It’s done: Butch Davis will be the coach at UNC next year.

Insta-quick Analysis: Butch Davis won’t be coaching Miami. Or anywhere else. He will, in fact, be coaching at UNC. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He will be wearing powder blue, most likely, and could gain an extra fifteen pound eating good barbecue. He will probably also wear a headset, hire some assistants, and then begin recruiting players.

In addition: He’ll probably say gosh a lot. ‘Cause Butch Davis does that.

You heard it here first! Gimme a fucking siren! WOOOO!!!

Butch Davis: will likely be wearing powder blue.

–Charlie Weis on when he gets his autograph seekers:

Like the seemingly innocuous little tangent he stumbled onto recently about Notre Dame students showing up outside his office at 4:30 a.m., trolling for autographs…

“No, that’s the safe bet,” he said, and then paused and shook his head. “And I just should not have said that.”

He just wants an autograph, Charlie. And your love.

–Andy discovers something truly bizarre: Urban Meyer tells his staff to go home at 11:00 p.m. This is around the time of night when Nick Saban used to call his LSU staff together for punji-stick fights and a quick Dexatrim before the second 11-hour shift. To the pain!

Saban’s staff, seen here prepping for the second shift back in the day at LSU.

–JoePa improving. We post this both as news, and as expose, since the ads on the site are for the “McRib Farewell Tour II.” Those lying bastards–you know it’ll be back in the spring. And yet you crave more…

–The Aggies lose their school president to the Defense Department. Mike Leach is rolling with laughter on the floor of his office at this news. No, really, he is. We’d put thousands on it.

–Different Leach/Leech: Iowa congressman Jim Leach, the asswipe who tacked on anti-internet gambling legislation to a port security bill, gets his asswipe status confirmed by losing his election on Tuesday and becoming a soon-to-be ex-congressman. The best part about it: you could still bet on his loss on any number of major wagering sites on Tuesday. Fuck yeah!

–Brian cannily points out that having Craig James sitting next to Doug Flutie in a studio is just plain wrong. We’d never thought of this before, but having a beneficiary of the SMU scandal sitting next to the Mulleted Marvel is a jarring study in contrasts, like having James Carville talking next to a nude Rachel Weisz in the same screen. It looked odd before, but now it’ll set off bells in our head when we see it. That should quiet things down a bit in there.

Wait, Carville was in the frame? We missed him.

–All things, all at once though. The death of Bryan Pata has thrown us for a disproportionately large loop, and we’re not sure why. Out of Kilter’s got more on the Pata tragedy at Miami. They point out Greg Cote’s obviously heartbroken column on Pata, which we quote liberally from below:

Death is never choosy. Doesn’t play favorites. Doesn’t care who you are. It will take John F. Kennedy Jr. in a small plane, Dale Earnhardt Sr. in a fast car, a homeless man beaten by bats, Sonny Bono on a ski slope, Bryan Pata in a Kendall apartment, or someone you will never hear of who just slipped in his bathtub and hasn’t even been missed yet.

We understand then that this UM football season didn’t become a tragedy until a bullet erased Bryan Pata for no good reason at all.

In the wake of Tuesday’s election news, one underreported story deserves mention: Alabama’s ongoing recount of points scored during their 24-16 home loss to Mississippi State last Saturday. Alabama requested the recount after reviewing game tape Saturday night.

Alabama coach Mike Shula says that while the game was a close one, he expects a recount to find the Crimson Tide victorious.

“I could have sworn we lost a couple of second quarter field goals in there somewhere. Or third quarter field goals. Whenever they were, they were definitely field goals, and we definitely made them,” said Shula in a teleconference early Wednesday morning. “We’re hanging tough and staying optimistic around here.”

Angry but optimistic: Shula files for a recount.

Stadium officials blamed the alleged miscalculations and ambiguities on the new digital scoring machines, which confused the elderly scoreboard operator, Jack Allster.

“It’s just so durned complicated, what with the buttons, and the numbers, and buttons. Where’s my old toggle switch? Where’s the old buzzers? Confound it…” said a visibly distraught Allster in a postgame interview.

SEC Commissioner Mike Slive said that while rare, point recounts were available in all games.

“Sometimes you just miss stuff. Like Tennessee ‘99, for example. They actually lost the SEC Championship game. If you go back and look at the tape, which clearly shows Arkansas scoring two tds in the third quarter. But people get excited and just miss a play or two, and lo and behold, you get human error putting a team in the championship.”

