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The New Radicals of blog features: one permanent member, many revolving pieces.

Texas Gal’s knows how the Shorn Emu sings. Shocking, sad, and underreported news from Notre Dame’s spring scrimmage: Jimmy Clausen shaved his trademark Emu-do. Without the distractions, bourbon warrior Texas Gal focused on the important things: Tom Zbikowski’s Van Damme-esque buttocks.

In case you need a brain enema after that phrase……this will not help at all.

The matchup of cocaine and Jean Claude Van Damme in the prolapse of his career has been as inspired a pairing as Peter O’Toole/scotch, Joe Piscapo/nandralone, and David Lee Roth/rockclimbing. Um…football? Yes, football…

Smrt pepl lke futbaw. Particularly smart Republican ones. Meanwhile, baseball continues its slow death, while NASCAR reigns supreme among people who didn’t graduate high school. Stereotypes: full of vitamin fact!

Tom Dienhart, goin’ robo at work if this is any indication. Cough syrup is a hell of a drug. At least it better be to make someone construct a ranking of coaches where one can construct these inelegant statements:

Jim Grobe>Steve Spurrier
Kirk Ferentz>Urban Meyer
Tom O’Brien>Greg Schiano
Chan Gailey>Phil Fulmer

We hate Phil, but God’s Wounds! Chan? By the Hammer of Thor, we’ve got to break out some seriously exaggerated oaths to encompass how truly silly that list is. Richt at 23, in a job that’s tougher than most people know? Great Rama’s Lingam! Bobby Bowden over Joe Paterno? By the Silvery Feathers of Quetzalcoatl!

Yet another Michigan blog. It’s like you all can read AND use the computer, Wolverines. Literacy, bitches, literacy.

Mike Leach, healer of souls. The best college football blogger in the known universe has the pirate captain on for a bit of soul-healing advice to a reader in the latest installment of “Ask Mike Leach,” re: why his friends who did not attend his awesome, championship tramp of a school aren’t speaking to him.

It could also be they’re avoiding you because you’re an asshole. I was listening to public radio recently while I was mapping the inefficiencies of my local sewer system for my upcoming presentation to the Lubbock City Council, “Optimization of Collection System Maintenance Frequencies and System Performance,” and I heard a story about a guy who suddenly realized all his friends thought he was an asshole.

MIKE LEACH LISTENS TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE!!! Shocking. Too bad they’re ending the series, their long, arduous mission finally accomplished.

Mike Leach: Ira Glass fan, yes, ladykiller, no.

Science verifies reason. It makes marginally more sense to go on defense first in overtime, according to people who work with numbers and stuff. We’re thrilled that the Sabermetrics crew has drifted slowly over to football, a significantly more difficult subject of analysis than baseball. We just can’t wait to see who emerges as the despised Joe Morgan of the antiempirical mob. We’re guessing Mark May, though Bob Davie’s a good guess, too.

A few quick notes from the Fulmer Cup front:

Northwestern gets in on the Big 10 Fulmer Cup rush with a piddling DUI charge for center Trevor Rees, pulled over for weaving and swervin’ in Wilmette like a playa should.

Haters. Next time, Trevor, don’t let them take you alive. (HT: Prof-fan.)

The tease of all Fulmer Cup teases may actually be dropping drawers at last. The Penn State burglary incident involving up to seven players should come to fruition tomorrow, legally speaking at least. According to double top-secret sources, two or three will face serious charges, while up to seven could be charged in all.

Penn State Players involved in burglary: all your brains are belong to him.

This could garner Penn State serious, serious points in the Fulmer Cup. We’d estimate that with three facing serious charges (4 points each?) and four charged with misdemeanors (point each), this puts Penn State in the provisional 16 point range, easily securing second place with the dismissal of a complaint against an unnamed Florida football player earlier this week.

Finally, South Carolina’s Cory Boyd hasn’t been exonerated or charged in an incident at a party allegedly ending with Boyd deciding to see if his handgun worked properly by shooting it in the air during said party. It allegedly worked just fine, frightening the hell out of guests and earning him a visit from the police. Steve Spurrier, conveniently losing his coachspeak manual for the 33rd year in a row, had this to say:

Spurrier said he does not think the players did anything wrong. “But I’ve said that before and (was) proved wrong,” he added. “So I’m not saying it anymore.”

Which he just said. But doesn’t say anymore. I am a liar, I never tell a lie, I am a liar, I never tell a lie…(Android head explodes shortly thereafter…)

Project 119, the effort by one 23-year old lunatic to visit every D-1 college football stadium in America, brings us this silent, moving dispatch from Cincinnati.

College students+open gates+snow=penis shapes. Take that down in your notes, because this is science, dammit. (HT: Da Wiz.)

Freshmen typically don’t make huge dents in their initial year in college football. If they do, they typically enter two career tracks: the Herschel Walker path-strewn-with-rose-petals career track, where children are named after you before you graduate, or the Mike Vick pattern where a spectacular peak in his freshman season dwindling out in a pitter-patter of injuries and unfulfillable expectations. (Not that THAT ended badly for him. He’s still able to afford the finest of chiba, and the elaborate technology required to transport it through airports successfully 99.999% of the time.)

Point is: even if you peak early, you’ll still have a peak. That’s more than most people can say about…well, about their lives, really. And in trying to write your “WOOO freshman who you should watch!!!” column, you’re looking for players who through massive graduation losses, sheer ineptitude by coaching staffs, or dumb luck could have the chance to alter game plans singlehandedly.

They typically tend to be at skill positions like running back, where quick-twitch nothink can get someone very, very far on talent and gall alone. Guile and technique take time, which is why linemen take years of coaching and investment to grow save for the umbrella-handed natural Orlando Paces of the world. There’s a few in there as well, but as you’ll see they’re of the obvious sort. (Hello, Marvin Austin.)

