Want to know why we think recruiting is creepy? Exhibit A, courtesy of Notre Dame shill and friend of Lorenzo Booker Tom Lemming discussing prized qb recruit Tim Tebow:

He reminds me of a thicker Steve Young.

Now that is what our female/gay friends would call a complete scouting report.

Lemming, seen here being surprised at Tebow’s thickness.

Chris Smelley has committed to the Head Ball Coach. No doubt there will be alot of Smelley fans in South Carolina in the coming years as Spurrier gets a chance to coach up this top flight pro-style passer. We certainly hope he gets early playing time which will allow us to fully explore all of the comedic possibilities of the Smelley/Cocks jokes we see in our future.

School: Louisiana State University

Ad title:: “Game Plan”

EDSBS title:: “LSU: Kicking Ass on the Gridiron and Training the IT Midgets of Tomorrow Off It.”

Setup: No real set-up here: the commercial simply begins with a thunderous drum cadence holding together the disparate elements of montage. The theme of the montage: LSU is your gameplan for life, illustrated here by x’s and o’s superimposed in quick cuts on the screen that alternate with images of LSU sports, the requisite microscopes, and other slides that flash some gnarly looking equations and what appears to be an organic chemistry diagram. Plenty of shots of large pieces of technology, jumpy video effects, campus life, profs lecturing, Mike the Tiger, and football fans covered in purple body paint. Insert one curious shot of what appears to be a female midget working in an bank of servers. End drumbeat, end ad on last frame: “LSU: A GREAT GAME PLAN ON AND OFF THE FIELD.”

Mike: criminally underused in LSU’s ad.

Subtext: Football! Tigers! Science! Midgets! Football! No dodging the bullet here–LSU nuts up and just admits that everyone thinks of it as a football school with an academic sideshow. (This is quite the opposite of this ad for Duke, which goes out of its way to advertise that in addition to being a top ten uni, it’s also got mascots, team sports with scholarships, and all that other plebe stuff Ivy League schools tweedily pooh-pooh. ) They make a nifty segue with the football diagrams, emphasizing the technical strengths of the campus, but the Requiem for a Dream jump-cutting leaves us less electrified and more motion-sick, emphasizing the overall metaphor of LSU education=football-orgy meth fit with lecture hall flashbacks.

Production values: Low. Video effects include nothing above the dollar bin variety. VHS video standard is not quite down to “L.A. Crack Den Porno” levels, but it’s not far off. We’ll call it a fair shot to say it’s just a shade above “Atlanta Local Access Rap Show” standard.

Hits: A full head shot of Mike the Tiger. He’s badass and knows it. Being Florida grads, we have a special affinity for mascots that not only cannot be led around on a leash, but are capable of eating their adoring fans in a matter of minutes and more than willing to do so if given the chance. The commercial also earns points for honesty by embracing the football factory image and admitting that people who work in the IT department often shrink to near-dwarflike size after a year or two of study.

Misses: Plenty. The commercial features only three clear-cut examples of the seven deadly sins of a university commercial, but fudges dangerously close to cliche territory in many other instances: look, someone graduating! Look, a black and a white professor lecturing! Look, lots of computer LEDs flickering away! (Remember that the flickering LED bank is to university commercials what shots of reel-to-reel data tape were to elementary science films: the very icon of technological advancement.) A midget girl standing next to a man in a bank of servers! (”At LSU, only the most astute midgets work in our server rooms. Their grubby little hands are what keep our IT department humming…”) Our favorite part is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shots of the campus at the end. It’s as if they did the whole commercial, watched it, and then slapped their foreheads and said, “Shit, we forgot to show what the place looked like!” Tacked on to the end of the ad you’ll find about 1.5 seconds of scene-setting featuring LSU’s terra-cotta tile roofs, which fly by so quickly you could have inserted shots of USC, Stanford, Florida without raising a single eyebrow.

In fact, we bet you could slip nude photos of famous LSU alums into the last few frames without anyone noticing. James Carville is shown on a bearskin rug is in the final frame. Prove us wrong–we dare you! (In case you’re screaming out loud right now from the mental picture we just impaled your sanity on…you’re welcome. )

Well, Mary Matalin would has hit it.

Summary grade: D We have to be tough graders here, especially since this is a public university we’re talking about here. (In the future we plan to review a Stanford ad, trash the hell out of it, and then give it an A anyway, since no one pays that kind of yen to be given Cs.) Earns points for embracing the football angle, but loses it in ADD execution, lack of branding, too many predictable shots of blinking lights and blooping machinery, and criminal underuse of badass mascot. Think about this—would thirty seconds of Mike the Tiger rolling on his back and playing with a ball have been a better ad than this one? Just Mike, lolling around aimlessly until the LSU logo popped up on the screen? Of course it would have, which is why it earns a D in our review.

