We can’t really hide it anymore: not only have we been watching the World Cup, but are obsessed and checking scores like Tunisia-Saudi Arabia is the Iron Bowl or something. College football has little to learn from the World Cup since fan enthusiasm is on par for insanity (if not scope) and the games can’t even begin a fair comparison because of their obvious, glaring differences. Brian Cushing would make a terrible midfielder, we’re sure, though we think Jan Koller would have been a decent second-string tight end on an American weight-training and diet regimen.

Jan Koller: would have been a fine second-string TE with enough chicken fingers and dead lifts.

One thing we can learn from the World Cup can be applied rapidly and effectively to the broadcast of the games. Watch a World Cup match and around fifteen minutes in, something strikes you: it’s seamless, uninterrupted sport. The splonking fan horns, the ebbing roar of the fans, the measured patter of the announcers…it rolls for 45 minutes without interruption by a single detestable commercial. Logos of sponsors are displayed prominently in the upper left hand corner for the entirety of the match to earn ad revenue along with periodic chime-ins from the announcers plugging sponsors.

Here’s the pros and cons to commercial-free halves in a college football scenario.

The good:

1. Umm…everything?

2. Shorter games. (more…)

SMQ celebrates one year up and sprinting today. Huzzah, sir! Stop printing your previews and we’ll drive down to your undisclosed location on the Gulf Coast and beat the hell out of you. If that isn’t the most complimentary threat you’ll get all year, we don’t want to know what the winner is.

Stewart’s suspicious of LSU in the SEC West. We broke Michael’s heart on the battlefield by admitting that they were in the lead, but suddenly we’re so unsure, especially with Auburn’s rock-solid schemes and the machine-like thing Tuberville’s got going on. They’ve been in on five of the last six SEC West championships, and nothing changed except the introduction of Will Muschamp at DC, which is an upgrade no matter how you look at it.

(Muschamp reanimated the once-shoddy LSU D into the killing monster of the 2001 defense, whose only loss came to the Gators in one of those strange games that bought [NAME REDACTED] three lucky years breathing as the head coach of Florida. Opponents of Auburn ‘06, just throw streak patterns to your tailback down the middle and you should be fine.)

Suddenly, we’re unsure…especially when we look at Les’ hat. That thing makes puppies cry.

Is that the chapeau of a champion? Stewart doesn’t think so.

As if they weren’t tied together by enough bloggers and sportswriters’ floating histories, Charlie Weis and Urban Meyer are both riding the new hotness of speaking negatively about your team and yourself in public. The latest example, with Meyer going first, since he’s thinner and therefore faster to the mike:

Did losing to Spurrier and South Carolina affix a small asterisk to an otherwise heartening season? No, said Meyer. “A big one.”

On Sunday he addressed the Atlanta Gator Club wearing khaki shorts*. In his prepared remarks, Meyer bluntly told the gathering of 600 that Florida was “not a great program.”

What’s he reading? Judging from the quotes, Schopenhauer.

Not to be topped, Weis channels his inner Bill Parcells again when discussing Notre Dame’s ever-growing status in preseason mags, and sets up loads of Cobra Kai jokes should you like to make them:

“Come August 6 when [the players] come back, don’t worry about them reading the magazines,” he said Tuesday. “Don’t worry about them trying to live up to the hype. Because I will be unmerciful.

“Every time there’s a mistake I’ll say: ‘I guess you’re reading the papers again, huh? That’s right, you’re an All-American, you’re an up-and-coming Heisman Trophy winner, you don’t need to listen to me.’ It’s going to be a bad training camp. It’s going to be good for me, but bad for them.”

For the record, there shouldn’t be a football fan out there who prefers the Tony Robbins approach, since nothing infuriates a non-retarded and not-blind fan more than being told by a coach that “I see improvement” when your team just got gashed for 200 rushing yards. (Cursing [NAME REDACTED], shaking angry fist at sky.] Neither of them’s topped John McKay’s famous proclamation when asked what he thought of his team’s execution (”I’m all for it”,) but it’s early yet.

One thing Weis clearly has the edge on Meyer in: open endorsement of collegiate tradition (read: drinking.)

… I’m only worried about Georgia Tech on September 2 at 8:08 (Eastern time). So if you’re down there, time your drinking accordingly.”

Bravo, Charlie. Bra-goddamn-vo. We drink to you, sir.

Cheers, fat man. Respek.

*It’s only his second year. We’ll get him in acid-wash denim soon enough.

Missouri enters the Fulmer Cup in glorious fashion with a third-degree assault charge leveled against running back Tony Temple and his girlfriend Kendra Power resulting from–and this is why they’re going to get style points–a fight at a Bennigan’s with a kitchen employee over a food order gone awry. (HT: The Wiz.)

This Monte Cristo is unacceptable, sir. Taste my vengeance!

You’ll never believe this, but like many recovering English majors, we spent considerable time in the hospitality business. There are a few rules in the hospitality business, and they stand with the gravity and certainty of divine dictate etched into stone. They are:

1. Don’t fuck with the kitchen crew, and…

2. Don’t fuck with the kitchen crew.

Most of them have been to jail for an extended stay of at least two or three days. If not, they’re punks, skaters, aspiring rappers/tattoo artists, UFC fighters in training, ex-Special Forces guys, women who would frighten Barbary pirates with their coarseness, meth addicts, African refugees who saw their Dad eaten by crazed Congolese militias, or drug dealers in the process of turning into one of the aforementioned identities. Whatever variety of badass they are, they have short tempers and work inside a sauna that smells like grease and garlic for 12 hours a day six days a week, and can make your life as a server a living, breathing hell if you piss them off as your orders mysteriously end up splatting on the floor or turn up cold and dead at the end of the line. We know this from experience, most notably a screaming match with a locally famous six and a half foot tall transsexual kitchen type in a Midtown Atlanta restaurant in 2001.

For one of them to come out of the back to confront these two over an order meant that badass kitchen person was having a very, very rough day to begin with, and likely wanted to beat someone’s ass anyway. Temple complaining about someone else’s botched order of chicken-stuffed nacho jalapeno potato-skin popper nuggets indicates a serious lack of sense, since having some experience with them, we assume they’re all carrying knives or worse. The fact that the kitchen worker took on both Temple and his former softball-playing girlfriend only confirms our two rules of working in a restaurant.

But good for them fighting as a loving pair. The couple that boot-parties together, stays together. Take 2 Fulmer Cup points, Missouri, one for the assault charge, and one for getting into a fight over defrosted deep fried somethings.

We’d post a picture of him every day if we could, but this month being the World Cup and all, we thought we’d raise the red flag of godless, communist soccer by using a legendary soccer player as our award-winning ’stache of the day. Though the peerless, Platonic ideal of all that is mustache remains Sam Elliott’s “Nevada Prospector,” the soccer world would not be complete without the greatest mustache/nuke-yellow combo of all time…

Carlos Valderrama.

His awesomeness will suck the paint off your house and give your whole family a permanent orange afro. Or, er, yellow.