LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…the final match on the card for THE BURGER KING MEATNORMOUS™ HEAVYWEIGHT DIVISION (sponsored in part by Huss Kies Personal Grooming Products:”Because You Want to Wash Your Ass With A Stick, Not ‘Cause You Have To!”™)…we request your full attention be drawn to the center of the blood and mayonnaise-spattered ring for our next two opponents, two tubby titans of the gridiron bent on paying the other’s exit fees from this mortal coil, one fresh out of a brief retirement, the other a desperate man holding on to his job and therefore not to be trifled with!

Barry Alvarez

Somewhere between Colonel Kurtz and George “The Animal” Steele…

Height: 6?3?

Weight: 260, but cush new job as AD could see new heights on a steady diet of chicken dinners and barbeque socials with boosters. Plus: lives in Wisconsin, where cheese comes on your ice cream.

Hometown: Burgertown, PA. (His girth was destiny.)

Fighting style: Submission fighter with vicious overhands and a wrestler’s flair. Known to come off the toprope and immediately place a stunned opponent in armbar. Prone to eating turnbuckles like his mentor, George “The Animal” Steele. Reminiscent of Tank Abbott with less cardiovascualr capacity.

Strengths: Vicious, quick, and unafraid to terrify his opponent with screams, pre-fight intimidation, and theatrical finishing moves once the match is no longer in question. Deadly off the ropes, and skilled at joint locks. Gets crowds on his side by slapping his own face, eating the aforementioned turnbuckles, and grabbing his own hand as if it were possessed before employing choke holds on helpless opponents. Capable of being seconds from defeat and still inexplicably rallying, especially with a cheering crowd behind him.

Weaknesses: Besides limited endurance, Alvarez suffers from his mentor’s weaknesses: a penchant for showboating that often lands him in trouble, usually involving a metal chair or a third party entering the ring behind his back. Distracted by the crowd’s adulation, Alvarez showboated for a full three minutes once before Randy Walker brained him with a table pulled from ringside, turning what had been a dominating performance into defeat.

In-ring oufit: Black wrestling bikini.

John Bunting

Hacksaw Jim would be proud.

Height: 6′3″

Weight: 83 Carolina Rib plates

Hometown: Portland, Maine

Fighting style: Whuppin’ and a-hollerin’.

Strengths: Trained in bar-brawling and redneck shooto technique, Bunting belongs squarely to the Road House school of fighting, excepting the school’s tendency toward feathered hairstyles and kung-fu silliness. He bites, kicks, and plain bludgeons his opponents into unconsciousness with a cold, mean ferocity fight experts describe as “hard to watch,” “illegal in forty countries,” and “banned under the Geneva convention.” Fond of fast attacks to the testicles and eyes.

Weaknesses: As with all “Road House” stylists, cannot handle a match longer than thirty seconds, after which he tires and holds hands out to be cuffed helplessly.

In-ring outfit: One-strapped overalls with two-by-four and broken bottle.

Leave your votes and comments below.

The Kyrgyzstan of college football just got a little warmer: Georgia Tech avoids the knee-jerk choice and hires a qualified AD to clean up the mess left behind by Dave Braine. Chan Gailey needs to hire a realtor now. Nathan’s got the summary here.

They came up around the same time, short, gravelly-voiced men whose derivative music and wholehearted embrace of even the most hidebound cliches of their “art” forms made them ideal fodder for the low standards crowd. While Stranko may be obsessed with the vanilla version, we’re intrigued by the chocolate power midget rap variation of power rock Jesus: Ja Rule. (We’d use hip-hop here, but doesn’t Ja Rule fit more with “rappers” like Skee-lo, Kool Moe Dee, and Chubb Rock, and less with hip-hoppers like Nas and Jay-Z? That’s what we thought.)

