Swindle and I had enormous fun on EDSBS LIVE this year with the annual chaos and silliness that surrounds the coaching carousel in college football, but I must say I’m always a little bit sad when that last hire is made, the fun wheel comes grinding to a halt, and the beginning of the offseason really starts to sink in.

But I was thinking: why does the fun have to stop? Why not take the fun all the way to its logical conclusion:

The 2008 Coaching Hires: Handicapping Who Will Be Fired First

Get out your actuarial tables, scandal sensors, and unacceptable loss forecasters, ’cause it’s time to figure out which of our newly-hired coaches is most likely to get shitcanned first.

Paul Johnson, Georgia Tech - 50:1 You know the only thing hard about Paul Johnson’s new job? Christmas, and the agonizing decision of to whom he owes a bigger fruit basket: Chan Gailey or the rest of the ACC. Can one objectively say who set the bar lowest?

Bo Pelini, Nebraska - 30:1 A favorite in the field to have a nice, long stay at his new home. The man is following Bill Callahan, for Christ’s sake - a coach who was so inept at so traditionally strong a program that Mark Mangino and Gary Pinkel stopped, stared, and thought to themselves, “Holy shit. We can do this.”

Bobby Petrino, Arkansas - 20:1 Following the Nutt Job, he should be more secure than Fort Knox, but let’s not forget this is a man who’s kicked two teams in the balls on his way out the door. He’s slick like Mitt Romney, which means we really can’t rule out anything. Especially because he’s headed to Arkansas, where scandals breed like bunnies. Great value bet here.

Rich Rodriguez, Michigan - 10:1 On the one hand, he’s the coach at Michigan. It’s a pinnacle job and they’ll keep him as long as he’s doing well, which he should. On the other hand, he’s the coach at Michigan, which means the intolerance for sleaziness is fiftyfold what it would be at a school like, say, West Virginia. Or Ohio State. So we’ve gotta hedge here: if he’s a man of good character, he’ll be there forever and win many many many games. If there are skeletons in his closet, he’ll be cut at the knees faster than you can say Sweatervest.

Regrets skimming the fine print…

Mike Sherman, Texas A&M - 6:1 We’re talking Aggies, so we’ve got a special set of questions that need answers: Is he fascist? Would he sacrifice his daughter’s life for a collie? How adept is he at fending off pirate attacks? To what extent would he prefer the world be more like it was in the 1880s than it is today? Would he buy a nice bottle of Boone’s to get a farm animal into bed? And would he know that Orange Hurricane would be the flavor to do it?

Houston Nutt, Ole Miss - 3:1 Buyer’s remorse? We’ll see. We do know the good people of Oxford are dropping by Nutt Job’s new home three times a week to help try to mold him into an acceptable member of society a la Michael Oher, but can you really teach an old dog new tricks? Hillary Clinton advises, “Not old dogs from Arkansas.”

Bill Stewart, West Virginia - 2:1 West Virginia was practically forced to make the classic “We’ll Prove How Much We Won’t Miss You By Hiring Your Old Assistant And Also We’re Suing You” move. Though the sentiment is understandable, the WPHMWWMYBHYOAAAWSY move rarely leads to a lasting relationship. Let’s face it: we’ve all been there. The girlfriend dumps us for a hotter, richer guy so we thump our chest, down that liter of moonshine, file a lawsuit, and then immediately go to bed with the ex-girlfriend’s sluttiest friend. Before long, though, we get over it, slink away to our physician, and triple check for STDs. (You best win and win big soon, Mr. Stewart.)

Rick Neuheisel, UCLA - 1:25 In real life, Vegas would never allow this man’s name to even be on the books, so sure is his impending combustion. After all, if this were a movie, the pitch would go something like this:

Plot outline: Born again coach Supremely sketchy egomaniac with hubris that would shame Bill Bennett is hired to try to outshine and outglitz the indomitable crosstown rival coach.

Setting: Hollywood.

