There’s so many ways for it to happen.

1. By your punter.

2. By someone you love. (more…)

Blogtoberfest: because there’s simply not enough regular summary posts on sports blogs these days.

Brian Cook will stab you in the face, fat man. Brian, meet Stewart Mandel. Again.

30 seconds later…

pWn3dzx0rZ, n00b!

Calvin Johnson would like to clear up the whole shoe thing. Though he did in fact use his own legs and lungs to run a 4.35 at the NFL Combine, Calvin Johnson did not use someone else’s shoes. In yet another display of almost embarrassing goodness, Calvin used his spare time not spent building clean water projects in Bolivia and turning Reggie Ball into a 47 percent passer to help out a fellow combiner.

“There was a quarterback there who was running with his tennis shoes on,” the former Georgia Tech receiver said Wednesday. “I told him, ‘Man, you need some cleats.’ We both wore the same size, 15, so I let him borrow mine. Then I had to put them back on before I ran.”

Size 15? It’s good to be Calvin Johnson.

Little known fact: owls are size queens.

NASCAR Meets College Football, and wins?

According to the eagle-eyed Pinfall Marks, this may be precisely what to expect now that NASCAR is part of the devil’s brew parceled out by ESPN/Disney/Cthulu Inc.

ESPN2 has nine Busch series races during the college football season this fall — taking away time slots that normally would have been filled by college football in the past. Eight of the nine ESPN2 Busch dates fall on Saturday. . .

ESPN would be bumping college football, a sport with an estimated average rating of a 2.2 share for Saturday night games, for Busch Series racing, a sport whose highest average ever is a 2.5. (And that was for a Bristol night race. For those unversed in NASCAR, this is to racing what a night game at LSU with 1996 Keith Jackson announcing and a nude Salma Hayek ‘98 doing the sideline work.)

Odder still: remember rule 3-2-5-e, and the current round of rules designed to shorten games? CBS was fingered as the main culprit behind these rules, but ESPN certainly had a stake in making programming more predictably sized in terms of minutes eaten. If they thought football was a thorn in the ass, wait until they begin dealing with the Russian Epic qualities of your average NASCAR race. Interminable yellow flags and crashes can drag races out to the five and sometimes six hour mark. It’s certainly bad for the person on the couch, but it’s worse for the highway patrolmen/women of the surrounding municipalities who have to burn through breathalyzers in an futile effort to keep a pittance of the drunk driving population off the roads after they’ve had two hours of delays to “top off” an already impressive day of boozing.

Perhaps ESPN/Disney/Cthulu see more upside, or are just willing to eat the marginal loss for viewership they’re picking up now in the dire waste of the football offseason. Either way, it’s going to shove more programming over to ESPNU, which no one has, and fewer people actually watch. To the programming maestro who merely suggests we pester the local cable provider to add ESPNU as standard programming (making it the fifth or possibly sixth ESPN channel on the dial…)

Wal-Mart looks like the Black Congressional Caucus in comparison: Lawsuits may begin flying around the room if more black coaches don’t begin appearing in NCAA football. Only six out of 119 coaches are black, and in case you didn’t notice, there’s a lot of black people playing college football and coaching it, too. Around half the playing population is black, while exactly 2.4 percent of the coaches are black. Lotsa black players. Not a lotsa black coaches. Inequality there. Yup.

Yet no one’s willing to meet the problem…

…except the worst possible suspects. By that we mean fans of easy math. And it’s easy math like that that attracts the lesser minds of our nation–in other words, Congress. Myles Brand in a written statement did his minor league Allen Greenspan impression by disparaging the idea of Congressional intervention while simultaneously disembodying his own role in the whole thing by saying:

The will to hire minorities for top positions in college athletics is “just not there right now,” NCAA president Myles Brand told Congress on Wednesday.

Poof! It’s just gone! Brand later mentions that the push for minority hires needs to be “actualized,” which presumably happens after consultants militate to proactively act as change agents in collating and reassessing organizational protocols in order to construct a positive and compelling new mission statement for the NCAA. (Consultant speak brought to you by EDSBS consulting. Leave $1500 donation for this work in the Donation Button up top, please.)

