The players are stalwart enough after a game that was embarrassing even to watch, but Leach’s rapid whiplashing from “We didn’t coach well enough to beat A&M, and we didn’t play well enough to beat A&M” to “We’re not gonna listen to our fat little girlfriends” doesn’t speak to a steady hand on the tiller. Mike, Mike — don’t you know the plump ones make the best pirate lasses? And with still-ranked Kansas coming to town on Halloween, can you really afford to alienate the wench contingent of your student section?

Video after the jump. He’s as completely suspended as Byron Hout was completely bitchmade by Blount’s sucker punch. Unsportsmanlike? Oh, certainly. Dirty? Completely, yes, but shit, would you so much as step on Blount’s shadow without his permission now? Somewhere he and Ron Artest are walking through a suburban mall right now punching people in the face randomly and talking about how awesome smoothies are.

“They’re the shit.” BLA-DOW!!!

[/concussed fifth grader punched into fountain]

“No doubt. And with the immune blast? I gotta have my immune blast, dawg.” SPLA-KOW!!!

[/48 year old science teacher punched into Banana Republic plate glass window]

It’s terrible, but if Blount’s intent was to walk a-feared through this world like Mike Tyson and Ray Liotta forever, earning calls for the National Guard for routine traffic stops because this motherfucker is totally crazy, then yeah: mission accomplished, baby. That’s WWE heel script-reading portrayed perfectly.

1. The angle we call “BITCHES GET STITCHES:”

2. The angle we call “Disturbing Involuntary Facial Expressions”

In review: Oregon is as bad as Phil Steele says they would be, and don’t ever, ever fuck with Legarrette Blount.

In marginally related news, please enjoy Tulsa World’s interview with Oklahoma linebacker Ryan Reynolds (emphasis ours):

Q: A lot of people thought your absence from the second half against Texas was the difference in the game. Even though you lost to Texas, you played in the Big 12 title game and the national championship game. Did it feel good to know that your knee wasn’t the difference in the entire season?
A:  Well, I don’t know about the Texas game, but as the season went on, I felt our team got a lot better. I felt if we were to play Texas later on in the season, or had a tie-breaker game or something like that, I think we would have won that game. I think we were a better team than Texas at the end of the year. I mean, I’m glad that loss to Texas didn’t have any effect on us going to the national championship. But I don’t feel like me coming out of the game was the reason why (Texas won).

Oh, where to begin? The implied statement that mid-October is too soon to evaluate the prowess of a team? After all, it’s only what, seven games into the season? The idea that losing the national title game (only the latest in an admirably solid streak of postseason choke-jobs) leaves one’s team somehow superior to a team it lost to by 10 on a neutral field, a team that went on to win its own BCS tilt? We just can’t decide. Angry Texas hordes, over to you. Arise, Army of the 45-35.

I am just watching the crazy spectacle of it all — frenzy and bloodlust and the low rumble of moans and the high-pitch of screams. I wonder why we need any more studies showing our nation’s education system to be in the tank when all you have to do is attend a college football game.

This is still the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights, right?  How do you immerse yourself in, of all places, Texas football culture and come away with the capacity to be startled by the fervor of any fanbase, anywhere, ever?

Nick Saban is the head coach of Alabama. I don’t see much joy in Nick Saban as he coaches the Crimson Tide against Clemson, even though his team is playing rather well and will ultimately win, 34-10. I see a lot of determined marching back and forth by Nick Saban on the sidelines.

Ah, but therein lies his charm, sir.

Saban, in a rare unguarded moment of glee.

What’re you, new? Nick Saban does not “smile”.  Nick Saban, as our crack commenters are surely about to remind you, does not have time for that shit.  Nick Saban’s teeth may occasionally be visible in his gaping maw, but be assured it is merely a contorted rictus of apoplectic rage, not an expression of happiness.  And isn’t that why we watch him?  He’s like a Martian.

Nick Saban doesn’t smile a lot, his face locked most of the time in a constipated grimace. But I understand that, because winning and losing a college football game in America is very serious business regardless of what I think.

