The Sporting News just read that homicide rates went up by thirty percent in 2007 there, so they’re sending us to New Orleans to cover the crowd and buildup to the national title game. So for the weekend you’ll find us over at the Sporting Blog, where we’ll be posting updates, photos, and hopefully pictures of drunk people fightin’ round the world on Bourbon Street.

If you are going to the game please send us an email at harumphharumph of the gmail variety. We’re looking to hang out with tailgaters from LSU, OSU, and anyone else who shows up to the Superdome. Not that you’ll need any, but we’ll buy you beer. Or you’ll buy us beer. Or we’ll just forget the whole thing and go straight to the ether and absinthe.

And now, Professor Longhair singing and playing “She Ain’t Got No Hair.” Enjoy your weekend

This post brought to you by Michael Richards, who’s really, really sorry.

So, if Bill Stewart really did use a racial slur that was one of the things that forced him to quit at VMI (along with his 8-25 record), then what was it? It couldn’t have been from the “black” outbox of racial slurs, since Sports By Brooks reports that Mike Tomlin, current Steelers coach, really liked him, and for our purposes we’ll assume Mike Tomlin is the spokesperson for the black race, along with Tavis Smiley and Mary J. Blige.

Hypotheticals:

Swedish: “Too warm out here for you Nordski? Nut up, Lindgren, you filthy herring-choker!”

Dutch: “Hey, Van Rinfelt, maybe you’d be more comfortable in wooden shoes, you dyke-jumper, you? You’d tackle harder if your mother wasn’t such a dicksuckinflog!”

Asian of any sort: “Wang! Yeah, you, Nuprin! Bring your powerpoint ass over here and explain to me what you were doing neglecting the A-gap, asswipe!”

Irish: “O’Connor! Sober up and get your bogtrotting pancake ass over here. A shant spudfucker like you should be used to fighting hard through blocks, like learning to read or using birth control!”

White trash: “Jenkins! A dirty golden toe ditchpig like you needs to realize that cover two means communication between you and the corner. What part of that don’t you understand, you pinewood moon cricket muppetfucker?”

This possibilities are endless, and can all be found at an exhaustive list of racial slurs here.

From the Gainesville Sun.

Your theme for the post:

One of the things you never see as a threat to your football program is divorce. But Tampa just brings the funk like that, as Ben Moffitt and wife are proving in their increasingly acrimonious divorce settlement.

TAMPA, AMERICA’S NEXT GREAT CITY SINCE 1979 - Shauna Moffitt, the wife of University of South Florida senior linebacker Ben Moffitt, said she wrote nearly every paper for him during his five years at USF and also completed two online courses for him.

“Ben Moffitt has never written a paper,” Shauna said. “Never. Ever. I love him, but he doesn’t know how to spell. He cheats.”

If you say that someone can’t spell in public, we’d argue that you probably don’t actually love him, but whatever–it’s divorce, let bullets fly and the grenades tumble. Most guys would prefer this to the usual gay/small penis/serial abuser accusations that surface after divorces, save for one detail: it could get an NCAA investigation working at USF.

The chances of the investigation actually digging up anything incriminating are tiny: if Moffitt was really getting papers written for him by his wife and her twin sister (yes, let your mind go there, now come on back) as alleged in the article, it proves that Moffitt is a cheater, but doesn’t come anywhere close to proving USF had anything to do with it. Whoever actually wrote the papers, the story does have some import for two people: Moffitt, portrayed as someone who’s deserted his family for the past two months, and Nick Saban, who earned tongue daggers from Leavitt after Saban suggested USF’s roster was full of guys “who probably could have gone to Florida or Florida State but Florida and Florida State couldn’t take them.”

As suggested in the title of the post: Moffitt may not be able to spell, but he clearly has a deep understanding of the economic concept of division of labor. (HT: ZZGator)

According to the always reliable internet buzz, Will Muschamp to Texas is a done deal, with something like 1.6 mil over three years as the pay. If either Mack Brown or Tommy Tuberville comes headhunting for you as an assistant, you’re truly gifted as a coordinator, and a spot as the DC at Texas is the next logical stepping stone to a head job for the still frighteningly young (34) Muschamp, who’s piling up the little Ivy League applicant coaching resume: forged in the furnace of Saban Academy, coaching under Tuberville at Auburn, and now likely to pilot a Texas d badly in need of repair. He’s playing Resume Hero and doing so in an extremely impressive fashion. If he could only get a gig as Pete Carroll’s tiny assistant, he’d have the perfect CV.

