“Farewell happy fields / Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail!”

Cornelius Ingram, TE, has a torn ACL according to Joe Schad on ESPN. It’s not the worst news for Florida, who has a potent replacement in Aaron Hernandez coming up, but it sucks royally for Ingram on a personal and karmic level. Ingram came back for his senior season, thrived at TE after moving over from qb, and has been the ho-hum oh just perfect citizen as far as being a credit to his school, team, and the utterly awesome name “Cornelius.”

You know what really broke his ACL, though, according to Urban Meyer? That damned celebration, of course. Urban Meyer hasn’t forgotten about that.

It’s time for the Fulmer Cup finals. Question one: who’s hung like Reggie F’n Nelson? Answer: Brian, who brought you the board two days ago, but we didn’t have time to post it. Clarifications and refusals to perform basic math follow.

Note again please that West Virginia’s points have been reduced to their correct status, since the player in question was allegedly kicked off the team after spring practice. Also please consider that though the record now reflects that said player, Kendall Washington, was kicked off of the team prior to attempting to shoot someone in their bed during a robbery, there was little we could find in the archives to back this post-spring bootage. None of this seems fishy at all, but please: just note that.

Georgia, too, has its correct tally restored this week, with Lomax’s charges dismissed and accounted for in the total. Send us one more email about this and we will say nice things about your football team and therefore curse your entire season. (”How the hell did Knowshon Moreno get attacked by a hippo at White Water? DAMN YOU ORSON!!! [angry fist]“)

We’re not correcting the rules. There’s a reason Alabama’s in the lead, and it’s because the charges were filed and scored accordingly. The only quasi-sane way to gauge a program’s actual quantified feloniousness is balancing the number of charges with the severity of the charges, thus avoiding giving UGA the Cup for having the most arrests of a paltry sort, and avoiding giving it to one program based on one huge neutron-bomb of an arrest.

From one angle, we could see this being the case with the Alabama arrest if and only if a.) Alabama hadn’t already had a turbulent offseason of arrests, and b.) if Johns hadn’t operated a small-scale cocaine trafficking operation in such close proximity to the football program. You make repeated sales to TPD including one in the parking lot of the football facilities, then you get the points with zero qualification or quarter.

As for the “how can this be worse than murder” issue, see the fact that charges are charges, and we can only work off what they file, and the fact that very few programs really have a nagging “murder problem.” Except for the Darfur University Fightin’ Salukis, we can’t think of a program that does.

The ninth circle is reserved exclusively for you, sir. ROOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLL TAAAAAAHHHHHDE!!!

Chase Daniel threw for 33 TDs last year, lead Missouri to its best finish of the Gary Pinkel era, and managed to fool the entirety of college football into thinking he was a humble 21 year old, and not the 37 year-old pizza deliveryman riding the most improbable streak of late-blooming athletic talent the world has ever seen since the rise (pun) of Shigeo Tokuda.

Not that anyone’s lying here, but consider the carefully

An outstanding all-around athlete who is also a First-Team all-district pitcher/outfielder in baseball, and a member of his school’s sprint relay team in track

What’s missing form this statement? The tag words …in 1989, of course. We are more than happy to believe Daniel is a stellar athlete, since that’s apparent to anyone who’s watched him drop the hammer on finely tuned throttle of the Mizzou offense. (Zero to forty points: four quarters. Standard road conditions and hopelessly waving Big 12 dbs apply.)

What we will not do is ignore the fact that Daniel looks, for lack of a more delicate word, a bit schlubby for a Big 12 qb. He’s a Chris Leak-six footer with a bit of spare flub about the middle and the chinstrap beard of a Sunglass Hut romeo who specializes in picking up high school women. (OMG! He has a SPORTS CAR AND HIS OWN APARTMENT!!11!!!)

He looks (conservatively) five years older than his surrounding cast, and saying we don’t think that every time he plays is like saying somewhere, deep in our dark soul, we don’t want Nick Saban to skydive into Tiger Stadium for his own safety this season trailing a long plume of red and white smoke from a lit Crimson Tide-themed flare he’s holding. We’re fine with lying to ourselves, but to you? Never. We swear.

Daniel, living the dream as he is, is officially on our list of “People We Love” as an atypical-looking successful college qb along with Freddie Kitchens, Rohan “Skinny Wickets” Davey, and Jared Lorenzen. We’re not alone in this: Daniel earned the cover of SI’s Big 12 Edition, and they’re of a similar mind on their theories surrounding Daniel’s origins.

For the record, Daniel has gone to a goatee for 2008. When the chips are down, though, we know Daniel will go return to the chinstrap whether he likes it or not. Its magic is powerful and undeniable. Look for it to spontaneously reform itself from the goatee’s hair when the Tigers need some comeback juju down by two TDs late to a conference rival.

(Oh, apologies! Chase Daniel looks like a killing machine! GRRR!! MUSCLES AND BEARDS!!!)

The Kid guest stars today as he performs his “homage,” or “total and complete rip-off” of A.J. Daulerio’s Cultural Oddsmaker. Enjoy him here and at House Rock Built, newly rebuilt for the ‘08.

Its not that hard to start a controversy these days. A bit of alcohol here, maybe an extra serving of purple drank or two, some not-so-bright skill position players, and you’ve got yourself a bonafide hit in the the 24-hour college football blog o cycle. You dont even need to combine the Kwik Stop robbery, DUI, train-running in any particular order any more, and you certainly don’t even need to have more than one.

Maurice Clarett taking his best friends Grey Goose and bulletproof vest out for a spin feel like forever ago, but its not too late for some schools to rocket to the top of the Fulmer Cup standings with some obcenely stupid act of disregard for the law. We’ve decdided to put together a brief list of the top offenses yet to be committed because, well, we dont exactly know why, but we have to think the following are only a matter of time.

Southern Cal 3:2

It has long been rumored, nay outright inferred, that USC is paying their VHT prospects in stacks upon stacks of wet, hot, stinky, delicious legal tender. The best storyline: Reggie Bush getting paid off in some sort of intricate sports agency tapping-up scheme likely bankrolled by the local Indian casino, a story making for a fascinating plot to some sort of straight-to-video Van Damme DVD. We’re going to go so far as to think that eventually the entire two-deep is going to get busted when Mike Williams decides to go State’s Evidence for a carton of Zingers.

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