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.

Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, already embroiled in a public spat with Comcast over the fees for shoehorning the Big Ten Network into Comcast’s monolith of programming, hasn’t let the controversy slow down his ambitious plans for expanding the domain of the Big Ten.

Even in the face of Congressional scrutiny, Delany’s plans to forge ahead with the hardball tactics that have made him a lightning rod for controversy in the world of college football. This includes the bold initiative to stuff the Big Ten network with all kinds of Big Ten related programming, including women’s sports, a negotiating point that escalated tensions between Comcast and the Big Ten when Comcast referred to “second and third-tier sports,” language Delany demanded an apology for in a press release. (Comcast refused.)

Most controversial–and potentially humiliating for Delany–is his proposed “Leave a Dollar, Leave a Dollar” campaign designed to exploit “unrealized value” in the Big Ten’s name.

“We realize that as America’s number one sports conference, our name has real value as a brand,” said Delany at a Wednesday morning press conference. “So we’re asking that when you say the words Big Ten in a sentence—you simply drop in a dollar into the conveniently located Big Ten Jars of Excellence around your area.” Delany paused in the middle of the sentence, pulling a dollar out of his billfold and placing it into the jar.

Delany: asking you to leave a dollar, or leave a dollar. Illustrations by House Rock Built.

Delany tried to silence critics of the plan by claiming they were out of step with today’s street culture. “We’ve done the research, (more…)

EDSBS Live! is going to focus on the Big East today, and with good reason: any and all Big East attention we might pay to the Big East has been clouded by our Owen Schmitt worship and the fact that trying to figure out what’s happening in the Big East is very, very difficult at the moment. So we’re going to air the thought process, talk to a few people, and settle the whole thing over cocktails tonight in ninety sloppy internet radio moments.

Owen Schmitt: clouding our thoughts on the Big East with his awesomeness.

But our ramshackle thinking of the moment on the conference goes:

The Big East is full of smallish, very well-run programs, and two biggish, very well-run programs. Consider the picture four years ago for the Big East: a conference with its two prime milkers taken to different pastures (wooo SEC agricultural metaphors!) (more…)

Hope that even with steady beta-testing and years’ worth of improvement that the NCAA franchise doesn’t lose its its glitches, the hiccups and oddities of programming that reward the gaming addict with little unintentional Easter Eggs of high-larity.

And please, please don’t lose the best glitch of all, one that should have been turned into a special unlockable character in Campus Legend Mode: the seven-inch tall linebacker.

We’re not sure what his name is, but one thing’s certain: if Ron Prince doesn’t stop calling us and asking us for the kid’s highlight tape, we’re changing our private number, bayyybeeeee. We’ve never seen a man with such a passion for midget running backs in our lives. And plus, as the YouTube clip makes clear, he’s obviously just a linebacker and special teams guy…albeit a hellacious one.

Last week’s Fulmer Cupdate is this week’s Fulmer Cupdate because very little happened in the universe of bad behavior in college football. The sums, followed by pondering, speculation, and other manufactured metacontent.

Notes, Speculation, and the usual errata.

Texas peeks in at the bottom of the big board following the arrest of Robert Joseph for breaking into cars in a (presumably) drunken stupor.

Anyone looking for examples of sober stupors may take a jumbo carton of Hot Tamales, dump the whole thing into your digestive tract in two minutes, and then report back to us on what a sober stupor truly feels like. We want no commentary on the Tamales’ remainder in twelve to sixteen hours, please, as it will truly be the most horrifying moment in your life when you meet it.

The rest stays static, with the “better and better” Illini still riding high on the burglary ring charges from way, way back in the Pleistocene reaches of one hundred and eleven days ago. The only real consolation is that you’ve lived this long without college football–sixty-eight days more is surely a cakewalk for a grizzled old scudder like yourself, no?

Crimes we expect to see from the summer lull: and and all involving the following.

75% will involve: Beer. Bars. Ladies. “Disrespect.” Hours past 12:00 local time.
Charges of public intoxication.

50% will involve: Theft. Property damage. Resisting arrest, which by itself is the Fulmer Cup equivalent of owning the utilities in Monopoly.

20% will involve: Construda, a.k.a. just plain old weed. Place this in the 75% bracket if the University of Florida is involved.

5% will involve: Jet-skis or other stolen watercraft. Dog-fighting. Tasers. Homoerotic content. Mudcat Elmore’s car. Gay sheep. Casinos (Ryan Perriloux edition only.)

Women, tackling dummies, lots of 40ish women doing deep squats: it all sounds like one of Carl Spackler’s more feverish sexual fantasies, but no! we say–it’s the Ole Miss women’s football camp, yet another one of those marginal offseason fundraisers that fill the long, empty, desolate, but now only 68 days or so until college football season begins.

And this article from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal is really the first and last thing you need to read about this year’s wave of camps, because we can assure you with scientific certainty that nothing, and we mean ABSOLUDDDELY NOFIN’ GONNA TOP DA OWE MISSAH CAMP with your honored host, the Orgeron.

LADEEZ DA OWGERON GONNA LURNYA SOMMADAT GOODOWWFASHUNNED FOOTBAW!!!

OXFORD, Miss. — Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron stood at the center of 400 screaming women.

“WAR TIME! TAKE IT OUTSIDE! WAR TIME! TAKE IT OUTSIDE!”

This is precisely what Ed Orgeron says to all the women he takes back to “The Tannery,” (more…)