Willie Cooper, a junior safety for the Miami Hurricanes, was shot this morning. His prognosis is good as the bullet hit him in the ass.  The investigation is ongoing, but, according to the local CBS affiliate:

at around 6:45 a.m. they spotted a suspicious car pull up in front of their home. A masked gunman got out and started shooting. [Brandon] Meriwether and Cooper walked to the corner of the residence where they saw one black male crotched down next to their home.

According to police, Meriweather yelled at the black male at which time the male jumped up and shot one time hitting Cooper in the buttocks. When Cooper was shot its believed Meriweather pulled a pistol from his pants pocket and fired three times at the assailant, who jumped a fence and fled with another person in an older model blue Audi, police said.

This might inspire a new ending to the next Michael Mann movie. 

 Miami’s new offensive line coach. 

When Orson asked me to co-host EDSBS this week, I thought….”Hmmm…posting on a Gator Blog. This should be interesting.” Some worried that I would use the opportunity to run down Urban Meyer or talk smack about the Gator Program. Not me. No I prefer to take the high road when it comes to such matters.
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Run Lindsay Run
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I’m not the kind of guy that would come on here and take advantage of my host’s offer of carte blanche posting to bring up painful memories of Gator moments in the past….like the seal clubbing in the Fiesta Bowl. No, I’m bigger than that. I wouldn’t stoop to that level.
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He’s still running.
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That’s what they’ve always said. Ol’ High Road Westerdawg. Anyway, thanks to Orson for the invite. Next time I’m on vacation, I’m leaving him the keys to One Georgia Sports Blog Tower, and he can pull double duty for me. Seems only fair. Note to Orson, I left your keys to the IROC on your office desk….and the jorts you sent me to wear while posting didn’t fit. Until then I leave you with the Head Ball Coach’s greatest soundbite ever. — Paul Westerdawg (bring on the 2-14 jokes)

What a great week it has been here on EDSBS thanks entirely to our guest bloggers, Peter from BON, Paul from Georgia Sports, and SMQ .  Why did we ask them to fill in in Orson’s absense….we’ll that is obvious.  As you can now see, they can write their asses off.  So, if you weren’t a regular reader of theirs before, make sure you are one now. 

Now for the hard part.  How does EDSBS top this week of guest blogging?  Well, we start with the demise of Orson’s luxurious red neck riviera vacation.  And then… it is topless women, shirtless football players (for the other half of our audience), free booze, instant acting Viagra and Cialis for all, free downloads of Paris Hilton’s hit new single and …

Could EDSBS turn into a Girls Gone Wild Party? 

…or perhaps just some more snarks and quips about the world of college football fandome, with some fart jokes and pop culture thrown in for good measure.  But anyway, a heartfelt thanks to our guest bloggers.  We just hope they haven’t upped the meager expectations of our readers.     

At the beginning of the month, we took a look at what correlation, if any, exists between an AP national title winning football team and its final AP Poll ranking the year before. I said at that time that I wanted to dig up the data for the AP Preseason polls to look at where the eventual national champions were ranked in the preseason of their title-winning year. 

Thanks to College Football Resource, whom I owe a giant tip of the hat, we have that data. Let’s have a look: 

¹AP National Champions 

For one thing, we can see that the AP voters struggled from 1980-1984. Before we get into further analysis, let me bring you up to speed on what happened in in that five year span: 

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It is our last “oldie but goodie” for a while, I promise, but I figured EDSBS needed its daily whiff of Orson even when on vacation.  So relax and enjoy.  Afterall, it’s Friday!

Coaches are often accused of being dictators. We decided that some of them might actually be real-life dictators. For more compelling evidence, please click on the more button to see some of our disturbing picks.

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Attention Gatorfans!  Time to start getting hyped and in gear again.  In order to assist you in that, UF has this nice piece of propaganda to watch as in introduction to Urban Meyer’s website. 

Below, my temporary EDSBS colleague Senor Westerdawg, drawing from ratings of which I have no knowledge, has identified “The Most Underrated Revenge Game of 2006” from among a pack of likely contenders, including Oklahoma-Texas, Florida State-Florida, Michigan-Ohio State and Notre Dame-Michigan State. Out-vengeancing all of those annual hate-fests in Paul’s estimation, however, is the typically tamer Auburn at South Carolina throwdown on Sept. 28 - not because, as one might suspect, impatient, grudge-holding SMQ fave Steve Spurrier will have his charges geared to atone for 2005’s horrific 48-7 loss on the Plains, in which the ‘Cock-N-Fire offense failed to enter Auburn territory before well into the fourth quarter. Rather, Westerdawg forecasts revenge will be sweetest for the Tigers’ eerily-well rounded, all-SEC back du jour, USC transfer Kenny Irons, who had not yet emerged as one of the most unstoppable weapons in the league when he faced his former team in ‘05 but will not spoil this final chance to cement said status by galloping for hundreds upon hundreds of yards against his old mates (and against Carolina Defensive Coordinator Tyrone Nix, former Southern Miss linebacker and coach and very large human for whom I have too much, um, respect to second Paul’s prediction).

I will make another prediction, though, itself related to a “Revenge Game of the [Insert Appropriate Amount of Time Depending on Your Well-Reasoned Perspective]“: Louisville, triple OT losers in Morgantown last year, will beat West Virginia and win the Big East’s automatic Mo’ Money bid.

