How old is Furman Bisher, the Pleistocene creature who also happens to double as Atlanta’s oldest ranking sports columnist? He lists his five favorite interviews and includes Red Grange and Shoeless Joe Jackson in the list.(!)(?)(!) He also mentions that he wrote for Sport Magazine, which is doubly shocking. A few of Bisher’s other achievements:

–Conducted the final interview with the legendary Mongol steeplechase team prior to the death of its legendary leader, Mongke Khan, and its subsequent defeat at the hands of the Mameluke Riding Team in 1264.

–Filed the first mass-produced sports story every published, a gripping account of a brutal man-versus-bear matchup between Blunderbuss the Great, 47-time bear champion, and Seamus “Whiskeybait” Finnegan in the West End of London, 1668. Wrote Bisher: “Paws alone could ne’er beat the spir’t from the batter’d frame of the filthy yet resiliente denizen of the Em’rald Isle, e’en in horrible, intestine-exposing loss. Yay, as the crowd pick’d thro’ the pockets of his pants as he lay prostrate by the side of the ring, he dragg’d the noble, separated upper half of his rent body across the ring, threat’ning all stealing his possessions with the last, liquor-soaked exhalations of his masty lungs.”

–Once wrote a column while getting fellated by Tallulah Bankhead in a Shanghai opium den.

–Covered the infamous “Columbus 1845 Hullabaloo Days,” where Bisher filed a death-defying description of the tragedy of the year, a record-setting crack-the-whip game gone wrong when the combined momentum of a 189-child long chain flung the final seven participants into a boiling kettle of brewing sourmash whiskey. Bisher made his deadline despite suffering from cholera and the loss of an eyeball in a barfight the night before. An excerpt from the poem he wrote to commemorate the tragedy:

“Lo, the whip did crack;
Their skin went all-a-crispy;
The Hullaballooers screamed alas! alack!
First the children! Now the whiskey!”

The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, the original proto-blogger himself, describes what most readers already suspected about his post-Pats Super Bowl slump:

Well, something weird happened. After that game, I couldn’t stop thinking, “All right, what happens now? What do I do? How can I top my dream moment?”

And the thing is, you can’t. The moment happens, it ends, you celebrate and feel good about yourself … and then it’s on to the next day, and you have to figure out what the next challenge is, and deep down, you’re wondering why you didn’t enjoy that watershed moment more than you thought you would. I don’t know Theo, I have never met him, and the experience of being the general manager of the first Red Sox championship in 86 years was roughly 100,000,000 times more profound and important than my experience in New Orleans. But the fact remains, after that Super Bowl column, I struggled writing this column for the next seven to eight months; eventually, I ended up moving to California to write for a fledgling late-night television show. That Super Bowl trip changed everything for me.

Which explains a lot. Again, be careful what you ask for…

A sure sign that things have gone terribly, terribly awry in this corner of the woods: the number one passing offense in the SEC is–hold on to your biscuits here–Vanderbilt.

The “warre of all againste alle”, as Hobbes might have phrased it, has yielded the triumph of the small, at least in an offensive sense. Pat Forde’s on it. The West Coast Moonbat squad is on it, initiating another round of their favorite pasttime and giving plenty of fuel for their outrage–constant outrage we say!–at people’s inability to see the acuity of their punditry.

You know a corpse is really drawing flies, though, when the AJC’s Terence Moore gets a column in about it where he pulls his patented finishing move: saying the right thing for all the wrong reasons. The reason the SEC keeps scores in the R. Kelly range (look! racism! right there!), according to Terence’s source Bill Curry, is the additive effect of years of cheating and the negative impact it’s had on recruiting ball players from parents suspicious of snake-oil salesmen coaches paying players under the table.

Again, here’s Moore with a belabored but accurate point: the SEC is not only overrated, but genuinely down this year. Sure. No debate there. A look at the stats and draft picks over the past few years=QEDMF. Again, Jay Cutler is your passing leader. Something is horribly awry in the cosmos when that has become fact.

Today’s topic: how to breathe life into a dead horse.

Enter the sketchy, “wanna buy six pounds of shrimp from the back of my car?” line of explanation: cheating has weakened the appeal of the conference. There’s no causality in Curry’s explanation that cheating or the implication thereof deters quality recruits from attending a school, and no evidence to support it. (more…)

I like this suggestive headline better than the previous Trojan Cold Cocks Man. Alright, the headline isn’t great but it was the best I could think up at the moment. USC linebacker Rey Maualuga was arrested for punching a dude outside of an off campus party. For the time being he has been demoted to second team. The only real surprise of the story is that a frat house was not somehow involved as it usually is in football player fights.