Of all the things we loathe about sports culture in the United States, it’s the enshrinement of “smack.” First, to steal our favorite word for heroin is a shame, since “smack” is an inherently funny word used in overwrought heroin dramas and blaxploitation flicks. For Jim Rome to take it to the masses and rebrand it as a form of discourse used IN ALL CAPS SEACREST OUT (that’s tight, broseph, tight) remains a fucking shame.

You’ll never take smack away from us, nor the glorious comedies it inspires.

Two, smack and smack-talkers off the field suck, and suck at what they do for the most part. A little convivial ribbing? Acceptable. A well-tuned jab and skillful riposte? Excellent. Bellowing in a parking lot at a total stranger? Well, legally that’s just assault, and if you’re going to do it, you may as well get the red-mist blood flowing and throw a drunken punch or two before you get pulled apart by your friends, who you’re lucky were there “or the Beast would have taken over, man, and I don’t want that to happen again.”

Three: Jim. (Four minutes of silence.) Rome.

Yeah, but fuck all that, cause the SMACK WAGON is comin’ your way, brah!

At each stop, the RV is giving away t-shirts and mini-footballs, meeting with student groups, distributing fliers, participating in radio promotions, attending university games and generating overall excitement. Garrity and other MSL staff, including former NFL All-Pro Chuck Muncie (a partner with MSL), are traveling with the RV.

“All of these schools are in it to win, so the competition is incredible,” says Garrity. “We expect it to become especially fierce as text votes begin coming in and the schools’ running tallies of tickets sold get posted.”

Text votes make me wanna fight like a brave! The promo is part of the Fox Sports/Big Ten Network’s Gridiron Bash, a series of college football kickoff concerts including:

–Fergie
–Maroon 5
–The Black Crowes
–Dwight Yoakam.

If you happen to be a college student longing to seduce your best friend’s mother, your train done come in, son. Five margaritas, a Fergie show, and two hours of sustained attention should be enough to convince her to play a little modern day Emma Bovary adventure with you.

Brian brings us this week’s Big Board, an active board for those who really, really don’t have time for this shit. Notes, clarifications, and open challenges to fight follow.

The biggest leap in the board comes from Oregon State. Do not blame us, blame the authorities who file the charges and insist on playing triple-word-score with the charges for otherwise five/six point crimes.

Al Afalava, a three-year starter for the Oregon State football team’s defense, was cited for criminal mischief, which is a felony, DUII and hit-and-run by the Corvallis Police on Feb. 9, according to Corvallis Police Department public information officer Lt. Dave Henslee.

See? Corvallis police charge him with everything including “untidy arrangement of vehicular garbage resulting in messy crash scene,” and by rule we spit out points like a broken ATM. Blame the Farvas at the Corvallis police department and drunkass Al Afalava for the skewed charges, not us. Mike Riley says he can tell Aflalava’s making a tackle just from the sound. Now the Corvallis police have the same ability.

Alabama makes the first of two ironic scores in the Cupdate. Your team captain gets arrested for disorderly conduct! No salt or pepper needed! Take that scotch neat, you will. Add in the Elder armed robbery arrest, and we’re talking magic.

Louisville went a-road tripping, and oh what a time that was. We awarded two bonus points for this one, but with the charges as they stand, even the brazen gusto of robbing a convenience store (and on a school night, young man) doesn’t tally up the pile of points Alabama and Oregon State racked up. Even so, the Farking is good to you and good for you in this case.

HT: Reed. He does reek of triumph, with just a hint of hot dog roller.

Double your irony at no extra charge: Iowa players get busted for drug charges while Kirk Ferentz, attempting to right the ship, is actually on the Iowa Hawkeye Booster Cruise. “Shore to ship, can you hear me–” “Umm, no…you’re breaking CHHHRRRGGGGGFAKEMOUTHNOISEKKRRRGGGG up KRRRGGHHHH…”

Kansas loses points due to a clerical error on our part: the trumped up “dog-on-the-loose” charge has been dismissed due to PeteJayhawk’s diligent work, informing us that the player in question is a fifth-year senior with no eligibility left. Not on the team, not in the tally.

Post your compliments, gratuitous stroking of our ego, and cries from the WAAAAAAHHHHHHmbulance below. And pleading for points is just perverse, unless you’re from the U. Then you’re just trying to compete like competitors would, playa. (We’re looking at you, Barstoolio!)

It’s more embarrassing than bad, or depending on your viewpoint, not bad at all, but here’s what we were talking about in the Curious Index this morning when we were talking about this being a bad day for Wake Forest: pictures that appear to be Riley Skinner posing nude for the camera.

Remember, kids: it all ends up on the internet. If there’s a video of you being ball-gagged and dominated by a prominent Canadian sex ed expert, don’t go around expecting it not to pop up somewhere. And if it does pop up somewhere…Sue Johanson, you’re a dead woman, you hear! A dead woman!

Sue, you promised!

Over the next two weeks, panties will be bunched in unreal quantities over the intents and desire of athletically gifted 18 year olds as recruiting season barrels along toward signing day. And with this, take as a warning of pinning too much hope on one recruit the tale of Xavier Lee, former…all-everything, apparently.

