Confidence is good. LSU allowed something like 12 points a game last season. That same pennypinching defense returns much and replaces an All-American (Laron Landry) with a potential All-American at safety (Craig Steltz.) In other words, you’re doomed. Resistance is futile. Sign wills. Call loved ones.

But in the hors d’oeuvres game on Thursday night that same defense plays Mississippi State, whose running back Anthony Dixon has something just as important as All-American talent, superb coaching, and an air of invincibility: confidence, galldarnit.

“You’ve got to have that confidence every time you go out,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who it is. You’ve got to be prepared and confident.”

Well, one out of two will get you in the baseball hall of fame. It’ll also make you a lousy neurosurgeon and end your career landing jets on aircraft carriers very, very quickly. But hey! Tony “Banana Fingers” Robbins is pulling for you!

For easy retard political blogger rage, press one! Dan Hawkins has not hired on a new team chaplain to replace former Buffs chaplain Mike Spivey, thus drawing the ire of political bloggers who just love to get a good, Instapundit-bitten “heh” on now and then. Hawkins says there “are different times and different places” for that. A team that won two games last year stands as a superb case for atheists to argue the chaplain was addressing an arbiter who would never appear, and for believers to consider hiring additional clergy to pray harder. Inane liberals/conservatives CAPS LOCK=PASSION!!! arguments to follow, we’re sure.

Jim Grobe rules, according to an influential member of the Waffle House family. Jim Grobe’s dual life as a Waffle House employee has created the second coolest t-shirt of the football offseason. First being our awesome “Fuck Lion” shirt, of course.

Now that’s motivation. We’re having Austin Murphy of Sports Illustrated on tomorrow night on EDSBS Live!, and got a promo copy of Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) in the mail on Friday. Murphy gets that golden ticket of access that only being an SI writer with long-form permission can, and it’s a witty gallop through the 2006 season that reeks of well-used trips to the thesaurus and a boggling accumulation of domestic SkyMiles.

Anyway, here’s a quote to get you to buy the book. Ed Orgeron’s opening line of his pregame speech to the USC d-line before the 2005 Orange Bowl:

“You’re all a bunch of fucking pussies!

Fin. Buy the book.

Sometimes, by not blogging on weekends, you lose. Hey, Chris Rainey likes white women! Well, who doesn’t. From Alligator Army:

“Every time you see a fine girl (in Gainesville), you see another fine girl better than her. (Some people) like different color girls and stuff like that. I’m a white girl man.”

Rainey’s looking to either flame out of the program in two years, or stick around to become a quote buffet for four years. We sincerely hope it’s the latter. Watching game tape is important, Chris–when scouting for a vanilla thrilla with a lust for petite but powerful chocolate luvas with eager gigglesticks at the ready such as yourself, we recommend scouting for white chicks flashing gang signs. G-g-g-gang signs.