We swear there’s a connection between the normal focus of this blog and Ja Rule…and here it is. Ja Rule is currently crawling in the steam pipes beneath Vanderbilt filming a horror movie, “Furnace.” As if this weren’t funny enough, Danny Trejo, the pockmarked badass from ConAir and umm…Spy Kids is in it, as well, making it all work for on a $1 million dollar budget and some generous cooperation from the Vandy administration. Just now, some unfortunate Vandy student just leapt from a toilet, paralyzed by the horror of hearing Ja Rule’s voice bubbling up from the innards of the pipeworks. It’s murdahhhh…

What’s my motherfuckin’ name? (D-O-N-E…)

Georgia celebrated the passing of Presidents’ Day in their usual fashion: racking up a single but valuble Fulmer Point for Mudcat Elmore’s driving on a suspended license. Again, we think the UGA Athletic Department’s refusal to hire a single intern to ensure proper licensing of all football players operating a motor vehicle is shameful…and funny.

Bigger points for the Dawgs loom with the arrest of backup offensive lineman Ian Smith, who had a bit too much to drink in combination with some truly horrendous timing. Georgia Sports fills us in:

According to the Red & Black, police had to hammer through a wooden door at Amici’s restaurant in downtown Athens to get to Ian, who had passed out on the shitter with his trousers and drawers around his ankles. Perhaps–just perhaps–ACCPD overreacted.

Depends on the verve and aggression of the ass pickle Smith was trying to steer in, we argue. We know that farmers have suffocated due to the fumes of pig shit in an enclosed space; why wouldn’t a burly offensive lineman struggling with a 32 gauge cheek-ripper forged from chicken wings and stuffed crust pizza in a poorly ventilated space be in danger, as well? We think the police acted responsibly here, since a turd of that magnitude could have easily killed a man.

We’ll award a total of three tasty Fulmer Cup points here, broken down thusly:

Public intoxication=1 point

Story involving passing out while taking a drunken poo: 1 point

“When police gained entry to the bathroom, Smith was found “passed out on the toilet with his shorts and underwear around his ankles,” the report said. Police had to prod Smith with a baton to wake him up.”= 1 point

We believe this gives UGA an early lead on the Fulmer Cup, just ahead of Florida and Purdue. (Standings to follow later this week.)

Exercises to prevent injury that may help UGA’s Ian Smith

Pat Dooley takes a crack at killing the offseason with a list of why Florida is the most hated team in the SEC. One glaring ommision though, no mention of jorts.

After the game, they made all these into cutoffs… the king of the jorts!

Curt Gowdy has passed away at the ripe old age of 86. He is the only man in the football, baseball and basketball hall of fames and has been the broadcaster for many great historic sports moments including Ted Williams’ last home run, Hank Aaron’s record breaking home run and that scene at the end of the Naked Gun.

You won’t be cut off by Heidi in Heaven. We promise.

We desperately need two more fat coaches–or at least very, very large coaches–for the Burger King Meatnormous Division of the Coaches’ Death Match. Leave your nominations below.

We need names of fat men–pronto.

Suntan lotion hater, former mediocre head coach, and now cable television demotee? This could describe Bob Davie, who may be demoted from his spot on ESPN calling foot-bawl games with the grand old man of the college game Ron Franklin if this column by Michael Hiestand is onto something. ESPN won’t call it demoted, of course, but Davie didn’t really contribute anything past the average patter opposite Franklin, which is kind of like saying you had Norm Chow as your offensive coordinator for three years and never broke .500. Here’s hoping Sean McDonough and Bob Davie get the Pam Ward detail next fall, with McDonough, inches away from on-air suicide, sullenly calling the number 3 Big Ten slot on ESPN 2 while Davie intones “he just makes footbawl plays, Sean” for the fifteenth time that night. We’ve got money on McDonough leaping headfirst from the booth before week six if that happens–takers?

This also means that ESPN now becomes the sole owners of Blackledge’s wicked Spurrier imitation, which is enough to all but guarantee a primo slot covering SEC games not claimed by CBS.

Sunscreen, Skeletor. Please.