We’ll leave it to the readers to decide who the 0.4 percent African-American is. Some suggestions:

–Fisher Deberry, noted Afro-American?
–Pete Carroll, soul brotha number one?
–Dan Hawkins, the Ric Flairish and therefore black-compatible head coach? (It’s a well-acknowledged scientific fact that all black dudes love Ric Flair.)
–Bronco Mendenhall (His name is Bronco, after all.)
–Chuck Amato (the shoes, the pecs)
–Ed Orgeron
–Les Miles (a black dude of the Carlton variety, perhaps?)

Amato: conceivably 40% black.

Reader Mr. Baddley wrote us around a month ago with this question:

Orson/Stranko,

PS….Do I get any sponsor money?

No on the sponsor money, but we were flattered nonetheless, especially since he’s going to have to go around with EDSBS on his car tags long after we’ve sold the domain to a Mexican bootleg pharma site. (Mexican Viagra! Now with added powdered donkey penis for flavor and potency!)

So we said what the hell–sure. After all, if any fan of any team could legally lay claim to owning a site written by Florida alums, it’s an Auburn grad in 2006. Plus it’s a sentiment any college football fan must by definition agree with: every day should be Saturday, really. It’s a transcendent message that disregards team affiliation.

The story comes full circle now as Mr. Baddley’s got his license plate. We can honestly say it’s the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen, including newborn infants, the sunrise over the Gulf of Siam, and Ike Hilliard’s “Brake ‘n Shake” touchdown versus Florida State in 1996.

The plate is still available in 50 out of 51 license plate-issuing principalities. Hurry before supplies run out!

Excuse us, while we wipe a tear away.

Filed directly under trademark law run rampant–and who says geekery and football don’t run hand in hand?–the NFL is seeking to trademark the phrase “The Big Game,” a phrase with a dual history in the pro and collegiate spheres. (HT: John.)

Because of the inanity of S*p*r Bowl copyright laws, everyone from Schleppy’s Pizza to Best Buy attempts to cash in on selling goods associated with the game by referring to it as “The Big Game” prior to S*p*r Bowl Sunday, a curious bit of verbiage your ear may have picked up as peculiar periphrasis in the rather direct world of advertising. The reason? Not being Official Sponsors of The S*p*r Bowl, they cannot use the proper name, and thus duck under the bar by simply referring to “The B#g G#m3.”

Football post-trademark laws: we were going to use this stock image, but someone’s got the copyright.

(Memo from EDSBS LEGAL: the NFL has previewed this post and requested the removal of all trademarked language. We’ll put it in language your puny non-lawyer brain can understand: President Camacho suggests you comply, vato. That goes for any references to the NFL’s championship game, the B#g G#me, or any other language they own. We’ll proof this for your protection afterwards. For reference, see NFL White Paper #48: Rules Regarding the English Language. All references hereafter refer to it.)

The B*g G#m3 (NFL White Paper #48) in collegiate terms refers to the historical tussle between Stanford and Cal, a name that through recent years has been applied more sarcastically than in reality. Nevertheless, the two f00tba77 (ibid.) t*amz (ibid.) have been playing together under the moniker since 1902, according to Cal f00tba77 (ibid.) historian Ron Fimrite. (Everyone’s got their specialties, we suppose. Imagine if your IRB proposal involved getting board permission to interview Steve Mariucci. Geeking out done, we continue.)

Cal and Stanford are countering the NFL claim by running to the arms of Collegiate Licensing Inc., our neighbors here in Atlanta who play the unusual part of hero here. They will likely grant the game its own brand name as the “Ir0n B0w7″ and “Teh R3d R1v3r Sh00t0ut” (hey, just being careful! one angry legal entity at a time!) have, and then k1ckk0ff the legal fireworks from there. It’ll be a tough issue to tAck73, (ibid.) sure, but that’s what lawyers are for.

Our prediction: the NFL gets up by a few t0uchd0wnZ (ibid), the Cal/Standford reps fight back with ferocious off3ns3 (ibid.), and the whole g@m3 comes down to a legal f13lD g0al (how many times are you going to make us do this? Ibid.) Then, B00m! (ibid.) The B*g G#m3 lives again.

By the way: the first google image result for “The Big Game?” Not what you’d think. At. All.

The Big Game Lip Grabber. Now suing the NFL for naming rights.