Rooftop like we bringin’ ‘88 back. That’s the line originally ringing through our brain while considering the new BCS pimp’s comments about bringing back the original bowl system. Fine, if you’re going to be a colossal dick right out of the gate and threaten us with straw men, then bring froth the body and make that fucker dance. It’s an idle threat, a straw man, and further proof of the odd insecurity felt by the BCS power structure as a whole. The checks are too big, the money too good, and conference already too far down the path of establishing championship games to eventually funnel up champions into something that will eventually be a playoff or playoff-like substance.

Just teach your kids the simple rule of “Authority figure says be afraid=be totally calm/authority figure says be calm=freak out and run to the bunker,” and they’ll be fine.

Gettin’ big money, playboy your time’s up: The thoughts over at Sporting Blog sprout a thousand tangents, all of which Matt Hinton carefully calculated, weighed, analyzed, and dismissed as unnecessary. We were IM’ing back and forth yesterday, a frustrating experience for us because he has this way of using “Facts” and “rationale,” while we prefer “blind prejudice” and “anger.”

One point of contention that remained unresolved: does the current system produce better matchups than the old bowl system? Our sense is no, not necessarily: the choice of matchups and their outcomes between the top ten or fifteen teams is a largely randomized process no matter what happens. (more…)

Set up any game, and it’s borders are what give it life and meaning. Not all these spaces are equal or limitless: A cricket pitch is usually a rough circle bordered by stands, but is by definition not limitless. In Grand Cayman, we once watched a cricket game where the players stood in a sandy, scraggly, and technically limitless patch of earth. Technically, by lack of agreement, if a player could heft the ball into the sea, a field would have to get it, as it was still considered in bounds. (The greatest danger anyone faced on this field was hitting one of the humpnecked white Brahmin cows wandering the perimeter.)

Soccer fields can vary in size without a defined limit, as can baseball diamonds, whose irregular shapes often influence the outcome of games themselves. Football and basketball, however, share a defined space. Play them anywhere and the dimensions of the field are the same, a uniform prison for the capture of competition no matter where you are.

This is not said at the cost of soccer or baseball: this isn’t a zero-sum game. But it does highlight the fundamental rigor of the game, a restrictive framework consonant with everything else about football. (more…)

Idiot…slow down… We can’t believe we’re saying this, but the offseason may be moving just a bit too fast in one respect: just poring over even an nth of Phil Steele’s 2009 College Football Preview convinced us we’re not prepared for the 2009 season, as in “going to an ant party wearing a suit made of honey” unready. We’re completely unprepared for a world where:

–Notre Dame is ranked 7th by someone other than Tom Lemming.

–Cal is ranked 9th.

–Ole Miss is ranked higher than LSU

There’s a whole host of other shocking but evidence based conclusions in this year’s edition of Phil Steele, including the suggestion that Bill Snyder will somehow have a better year than Mark Mangino. (Phil’s obviously underrated the flow and sick pimpness of Marky M.) You should pre-order and buy it so we can call each other on the phone and talk about after the movie like two giggly schoolboys.

The one thing that has always struck me as a misleading stat Phil uses–and admittedly, it’s one factor in a huge set of stats–is starts lost. (more…)

It’s a long offeseason. In an attempt to vary up the somewhat fatigued Friday rotation, we will change it up with various lab experiments, including The Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide To Spicy Living. The five categories are Drink (obvious), Comestibles (Food/Snack), Combustible (Shit what blows up), Transit (for making you transitory) and Canon (essential films, books, and movies to understand reality as you know it.) Enjoy?

Drink.

Holly: Continuing our “This Week In Imperialist Cocktailing” subseries, I recommend the Soixante-Quinze, or French 75. Gin, sugar syrup, lemon juice, and champagne. If you happen to be lolling about in my favorite 213 backroom bar, throw a brandied cherry in the bottom.

Orson: Fat Tire. Amber beers have the shortest half-life from the tap/awesome to suck/bottle. Abita Amber remains the premiere example of this, as it’s strictly meh from the bottle but guzzleworthy from the tap. When in Baton Rouge, I will drink draft Abita Amber from a gutter filled with decaying nutria, so long as it’s just been poured, and someone promises to feed me fried meat of some sort immediately afterward to kill the resulting bacterial infections and general -itis.

Fat Tire is here somewhere in Atlanta, and by Cthulhu it will be mine tonight. (more…)

The other thing we wanted to say here is how reminiscent Mike Leach’s idea for a college football playoff is of something out of a video game, a multi-tiered Super Smash Brothers game, a kind of mathematical palace of trial and error done with a kind of enlightenment-era procedural logic producing a cold, logical, and perhaps ultimately unsatisfying result: a champion determined by bracket.

When we think about what we don’t like about a playoff, it’s probably this freezing logic. It’s the only rational way to determine a champion, but it kills the romanticism of a single game’s stunning verdict. Nebraska ‘95, the Megalodon of college football teams pre-2000, would have obliterated anyone in a bracket, but the mythmaking’s far more precious and undiluted when all you remember is one colossal crushing noise, a few muffled screams, and then the blood…my god, the blood. The mythos dies a little when you multiply it, and it’s taken us years to figure out exactly that point, but that’s it: one game is simpler to digest semantically than five, and is more epically compelling.