If you read The Economist with any regularity, you’ll know that we rip off their caption style every day. (Our all-time favorite: a photo of a paralyzed George Wallace in a wheel chair reading a newspaper with an obviously distraught look on his face. The caption: “Too late for some?” The topic: stem cell research that possibly regrew spinal tissue and thus reversed paralysis. The cruelty was positively inspiring…)

Like The Economist, we also sometimes write about Kyrgyzstan and other places of no import to anyone at all simply because we can. In our case, we sometimes mention the Kyrgyzstan of college football, Georgia Tech, where a slow-motion coup against former AD Dave Braine has resulted in the least exciting job hunt ever for a new AD, who according to a lot of sources could be ESPN analyst and former Tech coach and player Bill Curry.

Mark Bradley writes that hiring Curry–who’s never actually managed an athletic program before–only sounds good to the ears of “the old guard” at Tech, who ask silly questions like the one booster Taz Johnson asked about ol’ 7-5 (Chan Gailey):

“Will people continue to pay for mediocrity?”

Our read as someone who knows this much (holding index finger and thumb apart about an inch) about Tech president Wayne Clough: he doesn’t give a disproportionate shit about the football program. Read that carefully, since it doesn’t say that Clough’s entirely deaf to the demands of alumni screaming for a better team. Clough’s clearly done an outstanding job at Tech: record alumni contributions, a campus rapidly metastasizing across the interstate into Midtown, ever-improving academics and high-profile projects. But football’s not the priority and won’t be as long as he’s around, which means more tapioca pudding for all with another few years of Gaileyball on the Flats despite a stadium expansion and high-profile scheduling.

Yet Clough may just cave and hire Curry over more qualified candidates simply to shut up an increasingly vocal segment of alumni, the ones Bradley refers to as “the old guard” in his column. If that happens, you can set the wheels in motion for the end of the Gailey era at Tech, since ADs typically like to bring in their guy as head coach. If not, it’s anyone’s guess how long the vanilla terror that is Gailey will reign at the North Avenue Trade School; just don’t expect Clough, who’s too busy doing crazy things like shaking money from alums’ pockets and nailing down large government grants and contracts for research, to care all that much about the disgrace of a 7-5 season. This will not happen.

And we promise, that’s all the news you’ll hear out of Kyrgyzstan for a while.

What Georgia Tech is to college football, Kyrgyzstan is to the world.

Virginia linebacker and former Butkus Award candidate Ahmad Brooks is off the team for the spring due to a positive drug test, say sources close to the Virginia program. Though the article can’t really come out and guess it, Brooks was charged with marijuana possession in 2003, and does reside in the Virginia area, so we’ll just come out and guess that Ahmad was hitting that purple, that purple, that purple. Note that he’s gone for the spring, which means he’ll be ready to go for fall no problem provided he can refrain from smoking marijuana in public with a shirt reading “Ahmad Brooks is the name, smoking reefer’s the game.”

UVA shall be awarded one Fulmer Cup point for the positive drug test, which is really an associative point since Brooks hasn’t been charged with anything. Yet a program should get the point simply for reminding us of anything remotely related to Mystikal or the Three Six Mafia, whose pot-smoking epics “Still Smokin’” and “Stay High” both cranked up in our heads when reading the Brooks article. Which reminds us to clarify a point for Young Buck, who in “Stay High” posits that:

Gotta keep one eye up on the po-po, close the window
when I roll the indo
Know they mad, cause I’m rollin Benzo

At the risk of sounding really, really square here: they’re mad because you’re driving and rolling kielbasa-sized joints at the same time, which is far from legal and obligates them to pulling you over and filling out reams of paperwork after arresting you. It’s us who’s mad because you’re rolling Benzo, because we’re haters like that who can’t sleep when we think about how you shine at the club and steal our hoes. Damn you Young Buck!!! (shakes angry fist)

What we see in our sleep: Damn you Young Buck!!!