See new content below–tons of it. And big hugs and thanks for the 450 bucks already poured into the PayPal account by readers.

August 4th last year was a big day for us, visitor-wise. Our server tells us so:

8/4/05: 3322 direct visits.

Big numbers for then. In comparison, we had a typically slow Friday this past week.

7/28/06: 12185

In fact, here’s the overall trend for traffic on the site since our piddly little 36 reader a day debut.

More people are stopping by the site, which is good, because it means there’s far more people out there with an appreciation for cheap jokes and Prince Wimbley references than you thought. However, it’s got us in hot water with our host, who’s been more than patient as EDSBS grows, swells, and ultimately has placed its fat adolescent ass all over the performance of the sites it shares hosting with on our shared server.

What we’re saying is: we need a dedicated or semi-dedicated host, or EDSBS shall die in the onrush of oncoming traffic that will likely increase as the season nears. Or if not die exactly, then it’ll be living in some kind of oft-suspended account vegetative state, since we’ve been suspended numerous times already for sucking up resources well beyond what we pay for on our host.

Therefore: let the EDSBS telethon begin! We’ll hope to spare you the sights and sounds of Orson singing “Send In The Clowns” in a disheveled tuxedo, but we will be begging most of the week with a message at the top of the site pointing you to our “Make a Donation” button, which goes directly to our PayPal account. The money will go for:

–Securing dedicated hosting for EDSBS for the next year.

–Paying something to the IT and Design people who are working on the site redo and t-shirts (yes, we swear they’re coming.)

–Getting a digital camera with video capability to capture road trips.

–Buying a sweet-ass Volkswagen Thing, outfitting it with a Hemi, and seeing if it doesn’t tear the axles off the body.

Okay, the last one’s strictly optional. But donations will help keep us posting fast and furious throughout the coming season with the inaccuracy, mild snark, extreme profanity, and complete enthusiasm you’ve come to expect from us. We do this out of love, and thus far have made the equivalent of a robust monthly cell phone bill from the combined ad revenue off the site. (Having a whole other job makes this strictly recreation.)

So please! (Taking knees, threatening to sing.) Donate now! Our levels of giving follow:

–Ten dollars: Thanks! People’s feelings get hurt when they figure out what you’re worth.

–Twenty dollars: Got money like WHOA.

–One hundred dollars: You earn your own standard simile used monthly at EDSBS. Example:

“Threading passes through tight zone coverage, Brady Quinn showed he has honeydew-sized balls–almost as big as EDSBS Platinum member Paul Westerdawg’s gargantuan pair.”

–One hundred thousand dollars: well, we’ll meet you on the corner in fishnets.

So donate now using the “MAKE A DONATION” button. All sums and total are appreciated! We’re giving this thing two weeks with constant, annoying reminders to drive the point home in between your normal doses of outstanding perverse college football humor content. But don’t do it for us, or even yourself. Do it for our dog, dammit:

She doesn’t know PHP. But she does know how to beg, so she’s helping out. Give now.

We thought we were down to our last post today–especially with the spotty access our hosting’s been giving us–but college football types keep getting arrested and stabbed.

This final shot across the bow of your productivity for the day: Texas Tech DB Anthony Hines, who was stabbed in a bar fight at Club Heat in Lubbock.(HT: Chris) (Every college town has one of these instaclubs, btw: always named in the Miami mold with “Club” preceding some risky-sounding adjective, or perhaps just a name with the single adjective left to stand alone, like the area code of the town or the word “DIESEL” or “FEVER.”) Hines was attempting pull people away from the fight when he was stabbed by an unidentified assailant in the midst of what was described as “a massive bar brawl,” suffering a stab wound that punctured his colon in the process.

Two observations must be made here:

1. Add this to the Ramonce Taylor pecan farm brawl involving over a hundred people, and Texas is officially the brawlingest damn state in the Union. Look for A&M to bust out with a chair-tossing fracas in the next week just to keep up.

2. This story allowed us to type the chrase “punctured his colon,” which will get us some fascinating search results over the next week. That it involved Leach’s pirates is certainly thematically appropriate, since pirates and punctured colons roll together like peanut butter and crack.

Yarr! Punctured colon.

When you’re mad and driving down Rocky Top
Better pause and count to teeeeeen…
Cause when you pull toy guns on Rocky Top
Cops gonna put you in the pennnn…

UT’s players don’t get arrested for Grand Guignol crimes. For the most part, they earned the attachment of their coach’s name to the Cup for petty, dumb crimes of the “Hulk, Smash” variety. Shy of one piddling convenience store tussle, they’ve been shy of living up to their lofty rep this year, and frankly, the offseason just hasn’t had the same zing with the Vol roster on behavioral lockdown.

