Straight Bangin’ is graciously hosting Blogpoll 3: Assignment Miami Beach. Three (or so) superbly constructed questions and their suspiciously amateur answers follow:

Q: Which unheralded player on your team will be the hardest to replace? Which seemingly inconsequential player could make the biggest impact?

A: O.J. Small, WR. The original black “white possession receiver.” Yeah, we’ve got a ton of wideouts. Yeah, we’ve got a cloning lab in the basement, evidently. Yeah, it runs on bales of cocaine, shredded tax documents, and discarded pairs of Fred Durst-style “big jeans.” But O.J. was just clutch, and even with five speedy backups, clutch is difficult to get with such consistency, especially when your most physically imposing receiver, Dallas Baker, has all the composure of Private Hudson in “Aliens.” (”We’re fucked, man-game over!”) Chad Jackson’s got to fill the shoes of a very underrated receiver very quickly.

O.J. Small was clutch no matter the angle.
Q: Most Valuable No-Name?
A: Jeremy Mincey, DE. The Gators line under Zook went from perenially cranking out draft picks–even if they were corpulent speed-bumps like Gerard Warren–to a bunch of non-descript speed bumps who were lucky to get sniffs from the Barcelona Dragons come graduation. Mincey could break that streak–at the spring game he looked and moved like a different player, teleporting around the field like Nightcrawler on andro making plays. He hit Josh Portis so hard on a play we swear Portis aged a year in an instant from the pain. Maybe Greg Mattison got in his head; maybe Urban’s got Mincey’s momma tied up in the basement of the O-Dome over a pit of sharks. Whatever it is, he and Ray MdDonald will make line calls trickier than they’ve been for opposing offenses than they’ve been in the past few years.

Q: Which regular-season game that won?t feature your team would you pay the most money to see this season?

A: Two games, because we’re feeling like Lou Holtz tonight, and will bend the rules to our liking. One: Texas Tech at Texas. Mike Leach’s offense. Vince Young’s warp-speed shuffle. Darrell Royal Stadium. Hot asses in blue jeans. Booze, Bevo, and babes. A Gene Chizik defense bent on strangling the opponent to death in front of 80,000 people. Barbecue, Texas-style. It’ll be magnificent.
Two (bonus) : Auburn-Alabama. Warren St. John does a better job at describing how utterly fun a game at Auburn is, even while the opposition is trying to set your trailer on fire. Peerless. And if it makes you feel better about yourself, a weekend around ‘Bama fans will convince anyone of their own innate sanity.

Q: Team as rapper?

A: Tupac. Like UF, toiled in obscurity for while, enjoying moderate success as a second banana. Kept their head up and got huge in the ’90s and and massive in 1996, when they were holding their balls and asking the college football world how they wanted it. Prone to public humiliation, punishment, and setbacks, much of it self-inflicted. Died a dramatic death just past the peak of success while sliding not into obscurity, but instead into a shadowy, mediocre half-death, still around and showing flashes of talent under clumsy new management. Can hopefully now complete the metaphorical circle by enjoying a renaissance as an Urban legend.

As we reported last week, Pitt is having its way with in-state recruiting thanks in no small part to the magnetic attraction of Wannstedt’s mustache. However, on top lineman recruit has bucked that trend and has chosen to sign with Penn State. Tom McEowen becomes the third recruit to sign with the Nittany Lions.

Lou Holtz, long considered the paragon of cheating-ass cheater cheatdom, caps his career with one last steaming pile of offal as his legacy: South Carolina has reported ten violations, including five majors, all occurring under the reign of Holtz and former AD Mike McGee. So Holtz plays a large part in luring Spurrier to Florida, plays grabass with him in the offseason, and turns over the program to him loaded with bugs? And blames it on society in interviews? How Snidely Whiplash of him…

Yes, there’s a theme.

