Fuzzy, wobbly, but still on two legs following the Alcoholacast. MVP this morning? The cups of water we were chugging in between what turned out to be about 1.5 bottles of champagne consumed during the game last night. Feeling better than Zac Robinson, though:

After the jump, please find LaGarrette Blount’s muscular run through the slap-happy Oklahoma State defense, who clearly had no idea what kind of angry livestock they were attempting to rustle on this play. Index along in a minute:

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We’ll be drinking champizzle for the EDSBS Live! Alcoholocast. We recommend you join us on Talkshoe…

…and then watch as we haphazardly employ the rules of the Holiday Bowl drinking game to disastrous effect. As commenters have pointed out, if we drink every time someone scores, we could be speaking with Dylan Thomas directly and personally by halftime. Either way nothing’s going gently into that good night with this game.

Hear you then.

The Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl is on at 4:00 EDT. It features Maryland and Nevada, though no one’s sure why, exactly. This is a metapreview of that game, meaning it was written while staring into a heatlamp while snorting ground-up ritalin off a razor blade, and contains little actual information of the direct sort.

TEARS OF THE BUN: SCENE ONE

SCENE: Refugee camp, Boise, Idaho. Extras cough theatrical coughs in between wailing at the sky. A low thumping from the east reveals helicopters thumping their rotors against the brilliant yellow blastlight of a rising sun. The choppers touch down.

Armed men exit. Colonel RALPH FRIEDGEN enters the frame, his handsome chins framed in the light.

FRIEDGEN: Where are our support troops?

COMMANDER CHRIS TURNER steps into frame.

TURNER: They…there are only 800 of them at most, sir.

FRIEDGEN: We’re stranded out here.

TURNER: Yessir. That happens when you lose games down the stretch and Clemson actually travels to bowl games. It’s a heapshitpile, sir.

FRIEDGEN: Yes, it is.

TURNER: But the Roady’s guys gave us these goody bags full of over-the-counter methamphetamine substitutes and porn mags, coach. We’re not completely stranded.

FRIEDGEN: We could run…but that’s not what soldiers do. (more…)

Peter and ourself will be renewing an annual tradition of broadcasting our alcoholacast of a bowl game. The way this works: we get alcohol, set up some rules, and then broadcast the two of us regretting our decision for two hours as we hoark down far too much booze for a weeknight. Last year, during the Independence Bowl, we started slurring our speech more than usual. The goal this year will be to get weepy and confessional before TCOAN cuts off the mike. (”NO! I’m about to tell them where I put the body, baby! I CAN’T LIVE WITH THIS.”)

The rules are open to debate before our final announcement post tonight, so the proposed rules thus far for our Alcoholocast of tonight’s Oregon/Oklahoma State Pacific Holiday Bowl are:

Take a sip if:

–They show that goddamn whale.

–Chris Fowler gets huffy.
–Jesse Palmer happily admits to not knowing something.
–Craig James goes WOOOOOOO!!!!
–An Erin Andrews sign is shown
–A graphic makes a whooshing or metallic sound.
–References to Oregon’s uniforms are made.

Take a full-throated glug for:

–A score.
–A turnover.
–A Craig James giggle-fit
–An Anchorman reference
–An “I’m a man I’m forty” reference

Finish your drink for:

–Craig James being called “Pony”
–Mike Gundy getting angry on camera.
–A shot of Erin Andrews’ astonishingly spaced cricket wickets

Your submissions are solicited and encouraged below.

An EDSBS co-production with inimitable Birmingham bureau chief Doug Gillett of Hey Jenny Slater.

IN A WORLD where sometimes life doesn’t go the way you’d planned . . .

A vast, severely furnished editor-in-chief’s office on the 32nd floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. Big East commissioner MIKE TRANGHESE sits behind a black lacquered desk, regarding RUTGERS with a critical eye.

TRANGHESE: You were one of our rising stars. Three straight bowl appearances, an 11-win season, this close to a BCS bid . . . what happened to you?

RUTGERS: Just a string of bad luck. Honest. Give me a few more weeks, I can turn it around! . . .

TRANGHESE: (shakes head gravely) I’d like to believe you, Scarlett, I really would. But you lost to Fresno State by 17, UNC by 32 . . . and we just don’t have that kind of time.

ANNOUNCER: . . . one Big East team is about to find that life is happiest . . .

RUTGERS sits dejectedly in a crowded, chaotic airport terminal. She is shaken out of her melancholy by the abrupt squawk of a PA announcement.