Dramatic Build: After federal agents use a Ryan Seacrest team gang bang videotape to coerce cooperation from the team’s quarterback, authorities are able to undercover an interstate heroin trafficking ring involving the team’s coach and eager recruits who want to earn a spot on the squad.

Climactic Final Scene: Troubled coach flees campus in explosive-packed Lotus with authorities hot in high speed pursuit. Unable to evacuate the targeted rival campus, Special Deputy Agent Peter Carroll is forced to make a daring move to stop the reckless coach from carbombing the rival university into oblivion.

Sequel: An imprisoned coach bribes wardens into transferring top inmate athletes to his prison so he can win the Penitentiary Cup.

By the EDSBS staff.

We care, just like a tiger does: with their claws and teeth first.

Tennessee has a minor, eeny-tiny-bit of a discipline problem, and not the sort that professional paste-eater and push-door puller Mike Freeman suggests should end up in the firing of Phil Fulmer. (Mike: Tyler Durden IS the narrator!) Fire him for being only good to excellent, sure; we’ve seen that in the SEC before. Fire him for blackmailing Trace Adkins with incriminating gay sex photos into performing at his daughter’s birthday party. (Unsee that, dear reader, and you have achieved enlightenment. We just typed it, and will not eat for several days.) Fire him for picking up field mice and bopping them on the head, and then dipping them in panko crumbs, deep frying them, and eating them during film sessions.

Fire him for any of these, but not the juvenile aborted Liverventures™* most Vol players get arrested for these days. The Vols just need a special blend of caring, discipline, and caring discipline outlined below. Because we care. We really do. In that kind of foster kid kind of care, the one where you don’t buy them fresh produce, turn on the heat for them in the winter, or buy them clothes that fit.

Actin’ Straight with EDSBS: Vol-arity Edition.

1: Pat Summitt. This doesn’t even have to take longer than 15 minutes. Simply invite Pat over, have the winningest coach at Tennessee ever come to a Vol team meeting and then allow her to rip each of the Vols’ gridiron types a new, perfectly torn second asshole. Summitt is the kind of thin-lipped, wiry, kerosene-eyed women who drove schoolbuses in my childhood: very, very quiet schoolbuses. There were rumors one kid, once, had spoken, and that only a red mark the birds liked to pick at on the school driveway stood as testament to her wrath. The team would be a lot like that schoolbus for the next year, at least.

2. Hedge mazes outside dorm entrances. Bull your way through fifteen rows of thorny hedge without bleeding to death? Do I smell starting defense?

3. The ChastiT belt. Fierce, made of stainless steel. Adorned with picture of John Chavis on codpiece for extra contraceptive power. (more…)

Kentucky’s gotten on the bandwagon of smooth succession set by Wisconsin and Florida State, naming Joker Phillips as the eventual successor to Rich Brooks at Kentucky.

Phillips is the current offensive coordinator and a UK alum who’s largely credited with turning the Kentucky offense into a scoring machine and tutoring Andre´ Woodson into an first/second round NFL draft pick in the upcoming 2008 NFL draft. (The freaky accent, though, is all on moms and dads, there.)

He also favors headgear that pays tribute to the oppressed Uighur people of Western China, which is nice. See after the jump: (more…)

It being the respectable Midwest where things are done a certain way and in a certain manner, Joe Tiller has agreed on a handover plan for his retirement and the introduction of his successor, Eastern Kentucky. The negotiations went something like this.

University Counsel: Good morning, Coach Tiller.

Tiller: Hiya. We here to pick my successor? (more…)

The Fulmer Cup 2008…now with theme song! God bless Garage Band loops.

MP3 File

The Fulmer Cup enters its third year of existence as college football’s premiere offseason time-waster and the only established measure of which teams really do have the least well-behaved student-athletes in the sport of football. In case you aren’t familiar with the system, we’ll recap the rules and even show you an example of the scoring, since the University of Tennessee–appropriately enough–gave us an example this weekend to open the scoring for this year.