And here’s where we veer off the rails completely.  I’ve read Bissinger’s stuff before.  I’ve been left with the impression that he enjoys football.  So what’s this, curmudgeoning for curmudgeoning’s sake, just padding his word count until he can dig into the apparent crux of the column?  Which is:  Nick Saban gets paid a lot.  Bob Stoops gets paid a lot.  Kirk Ferentz gets paid a lot (and he misses a truly skewer-worthy opportunity here to talk about the return on investing in Ferentz versus Stoops and Saban).  Nick Saban left this job this one time, after he said he wasn’t gonna.  NEWS TO US, this is.

“All in the name of college football.”  No shit, sir.  Where’ve you been?

“There weren’t any girls from the Big Ten who were hot enough to be on the cover, so they had to pull someone from the SEC,” she quipped.

ZOWIE! It takes a special kind of person to be on the cover of Playboy: you have to be willing to be naked, airbrushed to within an inch of your life, stripped of all your personal hair through various heinous methods, and must have undergone a procedure to insert plastic bags of saline into your chest. (Gullible. Apes.)

You said titties? Please, go on.

Obviously, we have two points totally unrelated to the obvious “school poontangery supremacy” argument, one we find noxious for many, many tiresome reasons. One: when the EDSBS calendar of “Wealthy Ladies Who Like Wearing Pants and Drinking” comes out in November, you’ll see just what we really appreciate in women: a superb credit rating, a proficiency with firearms, the ability to make a quality cocktail and then enjoy it, loyalty, and the understanding that, for at least an hour a day, we don’t want to talk to anyone and would prefer to be left the hell alone.

(Also, she should tell us how good we are at sex. That’s cool, too. She doesn’t have to mean it; she just has to say it. We have no illusions here.)

Our second point? Playboy was way, way hotter forty years ago. Insanely, ridiculously hott with two t’s and five damns careening down a freeway of lust and headed for the border post of Bonerlandia. The women actually looked like someone who, when planets aligned and standards lowered appreciably in the precise and unrepeatable circumstances of the moment, you could get a hand job and a pat on the head from at a party. And you’d take it and consider yourself awarded handsomely by fate.

Therefore: if contemporary Playboy is the home of the assless Stepford Wife, let EDSBS be the home to all the ladies of all conferences who like wearing pants, drinking, and most importantly, consuming eight to ten hours of football every Saturday in the fall. You’re diamonds of femininity, every last one of you. Also, if you happen to look like someone who posed in Playboy in the 70s, um, well…you just stay over there. We’re married, and you make us do that nervous sweating thing we can’t explain away with “No, honey, I was just looking to see what brand her jeans were. Really.”

–Hello?

–Yes, I’m calling regarding job opening #828D. May I confirm that this position has been filled please?

–That’s the corporate representative and public relations position, referent to the athletic program, correct?

–Yes, mademoiselle. I believe if you look at the CV submitted, you’ll find my friend is very–

–The position has been filled, sir. I’m very sorry, and encourage you to apply for other positions in the future.

–Is there any reason why my…client was not picked?

–He just wasn’t what we were looking for, sir. We had many qualified candidates, and it was a very difficult process.

–I…I understand. Thank you very much, madame.

–WHAT THEY SAY?

–You were not what they required.

–WHAT THEY MEAN? MAUAJI DESTROYER OF FOES HAVE CHARISMA AND SEX PEEL!

–There is no way to know.

–MAUAJI KNEW HEAD SHOTS WERE BLURRY.

–I would not beat yourself up, friend.

–MAUAJI NEVER SUCCEED AS ACTOR AND SPOKESANIMAL! FATHER OF MAUAJI WAS RIGHT!

–Now, now. Can Steve buy you something to make you feel better? An infant kebab, perhaps? A little spicy ke-baby for my best friend in the whole world make it all right?

–MAUAJI TOO SAD TO EAT.

–Now, I know you can turn down one ke-baby…but two?

