There are benefits to Adult Swim being based in Atlanta. Their obvious concern for college football is one of them. If you’ll recall, last year they thanked Ohio State for setting the bar on being overrated. For 2007’s madness, they’ve got Carl from ATHF speaking truth to power, and suggesting any Gatorade celebration involving Mark Mangino is an exercise in futility.

In short: my god, this is wonderful. (HT: With Leather.)

Maybe they could play the chocolate unicorn elves at the fruity candy-ass bowl in nevah-nevah land!

Come down off that ledge, Michigan Man/Woman: it’s not Ferentz, according to the Wolverine, Rivals.com’s Michigan site. The source is “really, really good and you’ll have to trust this because we’re all flying blind in this thing, you know, because it’s a coaching search, and those really just come down to, what, like 3 people talking in a room or something, and like, big drug deals have more witnesses than the negotiations involved in most hires, like right?”

Yeah, like right. On to the Hat and Brian Kelly for Michigan, who doesn’t really need to be in a hurry with this one. In fact, for those sweating it out, it’s going to be a sauna of a coaching search. Both Cincinnati and LSU are headed to bowl games, and the hire could, in theory at least, stretch into the bowl season if Michigan’s going to be as deliberate and decorous about this thing as we think they’ll be.

Blogtoberfest: it’s the best of the internet, or at least the part of it we read.

House Rock Built, busy mourning Notre Dame’s season in style, elucidates the difference between Ar-kan-saw and ARRRR–Kansas.

Sylvester Croom isn’t afraid to cry. Especially because he’ll punch you in the windpipe if you start laughing at him.

Andy Staples reports that Florida still has a piddling chance at a BCS bowl, but that hell would have to turn itself inside out to happen, basically.

Les Miles still thinks he is undefeated. And he is, in regulation at least. Thank the pertinent god of your choice that ties no longer exist in college football, or the BCS would be positively quadriplegic.

Oregon’s going to the Blow-A-Goat.com bowl, according to Addicted to Quack. That sponsor still has more clout and dignity than the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl ever had.

Um, sorry. We meant the Sun Bowl. That’s actually where Oregon could end up, facing USF. The other option from the Pac-10 are the Oregon State Beavers. Begin Bulls/Beavers suggestive headline competition now.

Drunken stupidity: Not just for the SEC anymore! A Washington fan ejected from the Apple Cup loss to Washington State beat a Sikh cabbie on Saturday, calling the man “an Iraqi terrorist.” Given his attitudes, we’ll also bet he fully supports Auburn’s sideline police dogs and whatever actions they feel are necessary to protect the public from 180 pound cornerbacks.

There’s cold, then Siberian…then there’s the Absolute Zero kind of cold. This response to the a police dog biting Jerraud Powers along the endzone sideline Saturday is beyond frosty. We need new verbiage for the degree of coldness delineated there.

(We have no idea who did this…but well played, sir. In a ruthless, heartless bastard way.)

Without Dr. Robert Cade, we’d have never known the joys of Brawndo, glowing sweat, Powerthirst, or the ti-zzight Keith Jackson ads where he dramatically overstates the effect of sugar, water, and salt mixed togther in a single beverage on the play of the Florida football team. (Hey, it worked, but Ray Graves probably had as much to do with a 70 win decade as Gatorade did.)

Cade, who died today of kidney failure, was the inventor of Gatorade, the wonder beverage launching an entire industry of obese child-fuel, and someone who shared an experience we had many a time in Gainesville: he scraped together around forty bucks and mixed up something that made him vomit.

“It sort of tasted like toilet bowl cleaner,” said Dana Shires, one of the researchers.

“I guzzled it and I vomited,” Cade said.

He’s talking about the first batch of Gatorade. We’re referencing just about any night between 1994 and 1997, but sure, it’s the same feeling, more or less, minus the cold press of a jail cell against your face and waking up naked in the primate research facility. (Again.) We hope Cade didn’t experience anything of the sort in his research or in his subsequent life as a researcher at the University of Florida, where he worked until his retirement in 2004.

Dr. Cade was eighty.

Mr. 2Cents offers up his own take on the coaching slaughter.

Yahoo’s Jason King has a nice, long-form story on the rise of downtrodden Kansas football program to its newfound goodness, replete with details like Mangino and assistants personally cleaning years of grubby fingerprints off the walls before recruiting visits and such. It also lets in a hint that Mangino is not very nice, and may in fact be downright mean, something we find shocking–shocking, Nigel!–in a successful head coach.

We imagine this all stems from a deep, unending unhappiness in the hardwiring of Mangino’s system. But don’t trust us–the film doesn’t lie.

