The final bell approaches. We’ll do anything for money…but we’ll do nutsoid anything for money for a good cause. There’s time yet to ding another school’s total, by giving to one of our fine charities in the name of disaster relief. You have until 8 p.m. tonight.

A review, courtesy of Kevin, and some damn impressive numbers indicating that this blog will likely be all Wolverine-y tomorrow, sans the face-ripping instincts and gut-spilling incisors.

Money raised to date: $13,917.00

Team Donation Standings:
1. Michigan - $4,035
2. Ohio State - $2,160 (inc $170 neg)
3. Florida - $1,605.00 (inc $100 neg)
4. Alabama - $505.00 (inc $50 neg)
5. Texas - $480.00 (inc $10 neg)
6. Oklahoma - $410.00
7. Florida State - $370.00
8. Auburn - $330.00 (inc $25 neg)
9t. Case Western Reserve - $300.00
9t. Virginia - $300.00
10. Georgia Tech - $275.00

Lurking: Tennessee, Nebraska, South Carolina, SMU

NOTABLE RIVALRIES:

Michigan $4,035 vs. Ohio State $2,160
Florida $1,605 vs. FSU $370
Alabama $505 vs. Auburn $330
Texas $480 vs. Oklahoma $410
Texas $480 vs. Texas A&M $0
Virginia $300 vs. VaTech $100
Georgia Tech $300 vs. Georgia $55
Oklahoma $410 vs. Nebraska $250
UCLA $100 vs. USC $0

Patrick summarizes the O.J. Mayo feeding frenzy over at Thirty-Five Seconds with his customary flair. The O.J. Mayo story happened at USC, the same school that had Reggie Bush…who took illegal benefits during his time at USC…perhaps if we could just make a tenuous, unsupported connection between the two…and then connect them via AN IMAGINARY REGULATORY LEVIATHAN RAINING HELL onto the university for its transgressions…well, then we’d have ourselves some columns, wouldn’t we?

At least Plaschke has the sense to put it on Mike Garrett and not call for some kind of symbolic stoning of USC. (Pete Caroll, buried to his neck and surrounded by villagers with intent stares and rocks in their hands. “It’s not fair! I am not jacked about this!”)

USC? Gimmeh.

Cartel-ish in the long run.

Brian provides toothy points on the APR over at MGoBlog, calling bullshit on our APR/NCLB comparison:

Orson’s analogy to No Child Left Behind is inapt. NCLB, oddly, takes money from failing schools. The APR takes students, leaving behind a smaller corps of kids the Idahos (Idahoes? In your area codes?) of the world can fail.

Technically, they are taking scholarships, which is money spent on the open market of recruiting athletes on your depth chart, which in turn kills your ability to compete, etc, etc. It damages a school’s ability to compete if they cannot beef up on the academic support side. NCLB is a perfect comparison because, rather than offer some ameliorative way out of failing status, it simply stamps FAIL on a program until it pulls itself up by its own bootstraps, just as the APR does.

The inexactitude lies in the subject compared: education versus having a football program. As Brian points out, having a division one football program is not a right. (Unless you’re in the SEC. But Brian sagely points that out, too.) However, the reason the APR chafes me is its inexactitude and susceptibility to manipulation by larger schools who may tip the scales with boundless tutoring and academic support programs to support comparable marginal academic cases who fail out at what we suppose we can call the Florida International Select Level of college football.

The college football universe already tilts toward Mammon. Unlike some, we’re not troubled by this. We’re a big, swaggering, swinishly capitalist country, and our universities appropriately follow suit. (more…)

Professor.

We were discussing the oft-explosive ends of Midwestern football coaches last night on EDSBS Life, and realized that if you’re going to go out in the heartland, you go big, dammit: either Gary Moeller it and disintegrate publicly, Woody Hayes it and punch an opposing linebacker on the field of play, or strap a bomb to yourself and blow up hundreds of innocents at a local mall like Ron Turner did.*

The men of the Big Ten kill themselves for your fine football, even going so far as to live in the Midwest to coach football for decades at a time. And while there’s more to Wisconsin than just their fine escorts, that remains quite a sacrifice.

So what the hell will it take for Woody Hayes–wait, that’s PROFESSOR Woody Hayes to you–for Professor Woody Hayes to get his statue in Columbus? Will he have to rise from hell itself and start punching fools to get someone to put him in bronze and not do it on the cheap and leave him looking like a cut-rate bronze Drew Carey? (And you know Woody’s in hell: it’s warm and they appreciate a nice savage drive block down there, unlike those robed pansies in that place up north.)