[begins sobbing]

–MAUAJI…MAUAJI SO LUCKY TO HAVE STEVE. NOT NEED MASCOT JOB WITH FRIEND LIKE YOU!

–Aww, that’s the child-eating terror of the streets of Bamako I know and love.

–AND FEAR?

–Of course, buddy. And fear. Now, let’s go get those ke-babies!

–YAY KE-BABY TIME!!!

One: what color is your season? In other words, please explain the metaphorical state of your program through the metaphor of color:

We would say black, as in our program is perpetually falling in a never-ending black hole of despair, but black’s a shade, not a color. Or black is every color. Or black is the absence of color…

Anyway, I guess black can also be associated with goth, or to a lesser extent, emo. Maybe we’re just trying to act out just enough to get noticed. The last two seasons were our rebellious years; we trudged away from our normal role of folding late in games and actually beat teams. Some even convincingly!

Thus, we’ve sold our tight girl-jeans to Plato’s Closet and picked up some more traditional clothing, and we may even stop slashing our wrists a bit. We’ve succumbed to the norm, and have decided to actually look like a football team. Instead of allowing the Devery Henderson’s of the world to slip behind our defensive secondary, we’re chopping Charles Scott at the line of scrimmage on fourth down and the game on the line. Will it take? We hope so. Jet-black hair dye is expensive.

Two: What historical nation and period do you resemble most right now?

Um, wow. So we’re guessing the first two questions are here for us to flex our intellectual muscles, huh? We’re severely lacking in that department
To answer the question, though, we’d say we are in a stage similar to that of colonial America. See, the traditional SEC powers are the Brits: all-controlling, mean, brutal, and unforgiving. We are merely peasants, looking for someone or something to rally around. That “thing” is the LSU upset last year, or, our Boston Tea Party. That “person” is Rich Brooks. He is our Paul Revere, our Ben Franklin, our Thomas Jefferson. Plus, he seems fairly close to those folks in age.
We are in the midst of our own uprising. No one thinks it possible but us. With all due respect (well, none I guess) to Ole Miss, at this time, we are the rebels.

Had a little coachy named Paul Revere…

Three: You have important players. Discuss a few of them hastily.

Dicky Lyons Jr. - Mr. Lyons, as I will ask you to call him this season, has developed quite nicely since he arrived on campus. Originally brought in and given the number 12 and the responsibility of trying to look like former Cat Derek Abney as much as possible, Mr. Lyons is now a serious threat at wideout. Plus, he’ll knock your block off. Now, after combining for over 100 catches, 1400 yards and 16 touchdowns the past two seasons, it’s time for Mr. Lyons to show whether or not he can lead an inexperienced cast of wideouts. The fate of Mr. Lyons might just be up to…
Mitus Harley – The quarterback competition between sophomore Michael Hartline and redshirt junior Curtis Pulley hasn’t left a clear-cut starter yet and that’s pretty ok with the staff. They’re toying with the idea of a two-quarterback system, or the super quarterback known as “Mitus Harley” for those of you TMZ addicts. Pulley’s scrambling ability is certainly intriguing, but failing to distinguish himself just like in 2006 with Andre Woodson makes you wonder if he’s better off with another year at WR. A developing story to keep your eye on.

Jeremy Jarmon -Being a talented defensive player at Kentucky can seem like a completely thankless job, especially with the wealth of talent employed by almost every university in the conference. However, Jarmon has elicited some offseason praise, after tallying nine sacks a year ago in his sophomore season. A prototypical speed-rusher, Jarmon comes off the corner, using his 4.7-40 time and strength to blaze his way to punishing quarterbacks.
Trevard Lindley -Lindley is the first true lock-down corner at Kentucky since, um, [error 404: file not found]. Another guy who is gathering some offseason pub, Lindley has been a terror at corner, even though he is often matched up with the opponents biggest threat receiver. Had a huge pick to lock up the Georgia upset his freshman year, and snagged one against LSU and Louisville as well.

Four: Name two games we might actually want to watch featuring your team.

