We close the week at EDSBS by thanking you for one of the more amusing weeks we can remember, even stuck as we are in the depths of the offseason.

–Kenny Irons, midgets. See below.

–Henri-Bernard Levy became our new media critic.

–Tennessee cracked the Fulmer Cup standings.

–A simply cracking edition of EDSBS Live! with the greatest piece of advice we’ve ever heard: “You’re pretty drunk right now, you probably shouldn’t eat that.”

–The Seven-Inch Linebacker.

–Joel’s brilliant Blake Mitchell tribute.

This weekend, to celebrate, we will christen our new Weber Grill, the minimalist genius-tool of all charcoal warriors. This should be easy as hell considering the early birthday gift came with an accessory we purchased off Rammstein’s helpful website.

Enjoy your weekend. We’ll be back on Monday with third-degree burns.

Since it is Friday (and the only interesting thing we can see going on is one piddly arrest for FSU for a dude with an ancient warrant), we’ll resort to LOLFutbawl to keep us amused.

The subject this week is Kenny Irons, who if you’ll recall from earlier this week, keeps a midget in his suitcase for erotic purposes.

Midgets. Oral sex. The Irons Brothers. Life writes its own jokes. We just put them on a tin platter and present them to you, because with ingredients like these, the chef can only stand in the way of such succulent flavors.

With us today is special guest columnist Bernard-Henri Lévy. He is author of La barbarie à visage humain, L’ideologie Francaise, and Spanker, Spankee: the Time I Disciplined Audrey Tautou with a Canoe Oar. He covers media issues for EDSBS.

Welcome, reader. Let us amble in the sunshine of football together.

Like the rays of a dying sun that has not yet imploded and evaporated our mortal hides with its final supernova wrath, the offseason continues to plague us. And from our totalitarian masters at ESPN, we have the shuffling of the order for the announcers that comes as an equal plague to us every offseason, too, a reordering of unchanging media ingredients similar to the disingenuous rearrangement of potatoes, nachos, cheese, these “buffalo” style meats, and the batter-fried chicken tenders constituting the appetizer menu at your ingenious Bennigan’s and Chilis.

(On my tour of your country, I sampled all of these variations at a quaint Bennigan’s in St. Petersburg Florida. Such an array of frauds! The Chicken O’ Tender Nachos, the Nacho O’Tater Skin Buffalo Fingers, the County Cork Buffalo Nacho Egg Rolls. To get in the spirit, I also drank eight, ruby red “two-for-one” daquiris, and truly felt as bloated and evil afterwards as the now thankfully dead Slobodan Milosevic, something only remedied through colorful, difficult, and passionate vomiting behind my rental car. What a lust for life sits in the corner of your average American strip mall! But I, ever the Frenchman, digress!)

Deep-fried passion, and an antidote for socialism’s ascetic hatred of human need!

ESPN, your three headed chimera of ABC/Disney/ESPN, gives you the following announcing teams, most curiously rearranged for no particular reason this season:

–The Apollonian Kirk Herbstreit, ideal of ideals of Americanicité (his shiny teeth! his highlighted, but unreceding hair!), will join your boorish ghoul of a man Brent Musburger in the booth for every game this season. No mention is made of Bob Davie, indicating that he has died the death inflicted on all servants of tyrants: transfer to a more boring, less prestigious spot on ESPN2 with the Mark Jones.

–Chris Fowler now adopts the spot of the jilted lover for Herbstreit as he remains on Thursday nights, this time with two men to fill the aching emptiness in his fatty, cheeseburger-clogged American heart: Doug Flutie and the odious Craig James, a man deeply corrupt in the manner of a petty tyrant like Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

–The commisariat of the Mouse, however, seems to be rehabilitating oncle Ron Franklin, long considered to be the quintessential voice of the gloriously savage sport of college football, will broadcast ABC games (most likely from the dusty, poetic midlands of the Big 12 and Big 10,) with Ed Cunningham and Jack Arute, who may send sympathetic emails to Fowler, his fellow jilteé after his breakup with your odious Musburger.

Ron Franklin: back from the gulag of night games on ESPN2.

–Sean McDonough, Chris Spielman and Rob Stone move to Friday’s special programming. The continued isolation of the mad, Teutonic Spielman proves that the Democratic People’s Republic of ESPN has little respect for the daquiri-vomiting passion that surrounds it in its home country.

Much else remains the same, though one disappearance spoils the day: Gary Thorne, arguably the greatest blend of elan and savoir-dire across a number of disciplines, simply disembodies from the map, erased like a lonely Russian commissar from the official photograph. I would posit here that intervention is required! Gary Thorne cannot become the Juba Mountain region of college football, erased by a cruel and monolithic overlord wearing the veil of legitimate governance.

