And that of course would be Reggie Bush. No doubt he’ll still be the first pick in the draft, which is why Adidas has snapped him up and signed him to a lucrative endorsement deal. I’ll bet he can afford to buy his mom a nice 3000 square foot home in San Diego like he’s always wanted.

You won’t be seeing much of that Nike swish on Bush anymore.

Rome–or, er, Troy–is burning. Backup qb Mark Sanchez was arrested yesterday on charges of sexual assault around 4 pm PST regarding an alleged assault early Wednesday morning. The 19-year old Sanchez–or the 21 year old Jordan Traver Uttal, if you believe his fake ID–left the 901 club and returned to Cardinal Gardens, the apartment complex where two prior allegations of sexual assault against Trojan football players have been made in the past two years.

Quantifying how bad this looks for USC may be impossible. Two things must be mentioned to indicate the extent of said badness:

1. As our readers have pointed out, USC’s “very concerned” point man for all of this is a guy named Michael Jackson. (And we thought he was in Dubai.)

2. This gives an excuse for Bill Simmons to stick his college football-contemptuous nose into our tidy corner of the internet by making his standard “Pete Carroll is not good” comment in a column.

Aside from the alleged sexual assault’s inherent and complete badness: anything that allows Michael Jackson sex jokes and gives Bill Simmons an excuse to write anything about THE GAME is the opposite of good.

Fulmer Cup points pending.

Carroll: who knew you could find trouble in L.A.?

The OBC is hitting up Gamecock alumni for cash the hard way: by saying that lack of cash=inability to compete in football. (For a university with some of the highest tuition of any public university, this boggles the mind. But this is the state where an Agricultural Commissioner ran a cockfighting ring out of state offices, so we really shouldn’t be surprised.)

Just a few of the things Spurrier says are necessary to compete with the other megaprograms in the SEC, according to his speech at the Myrtle Beach Big Cock Club (no, not that one, though their drag show on Thursdays is pretty good) :

–An expanded weightroom

–A covered practice area for rainy days

–Golden toilet

You want to compete? Winners need golden toilets.

–Money to pay administrative assistant/punching bag/gimp Ray Goff, Spurrier’s laundry coordinator, golf-spike cleaner, and one-on-one basketball bitch.

–Push-button triggered trap doors installed in defensive coordinator’s office for quick and easy disposal.

–Money to fund research into “boomerang blade-edged visor” research.

–Seed funds for “Leadfooted, Rubber-armed White Quarterback Cloning Center.”

–The Spurrier Channel. Campuswide broadcasting featuring nothing but episodes of Stephen J. Cannell programming, replays of Walking Tall, the 1997 Sugar Bowl, and Spurrier shooting a 73 at Augusta.

–The South Carolina Orbital Escape Elevator. Designed to lock up local recruits by exchanging four years of blood, sweat and tears for being shot into space and thus getting as far away from the Palmetto State as possible.

Kansas State linebacker Ross Diehl was pulled over for failing to obey a signal. Unfortunately for Diehl, he had an outstanding warrant for punching a fellow KSU student in February. Said unfortunate student, according to his attorney, had surgery to repair a broken nose and orbital bone and is seeing a neurologist because he has no feeling in either area. He and the attorney are monitoring the criminal case… and probably Diehl’s potential draft status.

Unlike the warrant at issue in Diehl’s case, this illustrative Warrant was not outstanding.

We seem to have found what’s the matter with Kansas. It seems the football and basketball tutors were a bit overzealous, among other problems.

You know it’s bad when there’s that pregnant moment of hesitation after the asking of a question. As in when you ask your girlfriend, “So what did you do this weekend?” and the answer begins with “Uhh…just went out. With the girls. And I slept with your best friend. In front of section 114 at Turner Field. Twice.” It just gets worse by degrees with each second.

Oh, yeah. We need to talk. Sorry about that. Happy Mustache Wednesday!

Yesterday we said that the Reggie Bush story stood as more of a mehhh and less of a WHOA than we thought on first reading. This kind of analysis is why we are complete and total idiots, since the story only gains stank points as each reeking layer of the story . It’s remiscent of the old Far Side cartoon depicting a crime scene featuring an alligator with a man’s feet sticking out of his mouth. The alligator has a stunned look on its face thanks to a boa constrictor wrapped around its ribs. Two gumshoes stare at the scene, pad and pen in hands, and one of them says: “I don’t know what it was, but I know this: it wasn’t pretty.”

Just the major spices in the recipe for major NCAA violation bouillabaise stagger the imagination:

–Shifty parents taking freebies on their son’s bill

–An agent dreaming a few pay grades above his level who founds a company that barely exists.

–A partner in said company whose testimony in a parole hearing is shedding light on the case

–The sister of said partner, who’s also the modern day Veronica Corningstone and a grad of Bush’s alma mater, Helix High.

–A shady and wealthy local Indian tribe distancing themselves from the case.

You know its bad when Chief Runswithpremise wants nothing to do with the episode. At the risk of putting too many basic cable-friendly references in a single post, we are now officially waiting for Roger Murtaugh, Martin Riggs, and a cast of wacky sidekicks to link Bush’s family to a South African kruegerrand smuggling ring via an endless series of exploding buildings and a smoking hot girl Mel Gibson gets to bang in his seaside trailer, capped off with Pete Carroll shooting Danny Glover while cackling on about “DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY!”

It’ll end with a witty one-liner and an explosion. Mark our words.