It has been more than a year since the original ballot to build a Woody Hayes statue, estimated at more than $30,000, was initiated.

“It would be unwise to spend a great deal of funding solely from USG on the statue,” Sprinkle said.

Bull. And shit. Student Government money pays for the Latin Club to go to conventions and read Catullus to other drunken Latin majors before awkward convention sex, among other useless things. What is should pay for is sweet bronze hammer of the gods placed in Hornrim Hayes right hand and a clipboard in the other. It should be forty feet tall, bulletproof, and with glowing red LED eyes at minimum–just like the real Professor Hayes, dammit.

For real commitment, rock-em sock-em robot action and a kerosene-powered flamethrower mounted in his mouth would be nice as well. Come on, Ohio State. The Subcommandante demands it.

Like that, but in a short-sleeved white oxford and a black tie with hornrims.

P.S. One more reason to give Hayes the despot-sized statue he deserves. When asked to comment on the temper that ultimately ended his career:

After the incident, Hayes reflected on his career by saying, “Nobody despises to lose more than I do. That’s got me into trouble over the years, but it also made a man of mediocre ability into a pretty good coach.”

To rephrase: “Rage made me, assholes. Piss off.”

*He may also be coaching for the Bears. Our crack editorial staff is researching this.

Today is nine kinds of catastrophically overbooked: freelance pieces, two SN pieces, and a mounting sleep debt we’re not entirely enjoying. (Less giddy sleepy, and more zombiedrooling stupor.)

We’ll get the CI up ASAP, but in the meantime accept comic gold. Warning: the chorus of this song is:

Why you comin’ home
at five in the morning?

Something’s going wrong,
Let me smell yo dick.

You may recognize it from Lord Byron’s epic poem Manfred. You may not. Either way, it’s awesome.

Note: always wear rhumba panties and a corset to bleach your cheating man’s clothes. (HT/Blame: OPS.)

SPITE AGAINST BLIGHT! That’s today’s variation on the EDSBS/Fanblogs Charity Bowl, or as it’s know at Fanblogs, the “Fanblogs/EDSBS Charity Bowl.” Bitches, we will diva-fight someone for top billing no matter how many tops we have to rip off. (SFW, as all boobs are bleeped out. Sad.)

Make a donation to one of our three fine charities today and you may specify whether the total goes for your team’s total or more entertainingly against another team’s number. Meaning: we expect stingy Georgia fans to actually show up and donate today to reduce Florida’s impressive total. (”Ahm savin’ for new trim!” Whatever, Early.) Tornadoes just ripped up Oklahoma and Georgia, half of the Irrawaddy river delta’s underwater, and Sichuan province just got rocked by a 7.9 earthquake. Pony up and make some primo deposits in the karma bank today.

If you learn anything from the totals, it’s this: don’t mess with Michigan in a fundraising war.

Team Donation Standings:

1. Michigan - $2,985.00
2. Ohio State - $2,305.00
3. Florida - $1,570.00
4. Texas - $480.00
5. Auburn - $355.00
6. Florida State - $350.00
7t. Case Western Reserve - $300.00
7t. Virginia - $300.00
8. Alabama - $230.00
9t. South Carolina - $200.00
9t. Georgia Tech - $200.00
9t. SMU - $200.00
10. Oklahoma - $185.00

Lurking: Tennessee, Nebraska, Va Tech, LSU, Notre Dame

At the moment it looks like this blog will be sporting Maize and Blue on Thursday, but that’s not a done deal. Because you are ready to donate and support your school of course, here are the particulars:

1) Make a donation online to the American Red Cross, CARE, or the International Rescue Committee.

2) Email the donation confirmation to kevin@fanblogs.com and state your team affiliation by 8pm EDT on Wednesday, May 14th. BE SURE TO STATE WHETHER YOUR DONATION GOES FOR YOUR TEAM OR AGAINST ANOTHER. Either way it counts, but we want you to have some fun with it, too.

3) Results will be displayed at Every Day Should Be Saturday and Fanblogs throughout the week, with the final results shown by Thursday, May 15th.

4) The winning school will have its colors displayed at EDSBS and logo/mascot shown on every page at Fanblogs.

Mondo important reminder: ALL DONATIONS MUST BE IN TO FANBLOGS BY 8PM EDT (5PM PDT) TONIGHT.

