Saban didn’t go to the office in Miami today, which means he’s either been kidnapped or hired away from Miami to Alabama. (Both equal possibilities in Miami.)

The numbers being thrown around by Alabama stagger the imagination: ten years, four million dollars a year, numbers the NCAA and anyone wondering about the thin, worn, rusty, and hole-ridden fence separating college football from professional sport. Saban, who we thought was born to coach 27 hour days in the miserable NFL, may be doing the unlikely and returning. (Since Alabama was pulling out all the stops, we shouldn’t be surprised.)

We think Alabama could save some dough, though. In fact, you may want to help them out by indicating your interest with a fashion statement from the haute couture of the EDSBS Gift Shop.

UPDATE: Scott Moore of BamaMag.com is reporting Saban has accepted the job and is leaving the Dolphins, per Finebaum.

We’re on Battle of The Blogs over at CSTV.com. The topic is “Why Your Fans Are Special.” We think we did Florida fans justice by saying we were loud, organized, and loud. We also said we were loud, and that we were loud. Did we mention loud?

Loud in so many ways, really: Florida fans.

Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug. And sometimes you’re the bug who, after hitting the windshield, is immediately drowned in a bluish ammonia solution while still alive, tossed to the side by the edge of a wiper, and then run over while still weakly conscious by an onrushing semi.

Michigan’s been all three: windshield (most notoriously in the Yakety Sax Notre Dame game), bug (against Ohio State), and then mangled bug against USC. A 3-3 game at the half turned to a 32-18 loss of definitive nature. How, when Michigan seemed so poised to confound the BCS system with a potential dual claim to the national title, did Michigan get hammered so badly in a crucial spot?

Hypotheses, in order of probability.

Michigan couldn’t block. Like a heart attack: simple, fatal, and quick. On both sides of the ball Michigan slid backwards all day like they were on carpet skates. Our best guess why? USC’s stronger than Michigan, a hypothesis that will infuriate Michigan fans already fuming at their conditioning program, which has been described as being so antiquated we always imagine their facilities to look a lot like the video for “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, though not as gay.

Culpability:Robert Blake-killing-his-wife certainty. You can see it all game long–USC’s pushing Michigan off the ball on nearly every play. Verifiable, doom-spelling, and damning.

Carpet skates: Michigan had them on at the Rose Bowl.

USC’s defense and Michigan’s offense= water, meet silver nitrate and magnesium. USC’s marauding, blitz-giddy defense and Michigan’s stodgy, run-first 1982 hottness attack probably meant disaster from the start. Michigan could not pass block. Michigan could not run block. Their counters to the pressure–screens and draws, just like Lee tells us to do on NCAA 2007–were eaten alive by linebackers. Slants, the great prophylaxis against blitzes in the passing game, either never happened or were never called.
Hot reads vanished in the fog of indecision and panic. All of that equalled a mini-Enschede for the Michigan offense, who came out flat and received zero help from playcalling or halftime adjustments.

Culpability: Super-string theory certain. Certainly sounds complex and interesting, and definitely requires an understanding of the subject we can’t possibly hope to have. Occam’s suspicious.

You’re living in your own private Enschede, Michigan.

Michigan got out-coached. Not really a point of debate. USC came out, racked up 16 points in the third, and changed what they were doing to win the game. Michigan’s offense tried to gamely keep up, but it was like watching a hippo run windsprints to see the Wolverine offense keep pace (or not) with USC. Waggle; run. Run; waggle. Michigan showed nothing new, showed no desire to destroy its opponent in its game-planning, and in total had us sounding like Merrill Hoge on the couch. (You must be a killer to play this game!!! A mad, bloodthirsty, hard killerman!!! Killerman yarrrrrrr!!!!)

By points alone USC’s halftime adjustments were at least twice as good as Michigan’s. Halftime adjustments for Carr mean a change of pants and a cup of coffee; for USC they meant redesign, a slew of new blitz looks, and taking more chances offensively in the name of forcing Michigan into a corner. It wasn’t rocket science; they just couldn’t guard Dwayne Jarrett, who solved the problem of the Cover 2 umbrella by sprinting straight through the gap in coverage and daring the Michigan secondary to knock him on his ass. Who dares wins–and USC did.

Culpability: Tommy Lee gave Pam Anderson Hep C Certainty. Certainly makes sense on a gut-level, right? Then again: unprovable, really. Maybe Michigan just didn’t execute all the great ideas Debord and English had. Then again: they’re responsible for getting those across, right? And really, Pam could have gotten that from any number of ex-boyfriends, right?

Pete Carroll was doin’ it for the kids in Darfur. You just can’t win a karmic battle with a noted humanitarian like Pete.

Culpability rating: Oh, like-gravity-certain. He’s out there right now in an old Huey dropping MREs into Burmese rebel camps while texting recruits on his Blackberry.

Besides muscle atrophy and indigestion, bowl season also gives the viewer something else: a great opportunity to comparison shop between networks. A few highlights from a long and intense weekend of bowl viewing that’s left the pants feeling a bit tight this Tuesday.

1. NFL Network catches Mike Leach losing it. When a major earthquake hit Kashmir in 2005, donations for the quake disappointed many relief agencies, who blamed what they called “disaster fatigue.” Enter why we’re not talking more about Texas Tech (yarr) and their epochal comeback from being down 38-7 to defeat Minnesota 44-41. We watched most of this from a bar, and am about to dislocate shoulder patting self on back. The scene:

EDSBS Legal Counsel B.J. Strykker: Doesn’t look good, man.

Orson: They can come back. They’re pirates.

Strykker: Really?

Orson: Yarr. They’re pirates.

