A few reports, but they’re mounting into something resembling certainty: Shula lives at Alabama. He’s going nowhere.

His offensive staff, however, should begin wondering who moved their cheese. (That’s the book, if you’ve never seen it, which teaches “people in organizations how to deal collectively with change,” or what sane, lucid minds call “getting laid off.”)

UPDATE!!!! Or maybe not. We’re relying on scuttlebutt and hearsay, but we will say that it’s not just trolling message boards kind of rumormongering, but whatever is happening is still “very fluid” right now. Alabama football: a maze of enigmas wrapped in a riddle inside a conundrum stuffed with boiled peanuts and pom-poms.

What do you do, exactly, Coach Rader? We have a book for you to read.

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and the now-infamous article exposing Mike Leach’s pirate fancy, spoke with us about his new book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Lewis follows the story of Michael Oher, the left tackle for Ole Miss who somehow emerged from the ghettos of Memphis to become the adopted son of a wealthy white Memphis couple after keen eyes recognized the massive profile of a prized NFL possession: the left tackle who protects the blind side of the quarterback.

Enjoy.

OS: Okay, we’re ready over here.

ML: So, tell me what you are. You’re a website, right?

OS: Yeah, we are. Just to give you a little background on us: we’re Every Day Should Be Saturday, and we provide occasionally straight but mostly crooked takes on college football.

ML: Crooked takes for a crooked business.

OS: Can I quote you on that?

ML: That should be your motto.

OS: I guess we can go ahead and get started. Yes, you have a degree from the London School of Economics, and yes, you write for the New York Times, but first we have to establish your bona fides as far as college football.

ML: Ah, well, let’s see how we can do that…

OS: You're from Louisiana, correct:

ML: Oh, absolutely, I grew up–when I was a little boy (this will be a starting point) I lived 2 blocks, 3 blocks from Tulane Stadium, the old Sugar Bowl stadium. And every Saturday we’d go down and see the Tulane football team play their season. So the Tulane/LSU games were my first experience of a serious rivalry. That was back when Tulane was actually kind of good.

OS: Okay, so without torturing you too much, if I asked you to complete the rhyme “Hot Boudin, Cold Cous Cous…”

ML: Say that again?

OS: It’s an LSU cheer.

ML: I have no idea. I sat on the LSU side. Roll Green Wave. I never understood how Tulane had such a lame mascot. I have no idea about LSU, I really don’t. That stadium was always all Tulane people. My father was a Tulane graduate.

OS: Tulane has the crippling disadvantage of having an unimaginable mascot, which doesn’t seem to affect Alabama, but there’s not hard and set rules in college football.

ML: Well, beyond that college football, I have no bona fides. I never played a lot. I was the quarterback on the hundred pound football team in eighth grade until I got hit once and decided this wasn’t for me. I played other sports, but not that. I went to Princeton, and the Princeton football team was I think worse than my high school football team. It didn’t seem like real football.

OS: But Princeton still beat Columbia, right? That was pretty standard.

ML: But everybody beat Columbia. That was in the era where Columbia didn’t win games for ten years or whatever. Princeton beat Yale when I was there, but it didn’t matter very much, and I didn’t even go to the games but for once or twice. I don’t really count. I’m not really a hardcore football fan. But if I were making the case for me, I would point out that Peyton and Eli Manning both graduated from my high school.

OS: And you did write an article about Eli Manning, and you did write an article about Michael Oher…

ML: Yeah, but that’s different than being a fan. When you’re a fan, you pay to participate. When you’re a writer, you’re being paid.

OS: Michael, you pay in so many different ways. So many.

OS: Let me go ahead and ask you: how is Big Mike doing?

ML: Well, his teams sucks. (more…)

We’ll beat you to the punch: we’re totally looking past FSU this weekend and on to Arkansas in the SEC Championship Game. And it’s not just because we’re jacked about seeing the DickBone offense Gus Malzahn’s put together, either.

It’s mostly because of this man, who probably already has a standing offer at the Clairmont Lounge based on his moves in this video. Again, no screen licking, please.

SOOOOOWEEEEEE! DANCE!

We bring you the tastiest trawlings of the internet. Yarr.

