In case you have to do it in a meeting tomorrow morning: how to kick a field goal.

For the record: we’ve made a 20 yarder before, but we shanked 25 to the left. Pa Swindle actually cleared a 25 yarder one Christmas, but landed square on his back after doing it, and applied liquor to the wound immediately afterwards. (Holidays at the Swindle household do usually involve odd bets, minor athletic activity, strained ligaments, and liquor.)

First: how to kick a field goal, with awesome production values:

Second: how NOT to kick a field goal, as done by some people who know better.
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Do we really have to say that any potential ban on text-messaging recruits, or limits, or anything else governing digital communication between recruits and coaches will be happily trampled with three seconds worth of inventiveness?

HUZZAH FOR THE NCAA INTERVENING PROTECTING THE POOR, SLOW-THUMBED ATHLETE WHO LIKE PAVLOV’S DOG SLOBBERS AND HELPLESSLY ANSWERS HIS PHONE EACH TIME A TEXT MESSAGE COMES IN! [/hectoring columnist.]

There’s a period of adjustment to any technology. Initially, you answered every piece of mail that came in your mailbox. Then advertisements, junk mail, odd sample issues of magazines you’d never subscribe to (SI? Not until they bring the football phone back, dammit), and that regular update from International Male your friends so helpfully signed you up for in 1998.

And now you throw half the shit in the trash without looking. Ultimately, that’s what recruits will do with text messages, just as they’ve done with phone calls. They’ll talk with whomever they want, and ditch the rest. Intervention is dumb, clumsy, sloppy, and short-sighted.

Declarative and hopelessly obvious commentary concluded, we now move to the post text-messaging world of college recruiting. With digital means excluded, coaches will have to revisit the world of analog signals transmission. A few of our suggestions follow:

Blimps

Big! Loud! Kids love ‘em, dogs bark at ‘em, and you know you secretly want one of your own to terrorize the skies with. Ideal for impressing recruits with over their practice fields with the message “(INSERT RECRUIT NAME HERE)’S A PIMP.” (more…)

Blogtoberfest! You’ll love it so much you’ll take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant.

Crist comes to Notre Dame! Alleluia! Sadly, Jimmy Clausen’s intro was a bigger deal than recruit Dayne Crist’s, since there’s no way Crist rolls up in the stretch Hummer. Crist is the Next Next Big Thing for Irish fans who’ve tired of Jimmy Clausen already. We’re ahead of you all and hyping Alvis Kedankic, a laser-armed pee-wee football qb from Glenridge, CA who sources tell us is already leaning Irish thanks to Charlie Weis’ gift of a badass Gundam Wing model last week. The NCAA has already announced its intention to investigate the matter.

May also have discipline issues following botched attempt to “make it rain” on a classmate during recess last week.

Mustain to USC. That’s what the LA Times says. We dare Houston Nutt to text him. Mustain’s only other rumored option was Tulsa, where his high school coach will be running his fast-paced, no-huddle offense for seven or eight games before scrapping it for an antediluvian run attack and benching his quarterback for no apparent reason.

Temple wants 66,000 for their home opener. The one with Navy. And we want a pony! A BIG SHINY PONY!!! We’ll name him Obelix, and we’ll never be apart while we ride to Pluto and back. He’ll be able to knit, too, because a horse that could knit would be really, really unique.

My, that’s one mobile, red, and throbbing Cock. South Carolina’s Garnet and Black scrimmage disappointed the OBC, who had nary a Stars and Bars around to blame for Blake Mitchell’s erratic performance at Spurrier’s favorite position, qb.

He could, however, soothe his anger with Hootie and Blowfish, who played the game as true alums would: literally rocking out with their Cock out. It’s huge, red, and flopping all over the stage in the video below. You have been warned.

This is where a Hootie and the Blowfish joke usually goes, something about how much they suck, blah blah denigration. But we consider them less a band and more one of the happy accidents of capitalism, a shitty bar band who made millions and now sits on their collective ass drinking beer, playing golf, and doing gigs at the South Carolina spring game. They might suck as a band–but they’re damn good at life.

Obligatory SMQ Plug. His Florida preview detonates once and for all the myth that Urban Meyer is merely an offensive whiz by showing how his Utah and Florida teams both win with bareknuckled defense and efficiency. He’s calling for 9-3 for Florida, which seems about right in a championship hangover year, sponsored by Icehouse, the beer of imperial excess on a collegian’s budget.

