Given our resident degenerate gambler, Solon’s, cold streak, a blast from ESBS’s very early days has returned to try his hand at a few picks… complete with his upset special. Doc Pedro is attempting to show us that if Med School doesn’t work out, he can have a future in handicapping.

Doc Pedro comes off South Beach for a moment to share his picks of the week.

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On the eve of the Red River Shootout, we find a lost Megadeth cover on Hornsblog.

Maggie at SI On Campus–we’re tight like that, you know, first-name basis, sharing hot tubs in Davos with Henry Kissinger and George Soros, etc.–invited us to compose our all-time team as we saw fit. We’ll take the capricious time machine approach in picking our team, taking players from both the present and the past to make up the roster of the all-EDSBS team. See the final composite team here at SI On Campus.

Quarterback: Rohan Davey. Take a 52-year old Jamaican lifeguard with the dt’s and put him in a uniform: that’s the best description of the chicken-legged, barrel-chested, improbably tenacious form of our choice for QB, Rohan Davey.

Rohan had much in the way of admirable quirk. First, he licked his hands a lot, often obsessively, sitting on the sidelines like a huge, sweaty, pink-tongued cat. Rohan also acted like he felt eighty, walking with a distinctly uncool limp even when uninjured and generally looking like a grumpy retiree preparing to pass a kidney stone.

Rohan Davey: Just 10 short years from collecting Social Security.

Actually, Davey didn’t just look older than his teammates; we’re still convinced he’s actually a retired CFL backup in his late forties. (more…)

According to the Tennessean, Casey Rick (uh, or one of them, dammit) Clausen will make the start against the University of Georgia tomorrow despite numerous ailments including two broken fingers on his non-throwing hand, a bruised shoulder, and a “sore” Achilles tendon that had Clausen in a walking boot this week.

An anonymous source reports that Clausen’s injuries are larger in scope than the team is letting on, and that Clausen will be playing with a plethora of ailments on Saturday. An excerpted list follows:

–Broken right tibia
–Septic gunshot wound, right buttock
–Snake bite, left calf.
–Scabies
–Cerebral malaria (recovering)
–Scrofula
–Severe abrasions from failed motorcycle jump at Caesars’ Las Vegas fountains, right hip/torso
–Lockjaw
–The screaming fantods
–Fractured skull resulting from ill-advised bat-fight in Knoxville alley
–Cholera
–Third-stage syphilis, contracted from a whore with a heart of gold in Kinchasa.
–Athlete’s foot.
–Dislocated shoulder from “reverse keg stand” with full keg.
–Pleurisy.
–Gout.

Clausen’s looking A-OK for Saturday’s start, despite an attack of the gout.

Mack, it is time to get that monkey off your back. You coach the #2 team in the country and they are rolling. You’ve won a tough game on the road against a top 10 opponent. Your quarterback is having a Heisman-level start to the season. Your defense is bringing it. You are looking at a possible show down with USC in the Rose Bowl (although Virginia Tech certainly has something to say about that). It is your time.

If Texas can’t ride this guy to victory over Oklahoma, maybe they should give up trying.

The Genius statue in Bobby Stoop’s office is a bit tarnished these days coming off of a dismantling by USC in the BCS Championship game last year followed by his worst season since his first at Oklahoma. They lost to TCU and UCLA and struggled against Tulsa for heaven’s sakes. They have quarterback problems, are waiting for a wide receiver to step up and Peterson is hobbled. They are ripe for the picking.

Mack, I guess what I’m saying is that this is your time to break out of the “great recruiter, bad game day coach” funk you’ve spent your career in. Clearly you’ve shown that you can build a program into the top tier of colleges as you’ve done in North Carolina and now Texas. But at Texas, they want a championship. To do that, you need to get past your nemesis and there has never been a better time. So let’s up the stakes. I say that if you can’t pull it off this year, turn in your resignation and go start the building process somewhere new. No pressure.

Mack Brown, seen here, trying to figure out how to beat Oklahoma.

If Mack Brown loses to Oklahoma…so…fucking…what. Every year Oklahoma beats them in a new and painful way. 2000 and 2003: agonizing shotgun executions. 2002: a standard woulda-coulda-shoulda game. 2004 and 2001: defensive humiliations, including the infamous Jackie Chan safety blitz by Roy Williams on Chris Simms that may have ruined Simms as a player forever.

(We mean it–we think that single play broke him. We’ll say that at the risk of his daddy calling us out on national television to defend him, which seems to happen more often than dignity would allow. Chris Simms will forever be stuck in the moment where Williams swipes his arm and sends him crashing to the turf of his own endzone in humiliation. The only way Simms can ever redeem himself is a.) Get sent to prison, b.) Get Roy Williams out of the league and into a corrections department gig, and c.) Burn Williams for a game winning TD pass in the last seconds of a guards/inmates game orchestrated by a sadistic prison warden. Until then he’s as good as pencil shavings to any team or coach.)

Reduced a man to pencil shavings in one play.

Yet Texas gets everything it wants from Mack Brown, save a victory over a rival program that’s been as good as any over the past five years. Texas since 2001 under Mack Brown? Boggle the eyes:

2001: 11-2
2002: 11-2
2003: 10-3
2004: 11-1

Most fans would sell their grandmother’s dentures for records like that. Is that the mark of a mediocre coach? Their facilities are palatial. They recruit like madmen. They routinely beat everyone else in conference and win their bowls and out-of-conference games, making a particularly prominent punching bag out of the Big Ten lately with the shootout win over Michigan last year and following it up by edging out the Evil Sweatervest at home this year.

They’ve established poll buoyancy–a loss never seems to drop them too far away from the top ten, and they bob to the top of every preseason poll–and their recruits routinely morph into highly touted NFL draft picks. Oh, and Mack Brown has made every major Texas high school coach think he’s their boyfriend by bringing them flowers and making goo-goo eyes at them while his coaches plunder the powerhouses for prime recruits.

Mack: persuasive and charming in ways we can’t possibly understand.

Tom Osborne lost five in a row to Oklahoma at one point. Spurrier’s record against Bowden was dismal–he never even won a game in Tallahassee. He did tie one, though, which was somehow so much worse than simply losing. (Feel the flames of rage lick your eyeballs, Stranko, as you recall every agonizing instant of the ‘94 Choke at Doak. We remember it all, too, since we were the ones laughing as you goaded to the FSU fans by doing the chop with your band shoe in hand, cleverly referencing the “Free Shoes University” incident. Got the whole Gator band doing it, too, if we recall correctly.) No one suggested these two step down because of the long single-opponent losing streaks, just as no one suggests that Zook should have stayed because “well, he was 2-1 against Georgia.”

It’s a hack trick to suggest he resign for not beating Bob Stoops. Normally, we’re all in favor of this kind of hackery–hell, we love Stewart Mandel, and there’s not a cheap shot he won’t usually take. But Texas being good is good for college football, if only because it keeps Bevo on the field and off the slaughterhouse floor. The coach responsible for their success is Grandma Brown. It would be engaging in Jim Romery to suggest he resign, and that internet job is already taken.

In honor of his Wolfpack’s “pulled straight from the cheeks of my mighty man-cleavage” victory over the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackects last night, we proudly present Chuck Dynamite.