Points are awarded for player arrests. These have to be current football players and verified charges, so if Uncle Jimboridicus calls and tells you that he swears he saw someone being stuffed into the back of a squad car…no dice unless we’ve got a wire report or an arrest record. Also, if it’s a graduated player, or someone who’s already declared for the draft…no go there, either. Coaches can count, but relatives of players do not.

The rules for scoring are as follows, but are not limited to:

* Murder: 5 points.

* Rape: 4 points. Downgraded to one if either participant is wearing a clown mask.

* Bestiality: 4 points. It’s a form of rape, really, no matter how much the goat has had to drink. High point value justified further by the fact that it involves having sex with an animal. You could say this was unthinkable, but in the past year alone two stories involving college athletes and at least the association with barnyard bonhomie of a most intimate degree have been reported, including the EDSBS Official GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD: the arrest of Oregon State player Ben Siegert for stealing a sheep used in a study on homosexuality in sheep.

* Grand Larceny: 4 points. We use this as a catchall for players being involved in crime so outrageous and well-planned it can only be described as ‘nefarious,’ ‘professional,’ or ‘legislation.’ Applies to large drug rings, chop shop operations, and the Haitian human trafficking ring that’s been run out of the Miami locker room since ‘93. (We kid! They didn’t get that thing humming ’til ‘95 at the earliest.)

* Hitting Girls: 3 points. We’ll downgrade this to 2 if the girl can hold her weight and requires daily medication to prevent her from gouging her own eyes out (since those were the ones we always ended up dating, and we understand); or we’ll upgrade to 4 points if the damage includes intensive care. Dad always said never hit girls, so we take this one seriously. Dad also said always double down with split aces, too, but we’ll be damned if we didn’t end up selling bone marrow in Macau the last time we followed that bit of advice.

* Car theft/Assault/Driving through houses drunk/Drug possession of the Tyrone Biggums variety: 3 points. “Drug possession” never sounds all that bad until you add in ‘crack cocaine,’ which is society’s signifier that your life has gone from that of high functioning simian in a complex society to that of a rat with electrodes in your brain’s pleasure centers hitting a pedal in a glass box in a lab. Weed? Par for the course, especially if you’re NFL-bound. Crack? Break out the Sports Century ‘Weepy Sonata’ music, because the story of your descent from boundless potential has just begun, and they haven’t even begun to show the grainy shots of 130-lb you huddled in a shelter on Skid Row.

* Fightin’ in ‘da Club/Weed Possession/Standard DUI: 2 points. Any scenario involving group fighting of a thugged-out, ‘we run this place’ variety, and marijuana possession of the nickel bag level. Possession of 100 pounds of marijuana is a totally different thing, and takes you right back up to the 4 point ‘nefarious’ level.

* Drankin’/Suspended License/Assorted petty misdemeanors: 1 point.

Crave it: The Fulmer Cup.

There is a fair amount of wiggle room here, especially given the degree of the crime and the zest with which is was committed. For example: there’s DUI, and what we’ll call Estonian DUI. Some poor kid who had one too many beers gets pulled over with a .09 BAC? That’s standard DUI. Some coach gets pulled over, say on a desert lane somewhere in Arizona, for instance, with a .45 BAC and a can of ether? This calls for bonus points, an award determined both by reader input and by Queen of Hearts Rules. (Orson is the Queen of Hearts here, and if he says off with its head, then it’s off with the head.)

The updated scoreboard will be maintained again by Brian “Hung Like Reggie F’n Nelson”, who will get an even cooler nickname this season if he keeps it up. Scoring is maintained in detail in the archives here, but somewhat more conveniently talled by our close personal friends at SAS Wiki at their indispensable Fulmer Cup page.

The Ellis T. Jones III award, neglected last season, will make a return to the scene this year. The ETJ3 is given to the player who makes such an astounding individual achievement he cannot fairly be considered to be part of the team. This is designed to offset not only the impact of one bad egg on a whole team, but also to recognize outstanding effort on the part of the individual. Think of it as the Davey O’Brien Award, but for stealing car stereos instead of passing.