The dialogue may not be correct–it likely included a few more yarrs, actually. But we did call it, since Texas Tech can run off forty point scoring binges with terrifying ease. Glen Mason, Minnesota head coach and obvious non-samurai, did not slit his belly open after the game and keep his ancestors from disgrace. Minnesota did this for him with stunning speed, firing him after the game. Sadly, this was not caught on camera.

What was? This. And we thought Mike Leach was too cool to care.

2. Clemson player practices the ancient art of ikebana…in his pants.

Kentucky and coach Red Foreman beat the stripes off Clemson, whose head coach must have questioned whether the team wanted to win or just jack off on the sidelines and lose. The answer, thanks to some alert Tivoing (HT: Jason), was clear on the scoreboard and on camera:

Dig deep, team, and find victory.

3. Gary Danielson calls Calvin Johnson “The Toilet” Reeling from the realization at what Georgia Tech could have been had Chan Gailey not started a 42 year old midget auto mechanic from Austell at quarterback for four years, Gary Danielson struggled to come up with a good nickname for Calvin Johnson. Riffing off Johnson’s well-publicized work with a clean water/sanitation project in Bolivia, Danielson actually said something like this:

“Well…maybe we should call him ‘The Toilet.’ I mean, around him, nothing hits the ground, right?”

Gary has never used a bathroom in China. This we can guarantee.

4. Musburger goes apeshit over a punt landing in the endzone for a touchback. In the course of any Musbergame, there will be several of these along the way: a stray bee flies into the booth, a b-list celebrity is shown picking his ear on the sidelines, a three yard run with a hint of potential occurs. Our favorite came in the second quarter of Michigan’s effete performance against USC. A USC punt sails toward the endzone, hits at around the eight, and begins what to the viewer is an obvious bounce into the paint for a touchback. Musberger narrates thusly.

And there’s a highhhhhh punt bouncing at the eight NO WAIT THAT’S SLOWING DOWN AROUND THE FOUR THE THREE WHOAAAA HOLY SWEET BABY JESUS THAT COULD BEEEEEEE aah that’s a touchback through the back of the endzone.

Brent Musberger could call a colonoscopy like it was the 2005 Rose Bowl and still try to get you to hang around for the biopsy. He may not succeed, sure; but he’s gonna try.

5. ESPN’s replay work in the Outback Bowl. With practice and a year of experience the camera angles are multiplying. Whether by luck or through design, the Outback Bowl crew caught as perfect and defnitive an image of the fumble as one could imagine having: Foster, parallel to the ground and lunging forward, his knee tantalizingly close to the ground with the ball clearly out and tumbling away from him. Mike Patrick cooed on the replay: “Outstanding work, guys.” We concur.

Foster’s only hope–that he hadn’t fumbled–was hopeless, according to superb replay work.

6. A Song Girl’s butt roast appeared for 0.3 seconds on live television. Go here and check it out if you like. Some will claim she went commando, which is highly unlikely; it’s more likely that she’s got a wedge or wearing a thong. Either way it’s semi-SFW cheesecake, and it’s the funniest thing we’ve seen since we sent the whole office that email of that monkey doing the thing. You know, the monkey thing we sent you.

We’ll try to run these things down in no particular order, beginning with last night’s insane, insane, insane Boise State/Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl.

Attempt to sift what didn’t happen in the Fiesta Bowl last night from what did in the following paragraphs, and you lose. Boise won’t compete for four quarters. Boise won’t be able to stop Adrian Peterson. Boise would keep pace admirably with Oklahoma in almost serene fashion, running identical gameplans to the Sooners until the mad flurry of mistakes, trick plays, and outright madness that would end the game. Paul Thompson would turn in a maddening performance, doing as much harm as good by throwing three interceptions after posting a tidy 20 tds and 8 ints on the year. A walk-on wide receiver would throw the winning touchdown for the team just over a decade into their D-1 existence. The running back for Team Underdog would propose to his girlfriend immediately after the game and on camera, thus ensuring he would miss out on the most freewheeling and satisfying years of NFL/Arena League bonus-fueled sexual conquest he would know.

Fox could have thrown in anything and we would have believed. Jared Zabransky’s alcoholic father cleaning up, working as the equipment manager, and then tearfully embracing him on the sidelines. An inspiring and hopelessly retarded ballboy. A walk-on whose whole dream had been to play Boise State football who finally got the chance to throw the winning TD (scratch that–actually happened.) We half-expected Zabransky to reveal that pregame, he and his crew of motley misfits had also exploded the planet-killing asteroid menacing earth, and that you were all very welcome, though Dan Hawkins had been killed in the process, and we should really, really think about that before the guitar solo takes us to the credits.

If Radio had showed up, we wouldn’t have been surprised.

The most impressive thing about the improbable script– (more…)

Balls. Just monstrous, huge testicular fortitude by Boise State.

We’ve played games of backyard football that ended with such chicanery, trickery, and pulled-from-the-ass heroism. We’ve seen games like this scripted in Varsity Blues, played them in various permutations of video game, and on occasion dreamt them up when we were bored, and considering the ultimate nutjob fantasy game.

But Boise State just beat Oklahoma, and if it didn’t happen, you could not invent it. Trick laterals, last minute comebacks, halfback passes, fourth down conversions….

And Ian Johnson just proposed to his girlfriend, the head cheerleader at Boise State. ON CAMERA. And you know she said yes.

We’ll try to capture this in the morning, but frankly, if you didn’t see it, you’ll accuse us of getting into the PCP early on Saturday. The B in Boise stands for balls. Planetary-sized ones.

A Bruckheimer movie broke out Tuesday morning in the Fiesta Bowl. We give it four stars.