GATE ATTENDANT: Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to begin boarding all rows, all sections for flight 4358 . . . (more…)

Remember a different time, reader: a time when the mighty Shreveport Independence Bowl knew real power, and would with its weed-whackered arm beckon esteemed squads from the mid-ranks of the Big 12 and the SEC to parley on its well-fescued field of battle. Lo, did the gods quake at its might, and send freakish weather to stem its power:

Forsooth! The economy hath helped to humble the Independence Bowl, who hath taken Louisiana Tech and Northern Illinois to play the part of Kano and Scorpion to their Shang Tsung this year. Reaaadyy….FIGHT! FOR THE AMUSEMENT OF THE SHREVEPORT-BOSSIER CITY METROPOLITAN AREA!!!

What is Northern Illinois, and should they borrow oxygen tanks from the morbidly obese in the crowd? We don’t know, and yes. The Huskies fall firmly into the category of “bowl team-like substance,” having finished the season losing three out of four by a combined score of 136-58. Their coach is named Jerry Kill, though, which should be worth two points on the scoreboard in every game. They play defense and wait for the other team to make egregious mistakes, and if you’ve seen this in action it is just as boring as you imagine it to be.

Louisiana Tech: Creating the Cyborg Crawdad of the Future today. We would mock Louisiana Tech, too, if they hadn’t benched aspiring CIA agent A.J. Suggs Taylor Bennett seven games into the season and started sophomore Ross Jenkins instead. They then developed something like a passing game to complement running back Daniel Porter, the only reason you should watch this game. He plays in a respectably nasty fashion, and this bears praise and notice.

Why aren’t we at the bowl game, pussy? Not because we are scared of Shreveport, a town we humbly suggested used the floating corpses of cattle passing in the river as a prime source of entertainment last year. No, we’ve been to scarier places, like Phnom Penh and Miami. The real reason is that Miami is a good kind of scary, and we’d like to charge our expense account to the gills for the 305 and not the 318. The economy affects us all, especially when you plan on racking up several grand in charges billed only to a single line reading “Winston Wolf (he solves problems)” for the national title game.

IN A WORLD OF SUN AND FUN…ALL CHARLIE  WANTED WAS TO GET AWAY.

“A little sun in the folds. That’s all I need.  Away from the sleet and the mail bombs and Clausen’s INT-to-TD ratio, on my way to a place where they deep fry whole fucking pigs for my pleasure.  That’s the ticket.”

But sometimes life…has another itinerary.

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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.

FOX runs down the swag you get in bowl games, and let us take this opportunity to state that the Poinsettia Bowl, much maligned though you may be for being sponsored by a Credit Union and sporting a poisonous plant as your emblem, thou dost swag well. TCU and Boise State players will each receive an iPod Touch as part of their loot for playing in the bowl, a far step up from the “complimentary bowl watch and goodie bag” most bowls COUGH COUGH NEWORLEANSBOWL COUGH offer their participants.

“I went to a bowl game, and all I got were pussy-repelling shoes.”

(The “goodie bag” really peaked in the early nineties when all Miami teams participating in bowls received enormous velvet bags containing one Cuban hooker. But, digression.)

Other highlights of swag handed out at bowl games, some coming from the Fox report, and others coming from our own sources.

Vegas Bowl They get a Wii bundle, a shame because being completely gay, Nintendo’s innovative gaming system will be of no use to BYU.

Gator Bowl Leave it up to the home of Limp Biskit to assume the youngsters would want Oakleys with an mp3 player built in, much less ones called “Split Thumps,” a name we assumed referred to an injurious Olympic weightlifting move or a sexual maneuver of moderate difficulty. We’ve always wanted sunglasses with an mp3 player in them. Now if we can just get that the codpiece with a flash drive in it that we’ve always craved, we could die happily.

Insight Bowl Actually lists “snack pack.” Unless this refers to pudding, FUCK YOU Insight Bowl. If it’s pudding, though, we apologize, because pudding is a treat indeed.

Humanitarian Bowl Includes a “nail pack.” This could refer to either a manicure kit or an actual sack of nails. One makes for an insulting commentary on the deplorable nail care of football players and young men in general; the other would make for the world’s worst post-game barfight.

Sugar Bowl A Sony Blu-Ray DVD player just so you can watch your favorite videos in a standard nigh-indistinguishable from other DVDs that Sony just wants to you try please try it OMG WE PUT THEM IN ALL THE PS3s JUST BUY IT TO STOP THE BLEEDING BLU RAY BLU RAY BLU RAY. You don’t even know what it is but it is awesome: trust us.

Orange Bowl. Includes “Customized crocs with Orange Bowl logo.” And fifty tickets per player, compliments of ACC fans traveling as well as North Koreans.

Fiesta Bowl The Fiesta commits the double offense of mentioning their “snack pack” and handing out something you can buy off SkyMall, the MyVu, a “personal media player” you wear like sunglasses. When both teams complete zero passes and forfeit the game due to a sudden outbreak of migraine headaches, blame the swag committee, who might as well have thrown in Alexander the Inventor’s Gravity-Defying Shoes while they were raiding Delta’s in-flight shopping crapfest for ideas.