This would not seem to be very out on the limb at all, as the Cardinals were monster favorites in the league in ‘05 - after displaying monster juggernaut status in C-USA in ‘04 - and mostly played like it, save an early, completely inexplicable wipeout versus South Florida and the very end of the game against West Virginia, when U of Hell blew a 24-7 fourth quarter lead - with a little help, it should be noted, from later-reprimanded Big East officials on a critical onside kick. Louisville also returns the Big East’s leading passer, leading rusher (and two more who combined to top 1,100 yards), leading receiver (and another in the top five) and seven starters on defense. The Cards also led the Big East in scoring (29 points more than WVU in league games, 136 more in all games, with seven straight games over 40, two games over 60 against BCS conference opponents and 30 and 24, respectively, in two games against top 10 national defenses without its starting quarterback) and outgained conference opponents by almost 175 yards per game; they outgained the Mountaineers by 60 yards head-to-head, the difference in that game turning on a +1 turnover advantage and a failed two-point conversion to tie on the final play of the third overtime.

I.E., Louisville is about to blow the fuck up. Again. And West Virginia is standing a little too close.

Don’t you know who I am? I’m the juggernaut, bitch!

Not that West Virginia didn’t deserve to win - but look what that victory, along with the stunning Sugar Bowl upset of Georgia, has wrought when projecting the upcoming season: the ‘Neers got early smooches from Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel, then full-on, under-the-skirt petting from ESPN’s Pat Forde, who proclaimed WVU No. 1 in May. Preseason magazines came out shortly after, all ranking West Virginia in the top ten, from 3 (Lindy’s) to 5 (The Sporting News) to 6 (Athlon, which also rated it the No. 1 “Program on the Rise”) and this week topping the Big East media’s preseason polls.

So does anyone else get the feeling this team’s going down to Maryland in a Sept. 14 Thursday night game, with at least two more humiliating defeats to follow? It’s easy to forget, with the way it started flattening folks later in the season, how much of a defensive team West Virginia was, and half that unit - and just about all of its principles - are gone. It’s also easy to forget how one-dimensional the team was, and I’ll will believe this team is some ‘95 Nebraska, run-for-280-at-will steamroller when I see it; it is sophomore slump time for Pat White all the way. I won’t go as far as (apparently) the only other ‘Neer skeptic this summer, Phil Steele, who picks WVU third behind Pittsburgh (though his top, uh, 47 has West Virginia No. 17, slightly below my projection, and Pitt way down at 39), but I’ve already elucidated the historical warning signs, all of which point to “bust”:

That formula was fleshed out with “Recent Bust Corollaries,” examples of similar recent hype cum ineptitude from Arizona, Texas A&M, Oregon State and, just last year, Purdue. It happens on smaller scales, too - like, what was Iowa State doing at the top of the preseason polls in the Big XII North last year?

It’s not that West Virginia is going to be bad - it’s not impossible, but very unlikely it will miss a bowl game, and probably will play in a decent. But over the long haul, the major arc, what’s the high point of that program? Can it do better than an 11-1, conference-title-winning, Sugar Bowl-upsetting season? I see no reason yet anyone outside of the state of West Virginia should believe it can.

Given the general attitude of this site towards him in the past, I’m not sure if I as a guest am allowed to say good thing about Heisman Pundit here, but what the hell: his idea for a “football major,” with a few core classes in general subjects, sounds like a pretty damn good one:

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Core History
Core Math
English Composition
Core Fine Arts
Performance Attendance
Music Theory
Music Skills
Performance
Piano Skills
Ensemble

Granted, the music major must take a group of core classes and I am not advocating that the general classwork be thrown out. But take note that the music major is also taking classes that apply to his particular skill–playing a musical instrument.

Here is what a Football Major curriculum could look like for an Auburn freshman:

Core History
Core Math
English composition
Football practice
Film Study
Weight Training
Sports Management
Sports Media
Nutrition

Basically, the player would get course credit for the activites he already participates in, plus there would be a special curriculum to educate them on how to be a professional athlete down the road.

Now, I can hear you saying already “But HP, a lot of these guys aren’t going to play pro ball. They need something to fall back on.”

Well, I can say the same thing for the Auburn cello major. What are the odds that he goes on to play for a major philharmonic? Many music majors end up doing things completely unrelated to their field because, like in any field, only the best make it to the top. The vast majority end up teaching.

For those players who don’t make it, there is always teaching and all kinds of related fields, from strength coach, to personal trainer, to agent, to sports marketer, to sports commentator, that a player can get in to.

And a player wouldn’t have to major in football. If he was still interested in economics, he could go that route.

But for the player that does have a pro future, he gets to the NFL as a more mature product with a better understanding of how his career works. He would have a clue about everything from contracts to agents, to how to deal with the media, to how to learn various offensive or defensive principles.
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Both of these guys should be be PhDs.

Given that so many players, even ones who don’t become long-term pros, are going to stay in the game in some capacity because it’s what they know and love - like a music major knows and loves music - this proposal makes sense. It’s not as if there’s no living to be made in sports outside of an NFL uniform.

Of course, this will never, ever happen, not in the productive lifetime of anyone reading this blog, and the many legions of James Gundlachs in the academic world - nice people, certainly, smart, hardworking people, but ones who do not like athletes getting sweat and dirt on the ivory tower, much less actually coming inside of it - will continually ensure this, even if the physical and sports industry training one could get by studying, and then successfully executing at tremendous speeds, the intricacies of the cover three zone blitz from a base nickel set against a trips hi-lo read off of play-action probably matches the social and eventually professional value of, say, a course that asks, “Is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a marvel of abstract architecture culminating in a gender-free paean to human solidarity, or does it model the process of rape?”

And who wants to argue against that?