But past the puffy, up-from-the-bootstraps vibe and hints of unpleasantness, there’s also a well reported flash of a frightening alternate reality and a former AD doing what ADs rarely do: speaking publicly and candidly not only about the hiring process, but about the candidates’ own behavior during the process. Kansas could have been Texas A&M ‘07 had it not been for Dennis Franchione practically oozing sleazegrease in an exchange with former Kansas AD Al Bohl.

One minute Franchione seemed ready to accept the job, the next he’d changed his mind. The end came when Franchione told Bohl he needed a little more time because he wanted to see if he was going to be a candidate for the Notre Dame job, which came open when Bob Davie was fired on Dec. 2. That same day, Bohl rescinded his offer to Franchione and hired Mangino.

Franchione had, at that point, hadn’t even finished one season with Alabama and was already throwing it around to both Notre Dame and Kansas. Kansas search committee member Ray Evans puts it better than we ever could, Hedley Lamarr comparisons be damned:

Six years later it looks like we may have dodged a bullet.

A bullet named Dennis, who could be coaching in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Dallas, Texas, or in the Canadian Football League in a few weeks, for all we know.

Bonus weirdness: The strangest post-game interview we’ve ever seen must be included with this post. The YouTube commenters seem to think Fran is “emotional” there. That is not the word we were thinking of when watching it.

Bloodbath does not describe it: this year 12 coaches have been canned in all, leaving behind a trail of tears, moving vans, and discarded coffee makers and dry-erase boards unseen since the great de-coachening of 2002.

It brought to mind one scene and on scene only: a vision of violence and force so appalling it almost earned the now-retired X rating, a demonstration of primitive, pre-CGI prosthetic and blood hydraulics so obviously fake and awesome it set the bar for an entire generation of young gorehounds…a depiction of oiled Austrian rage bent on saving the only thing that really mattered to America, Alyssa Milano…yet another example that the only qualification for being a movie henchman is to shoot wildly from the hip and possess zero ability to react to your situation…

Yes, we’re thinking of the shed scene from Commando, the most awesome of awesome scenes from a movie packed to the gills with steroidal excellence. And right now, the demands of war-painted fanbases are speaking with ze thickest of akk-scents und doing ze keeehling, mah freund.

Standing ovation to LSUFreek, who put this together at our behest. ONE HUNDRED COCKTAILS to you, sir.

Houston Nutt’s taking his sack of crazy weasels and trucking the family down to Oxford, Mississippi in a hire that…um…we actually can’t say anything bad about at all, really. What the hell is a blogger to do?

In lieu of negative bashing of decision-making, we’ll actually have to discuss what’s good about the hire. Nutt wins games, so that’s an instant improvement over his predecessor, who did not win games this year, something coaches are supposed to do from time to time. Nutt also gets people to play football very, very hard. Not always intelligently, true; but very, very hard, and in very simple schemes they can pick up with ease. They’ll run the daylights out of the ball with Ole Miss’s underrated line on first and second down before the real treat: the return of the Matt Jones offense with Jevan Snead, where he’ll have a one receiver pattern, find it’s not open, and then will have to improvise and “make a play,” a phrase that is the coachspeak equal of 12th century cartographers’ “THARR BE DRAGONS.”

Nutt will also be away from Fayetteville’s now-toxic social environment, where he probably could not send a single text message without a nabob piping in with “HEY, YA TEXTIN’ UR GALFRIEND, HOUSTON?” Oxford’s more laid-back, and the other thing Ed Orgeron forged with three years of yaw-yaw (besides a nice talent base) are the sweet oblivion of low expectations. It’s not like Nutt has to win five games to improve in the SEC. Winning just one would do that.

One game? That’s improvement? WOOOOOO GIGGITY!

As for the dearly departed: Ed Orgeron has been mentioned in rumors surrounding Washington State. If you see a huge Cajun berating bushels of apples for their bruises and lack of toughness in the next week or so, Washingtonians, you’ll know there’s some credence to this scuttlebutt.

A bad year for the Miami Hurricanes gets far, far worse: Sean Taylor, dominant safety for the Hurricanes and first round pick in the 2004 draft, has died in a Miami hospital after being shot in the leg during a break-in at his home this past Monday.

Taylor’s death from a leg injury is not as freakish as it might seem. The bullet struck the femoral artery, tearing it and causing unstoppable bleeding that left Taylor unconscious at the scene.

Miami police said Taylor was struck by the bullet in the femoral artery, causing a significant blood loss that Sharpstein told the Post “could not really be stopped, only curbed a bit.”

“Seemed like a lot of hope after he responded to the doctor’s command, but he lost of a lot of blood,” Taylor family friend Donald Walker told the Post.

Condolences to Taylor’s family.