–Spurrier is now going to Alabama, having hypothetically spurned the ‘Canes and President Bush’s entreaties to join him as the Secretary of Defense, and will now be joining Bill Oliver in Tuscaloosa along with other classics of the early nineties like Naughty by Nature, Rollerblades, and Mortal Kombat. Scorpion would make an awesome safety, man. Get over here! (None of this is true. Except for the bit about Scorpion, since a safety with a sharp grappling hook would be awesome.)

Scorpion: would be almost as intimidating as George Teague.

–Go Yang, indeed.

–The SEC will be outside looking in again in the BCS, which is precisely what happens when you schedule crapulence in your out of conference schedule and watch your offense throw a piston at the Auburn game. Florida’s schedule was rough on paper, but one more OOC game not involving a team you give your brother in a pick ‘em matchup in NCAA 2007 game would have made an overwhelming case for Florida’s inclusion.

Either way, Mike Slive will boldly shrug in protest.

–Fightin’ Amish introduces us to Pete Carroll’s website. We really, truly wish he hadn’t.

–Speaking of USC…Boi From Troy has his own mini-catch on the Cal/USC game. Brian Cushing evidently played a nasty role for DeSean Jackson, being one of two or three players the Trojans assigned to jam him off the line. From what we saw of the game, USC’s “jam” technique involves knocking the eyebrows off someone on every snap.

–BULLET BULLET BULLET!! INVEST IN TONGAN LINEMAN SHARES!!! Since the supply may be erratic for a while thanks to rioting and civil disorder in Tonga. Again, we repeat to Urban Meyer: recruit gay Polynesian linemen now and we will be rolling in Sears Trophies in no time.

–Peter admits that the Longhorns can’t win ‘em all: Texas A&M’s Meat Judging Team took home its fourth title in a row. We’re looking to field an EDSBS Meat Judging team, so female readers and gay boys, step on down and submit your qualifications below. We can’t have Dennis Franchione beating us at anything, especially judging fine pieces of meat of any gender.

Meat judge Morrissey would approve of A&M’s fine efforts.

–John Lopez, meanwhile, thinks A&M is dead meat in the game, which is but a shadow of its former self.

–Ivy Leaguers learn quick!

Ivy League leaders say they have protected the academic stature of their institutions, avoided the stain of recruiting and classroom scandals, and nurtured athletics as a truly amateur endeavor.

“Thank goodness,” said Derek Bok, Harvard’s president in 1981 and its interim president now. “The quality of football is not the primary objective of the institution.”

And that’s why you’ll never win SEC championships, Har-vahhhrrd: lack of dedication, dammit. (And, er, not belonging to the SEC.) That forty percent legacy admission rate doesn’t help, either: weak aristocratic blood will ruin a good blocking scheme every time. If you can get Yale alum and motivational master Aleksey Vayner, though, then do it: impossible is nothing for that guy.

No supplements needed on Bobby Bowden’s explanation for his son’s inability to call anything besides a square-in, jump ball, or blown-up screen as an offensive coordinator:

As for why things didn’t work out, he didn’t point to statistics or won-lost records.

“Because you all ignited it,” he said to a small room of reporters. “You listen to eBay and e-mail and all that junk, and you all kept writing about it and that fans it and makes it grow and grow, and it becomes a cancer. That’s why.”

Jeff Bowden’s playbook for sale. Opening bid: $550,000 from user exasperatedboosternfla.

Two things:

1. Don’t even try to purchase wemustignitethiscoach.com, because if you do our lawyaz iz strong and multifarious, yo.

2. Ebay actually does destroy coaches. Especially when they’re shopping for other coaches’ playbooks in a last-ditch attempt to properly call a game. In the middle of a game. (HT: Jeremy, WATB.)

3. Bowden’s actually pissed because Jeff totally got this notice about a real live confederate army vintage flintlock musket he was trying to buy that said he needed to give EBay his credit card information and then OMG! some huge charges on Dad’s Visa at a jewelry shop in Istanbul showed up so Dad had to spend like six hours on the phone straightening the whole thing out and that made him so tired that Jeff had to go put him to bed which sucked because then Jeff missed the episode of JAG he’d been waiting to see on USA. That TiVo think is wayyyy too complex to mess with, in Jeff’s opinion.

Stranko, is this where we put cheesecake? This is what happens when you have instant access to porn–you just go right to it and bypass cheesecake! And thus lose all cheesecake skills! DAMN YOU INTERNETS!!!
(This is Catherine Bell of JAG, who keeps Jeffy coming back for military courtroom drama with her Farsi skills.