The Florida fan who tells you they saw championship in year two coming is telling you a lie, something SMQ reminds us of here:

The tendency after what went down in the mythical championship game is to renovate the memory of last year’s Gators into one of a bloodthirsty pack of inevitable conquerors, but it wasn’t like that at any point in the season. UF put pretty convincing beatdowns on LSU and on Arkansas in the SEC Championship, but it only beat Tennessee by a point, struggled with Vanderbilt, should have lost to South Carolina at home and actually did lose at Auburn.

Meyer’s still constructing his war-machine. Christening: 2008, we’d guess.

Joe Buck speaks to me…one…word…at a time. Schutebag, still shitting from his mouth for money.

“I love Joe Buck….I think Joe Buck on Fox is my favorite play by play guy in the Country. He speaks to me.”

In simple syllables, very slowly, no?

Ty Willingham likes ‘em thick. Sophomore Washington offensive lineman Morgan “House” Rosborough weighs 370 pounds after his latest diet. Ty Willingham, molder of men, must have found a special on manclay, because that’s the biggest OL we can remember since the glory days of Aaron Gibson at Wisconsin.

We will pay Pac-10 defensive coordinators to throw the corner blitz at Rosborough. Please. Twenty dollars a call just to watch what happens if a.) Rosborough catches and then eats the unfortunate defensive back, or b.) watch him as he turns into the Rancor futilely chasing Luke around Jabba’s pit while he watches the corner obliterate the Huskies’ qb. Either way, it’s cheap entertainment that won’t quit one we capture it on Youtube.

If you’re an Alabama fan, you probably know that your coach has been labeled a “jerk” by esteemed, legitimate journalist-types. You also know that your coach, frankly, doesn’t have time for this shit–whatever the shit happens to be. He’s got games to win, asses to kick, underlings to push to the brink of insanity. Shit? No time for it.

And now you, Alabama fan, may join in the movement by declaring your own lack of time for this shit. In fact, you don’t have time for another sent–

(Click the image to go to our shop.)

The back: (more…)

Las Cronicas roll on…one suspicious text message at a time…

God bless brainy Michigan men who do the math for us: if you take the total number of text messages Houston Nutt sent to newscaster Diana Bragg over the course of 43 days, you get an average of 24.7 text messages a day. That’s 24.7 text messages to a woman not named “wife.”

Run the hypotheticals of that scenario in your head casting yourself in Boss Hawg’s role and your significant other as the wife NOT receiving 24. 7 texts a day. We imagine it at one point involves getting slapped/run over with car/killed by death, since the only people who text each other that much are:

a.) boss/subordinate engaged in act of making money
b.) kidnapper/relative of kidnappee engaged in donating ransom
c.) Fucker/fuckee
d.) Us/Stranko on a Saturday in the fall.

And you really only want one of those four arrangements to happen involving your sig/other. (Unless you’re role-playing. And if you’re role-playing being Stranko to us with your wife, we’re filing that restraining order now.) Not that we care what Houston Nutt does with whom–we don’t care if your marriage involves watching your spouse screw tasteful American Moderne furniture while wearing a plushie suit, though we would like pictures of that if you’re married to a football coach who likes to do that.

The guideline Nutt should follow is the shit-flinging monkey rule: don’t start a fight with a shit flinging monkey. Very simply put, the people trying to oust Nutt have tools at their hands Nutt can’t possibly have: numbers, relative anonymity, and plenty of free time. By putting out press release after press release, letting anyone and everyone comment on the case, and even addressing the situation, you put a mike in front of the poop-flinging chimps, a crew that includes guys like Pork Rind Jimmy:

Look at that man and tell me you’ll beat him in wasting free time. That beard alone is a hobby requiring hundreds of idle man-hours. We say this because we’re a blogger and know from whence we speak. Stop feeding the trolls, and they will leave, even if you’re scronking a newscaster from Little Rock and texting her exactly 24. 7 times a day. (Cling-AY!) There was another SEC coach in a media fishbowl who was having sex with a woman not his wife once, and he got away with it by doing one thing: shutting the hell up and coaching. A healthy dose of silence killed the story before it grew knees, much less legs.

We have no advice on spammers, though. If someone keeps showing up to Hogs practice with a BUY PHENTERMINE FREE PAIN SEX sign, we’d suggest you run them over with the nearest lawnmower, because that’s precisely what we wish we could do to ours. Die, Russian spammers. You die and go to hell.