Seeing “severe spinal cord injury” in a football article is never good; seeing it in an accident report involving your kicker walking away from the scene of an accident is sheer badness. Felony hit and run charges are expected to be filed.

When it comes to bowls, apply a handy beatitude to their valuation: and the first shall be last. Bowl games are much like clustered tourist attractions–the last stop is the biggie, with the outliers decreasing in value the further out you go.

In Orlando’s case, this is something like Medieval Times; in the world of the bowls, it’s got to be the New Orleans Bowl, which wins the Retsyn Award for truth in advertising by not even taking place in the title locale. Due to Katrina, the bowl game has been moved to scenic Lafayette, the gateway to Cajun country and home to the unfortunately monkiered University of Lousiana-Lafayette. We say unfortunately monikered since every dedicated NCAA 2006 viewer knows that as you’re beating them 325-0, their team’s name appears as “UL-LAF,” which sounds a lot like “you’ll laugh,” which we usually do as we loft a HB pass for the sixteenth score of the day against them.

But the Southern Miss Golden Eagles and Arkansas State Indians will be there, along with legions of fans and doting Eagle fan Sunday Morning QB. So just in case you feel like getting on your airboat and heading down to bayou country to watch bottom of the barrel qualifiers slug it out in the cancer belt, here’s our handy guide to the New Orleans Bowl.

Name: The New Orleans Bowl.

Motto: Laizzes les bon temps roulez! Yes, that’s “Let the good times roll” in French. Yes, it’s misspelled on the website.

Intrusive Corporate Sponsor: Surprisingly, none.

Tradition rating: Has been existence since 2001, which puts it on par with the Smoothie King down the street from you. But hey, they do tout the 2001 game as “the third highest-ranked game in the history of ESPN2.” Rating: Smoothie King.

Tradition rating: Smoothie King.

Setup: Sun Belt vs. C-USA.

Location. Gotcha! Lafayette, Lousiana, which you may have noticed is NOT New Orleans. (more…)

From the NBA rumor mill, the word is that the Heat are going to announce that Stan Van Gundy is resigning for “family reasons”. If by “family reasons” he means that it was inevitable that Riley was going to tire of running the front office and want to force out whichever coach he had in order to take over, then we believe him.

Van Gundy, seen here doing the Hand Jive, is a member of the EDSBS.com Mustache Hall of Fame.

Rampant speculation season has taken the place of actual action for the moment, so let’s take a roll in the muck and mire of the Colorado coaching search.

First, there’s the usual suspects. The perpetually insecure Glen Mason has been mentioned, if only briefly, which has got to make Minnesota feel a bit like the soon-to-jilt husband to Mason’s chronically insecure diva of a coach: he takes the program, makes it what it is, and yet consistently flirts with other jobs, including an all-out campaign for the Ohio State job pre-Tressel. A faint lead compared to…

…Dan Hawkins, who has already interviewed for the job, according to The Daily Camera… and now ESPN.com. Hawkins is already in the neighborhood and knows how to coach up talent. Irresponsible armchair psychology would suggest that Hawkins, a young, high-energy coach who’s pushed Boise to the limits of its potential, would suit this job description:

Bohn said he is looking for the Kathy McConnell-Miller of football coaches, a high-energy, people person who will embrace the job and the city of Boulder for years to come.

Ahh, to be the Kathy McConnell-Miller of football coaches.

With a rebel yell, he cried more–more more more more more.

Hawkins seems like the likeliest pick, but two others are already getting sniffs: former Colorado tight end Jon Embree, now assistant head coach at UCLA, and Butch Davis, former Miami head coach and renowned NFL draft expert.

There is at least one thing in which the SEC is the undisputed champion of all conferences and it isn’t arrests nor recruiting violations (thank God for Ohio State and FSU). For the 25th consecutive year, the SEC led all conferences in attendance this past season, bringing 5,593,699 fans through the turnstyles. Lest you blame this success on larger staduims, the SEC has led in percentage of attendance as well since the statistic began being kept in 1983 (97.43 percent last year). If only they could track liquor consumption by fans attending games, the SEC would have yet another reason to pat itself on the back.

A typical SEC home game is loud, crowded and smells of alcohol.

Compliments of the world wide leader. So USC fans, we recommend that you keep telling Carroll how humid it is in Houston and how that will affect his hair.