#11 Ohio State @ Toledo
Ohio State IS Johnny Cash IN Walk the Line. Jim Tressel, you can’t just keep doing the same songs over and over? And you sure as hell can’t do it in front of a rabid crowd of people who’ve killed people? You are incorrect, record executive/football pundit. Sweatervest will trot out his shufflin’, two-note bass line lovin’ Tennessee Trio of an offense again and again until someone puts his head in the John Cooper memorial guillotine, confidently plowing ahead with convention in front of an audience condemned to imprisonment. (more…)

Breaking news out of Honolulu, and obviously important enough to merit its own post: Hawaii head coach Greg McMackin has been docked a month’s pay for his uncharitable, sexual-preference-based characterization of Notre Dame’s pre-Hawaii Bowl rug-cuttin’. Officially, McMackin will be coaching the team for the next 30 days on a “volunteer” basis, with the money he would be getting paid instead being detoured to fund an intern for a campus LGBT group.

(Pre-emptive righteous-indignation stifling: McMackin’s free-speech rights aren’t being violated by any of this. The 1st Amendment prevents the federal government from prosecuting you for something you’ve said; it doesn’t bar your employers from fining you for making them look like a bunch of troglodytes. Thanks, carry on.)

With that out of the way, all that’s left is to sweep up the pieces. Can we expect an Obama-style “beer summit” between McMackin, the UH president, and Charlie Weis? Or would a “cosmo summit” with McMackin and the head of the Human Rights Campaign be more appropriate? We’re confident that any institution whose athletic teams were once nicknamed the “Rainbow Warriors” can be trusted to do the right thing here.

Hey, kids. If you’re reading this, it’s because we were in the emergency room all night getting a pesky couple of broken transverse processes of the L1 and L2 lumbar vertebrae taken care of by the fine medical professionals at Emory Hospital. You ever had Dilaudid? It’s like morphine, but with robot arms, a trust fund, and a horrendous gambling problem. We met last night.

Play me off for 6-8 weeks, Keyboard Cat.

No permanent or lasting damage, as the piece of angry, disunited bones in my back aren’t load bearing. They do hurt like I swallowed a plugged-in soldering gun, which is why I’m waking up in a few hours to dust off some more delicious, nutritious Percocet.

Thanks to all the well-wishers on Twitter and Facebook. (Our phone doesn’t work, as the iPhone battery died last night, too.) It’s pill and sleep time, and we’ll see what “we” feel like tomorrow.

Football is like life: it has a playbook, and when it breaks down, people get hurt. The first installment of this series appeared here as “Football Analogizing;” it appears here under a slimmer title.

Reads are important on this play, which we’ll call CAREER JET BANDIT X FLY D-BO OVER 2. We’re expecting good protection through a solid zone scheme of a middle class upbringing and lack of obvious physical or mental defect. We’re running four routes on the play. You’ll note the slot receiver is not accounted for in the playbook; this is by design, since you need one career option to forget, and then mourn as your lost ideal once it’s too late to choose it in the progression.

Let’s go through the reads, son.

First read: ASTRONAUT. The quarterback (you) takes the ball in the shotgun and surveys the defense. On this play, your first option is the X receiver, on this play known as ASTRONAUT.

ASTRONAUT is double covered by LACK OF MATH SKILLS AND DISCIPLINE. (Also, you find out you don’t like enclosed places when you go to Mammoth Cave as a nine year old.) It’s important to recognize this early and not force this ball prematurely, as you may end up in the military not flying jets, but instead handing out fresh underwear for hours at a time to new recruits as a logistics man. (more…)

We abhor end of the year lists mostly because they come straight from the stat sheet and the standings, not from the complex, muddled story of what actually occurred in the season. They also excise a good amount of the context to a moment, as well. Was any player in any single game as dominant in a moment as Brian Orakpo was against Oklahoma? Even with the stat line–two sacks, four tackles for a loss and a forced fumble–you cheat what he did to Oklahoma in terms of changing protections and flustering Sam Bradford into making–gasp!–two or three mistakes in a game.

Or, to concatenate that bit of praise and turn this into Connections with James Burke for football: did any single performance which led to a singular defeat that then led to the even bigger upset of undefeated Texas? Without Orakpo disintegrating the Oklahoma line and Colt McCoy being devilishly accurate, there is no undefeated Texas rolling into this game, where Michael Crabtree spontaneously generated the one moment this year that had us springing to our feet.