Forfeiting the 2005 season yesterday sounded preposterous. Today it seems inevitable given the unfolding funk surrounding the case and Bush’s refusal to say who–if anyone–was paying rent on the building. USC apologists here will claim that nothing has been proven here, which is true–but the court of public opinion and the jurists of the blogosphere will run on the strengths of the circumstantial evidence, which leans toward:

1. Dreamer moron wannabe agent somehow gets the cash for a house to bribe Bush’s family with, going as far as having their name built into the driveway.

2. Griffins move in, live in house for one year, and then duck out when people ask uncomfortable questions.

3. Agent gets jack as Bush signs elsewhere and leaves big, steaming pile of mess behind.

Now, cue the clowns…sure, it’s from an apostate blog in the USC sphere, but Bruins Nation sees this as one big block in the edifice of USC’s inability to control their football program. As Bill wrote us, “only a rival could care this much,” which is true enough; but this story and the accompanying bad pub could combine with the shame of a 9-3 (or–egads!–8-4) season to announce the Götterdämmerung of the Trojan dynasty.

Check The Wiz for the latest, though we’ll be peeping into our cell phone for updates on this thing all day.

Paul sums up the unfolding WVU spy scandal here. Peep the low-fi but double good game notes, especially.

One magnificent thing about blogging is qualifying exactly how deranged the behavior of fans reveling in the name of sport truly can be. In a feat of redneck excess–department of redundant redundancy in the phrasing there, but humor us–a South Carolina fan meshes several different southern obsessions in a single, fluid motion, encompassing the disciplines of public drunkenness, professional wrestling, and college football foolishness in one move. There’s no sound, but in our own sideways tribute to the late, great June Pointer we present one Gamecocks fan truly jumping for his love. (Feel free to grab your copy of Neutron Dance and play it since the clip itself has no sound.)

Remember: when jumping off a van, a lifejacket is essential gear.

When we open it, should we cover our eyes to avoid melting our faces off at the unbearable sight of its pure majesty? NCAA 2007 is coming, and IGN has a preview of an early version of the 360 version of Infinite Jest for the Football Set. (HT: Kyle, who we didn’t credit in the first edit of the post.) The early feelers are formidable:

–Photorealistic environments complete with satellite-derived sunlight angles and weather sims.

–Living environment: fans that gasp and Gator Chomp/Seminole Racist War Chant along with the fight songs, in addition to standing up in anticipation of a player scoring.

–A new momentum meter, which means Cuddles Swindle’s strategy of strangling us in 28-10 option slugfests could be a thing of the past if we launch a few long bombs in the first quarter for scores.

–The “Breaston Mod,” or in other words revising impact players who don’t measure up over the first 3-4 games of a season down to mere mortal status.

–The most accurate rendering you can get of a stadium without looking at the blueprints.

–Hopefully, the continued use of the phrase “He reached in and got himself a big sack,” which still makes us titter every time Herbstreit says it.

IGN, as always, has the four page, ten thousand word rundown you crave. Make haste! GO!

But do Tennessee fans lay down the instant they get down by ten in the game?

The MZone said it, and we can’t really deny it: there is a strong similarity between the Florida Gators’ helmets and the Sunkist Drink logo. The fearsome cursive of the Gators’ helmet (out of context) ranks somewhere on the galactic intimidation scale between a 16 year-old cancer-ridden Basset Hound and Lindsey Lohan armed only with a forty pound sledgehammer. (Get it? Because she wouldn’t be able to pick it up? Because she’s really, really skinny? HEY-O! We’re applying immediately for our spot on Jay Leno’s writing staff with that kind of stuff.)

Given that though, what’s missing is the context the Gators’ logo swims in: a sport full of seemingly namby-pamby mascots, logos, and colors whose inherent oddness is tacitly accepted by fans all over the nation. For example:

USC Trojans:

Intended messages: Military discipline, classical grandeur, warriors.

Unintended messages: Ritual sodomy. Condoms. Susceptible to ridiculous invasion plans.

Miami Hurricanes

Intended messages. Diversity. Power on a meteorological level.

Unintended messages. Michael Irvin. (Irvin= Coke, strippers, human trafficking, the 7th Floor Crew, Ken Dorsey breaking down the women’s soccer team, anything associated with Sean Taylor, Scarface.)

Intended message: Strong. Classic. Built with Midwestern modest and power.

Unintended message: Too cheap to hire a proper graphic designer due to Dust Bowl.

Now take our dear fruity cursive, the font on the side of the Florida Gators’ helmets.

We totally admit that the nouveau-riche ‘tude sported by Florida fans isn’t made any better by the 1968 marketing strategy clearly behind the lacy logo–it’s the visual avatar of the anonymous sun belt, the strip mall of logos. On top of that, it’s unusually feminine, curvaceous, loopy, and downright frilly. The compelling question remains: why keep it at all?

One word: irony. To wit: what could be more of a mindfuck than looking up on a crossing pattern and, with the safety whipping down headfirst on you with horrific speed, see the chipper, cheery Gator logo as the last thing you’ll remember before losing consciousness? It’s like being knocked out by Strawberry Shortcake on angel dust when a 250 pound, weight-room-kissed uberbastard hits you wearing the most cheerful colors and logo this side of the Disneyworld gift shop. If the concussion doesn’t kill you, the irony will. Don’t believe us? Ask Georgia fans, whose classic macho block G has quantifiably become the gimp of the lacy cursive “Gators” for well over a decade now–getting beaten stings a lot more when the guys handing out the pain wear a logo best described as “groovy.”

Buy more orange juice! Have a nice day! BOOM!