Donate early, donate often, and remember to specify your team donation. We’re at around $11K right now and expected to get a few thousand; getting to $20K would be beyond all but the wildest expectations.

Oh, festiva! Celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima with EDSBS Live tonight as we discuss SCANDAL in college football and at large with our guest, you.

The Four Scandalous Questions for the evening:

Who knew Hester was a Tide fan?

1. What was the worst scandal your school ever had? SMU fans, please feel free to call in.

2. What’s the worst scandal in college football RIGHT NOW? Feel free to slander whomever you like, so long as you are entertaining about it while on the air.

3. What’s the worst scandal you personally have been involved with? We’ll reveal ours on air, so scandalous is it.

4. What’s your favorite scandal? Nick Leeson, Rogue Trader. When you take down a whole bank with a single bet, you’re living to win, man. Leeson now writes books called “Coping With Stress” and plays poker professionally while running an Irish soccer club. Aside from time spent in Singaporean prison and colon cancer…where’s the downside, exactly?

We’ll see you tonight. Listen in with the sidebar or by going here at NowLive.com.

No, we’re not ready to actually make a top 25. Phil Steele (our only hope against Skynet) hasn’t spoken yet, and we’ll reserve judgment until then. It’s the only thing we’ll actually invest the few unmolested neurons we have left in before August. In the meantime, here’s the EDSBS staff’s offseason diversions list. Orson’s got odds; Holly’s got the evens.

Orson
25. Powerlifting. I blame Barwis, but I can’t go to the gym without doing something stupid with a bar and an Olympic rack. It’s way too fun doing moves that leave your whole body shaky like you just ingested a bad crack latte. It’ll be awesome until a disc flies out of my spine and knocks out grunty guy over on the fly machine over there.

Holly

24. Macrobiotic yogurt. The closest thing to cannibalism in your grocer’s refrigerator.

23. Mulberries. There’s a tree outside my door loaded with them. It’s like a squirrel-germ infested snack on the way to the car every time. I haven’t died yet, though I have found myself standing in the middle of the road feeling indecisive without explanation. (more…)

We woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning to finish a freelance piece. When you hear the quiet tone of an email bing! into your box at that hour, it is your good friend Xi Shuang Bo, who has helpfully sent you an attachment you should open without questioning or scanning from an anonymous server somewhere in Central Asia, or it is Google Alerts tossing five year old articles about Dennis Franchione at you. (”Franchione: ‘With McNeal, We Can’t Lose.’”)

So when, at 6:12 a.m., we heard a ding!, and would have ignored it had our spidey sense not been tingling. We were right; who else is awake at 6 in the morning thinking delusional thoughts of college football and hitting that Tuss early and often?

LSUFreek, of course. That’s who else is awake at that hour and cranking away.

As a semi-relevant bit of reader mail to tag to this, Dave writes in and notes:

I was looking over some stats today, and I noticed that UCLA punted for about 1,000 more yards last season (3,899) than Notre Dame racked up in total offense the whole year (2,907).

That does about sum it up, Dave. As we speak Charlie’s pondering tweaks as he walks among the endless aisles of virtual pie.

If it’s Monday, it must be time for us to mention that Scoreboard-domo Brian is hung like Reggie F’n Nelson and that it’s time for the Fulmer Cupdate for the week. Expansions, digressions, and other elaborate lies follow.

Florida makes a stout appearance with Jamar Hornsby’s credit card fraud charges, an eight pointer that’s enough to put them on the big board, albeit right down there at the bottom with only the mildly felonious teams. Urban Meyer, who kicked Hornsby off the team, is to be congratulated for nothing because what the crime lacked in actual severity it more than made up for in craven opportunism with despicable timing.

There’s something at root here to acknowledge: despite the vaunted decline in character and overall permissive tone in the Meyer era at Florida, there’s little to cite in his stay indicating he’s particularly lenient or harsh. For all the drill sergeant talk, he let Marcus Thomas smoke through a zillion failed drug tests before he got the boot. And for all the carping (ourselves included) about him being a lax disciplinarian, every kid who committed a major crime (Ronnie Wilson, Jamar Hornsby) was booted from the team…albeit after the requisite wait/see period that makes fans slightly queasyish.

To counter an additional angle of the argument, it doesn’t seem like there’s much differentiating his tenure from [NAME REDACTED]’s in terms of player discipline. The two biggest incidents in the prior regime involved an accusation of sexual assault (Clint Mitchell,) Taurean Charles’ double manfest of punching a smaller man off a porch at a party and then attempting to keggenate the guy’s head with a half-full keg, and then the frat fight [NAME REDACTED] broke up/got involved in towards the end of the Times of Trouble.