Now, for an example: Tennessee wide receivers Gerald Jones and Ahmad Paige were showing some recruits around this weekend. Light stuff, really: a nice cruise in the ride, a few joints firing away in the ashtray, and the one excuse a cop needs: a busted tag light. Paige granted police permission to search the car, they did, and now we know what explains Tennessee’s blunted deep passing game this year: two possession charges, one for Paige and one for Jones, and the first points of the new season go to the Cup’s namesake, the University of Tennessee.

The tally:

2 points each for possession, meaning a total of 4 for Tennessee. You count them each, and considering the piddly amounts involved, you’re not talking Tyrone Biggums/Nate Newton levels here.

Let the race begin! When the fat man says it’s time to dance, it’s time…to dance!

Also check out Miami Hawk Talk’s preseason rankings. They’re bullish on Arizona State, and why not?

June Jones and the Magic Playbook. There’s three parts, all posted below. Just…just watch it.

(more…)

Phil Fulmer’s first candidate for offensive coordinator is not Mike Debord, but rather the head coach of the Richmond Spiders, Dave Clawson. Clawson turned around both the Fordham and the Richmond program, leading Richmond to an 11-3 record and to the Division 1-AA (new terminology be damned) title game semi-finals against Appalchian State. (Which they lost, but no shame in that. Transitively, so did Florida.)

If you’re looking for a taste of what Clawson brings to the table as an offensive coordinator, Youtube’s not helping much. Here’s what we did find, notable for its peeks at what appears to be your standard, multiform offense in the Cutcliffe mode and some of the excellence you’ve come to expect from student broadcasting. At one point, he uses the phrase “SIKE!” We don’t know whether to praise him for this, or push him from the parapets screaming.

(HT: Luke, Tom.)

We all get our start somewhere, and Rich Rodriguez’s start came at Glenville State, a school never described without the words “tiny” prefacing it: an enrollment of 1392, tucked away in equally tiny Glenville, West Virginia, and the wellspring of the Rodriguez spread offense that has spread across this great nation of ours like so many “McRib is coming!” promo posters.

Which brings up the point: that Rodriguez spent six years at Glenville State. Six years at a tiny school in a tiny place with zero glory and a videographer that set things to Michael Jackson’s “Jam.” (Considering half of all college football highlight vids are set to “Boom!”, we really can’t judge too harshly.) He then spent another seven at West Virginia, so any and all accusations of carpetbaggery should be shat out the window with disdain.

He may have executed the breakup in a discombobulated manner, but he certainly stayed long enough to make it respectable. Coaching-wise, he’s a responsible serial monogamist who’s weak on the breakup, which most of us are. Hell we cried when we changed cell-phone providers. (Damn you, Verizon, and your wicked, alluring ways. You had to bring the tears with you, didn’t you? )

The rumor du jour–and the only food group this time of year is rumor, so double servings all around–is that Terry Bowden is pleading himself into contention for the West Virginia head coaching job. Or he’s making enough noise to be considered. Or he’s from West Virginia, doesn’t currently have a coaching job, once did in fact have a coaching job, and wants to get back into coaching, so using some vocational trigonometry BLAMMO!!! He must be in the running for the West Virginia job.

Anyone wanting to hire him should remember the curious case of Bowden’s departure at Auburn: Bowden fled the Opelika/Auburn metro area six games into the 1998 season after a 1-5 start and a near uprising by Auburn fans and boosters. It was not one of those quick little departures with a tasteful press conference and lots of jovial back-slapping, either: Bowden pulled the original midnight run move, leaving town literally overnight and leaving Bill Oliver to grit out the rest of the season. Bowden was there one minute….and then he wasn’t.

Go down, sun! Dammit, go down! I gotta pack!

We know Auburn’s boosters have roving packs of robotic dogs ready to kill at the drop of their master’s cap, but that’s pushing the logical fear envelope for a coach in trouble. The real shame in Bowden getting another job is that Yahoo would lose one of their more entertaining writers–Bowden’s column is shockingly good, and we’re not just grading on the former coaches’ scale, either; it’s legitimately good and often so.

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.