Louisville: Never will you see a basketball state get so turned upside down for a football game. Even if Mike Patrick and Dick Vitale spewed their pro-ACC garbage at you for weeks, you still couldn’t get hyped for a Duke-North Carolina football game. Not the case with these two basketball schools. A definite sports boner for any Bluegrass resident.
Tennessee: Dear God, are you there? It’s me TJ. And I need a win against the Vols this year. Our beloved Cats have suffered 23 consecutive defeats [LOLZ!!1 --ed.] at the hands of the orange-clad inbreds from the south and it seems like each year they get closer and closer to breaking through. After a two-point loss in four overtimes last year, Kentucky can’t snatch defeat from jaws of victory again, can they? Either way, these games are usually close and passionate because of Senior Day, if nothing else. This year it will be at Tennessee, which means the players who haven’t been arrested yet will be honored.

Four-A: Save us all some time and mention the game we’re better off NOT watching.

Norfolk State. Don’t be confused by that 8-3 record from 2007. The Cats second opponent of the season played one team from a BCS conference last year (an overrated Rutgers team) and got pasted 59-0. At least Western Kentucky will bring a crowd that scores high on the tailgating and skirts scale. Norfolk State brings it weak.

Five: Every hero forgets something in their toolbelt. What does your team lack?

Usually, when we were forced to read that trite hack Shakespeare in high school, every hero had one fatal flaw: hubris. However, for Kentucky, our fatal flaw in recent years has not been excessive pride, but an alarming lack thereof. That will happen when you’ve failed to beat your rival for over 20 years. Though confidence is intangible and thus impossible to carry in one’s toolbelt, it has certainly been lacking over the last few decades of Wildcat football. More recently, a belief that we can compete with the best has been apparent, and the results have been evident. That confidence must now continue to permeate the masses at Commonwealth—along with the Beam.

Six: Describe your team with a Jimmy Buffett song. No, we’re serious–do it.

Ok, Jimmy Buffett sucks and I’ve tried to put all of his songs out of my head so I’m going to stray a bit. [Might I recommend "Truckstop Salvation"?  --ed.] Kentucky’s 2008 team can be best represented by Jermaine Jackson’s “Let’s Get Serious”. After decades of living in the shadow of the greatest of all-time (UK basketball) Kentucky football has decided to get S-E-R-I-O-U-S and start acting like an SEC team. Finally free of the shackles of probation and equipped with facilities that actually give off the illusion of program in the finest conference in the land, Kentucky is ready to make a statement. Let’s just hope that they make that statement and don’t disappear into oblivion after peaking at #8 like Jermaine’s song did back in 1980.

Seven: We’re master wagerers. Give us a bet to place for up to ten dollars about your team.

Bet on power, respect, hustle, heart and dedication. Believe in blue. Bet on another bowl for the Cats.

For further serious reading on Kentucky, the Library of Congress recommends Kentucky Sports Radio, which is a blog, we think. 

We shall stuff sandbags with cease and desist letters. The Des Moines Register, clearly not busy doing anything else like covering biblical flooding threatening to engulf the major population centers of the state, took time out of their day to send a cease and desist letter to Black Heart Gold Pants for using this video to show the severity of the Iowa flooding before asking their readers to donate to a flood relief fund.

We’ll take our c and d letter extra-spicy, Ms. Hickman! You know, with the fancy ketchup. BHGP has their story here, Peter explains some of the finer legal points here; Holly points out that the paper sent the c and d letter despite offering the embed code on its site. Revisiting the letter….

As the copyright owner of that video, The Des Moines Register has the exclusive right to its reproduction and distribution.

…unless you give the goddamn embed code to put the video on any blog anywhere on the internet on your site. Streisand effect, work your magic! Oh, and for Ms. Hickman’s bedside table we recommend Walter Benjamin’s seminal work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Uh, we mean: we’re bloggers! Can’t read! Suck it, mainstream media type! YEAH! Baba-BOOOOIEEE RULZ!