Toss in capers with Channing “Nope, Not my Car” Crowder and Steven Harris, and then go even further back to look at the long line of youthful, muscled-up stupidity at Florida re: football players and discipline during the Spurrier era, and there’s only one crucial difference between any of them: Spurrier was a bit quicker to boot someone immediately, whereas [NAME REDACTED] and Meyer seem willing to do anything to avoid giving shoe leather enemas unless absolutely necessary. All three excused, hemmed, hawed, and kept players on when it was convenient to do so.

It’s a warm place–like Tallahassee or Miami–filled with top-notch athletes from impoverished backgrounds. Give them booze and a diet-sized slice of fame cheesecake, and this will happen…especially when coaches enable them by being even slightly tolerant of it, something Meyer undoubtedly and demonstrably has been. He’s enabled it where other coaches haven’t, and–we tremble with irony as we type this–he could look to the hardline fear Randy Shannon seems to instill in the same kids a few hundred miles south in Coral Gables as an example of how to do it in circumstances extremely conducive to player misconduct.

Oh, and an Alabama player got cited for walking around drunk. If the police actually applied this law even-handedly and not just to young drunk black men across Alabama, the state would be deforested in a matter of days with the frenzied ticket-writing.

Finally: Brian O’Blivion gets his points, corrected dutifully in comment threads for something like two months, awarded to Washington State. Their total now stands corrected at 12 total. Missouri’s looking difficult to catch at this point, yet the others refuse to drop out of the competition: WHY ARE YOU HURTING THE RACE BY STAYING IN, WEST VIRGINIA?!?!?!?

As noted in the headline: we’re both glad he’s okay and not the guy pulling the trigger given the recent trajectory of Florida offseasons.

Former Armwood All-American lineman Matt Patchan, who now plays for the Florida Gators, was shot in the back Friday night at Sadie Park in Brandon, Armwood coach Sean Callahan confirmed Monday morning.

Callahan said he has since talked to Patchan and added that “he’s fine.” Florida coach Urban Meyer just confirmed in a statement that Patchan was shot and is doing okay.

If he has a massive season on the line, chalk it up to involuntary iron fortification. Mike Barwis does NOT endorse this method of vitamin delivery, btw.

Not trainer-approved method of working in vitamins.

The University of Washington is ditching “Bow Down To Washington,” and in some senses that’s a shame. This site more than most enjoys a good dose of titter-worthy anachronism, and the lyrics to “Bow Down” have a few howlers we have to read wearing a top hat and kicking an urchin into a gutter:

So, heaven help the foes of Washington,
They’re trembling at the feet of mighty Washington.
Our boys are there with bells,
Their fighting blood excells,
It’s harder to push them over the lines than pass the Dardanelles.
So Victory’s the cry of Washington
Our leather lungs together with a Rah! Rah! Rah!

The Dardanelles comparison remains accurate for modern-day Washington football–easy to pass through, and to readers on the East Coast, situated in an exotic and foreign land–but the uni’s asked for submissions for the lyrics to an entirely new, Turkey reference-free fight song. (The music will not be left to the proles and will instead be composed by Bill Conti, the guy who did the Rocky theme and–more importantly–the motherfucking Falcon Crest theme!)

CORRECTION: Yes, this refers to the alma mater, not the fight song. Our submission still stands, and is much more singable than most alma maters we know.

We decided to throw our hat in the ring, and even offered up our own electrifying music to accompany the lyrics. It’s not your standard fare, but it captures the spirit of what we learned about the Unversity of Washington in at least ten minutes of internet research and what we already half-know about Washington Football.

With the use of a drum machine and keytar, you can not only drive the crowd into an ironic frenzy, but also save money on the expensive and indulgent use of a marching band. We’re considerate and proactive in every facet of our existence, U-Dub. Choose our song and see:

We’ll take that check made out to the Chicago Area Shriner’s Hospital, please. And you’re welcome, Washington. You truly are six foot twenty and fuckin’ killing for fun.

(Animation by Irishoutsider, in case that wasn’t totally and completely obvious. Blame him when the toothy peanut haunts your nightmares.)

As several commenters have suggested, we are COMPLETELY ripping off Cox and Combe’s “Washington”, though we’re stealing large chunks of Miss Kittin and the Hacker’s “Frank Sinatra,” too.