No way. Rock stops for no one. You don’t need less smoke, but rather more fire to illuminate the smoke. Consider more smokepots and strobe lights, or perhaps a Ronnie James Dio dragon belching flame over the tunnel. (HT: SBB.)

The Alabama Health Report, Brought to You By Dr. McElroy’s Whiskey for Constitution and the Pleurisy. Health and Alabama are not two words that often go together; in fact, only in the field of obesity research does Alabama really shine, unless you count the shitload of doctors in Birmingham who, presumably, makes lots of money treating each other’s ailments. (We’re not joking about the obesity research thing. Remember: you don’t have to make anything up, but just have to write it down.)

First, Terrence Cody’s knee injury is now named and quantified in terms of impact to his playing time: MCL, 2 weeks, and comparable to the injury sidelining offensive lineman/mangenius Andre Smith earlier this season. His replacement, Josh Chapman, benched 300 pounds as a ninth-grader and is considered the strongest person on the team. He is not, like Cody, the size of a bear on its hind legs.

Alabama Health Report, Part Two: Tommy Tuberville is not dead, and does not plan to be any time soon:

Tuberville says: “I did not have a stroke. I am completely healthy. … About three months ago, I had a full physical.”

Tommy Tuberville has not yielded to the Spanish Menace. He does not have scrofula, the screaming shits, nor cirrhosis of the eye. He has no immediate plans to withdraw from the colonies overseas, and he stands firm on the notion that relinquishing the gold standard would take us all down the road to serfdom. Tommy Tuberville stands tall against crypto-anarchism. Tommy Tuberville will not let the bastards grind him down.

Decommitment issues. In the meantime, both Tuberville and Clemson’s trying-way-too-hard Dabo Swinney are having to plug holes in the recruiting dike due to the firing-type issues surrounding both programs. The recruiting dike is a metaphor, and not a literal metaphor, though if she were literal she would be caring, sensitive, and would ply recruits with herbal tea and smart pantsuits.

So…they’re broke. But not. T. Boone has lost roughly a third of his net worth in the current downturn, but OSU football is his only investment paying off at the moment. Even that may have to wait, however, as Pickens is one of many boosters suffering investile dysfunction as a result of the market. At least he’s not Kansas booster Tom Kivisto, who has former FBI Louis Freeh sniffing around how he lost more money than you’ll ever think about making in the oil futures market.