A FAT raise! Get it! Phil Fulmer gets a fat raise, according to the Tennessean via the Wiz, and says he’s good for eight to ten years more as the head coach at Tennessee. Hear that? He’s good to go for eight to ten more years, meaning he’s telling you how long he wants to be there. Almost like Joe Paterno, really, if you multiplied the mass times eight and the national titles by two.

Jim Delany likes his coffee like he likes his women: bitter, cold, and expensive. Kevin over at Fanblogs says Delany and the Big Ten Network got heaping braised slices of their own ass handed to them by Comcast in the final negotiations surrounding their contentious, three-years-plus tussle over how many households would see the network at what price. The exact phrasing, though:

Now… I don’t know about you but where I come from, having left $8.5 million dollars per year on the table isn’t just losing on a deal, it’s getting your sweet pale @ss handed to you by a beast.

The bitter won’t bother Delany, though. He’ll keep his chin up as long as he’s got his standard lunch of infant bones and field greens waiting for him, followed up by the requisite administering of the afternoon paper cuts and lemon juice chasers for the interns. The small things keep one sane, you know.

Coming soon: geeks burning very nice sofas in a controlled fashion. The possible road jerseys for Michigan are carbon copies of West Virginia’s road jerseys. Michigan fans to burn couches in controlled fashion, drink eighty dollar bottles of aged whiskey with abandon, and to cheer for new sideline mascot in orange puffy hunting vest with high-powered deer rifle, “The U.P. Militiaman.” No similarities intended.

Resurgence; we can see it. If this is who Randy Shannon is recruiting, Da U may rise again:

Senior Zach Kane, 18, of Bay View Drive was at a party about 11 p.m. Saturday when he broke a bottle over the head of a fellow teen, causing serious injuries which required at least nine stitches, Police Chief Michael G. Mastronardy said.

That’s how you do it in the 305, son. One note though: a Miami player from Jersey? Is this a reverse Schiano dynamic in practice?

Yes, yes. Quite.

Devin Wordley, Art Critic, gesturing at the wall of a gallery: Yes! Quite! A savage excoriation of the Anglo-Germanic-American bloodlust for competition and cheap, facile artifice without edges; yes, a true jab at the hollow, bloody soul of the worker’s theatre. Note the use of faux-trope here as the artist cloaks themselves in the sheep’s skin in order to come closer for the true kill, working in the cheap mock-airbrush to get his Trojan Horse of an assault on the mores of violent spectacle: a dog’s life shrouded in the illusion of glory, a…

Dude: Dude, that’s my favorite poster!

DW: Um, yes? Poster, you say?

Dude: Yeah. If you get high and look at it, you will lose your shit. There’s no helping it. I mean…they’re dogs, man. And they’re playing football!!!

DW: Yes, I see now. Dogs playing football.

Dude: You gay?

DW: Yes, yes. I am. A gay man in need of a new art review before deadline this afternoon.

You may purchase Dexter’s favorite piece of subversive football art on Amazon for $29.99, marked down from its original $99.99 robbing selling price.

Grrrr! Ahhhh!

West Virginia police are investigating death threats by the P ‘n T Krue (”Monster!”) against Rich Rodriguez.

According to the report by columnist Mitch Vingle, Monongalia County, W.Va., Sheriff Joseph C. Bartolo said his office is indeed investigating the situation.

Bartolo called the forwarded information “very vague” but said Lt. Walter Fumich would head an investigation.

Oh, Lord/Jebus/Cthulu/Buddha/Charles Bronson, please don’t let this lead back to a message board. Please, please, please not. Because what fan hasn’t, at one point threatened to drop a safe on a particular coach? An open safe filled with irradiated scorpions, each given their own tiny little scorpion handgun? We mean, come on. Who hasn’t made that exact threat on a Gator message board…sometime in the past….say, right around 2004 or so…

When we think gangsta, we think Colorado, baby. Mountains! White people! A dry cold! Nothin’ more pimpin’ than that son. Hand me down mah fitted whilst we cruise to Breckinridge, bitches. We running snow to the slopes, if you know what we mean.

