EDSBS » 2007 » July

July 24, 2007

EDSBS LIVE! UNDERDOG EDITION

What: EDSBS Live! online radio, presenting the Underdog Edition.

When: 7:30 Eastern, 4:30 for all you angels on the West Coast.

Where: At NowLive, where you can chat with each other and the show hosts throughout the broadcast in the online forum, where underdogs from around the world flock to nip and bark at will. To phone in to the show, just call (310) 984-7600.

Who: Travis McGriff, 5′8″ of Gator wide receiver greatness and current spokesperson for the All-American Football League.

How excited are we? Underdog excited.

Our four questions for the show:

1. Adopt an underdog for the 2007 season. Team or player - you decide.

Willie Tuitama. He’s an oft-pummeled quarterback with a first-rank college name who’ll be running the relief worker offense of Mike Leach (surrounded by grasping hands, flinging things as fast as possible in a crowd) at Arizona, where former Red Raider Sonny Dykes will attempt to show the Pac-10 what a truly unbalanced passing game looks like. Tuitama got sacked 21 times last year despite being pretty mobile (or perhaps because of it?) and many were clearly Hit Stick shots.

2. Which underdog are you most looking forward to seeing fall flat on their face?

An allegedly resurgent Florida State, of course.

3. Name your favorite underdog football player of all time.

Contradictorily…Warrick Dunn. We have actually teared up telling people about the trials this one very tiny man has endured in life while still managing to come out as an abnormally decent and kind man. The only Seminole we’d ever chop for comes up to our eyebrows, heightwise. He plays in the NFL, and has for over ten years now. A phenomenal human being.

4. Tell us about your biggest sexual upset.

We banged Mary Matalin at the 1988 Republican convention. Hard. Oh, you mean overcoming long odds, not “being really upset afterwards.” In that case, how about remaining married for nine years? That’s as big an upset of the odds as anyone can claim.

Filed under: Coaches, the BCS, scandals, arrests, and other eccentri, College football, edsbs socializin', media whoring by Orson Swindle

[ 52 Replies ]

DO NOT EXPLAIN THE PLOT: WHAT WE DO HERE

Kyle’s got us requoting Susan Sontag in reaction to a piece of his. We swear it’s pertinent:

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Sontag basically says here that when talking about art (not science) you need worry less about how to interpret things, but more about wondering about the pulleys and levers involved in what makes a particular painting, book, movie, or in our instance, Youtube clip of a man crashing his bike into a brick wall so effective. Ditto for any and all discussion we want to participate in about the world of blogs and the mainstream media.

That spinning sound you hear? That’s Sontag in her grave.

(Again, please, put down the lighter and gas can. This won’t be long.)

We’re only concerned about what we find interesting in college football, and seek to write about it. (more…)

Filed under: Blog Buddies, College football, ESPN Hollywoodtainment!, bloviating by Orson Swindle

[ 56 Replies ]

THAT’S BOLD: MARK BRADLEY, PRE-COG.

Belated, but since little’s going on today, we dig this from the unused pile of things we should have mentioned at the time but didnt:

Mark Bradley offered up his extremely specific picks for the 2007 football season in late June because “deep down you know thereâ€™d be a void in your lives if I didnâ€™t.” Howard Stern-like bluster from the starchy, oft-maligned AJC columnist! He’ll be asking strippers if they were molested as young girls any day now and hanging out with alcoholic midgets any day now. I am the king of all poorly-run, barely-read Cox Communications-owned media!

The new precog Bradley predicts:

â€” Phillip Fulmer will be replaced by David Cutcliffe the first week in December. (The final straw will be Tennessee losing to Kentucky for the first time since 1984.) Hearing the news, Johnny Majors will laugh deep into January.

Mark Bradley knows…things…

My, that’s specific. What a roasting we shall give him should Fulmer be fired in the last week of November instead! We’re ribbing Bradley out of anger here, since he bumrushed our own list of amazingly specific–cough cough SPECIOUS cough–predictions about the season.

On September 18th, Kirk Herbstreit will look at Chris Fowler, and with all seriousness, ask if he just wants to, you know, hang out and play some 360 or something. Or hoops. If he has time, that is.

On October 13th, Dennis Erickson will wake up in a grotty alley in a dim corner of Montreal, Canada, shaking to the core from the cold. There will be $75K in poker chips in his pocket. He will have a game to coach in Tempe on the other side of the continent. Dennis will think: deja vu, daddy. Deja fuckin’ vu.

