It’s award day in the college football blogosphere, and we’re slowing the whole thing down with silliness like work and sleep. The winners thus far:

Best New Blog: Fire Mark May. YAY BLOO!!!

The Trev Alberts Quits to Do Construction Award for Funniest Blog. Mooninites abducted the winner. Pay him no mind.

The Dr. Z Award for Analytical Prowess: MGoBlog. One half of his brain is figuring out his acceptance speech. The other is applying string theory to an analysis of Mike Debord’s deceptively simple offense.

The Best Mainstream Blog Award: Dan Steinberg, for his DC Sports Bog at the Washington Post. Dan Steinberg once answered the phone and, after finding out who it was, still shot the shit with us for 20 minutes or so. That deserves an award all by itself.

And now our belated turn at the podium. I wonder what Deng Xiaoping is thinking right now….

Without further adieu:

The Jenn Sterger’s Rack Award.

First, the nominees:

The Jenn Sterger’s Rack Award

FOR: The best photoshop or other gag of the year.

CRITERIA: Could be a photoshop, a Motivational Poster, an On Notice Board, a fictional post, or something similar, as long as it elicited more than a mere smile.
CFB Award Nominee: Best Gag

And the winner of the AWARD CATEGORY Award is . . .

“Dear Diary: Chris Fowler,” SMQ.

We really could gush a lot over how well-paced this piece is; how tiny bits of verbiage make the funny into the poignant; or how well SMQ interlaced the absurdity of the thing with real and believable notion that this actually was Chris Fowler’s nervous inner monologue. Or you could just let the first sentence take you:

Dear Diary,

Tonight was a tough night. And I really thought things had been getting a lot better with Kirk and the play-by-play job. I try so hard, and Kirk is a nice enough guy most of the time, but sometimes he just makes me feel like I’m two inches tall!

In three sentences, Chris Fowler morphs into a middle-school girl on the sharp end of social ostracism. In fact, the first image we got was of a BFF bracelet–the kind that had half a heart pendant with “BEST FRIENDS” on it, which only matched up with the other half that said “FOREVER” worn by another girl.

True satire requires a grain of truth in the construction of an often lurid fiction, and the notion that beneath the starched suits and immovable hair Fowler spends his Wednesday nights sniffing Cabernet, watching art films, and wondering why he’s condemned to spend the rest of his life as the beta male in his relationship with glamorous Kirk…well, it sticks like Happy Fun Ball to flesh.

The rest is just oddball brilliance from someone who spends most of their time cranking out the best college football analysis on the web. Someone buy the man as many commas as he wants–SMQ, our hat’s off to you.