Remember, no one has the manual for life, since as another, far superior writer once suggested, it’s in the sac of tissue cut from the human body and discarded at birth commonly referred to as the “afterbirth.” So sometimes, when one is called on to appear at an NBA game in a guest appearance as the mascot from a popular local college team, one gets a bit tone-deaf in attempting to match the “urban contemporary” key of the NBA’s market image.

From the Denver News:

The University of Colorado’s costumed buffalo mascot showed up for a “kids night” at a Denver Nuggets basketball dressed in what some described as “gangsta-themed” attire, the Boulder Daily Camera reported.

The incident happened Friday night at the Pepsi Center when the “Chip” wore a do-rag, baggy pants, and a gang-associated tattoo.

Now, that’s not so bad. Come to think of it, if you consider on on a Sontag-ian “camp level,” it’s…

According to the Daily Camera, the mascot costume had a teardrop tattoo below one eye. The newspaper said the tattoo is commonly associated with gang activity, often signifying that the wearer has killed someone.

Oh, come on. That can’t be too offensive considering it’s a fucking buffalo, and totally has killed people. (As a species, we still have the lead on them by miles. Can’t fire a rifle with a cloven hoof yet? Tough. Tell it to Darwin.) The appearance of Chip in gangsta gear is part of a disturbing pattern of behavior by the mascot, who is youngish for a buffalo and trying to find herself, and consequently is hanging out with an undesirable crowd in an attempt to upset and shock her attendants.

See the crowd after the jump. It’s an ugly scene.

Illos courtesy of the inimitable LSUFreek.

Full of shit, but will get you laid: Baudrillard.

We’re big Jean Baudrillard fans, and not because we’re some organic tea-sipping grad student getting wood to the concept of actually writing crap bollocks about art, meaning, and dissecting meaning without having to actually come up with any ourselves. You’re out there, we know who you are, and we will refrain from making the Starbucks serve-us-our-latte professor joke, because many of you do indeed go on to do terrible things like teach Lacan and Derrida to smartstruck private school kids cowed by your ability to string together three sentences together and use the phrase “late-stage capitalism” without shitting yourself from shame.

Plus, when you can quote shit like this pants just fly off smart ladies not quite smart enough to realize just how full of shit you really are:

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

That’s Baudrillard, who rules like Motorhead because he’s totally quotable, completely full of shit, and sold tons of books in France despite the fact that he, himself, would remind anyone he was brimming with intellectual fecal matter. He insisted, in fact, on most everything being fake and shitty–simulacra–mere imitations of things that once existed, and that most culture was just growing like the fingernails and hair on a corpse.

Drop that at a cocktail party, and someone will probably either pose thoughtfully or call you a homosexual. Either way you’re going for the bullshit gold, since it’s English major bongwater primo stuff. However, it may rightfully describe the EDSBS official Most Despised Game, not a sport, but a game, the hypertrophied croquet match that is baseball, and the fact that old incontinent people care enough about it to waste an ex-Senator’s time on whether or nor its players are taking illegal supplements.

(Let us clarify that we don’t care whether baseball players are injecting mule piss into their veins or eating the live, still-beating hearts of polar bears in order to gain a competitive edge. This is because we don’t care about baseball outside of a lingering affection for fat players like John Kruk from our youth and good hooker stories involving profligate man-whores like Mickey Mantle, who once answered an ex-Yankee survey with a rambling account of a blowjob he received under the bleachers. He concluded with this quote, paraphrased as best we can remember:

She asked me what to do with the come, and I said, “Don’t ask me, I’m no cocksucker.”

See? Baseball’s not all bad! Except for the game, the management of the sport, and evidently the whole collection of cheating bastards who made up its elite players in the 1990s/2000s)

Things die, clothes fray, computers crash, and species extinctify, and sometimes, the nails growing on a corpse simulate life. In fact, this is what baseball’s done, buffeted by four or five huge major franchises while dragging the whole bleeding cripple party of other franchises along with them. Record profits! Bullshit, as exemplified by the large franchises who skew the curve. Bentonville, Arkansas, the whole thing: a little town whose average income is swelled by the immense wealth of the handful of franchises raking money in hand over fist, millionaires surrounded by the squalor of their neighbors.

