In Thursday’s Weather Schmeather Update, we erroneously predicted “blood rain, windy/  low of 38 degrees” for South Bend, Indiana. The low will actually be 17 degrees F. As a step to prevent further inaccuracies, Charlie Weis announced he will be predicting the weather himself for the 2009 season.

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We have plans in 2010. We don’t know what, but the whole year’s off the books with the news that West Virginia will be traveling to Baton Rouge to play the Tigahs. GIRL SCOUT FIGHT.

The luster may have faded off West Virginia a bit: their strength and conditioning coach no longer owns wolves, their coach cites odd bits of West Virginia political wisdom to the bafflement of outsiders, and they may have settled down into an 8-5ish trough under Bill Stewart. Yet the concept of the Mountaineer fanbase trekking to truculent Tiger Stadium at night rivets the imagination. Not only is there a real potential of the selling of brown liquor futures for immense profit possible prior to the event, but it also may be the largest collection of people who can taxiderm anything in one place ever for any reason in the history of the universe. (The list of things they are willing to taxiderm includes people, of course.)

It will be a Pikey wake minus the restraint of passing out due to too much alcohol. It will be badass in eighty different degrees. It will smell like Richard Harris’s handkerchief. It will be necessary in every single way. Can a single musket shot blow up an airboat? How many men with hunting beards does it take to subdue a single tiger? QUIEN ES MAS FEDERALLY SUBSIDIZED? The amount of chaos in this single frame could make the ghost of Hieronymus Bosch throw his hands up and run away from the scene weeping. The Garden of Girthly Delights is on the way, and you’re not ready. (Too bad, says Hell and All That’s Coming With It.)

If we have to die, this would be a noble way to go. (Also: corpse stuffed and mounted on a handsome wall plaque within minutes of our death.)

(The post title references the fact that Rasputin might be there. It’s that kind of event.)

When college football generates things like this…

…all boats are floated by a tide of joy it creates. (HT path: Joe Sports Fan through Bully for Old Mizzou.)

In our focus on offseason conditioning around college football, we present Colorado’s infamous “Jack Palance 13,” a series of grueling workouts named after a baker’s dozen of Dan Hawkins’ favorite Western actor’s movies.

Bloody Avenger Players scale a forty foot-tall pile of shale while towing another player behind them on a shock cord wrapped around their wrists . The prone player must visualize victory while refusing to bleed. Repeat until blood loss becomes unsustainable and constant.

Grrrrr. Training with the Hawk.

The Last Contract. Players bear crawl a path in the shape of the word “victory” with a pair of eighty pound kettlebells. Victory is to be sprayed across football field in letters covering the area from the ten yard line to the opposite ten yard line. After the five minute mark, the path is set alight to provide additional motivation.

Unknown Powers: Everyone leaves the practice facility, running in different directions, and must kill the first animal larger than their hand they encounter and return wearing its skin. (more…)

Jacory Harris of Miami is trying to gain weight the old-fashioned way: by eating himself into a clammy, gibbering stupor at “MLK Restaurant Proudly Specializing in Home Cooked Meals” in Miami. Put down your drool guards, fat guys, because we’re about to reprint quality food porn that is the culinary equivalent of watching vintage Swedish adult film through the scrambled lines of cheap eighties cable.

One glance at the menu backs up the slogan. Fried chicken and smothered chicken wings. Pan Sausage. Liver and grits. It’s all food, as one of your older relatives likes to say, that “sticks to your ribs.

I want an extra waffle THIS big.

Goddamn, that sounds good–even the liver and grits, which for some reason would be delicious in Miami, since for some reason anyone from Miami has the ability to competently prepare the filter-gland and make it taste way better than a body’s version of an air-filter has a right to taste.

It would sound a lot better if whole pieces of it didn’t bypass the digestive system entirely and take up residency in your colon, brain, and aorta, but who the fuck cares: you have to die someday, and doing that without completely wearing out the warranty on the equipment makes as much sense as letting your car die from old age and not from being wrapped around a telephone pole in a fiery 80 mile police chase. Harris is pounding the fish platter and extra waffle to bulk up, as qbs are following the over all trend of getting larger to absorb the pounding they’re taking from the even more swollen likes of linebackers and defensive linemen.

(Willy Korn is the heaviest qb in the ACC at 220, but 30 pounds of that is his cock, because Willy Korn is awesome because his name is Willy Korn, and saying his name in a mantra-like fashion has POWERS.)

He may have to take more of that, too. Miami wants a more “pro-style” feel, which by definition means more formations and more concussions for the quarterback, fewer points, and a vanilla playbook camouflaged with a zillion shifts and one yard runs on first down.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may: while West Coast football fans are genetically incapable of caring about football like most other college fans–NOBEL PRIZE!!! NOBEL PRIZE!!!–they still do, in between living perfect, mellow lives of casually pursued xtreeem sports and casual sex, care about football. Washington fans still do. In fact, they used to harm people. Quite badly, as in Miami’s case in 2000.

Which is why Washington fans may want to pause in their lunchtime ascent of Mount Rainier and put down the notepad they’re using to take notes for their next piece in Outside magazine to consider the magnificent descent of their program, and the tremendous shitpile their new headcoach is buried under. Most stories seem fit to cast a coach’s task list as being the inheritance of just one bad coach, but Washington’s is a series of false peaks upon false peaks: first the Luciferian fall from the 11-1 2000 season into Rick Neuheisel’s firing, the first nadir under Keith Gilbertson in 2004 at 1-10, and then the total heat death of the Willingham era and the winless 2008 season.

Washington’s had the worst kind of three-way one could possibly imagine having in terms of coaches this decade, meaning even a cold-hearted hanging jury such as ourselves has some degree of long-term patience with Steve Sarkisian. There’s no honeymoon period, because if the bride is dead it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. This is not a marriage, but rather a zombie resurrection. If Sarkisian is capable of getting Washington over 500 in three years, that’s success. It hurts us a bit just to type that about a program we remember beating an NFL-grade ‘Canes team at the turn of the millenium, but it’s true. If Sarkisian can show up for work every day during the season without bursting into tears and chomping Zoloft like rolls of Smarties, that would be success enough for year one.

Football is like life: it has a playbook, and when it breaks down, people get hurt. Enjoy.

The play begins thusly. We play the part of the quarterback, labeled here as O/S. The idea: to successfully pitch our way through an evening of socializing at a party in DC with the pitchman, our friend the local DC-ite and aspiring political lizard-person, trailing the play. (You ask: how are you friends with a person-lizard? Simple. You just feed them lettuce just like an iguana, and they’ll be your friend forever.)

The design of the play is simple: the blockers here are played by our liver and ability to make small talk. They will block the dangerous elements of the defense in order to free movement throughout the party, and if needs be the pitchman will take the ball of conversation or social interaction when alcohol or the awkwardness of discussing anything with the half-reptiles at this largely politico-style party. (more…)

For just $35, you and your loved ones can get your faces rocked off by the Dark Lord of Rock himself: NICK SABAN. That’s only a dollar per soul-scorching glare! Or fifty cents per use of the word “process!”

The Crimson Caravan Tour will hit all of the top spots, of course: Bimini, Ibiza, Davos, Yalta. Just kidding: they’ll be traipsing through the very dark heart of Trucksylvania itself: Mobile, Panama City, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Atlanta, where Saban and Three Doors Down will treat the Gwinnett Arena to an evening of conditioning drills and songs for guys with goatees and tribal armband tattoos.

Dress is business casual. As for the definition of that…

…why, yes sir! That’s exactly what we meant by “business casual.” See you there!