On September 16th, Tom O’Brien will wake and eat a bowl of Wheetabix, the same cereal that’s been waking up Tom O’Brien and the O’Brien household for twenty years. And Tom O’Brien will say out loud, “That’s a satisfying bowl of cereal.” Then he will finish that bowl of cereal.

On December 1st, Jim Harbaugh will tear a phone book with his bare hands to motivate his team. Because Stanford doesn’t bow down to anyone, and the best way to demonstrate this is by ripping a phone book in half, because only passion and commitment can rip up a copy of the greater Palo Alto area phone book. They will then get pummeled by Cal like no Stanford team has been pummeled in recent memory.

On September 4th, Rich Brooks will kick the ever-lovin’ shit out of a cat. Go ahead and pencil this in every day of the season, because if there’s one thing Rich Brooks can do, partner, it’s kick the shit out of that fucking cat next door every day just to show it who’s swingin’ the huevos around here.

Filed under: Blog Buddies, Coaches, the BCS, scandals, arrests, and other eccentri, College football by Orson Swindle

[ 39 Replies ]

THE CURIOUS INDEX, 7/24/07

1. We’ve been looking through the ACC this past week, mostly prodded by SMQ’s relentless dissection of the conference. As bad as they were in aggregate last year–or should we say, as mediocre as they were–the logical cyclical optimists thinking would be to say that they’ll necessarily better this year.

Contrarily: there’s no reason to say they’ll be dramatically better, though. Coaching turnover has hit in gouts: Tom O’Brien to NC State, Jags to BC, FSU’s breaking in a whole new brain trust, Clemson remains ever-mercurial on the way to 8-4ish, Butch Davis has some serious flooring issues, and let’s not even talk about the roof…even at Miami there’s a new head guy, which means the whole thing actually got more disorderly and unpredictable over the offseason.

2. Meaning that when people say there’s no reason Wake Forest could duplicate an ACC championship, there’s little actual structure to the argument. Jim Grobe returns 16 starters, an often baffling Chinese box of an offense run by the fake-named Steed Lobotzke, and the little quarterback who could in the form of Riley Skinner. They’ve got people to replace on d, but keep in mind that Wake actually pulled off the accomplishment of running the zone blitz effectively at the college level last year. Schedule, schmedule. They’re still good, and according to Tony Barnhardt on CSS a few days ago, Grobe thinks they’re better this year.

3. Finished Potter Saturday. Lesson learned, without spoilers: don’t fuck with Molly Weasley. We’ve decided our Patronus would be Danny Wuerffel running with a knee brace and flak jacket.

4. Got the first taste of NCAA 2008 on the XBox, and whoa holy hell hello sweet tar heroin. The playbooks for strategy whores have been beefed up considerably, and on offense, you’re forced to be a lot more patient. Unless you’re playing someone completely incompetent, the big scores happen just like they do in real life: because someone fucks up, and you take advantage. Take away the minor irritation of the occasional framerate shudder, and we’re content as ticks on a fat dog, even if the fans leap up and down like mad monkeys for four quarters at sedate venues like Notre Dame.

5. Big Daddy Drew’s preview of the Vikings on Deadspin is the balls, and none of you can deny it. He is the true Stairmaster.

6. Polling note: open for discussion here is the matter of Arizona State. Erickson’s very good on the front end of a program’s life span, and Arizona State’s got reasonable amounts of talent on offense. Defensively…um, Arizona State’s got reasonable amounts of talent on offense. Are they worth a 24 spot in the polls just to nab the possibility of them experiencing the early Erickson buzz…er, bump.

7. Song of the day: “Hang Me Out To Dry,” Cold War Kids. Bass-a-licious.

8. Reading: The Economist’s article on “The Enigma of Iran.” Phil Steele, natch.

9. Stellar name of the week: Mister Simpson, Cincinnati running back and transfer from Michigan.

10. Team we’re beginning to suspect won’t be as good: FSU’s terribly overweighted in the progress department. Phil’s gaga over their potential, but the offensive line and skill positions have been so badly mismanaged that their watershed season seems, to us at least, that it will take a complete purge at some positions to undo the damage done by Jeffy “the Unready” Bowden. The mismanagement wasn’t just in terms of instruction and strategy–it was done on the recruiting trail, as well.

9-3’s possible. 11-1 is, to be polite, improbable.

Filed under: Atlantic Coast Conference, College football, Pacific 10 Conference, bloviating, video game stabbin' by Orson Swindle

[ 47 Replies ]

DAILY AFFIRMATION: DAY 39

We’ve broken into the thirties. Courage, starving college football fan. In just 39 days, we all feed on the gridiron dish of our choice. In one coach’s case, the meal of choice is clear.