And the sport itself lurches along like a reanimated corpse. After three solid years of intense football watching, we went to a Braves game this past season, and we’d say the entire exercise was an extravagant waste of time if we hadn’t had Lexus level access and thus a intravenous mainline of beer and popcorn. And even after 14 beers, the game was like watching at tribe of macaques pick nits off each other: stasis periodically interrupted when, at a gusty 25% of the time clip, someone hit a tiny ball a sniper could barely pick up at one of the bored, improbably huge macaques. Then everyone settled down and began drinking again and talking on their cell phones.

Even when completely drunk, it sucked with the force of ten thousand Reggie Balls rolling downhill in a big gremlin-ball of suck. No contact, no passion, no energy, and as much strategy as a game of horse-shoes. Wait, that’s a disservice to horseshoes. None. If someone preens on one more time about the strategy involved in baseball, we will drop a safe on you from a great height, because there’s simply nothing going on out there. At least the British admit the whole thing is a front for beer-drinking and lolling around outside for a few days. We’d like it if baseball games lasted three days like cricket test-matches, if only because the epic drunk you’d get on would likely get Viking war songs written about you, your friends, and the time you each drank a 24-pack before noon without dying.

Instead, in baseball, you get this alleged psychodrama between batter and pitcher, who in the minds of most everyone are fighting a mental swordfight while tiptoeing on water like the assassins in Hero. In reality, baseball players are among the stupidest athletes we’ve ever seen–at least football players, big, lummoxy football players, may have been to college. Baseball players are recruited straight from high school, meaning they dive straight from being a high-school manchild to being million-dollar bonus babies at the age of nineteen, meaning that like the horde of Genghis Khan, the future inhabitants of the world may be by percentage all related to some baseball player, since rich nineteen year olds are only interested in pillaging the Hooters and strip clubs of this nation. Unlike you, though, they don’t wear condoms and have the money to do the whole thing properly, which explains how even white bread Steve Garvey ended up spurting out a whole flock of milquetoast lustspawn intent on making him a merely affluent man.

Really, batter and pitcher are just trading ones and zeros, and doing so poorly in most instances in between all the jock-adjusting, spitting, and stepping out of the box to twitch and scope trim in the stands. (Read Ball Four. We’re not making this up.) The rest of the time, everyone else just….stands around scoping trim in the stands.

Oh, but the romance! The history! It’s our national pastime, hearkening back to a SAHAHAKEREEGGHGHHKKKFJDmakdfadfkjg. Apologies. That noise was us garroting George Will, W.P. Kinsella, and any of the other bullshit geysers who’ve built up the myth that for some reason, merely because it’s very old and has been around a long time, that there’s some kind of moral or cultural onus to like baseball. (God, that felt good.) No one’s better at pulling a phantom peanut of sublimity from steaming turd of reality than a writer, and in baseball they’ve had a whole open sewer to browse in their quest to make shinola from shit. (Do you even know what shinola is? It’s shoe polish, which normal people use to shine shoes, and baseball players try to eat spread on crackers before spitting it out and saying “BOOO YUCKY” and impregnating a stripper.)

There’s a whole heap of turdulent literature just collecting flies out there, all of it devoted to baseball. Most of it should be burned and scattered to the winds, excepting Ball Four, which is about what rat bastard life as a player is really like, and that awesome book about how the 1986 Mets were all on cocaine, because books about people doing cocaine in the 1980s are the highest form of literature and fuck your mother if you don’t agree.

The sport should have been dead for years, and if the Mitchell report surprises anyone, then you, anyone, should be relegated to the salt mines along with people who like Family Guy and those who don’t use their turn signals in traffic. OMG, people are suddenly just so much bigger now in like a year! If this shocked anyone after years of stats and norms being established with interminable death-march 162 game seasons…we mean, it would have marked a spurt not just in baseball’s evolution, but humanity’s. Sammy Sosa should have had Waterworld gills. Mark McGwire should have been telekinetic, and Albert Pujols should have had the ability to levitate (over the border! To Mexico! For illegal steroids!).