A few of our future Walker/Vick career path selections…

Joe McKnight, RB USC. Potentially horrifying scatback-y type from Louisiana who already fit the USC mold coming in by embroiling himself in a minor recruiting controversy. Allegedly runs a 4.3, allegedly shifty as Juan Pablo Montoya on a road course, and definitely loaded with blue-chip reputation burden. Fortunately for him, so is everyone else at USC, so he’s in good company, even in a packed backfield. Carroll (hearts) freshmen, and could use McKnight as Reggie Bush was used early in his career, making appearances on third down, in the slot, split wide, and hopefully not skeezing a free house off a semi-retarded sports agent under his coach’s nose.

Joe McKnight: elusive, as Les Miles and Ed Orgeron found out the hard way.

Noel Devine, RB WVU. Noted physical freak with academic shortcomings, Devine has qualified at last and is heading to West Virginia. Given the slew of speedy, option-friendly talent already stockpiled there, Devine would seem to have a year of chopping in front of him. Consider that his coach will be Rich Rodriguez, (more…)

There’s a spectrum of giveafuck. On one end, there’s Oprah. She cares. About everything: your soul, your life, eight dollar coconut macaroons, South African schoolchildren…even your poop. Oprah is blessed with a surfeit of giveafuck–from left to right, put her wayyyyy over on the right of the giveafuck scale.

On the far left, just next to John Daly, Andy Dick, and Kim Jong-Il…there’s the guy on the left in this video of two slammed Oklahoma State fans singing a song about a lonely Okie.

Our fave is the “HRRRRNNNGGGH” that constitutes his only bit of “singing” in the video. He makes that noise right after displaying the signs of having a stroke, after which he recovers and seems to feel much better.

We can only assume T. Boone Pickens is at this moment wangling some way to enter both of these guys in his pioneering Oklahoma State Fundraising Death Pool to raise more cash for the Cowboys. After all, it’s “just another way of capitalizing existing unexploited risk.”

Leave it to the Germans to show us how to really get a drunk on.

How we’ve managed not to have this man as the Mustache of the Day, we’ll never now. Blame our trademark negligence for missing a true legend of the lip.

The Mustache Wednesday ‘Stache of the Day: Geraldo Rivera. So nice you’ll need it thrice:

Not even the briny sea steals the vim and vigor from his sole companions: justice, and his mustache…
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Who cares about spring football? The usual suspects, according to nifty graph put together by the boys at Big Red Network:

Kind thanks to them for allowing us to use their snazzy image: check out the rest of the article at Big Red Network on pain of having Tommy Frazier run you over like so many Florida defenders, blood clots in his legs and all.

Enlightening to us is the overall pattern mattering most in spring games: hope. We knew it mattered, but if a program feels particularly hopeful, the best way to see it isn’t in the panegyrics local scribes spit out every time a new coach rolls into town. It’s in the attendance leap from the prior year’s spring game. (Fans in East Lansing must really, really be vibing off Mark Dantonio.)

It’s also a rough approximation of the value of a head coach to a program. The spring game costs nothing, means effectively nothing, and reveals little about a team. It’s a fluffy event with little driving it besides the need to see something, anything football-esque in the void of the offseason combined with the desire for a rollicking good sunburn to break in your hide pre-beach season.

The only thing a spring game brings with it is buzz–pure jejune hype about a team’s projected potential hypothetical goodness/badness going into the season. And if you’ve got someone at the helm who can make something out of nothing, or god forbid force the groundskeepers to close the doors at capacity for a scrimmage, you’ve got someone who by sheer talent and shine brought them there to park on the lawns, purchase eighty dollars worth of gas, and roll down to what is essentially a non-event.

That’s a stellar indicator of a coach’s value to a program: the one based solely on his reputation as a program manager capable of making what was good become great. Judging from the bottom of the attendance list, hope in that department does not spring in Champaign-Urbana, “excitment” and “getting better and better” be damned. Illinoise had “several thousand” fans at their spring scrimmage in Chicago, estimated at more like 500 by the Big Red guys.

We checked the calendar to see if we’d been Sid-Finched: nope, it’s April 25th. Checked the byline: that’s the Times, all right, and not terribly prone to making things up under Lee Jenkins’ byline. Evidently the whole story on Walter Thomas, dark horse draft pick for 2007, is real and verified fact.

And barring some spectacular photoshopping, this shot of Shamu doing a backflip is real, too.

And Sea World applauds!

If you’ve ever wondered what all those pesky academic and behavioral regs surrounding college football prevent you, the college football fan, from seeing, Walter Thomas provides an extreme example of just that. Booted from Oklahoma State for a sprained cerebrum after a year (Sooners fans, wait a moment for the guffaws to settle,) Thomas settled at Northwest Mississippi Community College before being arrested on a charge of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. (Kids!) He only played two games in his entire career, but we’ve decided to love him for the following reasons:

–Runs the 40 in 4.9 seconds
–Is a 6′5″ defensive tackle
–Showed up a day late for his interview with Jenkins
–Can bench press 475 lbs and squat 800 lbs.
–Is part of a rap group called “Tre Slide”
–Would be a perfect running mate for Pac-Man in Tennessee:

“Growing up, Thomas was somewhat self-conscious about his size, so he befriended the smallest kids in school. They played a game called “Cut the Cake,” in which they found the biggest building in town and raced each other around it.”

Smallest kid meets biggest kid? BFF? Two thugs make good? Or destroy whole wards of Nashville during one of their 30th birthday parties? Either way, it must happen, Mike Reinfeldt.