Worry no more, though: a real lockdown of nth degree foolishness awaits Vol DB Marsalous Johnson, who in a fit of road rage pointed a toy gun at a motorist on I-40 in Putnam County, TN. Not a bright thing to do in any situation, this got hip-waders deep when the other motorist revealed his day job: law enforcement officer. (HT: Clay, Rick.) Our wine/schadenfreude reviewer chimes in:

Just sit back and roll in that a little bit. Isn’t that nice? Luxuriant, like a fine wine, with hints of cherry, leather, and pepper. Light on the palate, clean finish with a little oak and a final adios of berry. It’s really a light Spanish Tempranillo of a crime, no?

Our thoughts exactly dude. Aggravated Assault Points of three pending for the Vols, with an optional point bonus for stupidity beyond the call waiting in the wings.

Like most great stories, this one’s tucked away in a whole other article about the beginning of Florida practice:

Meyer said all 26 of Florida’s incoming freshmen will begin practice next week, but DB Wondy Pierre-Louis had a difficult time becoming eligible to come to Gainesville. Pierre-Louis didn’t have to worry about the NCAA, but rather the U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Service.

Meyer said Gators defensive backs coach Chuck Heater traveled to Haiti to help ensure that Pierre-Louis would get his visa.

Chuck Heater went to Haiti on a recruiting trip? Besides sounding like the worst husbandly alibi for a coke ‘n whores binge in the Caribbean to tell your wife ever, Heater earns massive points as a lightning-pulsed recruiter for that. Going down to South Florida’s one thing; braving the piss-reek of Duvalier Airport and the often flaming streets of Port-Au-Prince to argue with United States consular officials embodies recruiting madness.

Florida’s evidently got a lead on all other schools save Miami for Carib recruiting. But while we’re making our own little contract of Tordesillas, what schools would have an advantage in recruiting geopolitically? Tennessee would own Austria, or at least display pronounced interest thanks to streets crammed with tasty pastries and greasy sausages.

Leave your own geopolitical matches below.

Pictures from Chuck Heater’s vacation.

Ineligibility and concerns thereof…soak in just one of the heralds of football sitting just one shimmering month in the distance.

–Oregon State already lost the most underrated wide receiver in recent history, Mike Hass, to graduation; they may lose more to academic ineligibility before the season. Wideouts Marcel Love and Ruben Jackson may both be declared academically ineligible, leaving Oregon State in a position of “forced offensive diversity.” But with all that throwing to the tight ends and running backs, they’ll surely win a national championship, right? OSU’s got a good stock of JUCO talent to supplant the losses, but even then they’ll be wafer thin at wideout going into fall if neither Love nor Jackson qualifies.

–Florida DT Steven Harris, who’s only a potentially vital piece of the Gators’ vaunted D-line, ain’t with the team right now due to “personal issues.” Initially the reporting centered around injuries that might hamper Harris’ participation in fall practice. Now he’s got undisclosed personal problems. No worries, though. D-lineman grow on trees. You can go right up and pick one for yourself sometime next time you’re in Asscrazyland.

–Brent Schaeffer, the starting quarterback at Ole Miss not actually enrolled at Ole Miss yet, is sitting somewhere feverishly working on an American History Crossword puzzle for his correspondence courses, yelling out things like “Who the fuck is Big Bill Heywood! And 54′ 40 or fight? What the flying fuck does that mean?” If he manages to complete the puzzle and get back in time for the very beginning of classes, look for some downright unruly play by the Ole Miss offense for those first weeks of the season.

54′ 40″ or fight, motherfucker!

Follow the adventures of Brian as he attempts to hold onto the 15K pot he’s built at the World Series of Poker. Highlights thus far: he’s been tabled for ten minutes for dropping a prohibited profanity at the table and sat one table away from Ron Jeremy. Envy doesn’t describe our feelings at both of these achievements.

James Gundlach, the professor/whistle-blower/leading recipient of death threats in the last week in Alabama, isn’t going away–though the more Gundlach talks, the less it seems likely that the school did anything that the NCAA will find unseemly. (Accreditation woes remain an entirely separate issue, however.) Tubs is confident an academic review will turn up nothing, but his coach’s confidence didn’t keep Will Herring from dropping a quote that we’re betting zillions on to come back in mocking triplicate from rivals one day:

“It has not been a distraction, not to the team,’’ linebacker Will Herring said. “Has it been fair? I can say it hasn’t been fair, but life’s not fair, you know? We’ve climbed up to the top of the nation academically and when you’re on top, people want to shoot you down.’’