Musberger’s bellowing call–so enthused he fucks up the pronunciation a bit, blurting out something that sounds like “CROBB-TRAAAAAAYYY”–is all you need. We don’t even hear Herbstreit after that; the delirium of the moment still lingers and obliterates all commentary. There is a moment in each season you remember with a clarity bordering on the surreal , as if a South American writer had gotten a hold of the script and written floating women and feathered angels speaking odd tongues into the background. There’s more than a little Marquez in Crabtree’s catch, and not just in its mythical content; the tragic side kept Texas from the national title game, and put Bob Stoops’ toes in the surf of Biscayne Bay.

Our apologies for today’s lack of content, campers—Fearless Leader Commandant Swindle is stuck in mortgage lending/house closure hell*, and my latest FCP masterpiece is dropping frames like they’re third-period French. We shall return. In the meantime, we suggest you bust out your covert eggnog stash from the office minifridge, open up your hearts and let the Patrick Swayze Christmas in:

*Also, feel very free to leave all manner of well-meaning but overbearing advice for new homeowners in the comments for Swindle to find. He’ll like that.

Dan Mullen will be the new coach at Mississippi State, according to ESPN.com and the Clarion Ledger. If so, then au revoir, Dan, and happy sailing.

What you will be receiving in exchange for a large paycheck payable to one Dan Mullen: a man who wrote so many plays on index cards as an assistant at Syracuse that he developed a strange fungal infection on his hand, forcing him to wear a glove for the remainder of the season. He’s obsessed, naturally caffeinated, and his offenses really do adjust to the personnel they have, a claim every coach with an offensive “system” makes but few actually live up to once they get going.

He is a superb hire who may do this strange and potentially frightening thing called “scoring points.” Be not afraid, People of the Cowbell. This is permitted under NCAA by-laws.

Will this be a distraction before the national title game? OF COURSE NOT. Look! A BABY SEAL AWWWWW!!!!!

This seal says there’s nothing to see here. Move along.

Louisville was down 49 at the half to Rutgers last night. If you missed the first half as we did, you tuned into the second half and fully expected Steve Kragthorpe to read his death poem into his headset, kneel, plunge his tanto into his side, and commit ritual suicide on the sidelines.

Unfortunately for Kragthorpe-san, it’s hard to commit suicide when Davon Sharp and the rest of the Rutgers team is doing the job for you:

Louisville is standing by their man for now, but Louisville’s pile of hot fail is accumulating like so many yellowed toenails stuck in the shag carpet of mediocrity. They went 1-5 in the Big East, yielding one of those to newly-fired GERG and Syracuse. They suffered through a macabre series of injuries this year, yes–they only took 25 players to Rutgers, and presumably expected the worst–but their late collapse was well short of a Thermopylae-style last stand. The Cardinals have looked mediocre to awful at times under Kragthorpe, and your trend graph is flowing ever-downward at this rate for his overall performance at the school.

You know a game is bad when ESPN keeps showing shots of the Lincoln Tunnel on commercial outros. You also know your defense had no shot when you let Mike Teel throw for seven touchdowns in his last game as a Scarlet Knight. On the upside, the slack time in the second half allowed for Chris Fowler to admit he’d never been to a local greasy spoon before midnight or sober, basically, and that was almost worth the agony of watching the second half.

#11 Ohio St. at #24 Northwestern

HOLLY, QUASI-RATIONAL: Relax your bedtime grip on your Glocks, America. Ohio State has two losses, and the universe can breathe easy, safe from the specter of a third-straight Buckeyes champblahblahblahBig10bashing. Statistically, these teams are surprisingly well-matched, but….look, we’d all love to pick Northwestern, adorably ranked after a victory over Minnesota, but if pluck guaranteed wins, we’d be celebrating the single-digit ranking of Texas Christian (HOW DARE YOU PUSH US TO ACCEPT UTAH AS A LEGIT TEAM, HORNED FROGS).

ORSON, IRRATIONAL. The force is strong in the young one…

…but this is episode five, and he loses his hand to the Dark Lord.

Baylor at #4 Texas

ORSON, QUASI-RATIONAL. If Baylor had the chops on defense to hold Colt McCoy in check, we’d happily tiptoe over to the pond of tribute bets and salute Art Briles and Robert Griffin for revivifying Baylor football. (more…)

A UGA tailgate. The sounds of “Straight to Hell” by Drivin’ and Cryin’ waft over sea of red tailgate canopies.

Georgia fan: Where’d I put my “You don’t need nObama if you got Knowshon” sticker?

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