Having a top ten defense helps, too. What Muschamp’s defense has in common with former Texas DC Gene Chizik’s attack is a collective satanic mean streak, though Muschamp’s defenses don’t tend to lead with the head like Chizik’s did. (Hello, Reggie Brown. Hello, Joel Klatt.) Muschamp’s also way more blitzy, and will often come into the second half with rapid and canny adjustments. (Hello, Florida 2006.) They just play mean, fast, and smart football without making things too difficult on themselves, something Texas’ defense needs badly.

In short: he yells, he barely sleeps, and his players would by all indications eat glass for him. Sold!

HT: Orangebloods.

I win and I get…fruit? What the fuck is this shit?

We’re still a bit dazed from watching two teams labeled WARNING! DEFENSIVE CONTENT! last night. A snap pick and return on a lamely thrown curl route? A safety making a pick? Contested interior blocking? A combined over/under below fifty? We did not come screaming on fire to this planet to write a blog called Every Day Should Be Sunday, sirs and madams!

Fortunately, after a mid-game conversation with SMQ, our admiration/shock at the amount of defense played waned a bit as we also realized that neither offense in the game really offered any great shakes either. A few notes:

One: Virginia Tech’s traitorous offense. And has for a long time. We understand the pound the rock, kill the clock philosophy, and how well it meshes with the defense, the special teams blah blah blah…but with eleven minutes left in the game, down 24-14, and the ball in Sean Glennon’s hand, VT only had the defensive half of the formula needed to win the game. It felt like watching clear doom descend over the team–one could almost see it in the droop of shoulders and in the stance of the defense on the sidelines, the defense that for all intents and purposes only allowed seven points. They were waiting for the offense to sell them down the river the whole fourth quarter. They did.

Mmm, love that rodeo tacklin’. In the third quarter all of Virginia Tech’s defenders were glowing with video game bonus. At one point–we think this was Barry Booker–a massive DT grabbed hold of Todd Reesing and fucking German Suplexed him, spinning the qb across his hip and onto the back of his neck with a judo champ’s skill. Last night at one point the announcers debated whether they’d ever seen an academic All-American defensive tackle. We can’t think of one, but we do know one who can pull a wrestling move in the middle of a football play, and that’s kind of awesome, too.

Todd Reesing is plucky. Not overwhelmingly talented–as Mangino just went out and said about his team in the postgame–but plucky and just mobile, tough, and mean enough to keep chains moving and try throws that had NFL scouts breaking out the really, really red markers to write “HIGH RISK” across his profile. He had ten rushes for something like -6 yards, but many of those rushes were the crucial scrambles and keepers that kept chains moving. He looked like the world’s most badass high school QB playing at the college level, which on a defensive team is more than enough.

Two great tastes that taste great together: Sean Glennon’s pocket presents/ Kansas’ d-line. Glennon alternately scrambles his way out of and into trouble–more than any other qb we’ve seen he replicates video game AI qb perfectly, sometimes bouncing around for maddening escapes and first downs, and then just as often stepping directly into a forearm shiver. With Kansas’ line blowing through Tech’s all night, we got to see examples of this all night.

It was enough to make you a little ill.

The Gatorade Defense. There will not be a fat joke here. There will not be a fat joke here. There will…aw, fuck it. There’s totally a fat joke here. They didn’t douse Mangino with Gatorade because he’d swell, because he’d absorb it all, because it would boil off his 214 degree body with visible steam, searing bystanders, they didn’t do it because he’d eat the jug…whatever. It’s a testament both to his control-freaky, no Mr. Nice Guy personality and to his preparation that Mangino actually had some assistant ready to block the Gatorade. Then again, to drag Kansas from football purgatory and into the Orange Bowl, being a controlling dick is most likely a prerequisite for the job.