In conclusion, we were going to say die, baseball, die, but considering it’s been dead for decades anyway, there’s no reason to send a duplicate death certificate around. Instead: Baudrillard, fingernails, corpse. There’s your snapshot there. No one mourns the moa, no one misses the Edsel, and when we’re eighty or so, no one will really mourn football since by then it’ll all be flying robots with chainsaws farting balls out of their shiny titanium rectums and sodomizing each other after whatever constitutes a goal occurs while the crowd roars for Beef Supreme to enter the arena. (Personally, we can’t wait for this. If brains in jars are involved, we’re already looking forward to it, and it doesn’t even exist yet.)

Cricket’s huge in India we hear. Going offshore may be the best decision, especially with all those lax overseas pharma rules. You’ll be able to inject whatever you want, and the only real threat to the sport will be nuclear war between Pakistan and India. And with that much nandralone coursing through your system, players might just breathe deep and exhale fire without harm in the face of it all.

Postscript: Yeah? But what about football problems steroids corruption blah blah blah. Ooooh, diversion! Someone graduated from the Playskool Institute of Fucktard rhetoric! Let us restate: this is about baseball, which we hate for all of the reasons stated above. Not about football, a sport crippled in its own special way. We’re not arguing about which one’s better. That’s obvious: football, which trounces pantywaisted baseball in a street fight and smashes its face into a bus stop sign with ease. Even pro football’s better than baseball. Dammit, we’ll go there: Golf’s better than baseball, because there’s a chance we can listen to David Feherty and marvel at John Daly’s ability to not die and have the DTs on air. We’d rather tie our balls to a 747 and give the clearance from the tower ourselves than watch golf, but that’s the truth.

It’s the last call for Da U at the Orange Bowl this Saturday night when Miami hosts Virginia under the lights. I’m not a ‘Canes fan but I’m a football fan and if I had to name my most vivid college football memories, half of them would be housed at the OB.

The ‘84 National Championship Game: Greatest game I ever saw. The call Osborne made to go for 2 at the end was like a perfect storm of stones, musk, and arrogance [for the young pups, see: Miles, Les]. This is the game that hooked me on college football and it’s an addiction I’m still battling today.

The ‘87 Orange Bowl: Brian Bosworth stalked the sidelines while on suspension from the team sporting a wicked haircut and wearing a t-shirt that spelled out N.C.A.A. with the words National Communists Against Athletes. On the field, the Sooners laid the wood to Arkansas 42-8 but all I remember is the Boz and his stance against the man, trying to hold a brother down.

The Brawl and The Call: Not one word needs to be said.

It’s not just about the games, it’s about the fear, loathing, and feral atmosphere that permeates the old joint. When they come out of the tunnel, I used to wonder if it wasn’t fog at all, but rather a blizzard of crack smoke. The electricity in the air isn’t something synthetic (unless you count the fans, players, coaches, and broadcasters fueled on Charlie and Cris) either. There appears to be something very real that turns people into maniacs with a riot mentality when they enter the hallowed walls of that place. It may look like it’s on death’s door, with the crumbling walls, dilapidated toilets, and mysterious yellow fluid that leaks from its bowels, but if you look her in the eye, there’s still a fire raging in there that will take all you got, all night long, and laugh in your face when you’re done. Kind of like Peter O’Toole.

But thanks to criminal city management, fiscal nightmares, and $2 whore, Donna Shalalalalala, the OB is shutting her doors. What’s worse, the ‘Canes’ new home will be Dolphins Stadium. The thought of the ‘Canes playing in that synthetic place makes me sick. The concessions serve tater salad and tapioca; it’s like a goddamned nursing home. Look what it’s done to the Dolphins! But alas, this isn’t about the future, it’s about the past, so this weekend, when you’re tailgating, whether you’re at a game or on the couch, do a rail of blow and pour a little out for a fallen homey. You don’t have to love her, but you gotta respect her.

Recognize.