Let us remain thankful that Lincoln Financial continues its quirky practice of only hiring the announcers named “Dave,” that most jocular of American monikers.

Salut!

Bernard Henri-Levy is so fucking rich he can afford French taxes. He has a difficult and often compromising weakness for Chili’s waitresses, and covers media issues for EDSBS.com.

No clue where she’s from, but finding a really attractive woman named Esther earns her a roster on the Cheesecake Wagon any day. (Finding a woman under eighty named Esther is just plain remarkable.) Plus for those of us who remain suckers for curly hair…well, she preys on our weaknesses there, too. It looks naughty! We can’t help it…

Presente: Esther, and possibly some bonus cheesecake for those who make it past the jump.

(All photos from Bullz-Eye.com. Give their lad-mag of a site a peep in gratitude.)

Esther de Miami, who will likely NOT meet you and the News Cafe for coffee.

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“I feel like I just crapped a pineapple”–those were the words of Ronald Reagan after pushing through a particularly contentious piece of legislation in his first term, and they reflect our own feelings as the Tennessee Volunteers finally grace the Fulmer Cup with their esteemed presence.

We’ll open the bidding with a question: what’s hard, made of cocaine, and looks like crack and was found on the dashboard of walk-on Tennessee football player and rhymes with crack? If you said crack, you’re obviously a felon. Turn yourself in now. If you do it in Knoxville, you might share a bunk with Justin Jackson, who can now look forward to being sexed by inmate Barry and his delightful selections of homemade toilet wine.

It’s crack. It gets you high.

Tennessee football walk-on Justin Jackson has been dismissed from the team after he was arrested on charges of selling crack cocaine, university officials said Thursday.

He sells cocaine! Ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-kaayeaahhaawwwww!!! Phil Fulmer, who is very, very fat, has kicked Jackson off the team, a punishment Urban Meyer described as “harsh.” For actual selling of motherfucking holy shit CRACK, the Tennessee Vols will receive 3 points for selling narcotics and one point for the longstanding crack bonus. (Crack always gets a bonus point, because crack is…crack, worthy of a point unto itself.) He also got a generic weed charge, tacking two points on for a total of six points in all for the Vols.

Not enough to even get them on the big board amidst this year’s stiff competition, but enough to make us feel like the world is close to spinning on its correct axis. We feel like we just woke up to the promise of a new day, as if the universe were made suddenly whole and right in a single act. (Exhale.) We would like to ask you to join us by standing up in your office chair right now, clicking the jump, and engage in an office dance party to celebrate the circle of life, and deliver an important anti-drug message, too. Remember, people: you don’t have to smoke crack to have a good time. (more…)

How long this took to rig up, we’ll never know. All we can say for certain is that we’ve never been more simultaneously sickened and impressed at the same time–or at least as much as we’ve been since we saw Meet the Feebles for the first time. (You ever care to see a muppet walrus fuck a muppet cat? Or watch a Kermit the Frog lookalike shoot up? Yes? Then Netflix is ready when you are.)

Anyway, we present (via Paul Westerdawg) the fully choreographed Buck Belue to Lindsay Scott play, the most clearly historical instance of the Gator defense’s inability to defend the slant, no matter the year. The scene syncs perfectly with the Larry Munson call, which is included.

As bad as it was for Florida, an announcer admitting that he broke a chair during a call is still more evidence of Larry Munson being run-flat gangsta awesome. How the person who rigged this whole thing up so cleverly without figuring out video transfer, though, escapes us, since that’s something we’ve figured out, and we’ve got the HTML skillz of a lobotomized marmot.

According to Bruins Nation, noted humanitarian and USC football coach Pete Carroll attended a service at the Agape Spiritual Center, one of these Oprah-friendly nouveau religious centers for those who like their religion without crushing guilt, obligation, or judgement. You call them New Age, we call them total pussies. (Lapsed Catholics say what!)

Pete then, according to witness UCngLA from the openly biased folks at Bruins Nation, addressed the crowd with the following opening line, excerpted from the post at BN:

“It’s great to be in this place, to be among all these angels.” And by angels he was referring to the audience.

Pete Carroll will be with you angels in a minute. First he’s got a Palestinian crisis to mediate. Then he’s got Pilates. Then: you, angels.

This is true. We’re taking it as true. Even if it’s not true we’ll never admit it. You angels, you can’t take this away from us. Pete Carroll is the guy who names trees in his yard. Pete Carroll really does ride a golden unicycle. Pete Carroll is the nearly 60 guy with sculpted abs who hangs with Will Ferrell. Pete Carroll really does drive a Range Rover, because you never know when you’ll be called to lead an aid convoy in Darfur. Pete Carroll is the youth pastor who will write a check made out to you with the sum line filled out as “complete happiness,” and sign it with the name “God.” He is Kevin Rawley from Meet the Parents, and is making you a stunning hand-carved gazebo with his own hands as we speak.

