Taste my intensity. Blame a single bullet point in an update on the Jets offseason on the frisson of pleasure, fear, and freckled intensity that shot through Notre Dame fans yesterday. Watch me bite my lip and glower to push you to the heights of .500 football as only he can. GRRRRRRRRRuden.

S0812_Dolphins_Bucs_ES001.jpg
GRRRRRRRRRR…wild card slot.

We can understand why Notre Dame fans get so excited over him, as he’s actually been a head coach, and is not the guy currently holding the job, who may be blamed for everything with a convenient ease. However, Charlie Weis’ buyout remains so astronomically large as to render the idea both insane (not ruling out hiring in any case, this insanity) and fiscally improbable (a much more effective choke on the idea.) It has been ruled improbable by John Walters of MSNBC and graphed by Doc Saturday, but let us say that if the variables are “Notre Dame” and “coach,” the answer is a set of mathematical brackets with the answer “all numbers real and imaginary” in between them.

He accused us of being hillbillies who eat wood! Or we thought he was funny. Mark Richt suggested to a recruit and his family that one of his coaches devoured wood in the name of good barbecue…AND THEY FOUND IT QUITE HUMOROUS.

That was all Richt needed to start teasing Ball. “He asked [Ball], ‘What do you do? Bite into each type of wood before you use it to see what type of flavors you have?’ They kept joking back and forth about it. It was so funny, everybody was laughing.”

And then Brandon Spikes tackled Richt for an eight yard loss, ate his barbecue, and gave him a pink suit to show his ass some style.

An anonymous cartel? That’s even better! Blutarsky nods in Brian Cook’s direction, and rightfully so: the only thing better than a cartel is an unaccountable, faceless cartel determining the extremely contrived national champion we comfort ourselves with at the end of the season. We’re pragmatists at this point in that we don’t want a pure playoff by name, or a continuation of the BCS, or even the paleoradical idea of going back to the old pre-BCS bowl/poll system. We’re just hoping for “less contrived” at this point, whatever that might be. We would also like a complimentary, guilt-free mistress with a clean bill of health, a Shelby Cobra we could wrap around a telephone poll guilt-free, and a guilt-free inheritance dropped on us in the next few days. We all have hopes.

You may have your wish. Bill Young, Miami’s current DC, is wobbling toward accepting a job as the defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State, thus creating a vacancy possibly filled by current Georgia DC Willie Martinez, who is quite good but occasionally makes Georgia fans’ “to be whooped” list when his defense fails to show up in spectacular fashion. (And it only seems to happen this way with Martinez: big failures, not small ones.) Also on the “to be whooped” list: FDR, Florida, Charles Darwin, Steve Spurrier, and Gravity.

That’s a slightly terrifying idea. In addition to the greatest recruiting class in the history of the known universe, Brandon LaFell will return to LSU next year to ensure that the LSU offense hangs somewhere at a steady terrifying for 2009. Subtract the charity of Jarrett Lee, who only throws touchdowns (both ways,) add in any improvement on defense at all under Number 3 Bulgarian Customs Inspector John Chavis, and include the play of qb Jordan Jefferson, and this is all looking typically fearsome for those electing to play LSU this season.