Yup. Just take that one, sniff the bouquet, and let it roll around the palate for a while. Ahh, quality.

James Brooks and friend showing what they learned in their math class.

Why speed up college games? Saturdays exist in an idyllic, clock-free sphere for college fans: waking up late, having a drink at an hour usually reserved for people with the DTs, and watching one epic game bleed into another over lackadaisically arranged hours in front of the tv or at the tailgate. Time’s not particularly relevant on a day measured more by the number of beer bottles on the coffee table than by the inconveniences of the clock.

Yet rule gremlins—pressured by television networks and their tight schedules and conference financial interests—ran amok this offseason in the rulebook in an attempt to speed up game. To wit:

For the first time in college football history, the game clock will start at the referee’s ready-for-play signal — not at the snap — following a change of possession. Officials estimate that could reduce the number of plays in a game by a dozen or more.
The other change: The clock will start on the kickoff itself instead of when a player from the receiving team first touches the ball.

Reducing plays and possessions…nah, that won’t affect the game. At. All. Unless you’re playing the game, watching it, or officiating it. Everyone else will be fine, though, and don’t panic: you’ll see the Yella Wood ads you crave in triplicate hourly.

Spurrier’s suggesting underdogs just earned an edge in reducing the number of possessions. Pete Carroll hates it period. Mike Riley’s concerned about the odd sight of ending a game with an empty field. The rules have received universal notice across conference media days, and with an almost universal verdict: they’re total, utter crap.

Speeding up the game shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of officials or players. It should fall with advertisers, who should go live and uninterrupted for the whole course of a game with a single break at the quarters or the half. It works magic for soccer, and rather than being subjected to the torture of watching the same ATV ad fifteen times—WOOOOO!!!—we could see the Yamaha Logo for a languid fifteen to thirty minutes posted up in the upper right hand of the screen accompanied by periodic mentions by the announcers. Hell, put two logos on the screen if you like, so long as they don’t block out the play on the field.

10-20 plays a game=fifteen more viewings of this.

Better yet, sponsor individual players and coaches when you show their names. Since they’re effectively chattel of the NCAA, why not put them on the players names when you introduce them. Chris Leak, sponsored by Turtle Wax. Willie Williams, sponsored by Lil’ Wayne’s new joint, Shot Ya N Da Neck Biotch. Paul Pozlusny, brought to you by Pain: Hurting the Human Species for 500,000 years.

The answer to speeding up games comes in speeding up the ads, not the game itself. But it’ll take a couple of public, embarrassing pants-crapping anticlimaxes at the end of big games to illustrate just what the rule changes entail. Imagine if the OSU/Texas game ends with an empty field after a see-saw thriller? Or the complaints from major programs if the “November Surprise” games they usually pull out at the last second become crippling losses when they lose 10-15 snaps a game? The rules could do marginal wonders for parity, but parity has rarely seemed to be a priority of the CFB Brahmins pulling the strings on rules flubbing like this. The rules don’t innovate; if anything, they point to a failure of imagination on the part of advertisers and the rules committee. Given that this comes from the same people who find the exuberance of youthful celebration penalty-worthy, there’s little to get shockedified in that respect.

Arkansas as a football state is not exactly cursed. They have a cool mascot–mmm, bacon–a history of good, and if not good at least interesting coaches, and lunatic fans willing to make piggie noises loudly and in public.

However, they’re not exactly living on the shiny side of karma’s ass, either. In our own lifetime as a football fan, Arkansas has always been this close to doing something before imploding or being struck down by something resembling dumb luck or a “half-curse,” which we’ll refer to here as the hemicurse. They always play hard yet lose due to offensive power outages or improbable last minute plays by the opposition; they make SEC championship games only to have Clint Stoerner fumble while running the clock out or Ben Hanks intercept an option pitch. And their phenoms inevitably flunk out or suffer sophomore slumps that stretch well into their junior and senior years.

Fumbling toward ecstasy agony.

All of this makes Darren McFadden–aka Defense Department Weapons Project X34b “Universal Warrior”–getting his toe broken in a bar fight Saturday night all the more expected, since this is exactly the kind of thing you should expect when it comes to Arkansas football. McFadden dislocated the toe early, early on Saturday morning at Palace the Club in Fayetteville in an incident that got as sloppy as you could expect for Arkansas at four in the morning:

“Darren was kicking and kicking at him and his shoe came off and his foot hit the pavement,” Millsap said.

Sgt. James Lesher of the Little Rock Police Department said that while the fight was going on, someone stole the car McFadden’s stepbrother was driving.