Like God, if Pete Carroll didn’t exist, we’d have to make him up.

We been done seen ’bout everythang now! Four Florida State recruits booted from Disney World’s Downtown Disney in Orlando claim the park is guilty of racial profiling after they were asked to leave for “loitering” there last weekend.

Disney boots FSU recruits for being tall, black, and stationary.

The recruits were at the park as part of a “bonding” weekend for five high schoolers who have already given oral commitments to the Seminoles when four of them were followed for “an hour and a half to two hours” and then asked to leave the park. The four refused, and were then allegedly fingerprinted by Disney cops (do they wear Mickey gloves?), photographed, and then banned for life from ever returning to the Disney World Property.

The four got the boot thanks to Disney’s loitering policy, (more…)

As pointed out elsewhere, Washington’s got a testicle-busting schedule on their hands. (Holy mixed anatomical metaphors!–ed.) Ty Willingham and company have decided what a good day to die is, and that is on Saturday. To wit:

Syracuse: Um, the Washington of the Big East? Even pitching here, but played in the Carrier Dome, which Syracuse actually inflates with pure helium during games. Unaccustomed to the pure, toxic form of the gas, Washington dies a squeaky little death in this game. (Don’t believe it? You come up with a better explanation of why good teams go bad in the unassuming Syracuse game environment.)

Ty Willingham and the Huskies: this year, they dine in hell.

Boise St: Beat a better Pac-10 team this past season in Oregon State, which looked like ashen heaps of shame for the Beavers until the Statue of Liberty Game. Now they’re the favorite here, which means they’ll have difficulty dealing with the pressure, stumble, and still win this game running.

Ohio State: Loss. Will not get ugly after the second quarter. Because it will be 20something to three then, and Tressel and the Sweatervest Mafia will call off the dogs. Fortunately, as this will be Tennessee/Florida week, no one will watch this game anyway, so it will be a quiet death.
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By request, we violate our unspoken policy of not using baseball players and salute the dearly departed Rod Beck and his trademark ’stache, our Mustache Wednesday Mustache of the Day.

Happy Mustache Wednesday, motherfuckers. And Godspeed to you, Rod.

Two interesting notes regarding the NCAA, your favorite curiously defined regulatory entity, bear some mention here. Both come courtesy of the good people at Miami Hawk Talk, the smartest damn mid-major board in the universe, and both make sense, which means the sun will go dark today and the man in the rabbit costume is bound to waltz into your office and start talking to you about wormholes any second now–because this is the NCAA we’re discussing.

The NCAA first has decided to pursue where the FBI has relented in the points-shaving scandal at Toledo, conducting its own investigation into the university’s handling of the Harvey “Scooter” McDougle case. McDougle, a running back, had been accused of taking money from a Detroit gambler to recruit others to shave points in football and basketball games at Toledo.

The charges against McDougle have been dropped, but the NCAA presses forward:

“We have had repeated contacts with the university … and have been working collaboratively, including a previous campus visit to interview an individual about a potential sports wagering issue that had been brought to our attention,” NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Meaning that doing this as a MAC school could get you fucking fried by the NCAA, especially on the heels of the stories of Toledo coaches taking the company card to pay for expenses during trips to Germany to go “recruiting.” In Germany. Where the only football played outside of NFL Europe involves guys named Beckenbauer, Voeller, and Ballack.

Second, the NCAA’s reconsidering its ban on text messaging and other forms of digital communication. OMG URBN IZ XCTED NCAA WUZ SO NF!!! More than thirty schools filed override complaints in regards to the ruling, meaning it will be reviewed.

Last year in the early, gawky adolescent stages of the Fulmer Cup, the D-1AA Delaware Blue Hens scored an ineligible but still spectacular Fulmer Cup coup by invading someone’s home and stealing, among other things, the home dweller’s steroids. (Bad form, we say! A man’s steroids are his castle!)

This year’s D-1AA upstart in the Cup of Shame: Samford University, the small Alabama school that spawned the coaching careers of Bowdens Bobby and Terry. The contestant: Michael Sherrod Hall, starting defensive end, who clearly thought his sweatshirt of invisibility was cloaking his true identity when he sauntered into an AmSouth bank in Inverness, Alabama, pointed a gun at a teller, and asked her for a non-tax-deductible donation to his college fund.

Ahm in ur bank, steeelin’ ur cheez.

