This week’s random notes and observations come to you, as always, from deep inside Pete Carroll’s Enchanted Gridiron Grotto. It’s champagne bath week in honor of the thumping of Arizona State, meaning that champagne is all we’re bathing in down here for a while, meaning a helluva ant problem is on the way pronto.

The Grotto this week is brought to you by Jared, who wants you to know that if you’re looking for a cheap whore detector, you can purchase a wide variety of them at your local Jared jeweler.

Last night, during EDSBS Live, the discussion board broke out with a long chain on the infamous dog of dubious pedigree that nipped Jerraud Powers, Auburn DB, in the waning minutes of the Iron Bowl. Elroy the Racist Dog, as we’ll now call him, elicited the following string of comments that had us barely able to continue the show:

That dog has Birth of a Nation on DVD

That dog hates running quarterbacks.

That dog won’t eat peanut butter.

That dog has plenty of black friends. Really! He does!

That dog hated the Cosby show.

That dog doesn’t understand why Jimmy the Greek was fired.

Brent Schaeffer still looks, at each game, like a talented athlete attempting the quarterback position for the first time no matter how many games he’s actually played under center.

Nebraska’s defense would have allowed 35 points to Craig James’ flag football team.

He went to Jared to buy me some shiny fossilized carbon! God, you monkeys are so easily impressed. We can’t escape from these commercials. One on the radio this morning touted the best name for a pearl necklace we’ve ever heard: THE LADIES’ PEARLMASTER. It’s got a Hemi in it made from real lightning! REAL LIGHTNING!

Robert Killebrew again earned the Emily Post award for best etiquette displayed by a linebacker, courteously allowing Aggie defenders to run clean around him and his gentle, supportive tackle attempts all day long. He’s earned a spot in the hearts of Longhorn fans everywhere. A lesion, really, from stress and aggravation, one that may very well kill some of them one day in the distant future.

Kept waiting for someone to bare their breasts in the live shots from Baton rouge. Sadly, the only nudity seen during the game was Mike the Tiger lolling on his back in his cage. Full-frontal tiger penis action that got every Chinese pharmacist giddy with the thought of massive profit.

The Father-in-law notes that one of the Aggie cadets has an Eagle Scout badge on. You could dress yourself up like Timmy in a Rug Rats episode where they all pretend to be soldiers couldn’t you? Bucket on head, putter in hand, wearing someone’s name Best Buy name tag and a pair of cowboy boots, couldn’t you? (Mike Leach co-authored this blurb, and wants you to know it is sponsored by Mike Leach’s Pirate School for real football pirates.)

Rodderick Muckleroy, Texas: another fake alias we must love.

During the LSU game, Jacob Hester rolled into the endzone with an Arkansas helmet rolling behind him. There could have been a head in there, and we would not have been surprised.

A fullback dive in a different formation is still a fullback dive–when you hit it right, it’s like legal theft. Peyton Hillis did this in stunning fashion in the Arkansas game. When he gets back there, he’s only fighting the wind on the way to the endzone. It’s wishbone wonderfulish.

In the Longhorn/Aggie game, Fran called a fake FG and got it. In the Missouri/Kansas game, Pinkel did the same on the first drive of the game and got clobbered short of the first down. Stupidity and daring are often the same coat put on different ways.

Les Miles picayune tactics watch: Miles used a time out to stop the clock, possibly giving them Ark. a full minute to score provided they get the ball back. Kirk Ferentz will never do that at Michigan. He’ll also have a hell of time winning ten games a year, as Miles has done at LSU.

We’d never, ever want to coach against an Arkansas team in overtime. You don’t want to get in a hammer fight with them. That’s the only weapon they bring to the fight, and the last thing a fatigued team of any kind wants to see are three hot running backs begging to piledrive a game into submission. It’s second to watching Auburn’s kickoff

Asshole route on Tennessee’s first TD. The press will refer to these as “jerk” routes, but at the heart of the West Coast-lite attack run by David Cutcliffe (and in the pros, Jon Gruden) is a burning desire to make one guy on your defense look like a total fucking asshole. That is precisely what happens as Arian Foster runs through a play-action fake, scoots into the left flat, and up the sidelines for a wheel route TD with no one near him. The collected thoughts of everyone in the stadium practically seethed the word “asshole.”

My, Virginia students look conspicuously well-scrubbed.

Hawaii fans celebrated their TDs with the tradition of throwing spare receipts onto the field. Judging from recent reports of fan behavior, those could also be bail receipts. In the universal television conference, only Dog The Bounty Hunter informs us of anything going on in Hawaii, so they must be bail receipts, since the show makes the state look like one long methamphetamine bust with Dog eventually incarcerating everyone, including himself. Leland, watch this guy. I mean, me.

Again, we can’t really remember how Virginia scored against Virginia Tech. We never do. A quarterback draw? PI call for 15? Double steal with a suicide squeeze? They’re in the lead, and we can’t remember how? They play amnesiaball, never doing anything particularly memorable.

CBS played the Killers’ cover of Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” on a commercial break. Little known is the fact that Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis was an immense Baylor fan. This is also why he hanged himself.

From an uproarious ESPN interview during the USF/Pitt game: George Selvie, on sacks:

“Sacking the quarterback, it’s all good…I compare getting a sack to getting honeybuns, my favorite food. They’re so soft…so sweet…”

He then maws down on a honey bun he’s had waiting as a prop the whole time, and his eyes flood with an almost sexual delight. This, for some reason, moves us. Selvie wasn’t putting on an act: he obviously has some sort of metaphysical connection with honeybuns the rest of us don’t have. (Mangino Fulmer Friedgen joke content insert here.)

Metaphors you do not have to invent, part one. Bostick throws a pick six. The camera flashes to Dave Wannstedt. He is on crutches. Just like the Pitt football program.


There you go, all on a plate. No fixins’ needed.

USF DT Allen Cray gets in a nice bellyflop sack on Pitt qb Ryan Bostick. The kind where Bostick probably pissed himself a bit on impact.

History comes full circle as Matthew Stafford pulls a reverse Godsey on Georgia Tech and rumbles through for a TD on an option play against the Jackets. Stafford likely had the same conversation that Friedgen had with Godsey after the run:

Godsey: “Hey, coach, did you see me pulling away with my speed?”

Friedgen: “George, I don’t think they believed you had the ball.”

The whole Giggity giggity thing isn’t about plagiarism–it’s about outright theft from two sources, Big Daddy Drew and the Ernest T. character from Andy Griffith. Jones and Nutt are friends, so it only stands to reason that Nutt would talk like Jones, just with less clarity and with the caps lock on. Remember: amateurs imitate, pros steal, or at least that’s what T.S. Eliot said, along with “Mehhh, I can’t play sports because of my weltschmerz and bad arches,” and “Why, that would be like trusting a Jew, for God’s sakes!”

Yay! Audible bullshits and fuck yeahs in the background of the USF/Pitt game.

On CBS, Steve Beurlein says the fake punt Kentucky gets a first down on wasn’t planned. This comes after the cameras catch Rich Brooks visibly mouthing “We’re going for it” before the commercial break. Great moment in broadcasting, especially when Beurlein convinces his broadcast partner of this after the break.

Metaphors you do not have to invent, part two: Todd Reesing, fresh from taking a sack and ending Kansas’ chances of winning a national title or Big 12 title, gets up with a solid ten pounds of dirt stuck in his facemask.