That’s as bad a night as we can remember having in college, and we didn’t even dislocate our toe kicking the pavement. Though early reports indicate that McFadden will not play Sept 2 against USC in Fayetteville, we bet Houston Nutt will have McFadden’s whole family bound and gagged in a warehouse somewhere on campus in order to extort the wunderkind into playing through the pain. Nutt’s already double mortgaged the house in order to keep his job this year, and a desperate man takes desperate measures. Given the slow creep of the Hawg Hemicurse and Nutt’s verified Boss Hog insanity, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Crazy like a…well, just flat-out crazy, actually.

The Orgeron still awaits the arrival of prized recruit and expected starter Brent Schaeffer.  The hold up is that Schaeffer is trying to finish up his course work at the Harvard of the west, College of the Sequoias.  If this doesn’t happen soon, we expect The Orgeron will be angry; and nobody wants that to happen.  So, for the love of all that is good about humanity, please pass that class Brent.  I’d hate to see all the other innocent students, faculty and staff at the College of the Sequoias end up suffering the wrath of the beast. 

The Orgeron is seen here warning California that an apocalypse is near if Schaeffer doesn’t report soon. 

2200 yards.  That’s the goal Adrian Peterson has set for himself this season.  That would pretty well assure him of a Heisman Trophy and probably mean a pretty good season for the Sooners, but can he do it without breaking down?  Well, he’s got a 12 game schedule… and if Barry Sanders could get over 2600 in 11, it is certainly possible. 

Barry Sanders proved it is easy to stay healthy if you don’t let the defense touch you. 

(more…)

Lo! The Fulmer Cup Scoreboard for the beginning of the home stretch looks thusly:

Notes, clarifications, and complete gross errors:

–Navy, on the clearing of all charges in the Lamar Owens case, loses all points. Corrections will be made shortly, and their record will be as squeaky clean as the launch tubes on a nuclear sub.

–Despite his impending transfer, Texas will keep Ramonce Taylor’s points. This is not a bad thing since Texas also gets to claim that their players get into hundred person brawls on peanut farms in the middle of nowhere, which is soooo Fight Club-hot of them. (The number of women we know who drool over the fight scenes in that movie is disturbing. Or encouraging. We can’t really decide. All we know is we’ve been punching everyone we know in the face for years, and no one’s ever called it hot when we did it.)

–We didn’t touch the Fresno City Community College story involving numerous football players and an alleged gang rape because it involves a community college, which is not within purview of the Fulmer Cup.

Please leave any notes on scoring below, since there’s so much on the table we’re sure we’ve missed something along the way.

See complete scoring here, and as always thanks to EDSBS Players’ Club Member BIGMIKE for maintaining the scoring.

SEC Media Days are going on now (Florida’s on from 10ish to 12ish today. We’re looking forward to Urb saying something like “nut up” or “beat them ’till they wet their pants,” or anything else identifying him as a guy who secretly watches tape of “UFC’s Greatest Knockouts” late at night.) They’re great sources for loads and loads of non-information usually, but in one case they actually provided shocking news out of Knoxville: Phil Fulmer is an admitted mutant.

“I’d never been through anything like I just went through,” Fulmer said. “It was a new experience. You’re darned right. My stinger is out pretty good.”

Phil Fulmer has a stinger? Yikes. He must only use it on pizza delivery boys, since we imagine speed would an issue for a rampaging Fulmer looking to stun prey. He must rely on surprise…

Don’t let him get too close, [NAME REDACTED]!!! On second thought, go ahead and cuddle up with him while you’re there.

We’re having some technical difficulties at the workplace preventing posting.  Stay tuned for more hillarity later!  In the meantime, think about the bone-crunching action that awaits us all in just over a month.

In Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a man’s soul is compared to an onion: many-layered, but ultimately hollow. (Scandinavians don’t boast the highest suicide rate for nothin’.) We don’t think that’s true of Al Groh. We think his soul’s more like a watermelon, and if you crack it open, there’s a Betamax tape in a plastic bag. And on that tape, if you manage to unearth a functional Betamax VCR, is a five second clip of Groh in a sleeveless sweatshirt looking right into the camera and saying “Get off my fucking lawn, kid” over and over for an hour.

When asked what he thought about a third of his recruiting class failing to qualify, Groh said “I wouldn’t say (the recruiting class) took a hit…I would say it followed plan.” In addition to being postively [NAME REDACTED]-esque, it’s also quantifiably deranged. This either means Groh’s been drinking antifreeze in the garage all summer while watching old reruns of NYPD Blue (you KNOW he loves him some Dennis Franz), or he really just wants you and your meddling reporter ass to get off his fucking lawn and leave him alone. We’d bet on the latter. (HT: Bill.)

Happy Mustache Wednesday, Motherfucker!