The fellas at Mzone have outdone themselves. They’ve worked up a list of alternate sponsors for the bowls. My favorite:

Some other suggestions from me include:
– Viagra Motor City Bowl — Because it’s really tough to get up for this quasi-tickle pile involving MAC and CUSA members. If I’m not mistaken, the winner of this game doesn’t have to play an SEC team the following year.
– Gore-Tek Boise Bowl — Who’s kidding who here? It is cold as shit in Boise around Jan. 10th when they finally place this thing. Why not embrace the reality with a sponsorship that says, “Look, we know it’s ridiculous how far north we are, and it’s ridiculous that we’re hosting a bowl. But if you come all the way up here….we’ll give you a warm coat because we’re the nicest Eskimos that you’ll ever meet.”
– Cheetah III Showbar Peach Bowl — The logo would include a busty blonde with stars over the nips with the slogan “a true Georgia Peach.” Great synergy as bowls were originally designed to promote tourism. Nothing packs in the crowds like strippers.

Paul Westerdawg

So NCAA Football 2007 is exciting! And, er, well, pretty much exactly the same as NCAA Football 2006. Which was itself pretty much the same as NCAA Football 2005. But look at all the new, temporarily accurate rosters and ratings to obsessively tinker with over the next eight months!

I really do update the rosters and numbers to my own standards with single-minded, rabid compulsivity, a habit I first tried to hide from my current NCAA-playing roommate but now don’t even bother to conceal. The continued improvement of the EA Sports games has had the side effect of making me crazy about getting every element of the virtual game as close to the real game as possible: if the quarterback from Akron is rated four points too high, my entire dynasty feels fraudulent and uneasily teetering on the edge of absurd unreality.

Which is one reason I’d like to see both NCAA and Madden - which I barely even looked at last year - drop the number ratings altogether and go to a player evaluation system that looks like what they currently do for the draft and recruiting: list player 40 times, bench press and squat numbers and generic descriptions for certain abilities, i.e. “great hands” or “poor arm strength,” etc., rather than be so specific as to say “78 speed,” as the former is what a coach actually has to work with (and will not make me say, “Hey, Video Brady Quinn should be a 65 speed, not a 62!”)

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Ah, the beautiful preseason… that magical time of year where anything’s possible and everyone’s still got a shot at glory. Even in College Station, the season still holds promise.

And the preseason is also that perfect time of year for a nice game of “what if.” What if Notre Dame fields a competitive defense? What if any team in the Pac 10 fields a competitive defense? What if Mark Mangino impregnated Rosanne Barr? Would the political climate on abortion change in this country?

Try getting that image out of your head today.

These are the things we’re thinking about as the long slog through the preseason drags on. And today we’ve got the ultimate “what if” game to keep your head spinning through your work day.

What if the perfect BCS shit-storm actually came to be this year? What would it look like?

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Chapter 3 in the series of Pepidemiology (the study and classification of pep) was originally posted on June 10, 2005.  So if you are new to us since then, or just want a refresher course, read on!

Welcome to Chapter Three of our ongoing study of the art and science of college rah-rahdom also known as Pepidemiology. Chapter Three will focus on an oft-overlooked but integral part of college pep: the costumed mascot.

ASU’s Sparky: Devil worship never looked so funny.
Note must be made here about the term “costumed mascot.” The mascot, the living, breathing symbol of a team, can sometimes be a living, breathing member of the species, as in the cases of Bevo the Longhorn, Ralphie the Buffalo, or Uga the Bulldog at UGA. We’re splitting mascots in two categories for a good reason: costumed mascots and animal mascots have distinctly different skill sets. Ralphie can stampede, the War Eagle can fly around Auburn, and Smokey the Hound Dog at Tennessee can bite people on the sidelines with impunity. We remain certain that this is not the case with costumed human mascots, though Tree at Stanford may indeed be capable of the biting part, for all we know. Thus the division into two categories in our taxonomy. (This is science, people.)
The costumed mascot takes on one of three forms:

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The Birmingham News eats The Huntsville Times’ dust this morning on the about-face of Auburn prof James Gundlach, chief whistleblower in The New York Times‘ initial indictment of the program’s practice of steering athletes towards easy courses, who now says he will not participate in the investigation - though he was met with “heartwarming” applause by 10 or 12 faculty members in the parking lot Monday.

A quick follow-up to Monday’s point about other colleges steering athletes in clusters towards one or two majors. I looked up a few old media guides and programs (which restricted themselves to senior bios only) last night and found that, in 2003, Southern Miss players were overwhelmingly majoring in coaching and sport administration or criminal justice by huge margins; UAB players were only slightly less likely to be in history (one of my two majors) or criminal justice, Memphis players to take “interdisciplinary studies” or Nebraska players business administration - though, to be fair, the Huskers have a ton of players and a pretty wide range of disciplines represented on the team.

A couple quick looks at random schools’ online media guides this morning shows USC has a lot of sociology majors, including Dwayne Jarrett, on its roster; Florida State has an unusual number of players studying “social science“; and in 2005, Louisville players could be largely grouped into marketing or sports administration (or, even more often, “undecided,” an option certainly not restricted to jocks).

I also quickly looked at other schools, including LSU, Tennessee, Ohio State and Texas, but the information on player majors in those guides was either too time-consuming to compile (as in Texas’ case, because UT, like Ohio State, hasn’t released its probably record-breaking ‘06 media guide, at least online) or not apparently available in the bios of many players (LSU and Tennessee presume, correctly in most cases, that the media cares not about this superfluous element of athletic life). The only two guides I glanced at that seemed to show a legitimate smattering of studies in a range of fields were those of Florida and Georgia - though UGA suspiciously offers the broadest possible major, presumably to all students, termed “Arts and Sciences,” a colossally comprehensive combination that seems fairly impossible to adequately cover in a few years. Why not just let folks major in “Studies”?

Anyway: not scientific, small sample size, no evidence any of those courses were or are inherently easy, etc. etc., but the prevalence of this not-at-all new or secret trend is threatened only if the NCAA finds Auburn was wrong to steer athletes toward certain classes, which it seems a large number of major athletic schools have done for decades. Otherwise, it will have to be determined that these particular sociology classes were dunce-worthy on a fraudulent level, and probably also that the AU athletic department or the university itself (possessed by its evil, evil boosters) knew it. That won’t be easy to do.