Bear Bryant, when he wasn’t breaking the soul of young sideline reporters, coached football. And like Chuck Yeager was for pilots, anyone and everyone who ever played under him not named Joe Willie Namath attempted to adopt the Bear’s manner of speaking point for point. And no one, we mean no one has accomplished this to the extent Mississippi State coach Sylvester Croom has.
It’s difficult to overstate, really, just how deep his voice is but we’ll try.
–Croom’s voice makes Barry White sound like King Diamond.
–Croom doesn’t fish; rather, he ducks his head under the surface of the lake and hums, happily skimming his stunned catch off the surface with a net.
–He repels boatloads of Somali pirates with a single bellow.
–He can control the migratory patterns of elephants by humming the bassline to “Mmm Mmm Mmm” by the Crash Test Dummies while sitting in his chair.
All completely true, which is why we’re alarmed by his visit to the White House today, since a simple “Thank You, Mr. President” could be enough to shake the rafters loose and bring the heart of our democratically elected leadership down around his ears. We plead for Croom to whisper, and perhaps only rattle the buttons off our President’s expensive French suit in the process.
Since we couldn’t find footage of Croom talking, here is the Miss State band giving good advice if you should find yourself trapped one on one with a loquacious Croom: Don’t Fear the Reaper. If ever there were a uni with a fever for cowbell, it would be Miss State. If the two guys manning the very special percussion in this song do not amuse you, you dine on baby kittens seasoned with despair.
Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten, does his job well. His job is to represent the interests of the corporation known as the Big Ten, something he’s done admirably. He integrated Penn State into the conference, made sure the fine Midwestern hog that is the Big Ten got a wide berth when he was helping build the BCS, and has helped usher in new revenue streams via “the Big Ten Network,” a football content provider coming to DirectTV only this fall. Jim Delany’s being proactive and visionary. Jim Delany’s turning in his TPS reports on time. He’s harmonizing synergies and being a charismatic problem-solver and self-starter.
Hi. I work for a failing mid-size paper company.
He’s also, to the average college football fan, a faceless powermonger with a rank list of heinous policy decisions to his credit, a few of which would be hanging offenses in a court of tailgaters. His big quote in a Yahoo! Sports article a while back was “I don’t work for college football at large.” His work in stitching together the mixed gristle and organs of college football into the BCS stands as a perfect example of his best and worst work: a skillfully negotiated pact between large partners with diverse interests generating huge piles of cash that almost everyone of any sense hates, a Frankenstein that almost resembles a living entity.
At least the old bowl system, corrupt and bucolic as it was, had some charm to it, and made few real claims to being a national title system. The BCS instead does it through a melange of computers and open politicking not dissimilar in tone to a four beer discussion at your local swillhole of choice. Its benefit relies more on enforcement of rules benefitting vested interests (especially the Big Ten) and less on creating the shiniest, most alluring carrot of all for the fan: truly open competition for a national title. Instead of a playoff bracket, you get the BCS: faceless, three letters as faceless and meaningless as a government bureaucracy, a simultaneous failure of imagination and vision lurching along like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, minus the invigorating dance number.
That’s Delaney on the left, BCS on the right. They never do this, btw.
Beer, the hospitality of tailgaters, and impending obsolescence do add up: we missed prime a.m. blogging due to a doctor’s visit to have a trained professional look at the official right knee of EDSBS. Prior to today’s diagnosis, we’d been relying on Dr. Stoical McDumbass, who’d been telling us that singing pain in the right knee was a good thing, and that we weren’t reading our Marcus Aurelius with enough diligence:
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.â€
Did we mention that Marcus Aurelius was an emperor? Anyway, the diagnosis didn’t even give the comfort of man points in the form of “It’s a torn ACL. I’ve been walking on it like it was nothing.” Runner’s knee at thirty: now officially and indubitably a yuppie blogger type.
We’ll be along in a bit with Jim Delany being a dick about the SEC. BTW, Jarvis Moss just sacked Troy Smith again in the shoe section of a Dillard’s in Columbus, causing him to fumble a pair of Tims he was buying, which were recovered by Derrick Harvey who promptly returned them for in-store credit.
EDSBS Store Live it. Love it. Wear it until it's ripped from your body by envious hordes of tailgaters.
Locker Room
About us
Orson Swindle and Stranko Montana are two men pushing thirty who should know better than to run a college football blog, but evidently don't. Both graduated from the University of Florida, and both agree that college football is far too important to be left to the professionals.
Contact
Comments? Questions? Long strings of profanities directed at something we said? Please send your comments to harumphharumph -a- yahoo -dot- com. Please direct all tailgating photos and stories to edsbsfans -a- gmail -dot- com.
Lake The Posts Northwestern football, which is purple and smarter than you and no thank you would NOT like a ten win season at the cost of academic integrity, thank you very much.
Maize ‘n Brew And still yet another strong, funny, and literate Michigan blogger. Embarrassment of riches over there, really.
MGoBlog The horribly, admirably partisan Kodiak Bear of UM Blogs
Loading ...