Not fair, no: but for the simpleton heart, the single game playoff means more, which is probably precisely why it’s doomed. The bowl system stripped of its financial sundries right now is a purely romantic structure, a jury prize for the most part. The Darwinian playoff is no such thing at all.

It’s a long offeseason. In an attempt to vary up the somewhat fatigued Friday rotation of non-sequitur posts called the Corrections, we will vary it with various lab experiments, including The Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide To Spicy Living. The four categories are Drink (obvious), Comestibles (Food/Snack), Combustible (Shit what blows up), and Canon (essential films, books, and movies to understand reality as you know it.) Enjoy?

Drink.

Holly: Aviation Gin. They say: “With its full and weighty mouth feel, regionally inspired flavors of earth and spice, and a uniquely cool finish, Aviation is a rare expression of gin that shines both on its own and in one of a large number of resurrected and modern culinary cocktails colliding with ice and tin on the insides of Boston Shakers at discerning cocktail bars around the world.” I say: Aviation tastes like it’s crushed from juniper berries plucked from the titty of a naked angel of God. (I don’t know why the angel is sprouting things in this particular scenario, but this is the kind of hyperbolic bliss Aviation drives me into. Also, it renders the drinker completely comfortable with ending sentences with prepositions.)

Orson: The Harrier. God, we feel so ready to put on a pith helmet and oppress people when we drink this, and we mean that in the kindest, most polite and thorough way possible: the British way. (more…)

HT: Kleph, via Paste’s Obamiconme widget.

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I stand here before you humbled by your choice as your college football meta-chronicler. Literally hundreds of you stand before me today. I will not forget your choice; nor will I remove the annoying Zwinky ads, because they get us that paper, son.

We stand on the edge of a great precipice: the offseason. We have have faced such travails before, and will face them again. Know that we will face them bravely, and that with the help of discounted Spanish wines, drank, online pornography, recruiting service reports, spring football, and endless previewing and re-previewing, we will survive…weakened, sunburned, and likely with five new addictions, but nevertheless intact and ready for the sweet, nourishing magic teat of football to be thrust in our mouths once more.

We promise the following things as we take hold of another offseason:

1. We will uphold the Fulmer Cup. We will not yield to the urge to change the name, nor slacken our eyes’ fixed gaze on the point total, nor be held in thrall by the desire to be unfair to one team. As always, we shall be unfair to all and aggressively so. If this be our Old Testament, we shall play the smite-y god of this chapter with zeal. (more…)

The arrows may or may not be right–we’ve submitted multiple, angsty drafts at this point, and the deltas may be completely scrambled now–but the muddle is totally real. Sometime after 8 or 9, this goes to shit completely and totally.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama	—
2	Texas Tech	—
3	Texas	2
4	Florida	—
5	Oklahoma	1
6	Southern Cal	2
7	Penn State	4
8	Ohio State	2
9	Utah	2
10	Boise State	3
11	Oklahoma State	4
12	Missouri	6
13	Pittsburgh	11
14	Georgia	—
15	Michigan State	1
16	North Carolina	10
17	Florida State	9
18	Brigham Young	8
19	Cincinnati	2
20	Virginia Tech	6
21	TCU	12
22	South Carolina	4
23	West Virginia	11
24	Ball State	1
25	Tulsa	—

Yes, it sucks. To be frank, we don’t even like our number one at this point. Alabama’s offense has spells of crapulence, and their signature wins against Georgia, Clemson, and LSU look less impressive with each passing week of 2008 Georgia/Clemson/LSU football. (Defense: optional!)

Texas? Sure. Guesswork. It’s all just lunchmeat thrown on the asses of so many miserable groupies at this point. (PAPA ROACH YEAAAHHH!!!!) The randomized excellence of the Big 12 South right now forces us to put Texas above Oklahoma because they beat them. Otherwise Oklahoma score points like a mid-debate fired-up Christopher Hitchens on his second bottle of sherry on anyone they choose to annihilate.

The rest: hopeless. The easy crutches are all gone. Pittsburgh? Really? Michigan State? Don’t make us rank Virginia Tech, life; no please, do not make us rank them, or Minnesota, who has the thinnest 7-2 record in the nation. Michigan and Tennessee being decent made this 8 percent easier in the good old days, but now we’re left in the soup line ladling out Cincinnati and TCU gruel. Spare us a dime. This season has left us bereft of solid rankings, and a bailout is needed.

#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…)

“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.”

Joe Paterno is dying in front of our eyes, and that is no overly dramatic statement. His body is beginning the inevitable decline he staved off for so many year by running, staying involved in his job, and leaning on the good credit his robust genes advanced him in his later years. This is not a sentimental judgment: it’s fact, as clear to the viewer as the cane he now requires to get from point A to point B or as obvious as his absence from the sidelines when he takes to the booth in the second half of games due to hip pain.

Brent Musberger may be annoying, predictable, and prone to over-excitement on the smallest play, but give him due credit for honesty in discussing the factors motivating Paterno’s insistence on remaining on the sideline.

He is fearful — and he looks back at Bear Bryant as the example — he is fearful that he would not be with us if he stepped away. He is a man that doesn’t fish, doesn’t play golf…he has no other interest other than his family and football. And he’s just afraid what would happen with the rest of his life if he walks away from it.

“What would happen” here is cloaked language for what happened to Bryant: death. (more…)