–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…

And then he answered one question too many: Is there a better time to catch you for that?

“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.

Death, though, overwhelms everything, every time, at least in the time when we force ourselves to bow heads, for just a moment, between the regular beat of life, between the cheering or the resumption of complaint.

In that moment, in a fleeting spasm of clarity, we understand that a 5-4 record is just what it is and not anything more: a disappointment.

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.