Despite being the stomping ground–literally, in some cases–for the Tennessee Volunteers football team, the award for most dangerous campus in Tennessee goes to…Vanderbilt. All that cash floating about the place makes it an easy target, we suppose, though shouldn’t the servants be doing something about that? Would it kill you to throw yourself in front of bullet every now and then, Bucksley? Or at least carry one of those taser thingys? Really…It’s so hard to find good help these days.

Jeeves! Put down the crumpets and tell this hooligan to unhand my European carry-all.

Sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due: we wish we wrote this caption. And this headline, too.

MGoBlog takes on the nearly impossible task of organizing the unmanageable in trying to lend shape to the BlogPoll. Rules? There’a few: don’t miss votes, don’t be a total homer, and don’t do asinine things like vote for Duke in the top 25, unless Ted Roof fellates the devil and actually gets them there. Oh, and even if you’re late, kidnapping Aaron Taylor will get you in. Our advice? Bring twice the cholorform you’d normally use, and back up the fucking truck–the Honda just ain’t gonna cut this time.
In additional news, the next round of talks–we’re making it sound like we’re trying to stop a nuke program, right?–is being generously hosted by Straight Bangin’. We expect a hip-hop flair, Joey, and will go as far as suggesting this question: if your team was a rapper/rap group, which one would it be?

Is your team the Snoop Dogg of college football? And if so, is it Death Row Snoop, or crappy No Limit Snoop? Or renaissance, Neptunes-era Snoop?

Children left on doorsteps. Unwashed men sitting trancelike in front of glowing blue television screens. A woman sobbing uncontrollably in the corner. A scene from Infinite Jest? The Twilight Zone?
No! It’s day Zero of NCAA 2006: the Quickening. Flee your homes, carrying only your gaming systems and your televisions, and join us in the new non-worker’s utopia, mashing buttons until we achieve a state of perfect, blank, drooling consciousness with 562 yds. passing, 6 tds, 128 yds. rushing, and no picks for the game. But enough about Reggie McNeal playing with the spread option playbook…

Reggie McNeal could goes large in NCAA 2006.
The reviews are starting to trickle in, and are largely positive. IGN.com, the grandaddies of this whole “let’s play video games and write about them on the internet thing” (geniuses!), give it a 9.2 for the Box edition, even suggesting you take your copy of 2005 and place it under the leg of your wobbly coffee table since you won’t be needing it anymore, along with your credit cards, marriage license, soap, and anything else from your former life. One wonders, though, if Boi From Troy didn’t submit the review under the pseudonym “Craig Beridon” when reading this excerpt:

A personal highlight for me would be the detail of ass cheek animation present when a player shifts his weight while sprinting or juking across the field.

That’s hot.
Gatorsports shows us some of the more theraputic possibilities of the game, as one of their staffers cranks up the game and wastes no time taking former Gator coach and fraternity outreach coordinator Ron Zook to the woodshed in a 35-7 defeat in the Swamp. (The gamer in us cringes when he lists Chris Leak’s outlandish numbers in the game but also mentions throwing 2 picks–watch your safeties pre-snap, man! This is science, dammit!)Blue-Gray Sky admits that it doesn’t have a system in the BGS lounge, but take a look at the entry anyway for some hilarious embedded links. Westerdawg test drives the game with the Ol’ Ball Coach, who wonders what button puts Danny Wuerffel in, and Ian says we might not see him for a while. More updates pending, though we doubt it, predicting a slide into “Day of the Dead”-esque chaos as the perfect entertainment sucks more and more victims into its sweet orbit.

In case you ever doubted it, the nickname “Tigers” at LSU does have something to do with the Civil War. In addition to us dispelling the myth of large, man-eating Asiatic great cats wandering the bayous, we also bring to you the indefinite suspension of Chase Pittman, pending the results of being charged with “fightin’ in da club” earlier this week. This is actually a charge in Louisiana, along with “disrespectin’ da fais-dodo” and “improper use of gris-gris in a non-voodoo establishment, chere.”

Dat dere fightin in da club get you straight put in the slamma, I garountee!