High School: Graduated from Seabreeze High School in 2004… rated a five-star player by Rivals.com and the No. 1 rated dual threat quarterback in the nation…named to the Superprep Elite 50 …PrepStar Top 100 Dream Team member…regarded by some as the top quarterback prospect in the country…holds Florida’s all-time record for passing yards (9,082), completions (549) and TDs (98)…named Florida’s Mr. Football for 2003..

He’s taking all of that to the NFL draft and declining to transfer, says Lee’s father in the announcement telling the bit of the world still cognizant of Lee’s existence that he was, in fact, leaving Florida State after the coaches asked Lee to switch to tight end for the 2008 season.

According to Willie Lee, Xavier likely will prepare for an anticipated invitation to the NFL scouting combine, and will not transfer to another school.

“Can’t blame him, man,” Willie Lee said of his son’s decision to leave school, according to the Sentinel. “What else is he going to do — sit around there and watch other kids go ahead of him?”

It worked for four years, Willie. What’s a fifth? Lee, as heralded a high school recruit as there was in college football, will move on to prep work for the combine. If Drew Weatherford is drafted exactly one spot ahead of him, we will roll on the floor in fits of laughter.

Xavier Lee, seen here seconds before being benched for Drew Weatherford.

We recap the most malicious strokes of fate for 2007. Did you leave the iron on? Because that will burn your whole house down.

5. Whiff! Tackle! Fumble! Weeping! You’ve got the ball, you’re down 14-13 in a tight ball game against a team with an iron deficient offense, and they’re 1:24 left on the clock. What would shock the hell out of someone? Really finish the game off? How about a pass? WITHOUT PASS PROTECTION! BOLD!

We’re not sure if the malicious stroke of fate in this case is Quentin Groves planting you face-first into the turf and causing you to fumble and losing the game for you or the offensive coordinator making this call in the first place. Either way, though, life hates you, and the tire blowout that sent you flying into oncoming traffic was no accident. Your mistake was showing up in the first place.

(Edited from the original. Our apologies for the usual errors.)

We recap the ten most painful and malicious moments of the 2007 season. Life isn’t fair. Are you alone right now? Don’t you think that’s a bit…dangerous?

7. Mikey Henderson stabs you in the heart. Little can help soothe the pain of an overtime loss at home, but you know what you can try? Nothing. You thought we had some cheery recommendation there, didn’t you? We didn’t: it’s a hole that never goes away, no matter how much booze, crack, consumer spending, or reckless sex you pour into it.

Ask Alabama fans, who somehow gave up a game-winning and game-ending TD to Mikey Henderson from Matthew Stafford. We recommend you become a friend of horror. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends.

Meaning Alabama fans should send cakes and gifts to Stafford and Henderson, because this will be horror for the remainder of the offseason for Tide fans.

You can almost hear Bama fans: “HOW THE HELL DOES A 5′ 9″ WIDEOUT DO THAT!” With malicious fate pushing at his back, of course.

Your theme for the post:

One of the things you never see as a threat to your football program is divorce. But Tampa just brings the funk like that, as Ben Moffitt and wife are proving in their increasingly acrimonious divorce settlement.

TAMPA, AMERICA’S NEXT GREAT CITY SINCE 1979 - Shauna Moffitt, the wife of University of South Florida senior linebacker Ben Moffitt, said she wrote nearly every paper for him during his five years at USF and also completed two online courses for him.

“Ben Moffitt has never written a paper,” Shauna said. “Never. Ever. I love him, but he doesn’t know how to spell. He cheats.”

If you say that someone can’t spell in public, we’d argue that you probably don’t actually love him, but whatever–it’s divorce, let bullets fly and the grenades tumble. Most guys would prefer this to the usual gay/small penis/serial abuser accusations that surface after divorces, save for one detail: it could get an NCAA investigation working at USF.

The chances of the investigation actually digging up anything incriminating are tiny: if Moffitt was really getting papers written for him by his wife and her twin sister (yes, let your mind go there, now come on back) as alleged in the article, it proves that Moffitt is a cheater, but doesn’t come anywhere close to proving USF had anything to do with it. Whoever actually wrote the papers, the story does have some import for two people: Moffitt, portrayed as someone who’s deserted his family for the past two months, and Nick Saban, who earned tongue daggers from Leavitt after Saban suggested USF’s roster was full of guys “who probably could have gone to Florida or Florida State but Florida and Florida State couldn’t take them.”

As suggested in the title of the post: Moffitt may not be able to spell, but he clearly has a deep understanding of the economic concept of division of labor. (HT: ZZGator)

Only fitting that in Opposite Year (as opposed to Opposite Day), that Lloyd Carr and Michigan would slip the shackles of malicious fate and win a game they were not, by any measure of word, expected to win. Michigan embodied the twisted braid of 2007 football kismet: losing to Appalachian State, bouncing back to face tOSU for the Big Ten crown, losing a bitter and winnable rivalry game, and then finding redemption in a hardfought game with Florida where they outmanned the Gators across the board.