Moore’s exceedingly well thought out plan came to an abrupt end in Douglas County, Georgia, where police found $18,000 in cash in the car after they arrested Moore. Samford coach Pat Sullivan has suspended Moore from the team, a punishment Urban Meyer called “harsh.”

Were we assigning actual Fulmer Cup points to the incident, Samford would ascend onto the big board with elan for seven points or so: four for the armed robbery, two for interstate flight, and one bonus imbecile point for his sweatshirt of invisibility.

We’re slow getting to this–but we’ve been busy with that purple drank and getting Joel to make Blake dance. Peter had a post re: the players you’d like to steal from other teams regardless of how vile their current affiliation might be to you. (E.g. Texas fan drafting Aggie, Florida fan drafting Nole, Stanford fan drafting poor person…you understand.)

The EDSBS Traitor’s Draft must include the following picks:

Glenn Dorsey, DT LSU. Once we went fishing off Destin with a crusty old redneck friend. At 5:30 in the morning, no one felt too talkative in the car. A flabby, shirtless power walker strode along the road, his rolls giggling to themselves in the early morning sun. Crusty old redneck friend, his voice cut by years of Marlboro Reds, said simply as we passed him: “Good morning, fatass.”

Good morning, fatass. We only mean that in the best possible way.

Good morning, Glenn Dorsey, just the fatass defensive tackle we want to draft onto the Florida Gators. 6′ 2″, 300 pounds, and could double as a riot control barrier if he had to in a pinch. Dorsey’s huge, but possessed of a supernatural quickness you’ve come to yawn at on the mind-boggling LSU roster. (more…)

What: EDSBS LIVE online radio.

Why listen? Because we’re talking about the Big East, indicating a high probability of West Fuckin’ Virginia references in the broadcast. WE DRINK DA BEAST AND FUCK FAT BITCHES IN HAYSTACKS–at least tonight, we do.

Where: At NowLive, where you can chat with each other and the show hosts throughout the broadcast in the online forum (now with added bacon pants). To phone in to the show, just call (310) 984-7600.

Who: Mike from Card Chronicle, and Greg Auman, USF beat writer for the tenacious St. Petersburg Times.

Our four questions… As always, the format for short attention spans for the show, this time focusing on the underrated, which the Big East traditionally has been since time immemorial.

1. Most undervalued team, 2007? BYU. The tradition of making math difficult for the scoreboard operators in the Mountain West continues, but BYU put the irons to Oregon last year in the Las Vegas Bowl as much with their defense as they did with John Beck’s tasteful, politely accurate Mormon passing.

Over on this side of the continental divide…how about Arkansas? Same rushing offense from last year and one more year of experience for Casey Dick to bring him just a hair closer to competent ain’t bad. And their schedule is easier this year than it was last year.

2. Give us one underrated coach and one underrated announcer

Brian Kelly, wacky man that he is, coach of Cincinnati, who put Central Michigan into a bowl game. Again: Brian Kelly, the man who put Central Michigan into a bowl game. Salute, you cretins. Honorable mention: Rich Brooks, the coach so old and salty we got scurvy just typing this.

Underrated announcer: Bill Curry. He’s got a batter-fried voice and makes simple, clear observations about what one team is doing on the field against another. Novel concept, especially from the network that brings you FORCED CONFLICT BETWEEN TWO YELLING INTERLOCUTORS every ten minutes.

3. Advice that you’ve been given that you undervalued and wish you hadn’t.

“You should think about taking business classes, or at least something to back up that English degree.” Oh, tales of woe, you all begin with one simple declaration: “Major, English.”

4. Tell us an undervalued sexual asset (e.g. hand strength, ownership of a quality bed).

Going with strength here. You may like your weakling anime fantasies, but we want some pushin’ back, dammit. It takes two to make a rodeo.

Join us tonight–or we’ll send one-eyed Gators after you.

As a breather from accusing the New York Yankees of being marginal partners in genocide, we bring you Malcolm Kelly, Oklahoma wide receiver, goin’ freestyle after the Sooners’ Big 12 Championship win over Nebraska.

We’d talk some more, but we gotta sip some codeine ’cause we gotta kill a cough. (Purple Drank, lawya. Nothin’ less.) Take the mic, Malcolm.

Let us say that Kelly’s not bad–he’s got that rubber-mouthed Dirty South, UGK thing going for him in the rhymes department. And it’s hard not to like the “‘Coz I’m a playa, from the Himalaya” line, especially because he might be insinuating that his true identity is that of the Yeti, which is VHT, indeed.

Too bad dope rhymez don’t get you past Boise State. BURRRRRRRN SSSSSS!!! He could blame too much purple drank, however; it worked for DJ Screw, after all.