Slive then blanched and stammered, “Um, I shouldn’t have said that. Excuse me…”

Shula blames no one but himself for missing the alleged points miscalculation. “We kicked ‘em and then didn’t really notice that scoreboard didn’t change. (more…)

Some brilliant, brilliant person posted the old Burger King “Legends of College Football” commemorative cup commercials on YouTube. Watch below for:

–Bo Jackson singin’ his ever-lovin’ ass off to the Auburn fight song. He should have known it well, dammit, as much as he was paid to go there. Blue-chip SECers cost some coin back then.

–Lou Holtz cajoling a bewildered Tim Brown into singing. Tim must be normal, since like most people he’s both confused and frightened by Holtz.

–Tom Osborne apparently suffering a minor stroke of some sort at the end of the video. Or singing. We’re not really sure.

–Jim McMahon, who was so drunk for filming he was forced to do the ad sitting in a deck chair while wearing a Detroit Lions jersey. None of this is provable, but we still suspect it to be true because it is much funnier that way, and yet still plausible given that it’s Jim McMahon.

We remember these commercials, mostly because we had the cups, since pre-adolescents live for free things handed out with fast-food purchases. Which we got when we bought the old Burger King fish sandwich, known to the world at large as “The Whaler.” Burger King then pulled off the amazing feat of giving it a more absurd name by rechristening it as “The Big Fish,” since “the Whaler” probably conjured up fewer and fewer images of hearty Nantucket harpooneers chowing down after a long day at the oars, and more and more images of floating Japanese whaling slaughterhouses firing rocket launchers into cute belugas.

Making this blogpoll felt like doing trauma surgery. Nurse! More clamps! Everytime we moved something, something else started bleeding all over the place. It’s a mess, but see the serious problems discussed below, which are endemic and won’t be resolved until bowl sexy time.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Ohio State	—
2	Michigan	—
3	Texas	—
4	California	1
5	Louisville	1
6	Florida	3
7	Arkansas	9
8	Auburn	—
9	Notre Dame	2
10	Southern Cal	—
11	LSU	11
12	Oklahoma	7
13	Rutgers	2
14	Wisconsin	1
15	Tennessee	11
16	West Virginia	9
17	Oregon	4
18	Georgia Tech	4
19	Wake Forest	1
20	Maryland	6
21	Virginia Tech	2
22	Nebraska	4
23	Boston College	11
24	Clemson	6
25	Texas A&M	8

Serious problems:

West Virginia has no d. None. Louisville can do that to people, but if the Mountaineers don’t hold serve once, they lose. Almost happened against Georgia in the Sugar Bowl last year, and totally happened in the UL game. They plummet with serious rebound opportunity.

Arkansas’ ranked over USC right now. USC’s not getting better over the course of the season; in fact, they seem to have plateaued. Arkansas, on the other hand, is running eight plays to victory every week and screaming upward. Coming up: Oregon, Cal, Notre Dame. Sweep the three and shininess will return with ease, and we won’t have to do anything silly like this again.

The Wisconsin issue. They’ll finish the season with one loss, but it’s puffery. They’re good, but their schedule’s wahhhhfer-thin, with the next toughest game after their loss to Michigan being a road trip to Iowa, who are not good. Bielema is our man of the year for the 15 Second Kickoff, but his team will roll into a bowl game overrated no matter what they do. And how do we punish two teams like Tennessee and LSU for playing each other to the last bloody seconds of a conference game? And especially LSU, who won a road game in hostile, Special Golden Estrus-scented territory?

The smell of Neyland: bags ‘em every time!

–Nathan in our comments asks: “What on earth is going on with the ACC in your ballots?” Take off the “in your ballots” when discussing your completely facacta megaconference. Sanity forbids us from bumping the best-looking team (Wake Forest) too high, so up goes Tech. But they’ll lose an improbable game along the way, and then we’ll have to dredge up another mediocre ACC team (likely Clemson or Boston College) just to put them in the ballot. Someone figure out parity, get some Bellichickesque football math going, and just start winning the damn conference convincingly before Butch Davis takes over at UNC and does it for you. Because that’s gonna happen.

–As for A&M, Georgia Tech, and Boston College, we don’t trust them. We’re pretty sure Oklahoma’s too high, and that they’ll break our hearts, too. Yet like many other pollsters, we’re haunted by the ghost of championship booty past. Two losses? Ah, but that ass, shorty. Ooh! That ass.

Miami DT Bryan Pata is dead. A murder investigation is underway.

We wrote this yesterday about Miami:

Your time here will be nasty, brutish, and short.

We’re not taking it down, because we wrote it. But writing that hours before a Miami football player’s life ends in an act of violence makes the stomach turn.

Condolences.