seeerrrrious year in Iowa City.

Arizona State: March 19. Dirk Koetter is having another one of those expiration date years, the one where wonks and fans alike scratch their collective asses trying to decide whether this thing is going to work. ASU has been the tempting pick for Next Big Thing the last three years running, mostly the result of a huge offense capable of tossing up old school Pac-10 numbers while simultaneously making equally catastrophic mistakes. Last year the Sun Devils tossed in the potential for a breakthrough year early, but recovered nicely in discovering Sam Keller at qb. So why not pick ‘em to make a run at the Pac-10 title? Or go bust and cost Koetter his job? Or to upset USC on Oct. 1 in Tempe? Or to lose to Temple? The Sun Devils could do all of those in one year this year, especially given the erratic defense. So what are we saying? That they’ll be good? Or awful? Or both? Our answer: yes, exactly…

Dirk Koetter, celebrating. Or screaming. For ASU, it’s all the same.

A weekend of frustrations at our dear platform left all of my 30 regular readers stranded this weekend. After three cups of coffee and a vegan bar, we managed to figure out the devilishly intricate problem: we’d saved the wrong password in our archives. Apologies for the lag, or if you’re oppositely inclined, we apologize for our return (I’m talking to you, Ohio State fans.)

In case you want to delay the day a bit further, look here for an excellent rundown of coaches and their various situations, run down conference by conference. Ron Zook gets best hire in the Big Ten, which just goes to show that accolades, whether you get them by default or not, are still accolades.

The offseson forces writers into corners. Nothing doing, spring practice brewing, and program either imploding under the weight of boosters’ expectations or cruising happily under the radar. Oh, or undergoing NCAA investigation, which would worry most programs if having the NCAA examine your program’s practices wasn’t akin to having MC Hammer audit your tax return.

One angle writers milk the hell out of in the offseason is the follow-up, since it takes little but a barn full of quotes and a few questions with the subject of the article to make a pretty little package of a story. Today’s feature, though, goes a bit above and beyond the usual follow-up story, since the topic of Willie Williams never fails to attract attention-both from football fans and Miami area law-enforcement officials.

You may remember Willie from his infamous recruiting diary, published online at the Miami Herald. (We’d link to it, but sadly, they now charge $2.95 for the whole article, which would put us 12 bucks out for the whole thing. Would really cut into our online porn budget…)

The diary disclosed that, among other things:
-Recruits get a lot of steak and lobster thrown their way.
-Recruits get a lot of women thrown their way.
-Larry Coker greets prospective recruits in a white Cadillac Escalade.
-Larry Coker can do this with a straight face.

It really was superb work, high on the Bill Simmons’ scale of Unintentional Comedy. Willie concluded the tour de force by actually getting arrested during the recruiting tour he was chronicling, not just on one but a slew of counts involving a bar fight, setting off fire extingushers, and hugging a woman against her will. This brought his total up to 11, all accomplished before he ever enrolled at a university and most involving petty theft.

Looks like Willie’s been stealing something else this offseason: the hearts of Miami fans and teammates! (Cue groan.) Here’s the follow-up on Willie and how’s he’s working hard to overcome his, uh…”stealing stuff and beating people up problem.” Congrats to the AP beat writer who copped a free trip to Miami and per diem off this: it’s your world, we’re just living in it.

Oh, not rushing to judgement here…but when there’s a grand jury involved, the state talking about reopening a prior investigation, and a university president gone (yes, we know about the Ward Churchill thing, but the football program certainly didn’t help, we have to think the CU football program tips toward critical mass a little faster now…

This report doesn’t make things look any better. “Stabbed in the back”? We all know what that phrase meant for Kelly on Survivor, now don’t we? We predicted earlier that this whole thing would end with Barnett gunning Kenny down-the little man in the orange hooded sweatshirt needs to start worrying now.

We wondered what the hell was going on at South Carolina starting with the whole brawl last year with Clemson, which began as friendly grab-your-mask and-yell football scrapping and degenerated into a crowd-silencing melee in a matter of seconds. (Click here for the stomach-churning shot of Yusef Kelly “defending himself” against an SC player. Did we mention the player is lying face down on the ground while Kelly kicks him in the head? And that he’s not wearing a helmet?)

Then four players-including the team’s starting qb-were busted for stealing equipment out of the SC lockerroom. Then Demetris Summers, SC’s leading rusher, was kicked off the team, allegedly for getting hiiiiiigggghhhher than a Gamecock should. Feeling left out of all the attention, Moe Thompson breaks into a dorm and steals some shit just to keep pace with his spotlight-hogging teammates.(Citizens of Columbia, rest easy! Thompson turned himself in to the po-po.)

We were going to summarize all of this for you in greater detail, but someone’s already done it for us here . What the hell was Holtz doing? We think we know, but we’ll lay out the case point by point:

1. Stranger enters town, promising great things…
2. Gets town tantalizingly close to great things…
3. Stranger corrupts town…
4. Town feels somewhat cheated….

We’d say that we think we’ve seen this before, but if you clicked on the gamecockssuck.com link above, you know this can’t be true.

Coach Bobby Pruett is out at Marshall, citing being 62 and tired of working fourteen hour days in West Virginia as his reasons for leaving.

We always like Pruett from his days at UF, even after his defense let Tommie Frazier run all over us in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl. We wish him the best, even if we wonder at this decision to stay willingly in Huntington, WV.

The yearly quota for WV news in this space, by the way, has been fulfilled. Notify the feds for me, will ya?

Something nagged us after we posted our pic of Rick earlier today: who does he look like there? We racked our brains until the theme from Airwolf clued us in , and the name came flashing up in our memory.

Jan Michael Vincent, aka Stringfellow Hawke, the star of such classics as White Line Fever and Alienator. From what I understand, both enjoy drinking, and have never been seen in the same place at the same time. Hmm…

Another good dig by our senior Knoxville correspondent, Stranko Montana, this time concerning a K1 match between Omega Psi Phi’s UT chapter and the UT football team-ed.
At the house of University of Tennessee’s Omega Psi Phi chapter there was another great example of the second most famous maxim. The most famous of course is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but only slightly less known is, “Never mix frat boys and footballers when women are present”.

A rumble ensued last Saturday evening between several party-goers and several members of the UT Football team according to the Daily Beacon. The DJ of the party, Antonio Brown, attempted to settle things down by stating “yo, yo, chill out! There is too many females at the party for you all to want to fight.? Players and fratboys disagreed, and continued to brawl.

Although Phil Fulmer was too busy keeping the University from implementing a class attendance requirement for his players to show up on the scene and regulate, the word is Ron Zook is gathering several members of the Illini together for a bus trip to Knoxville to send a message to Fraternity houses everywhere that this kind of insolence will not be tolerated.

Gator fans can’t put the knife in Zook enough, eh? “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…”

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