Carr’s time as a coach is done, but earmark this moment in time for a reason. In a season where semantically everything went against script, two things happened in this game that came straight out of Hollywood football central casting: a retiring coach who did things the right way won his last game, and the Heisman Trophy winner lost his postseason game. Michigan crawled a long, Lemmywinksish path up the large intestine of the 2007 college football season. As must as it sucked to be the fall guy in the script, it was nice to be part of a crowd-pleaser, even if it meant enduring the part of an agonizing death scene.

Good game and good-bye, Lloyd. See you in the Bo suite.

No fucking way: West By God Virginia is suggesting that WVSports.com (Rivals’ WVU board) is reporting that Nick Saban’s agent contacted West Virginia about the opening left by Rich Rodriguez’s departure.

4 million dollars buys you dick these days.

EDIT/UPDATE/ETC. WBGV reported this first, no WVSports, who confirmed the story, most likely from the same source. As with any of these stories, be ever skeptical, but with Petrino’s rain of back-daggers on Tuesday, perhaps Nick Saban and agent felt the need to flex their skills just to show the new kid in town who the real tiger-style master is.

Tonight, on our first sad puppy clown face edition of EDSBS Live, we’ll be discussing Michigan’s dramatic coaching search with Brian Cook of Mgoblog, who’ll have extremely kind and positive things to say about Michigan AD Bill Martin and everyone else involved in the process of picking the Wolverines next head coach.

In honor of Bill Martin, we’ll hit ya with some Christopher Cross pre-show, just to keep you properly mellowed out and smoooooooooth.

7 EST, hit the button on the right sidebar and join the fun.

Good stories need good villains, like Dr. No, Keyzer Soze, or Andy Garcia in When a Man Loves a Woman. (Let the woman drink, dammit!) For Florida fans and ACC foes, the sunflower-seed chomping clipboard frog-god and defensive mafioso who sent garnet-and-gold hitmen to kill quarterbacks at a startling clip through FSU’s glory years of the ’90s played this role to the hilt: Mickey Andrews, who still calls the defense for the ‘Noles and who may be retiring following this year, per FSU Sports Commentary.

Despite his substantial villain cred, we’re not sad to hear Andrews might be retiring. We’re can’t be sentimental, especially about a defensive coordinator whose defenses persistently added dirty play, late hits, and deliberate attempts to injure to their repertoire of solid schemes and eye-popping talent. Ten years ago, we’d have been the first to happily throw his box of office mementos and personal belongings to the curb: quarterbacks simply died against Noles defenses.

But we’d like to go ahead and come right out and say that he’s grown on us as a Gator fan. No, really. We’ll take him there as long as he wants to stay, just because he’s such an old-school, classic sort of figure. Really! No ulterior motives here. He’s superb.

KeepMickeyAndrews.com! Dibs!

Without Dr. Robert Cade, we’d have never known the joys of Brawndo, glowing sweat, Powerthirst, or the ti-zzight Keith Jackson ads where he dramatically overstates the effect of sugar, water, and salt mixed togther in a single beverage on the play of the Florida football team. (Hey, it worked, but Ray Graves probably had as much to do with a 70 win decade as Gatorade did.)

Cade, who died today of kidney failure, was the inventor of Gatorade, the wonder beverage launching an entire industry of obese child-fuel, and someone who shared an experience we had many a time in Gainesville: he scraped together around forty bucks and mixed up something that made him vomit.

“It sort of tasted like toilet bowl cleaner,” said Dana Shires, one of the researchers.

“I guzzled it and I vomited,” Cade said.

He’s talking about the first batch of Gatorade. We’re referencing just about any night between 1994 and 1997, but sure, it’s the same feeling, more or less, minus the cold press of a jail cell against your face and waking up naked in the primate research facility. (Again.) We hope Cade didn’t experience anything of the sort in his research or in his subsequent life as a researcher at the University of Florida, where he worked until his retirement in 2004.

Dr. Cade was eighty.

Despite the obvious mention of the “new coaching staff” Tom Osborne claims that no decision will be made about the coaching staff until the offseason. Tom Osborne also wants to sell you some ocean front property in Arizona, promises you don’t have to worry about your daughter on prom night because she took a “virginity pledge” and extolled how much more difficult it is to recruit to Notre Dame because of the academic standards.

HT: W. Brinson.

Vegas, move the line! The ever-flammable Kyle Jackson is starting at free safety for Florida this weekend against Georgia in place of freshman Major Wright, out following hand surgery.

It’s a smallish game between two no-name teams at some undefined competitive level of high school football. Yet the simple, Windows Movie Maker-crafted message of the video should call shake traumatic memories loose from your brain with amazing effciency of a horrid, pants-wetting terror felt when watching the nightmare unfold in front of your eyes: quarterback flushed, running, pursued by an unstoppable mob of faceless baby-skewerers, looking to throw, and then…

NO NO NO NO NO NO. Sometimes, when the pass is bad enough, we can actually yell in that low-pitch slo-mo voice you hear at the end of the video. Doug Johnson, you gave us that talent, and for that, we thank you. It’s handy for scaring the shit out of drive-through clerks late at night, or for phoning in those pesky but necessary ransom demands over an untapped public phone.