Drink:

This hat was made from the beer consumed between 10:14 a.m. and 10:46 a.m. From an ode to Busch Light.

IF: 24 pack of Busch light: THEN: Ohio State. We’ve never seen people drink more shitty beer with greater voracity than Ohio State fans. Never. Not at LSU, not at Alabama, not at Georgia, not at Florida (where beer, liquor, and “whatever your friends from Miami had in a dropper” get thrown into a single vomitous swirl.) Nowhere is there a greater thirst for building a solid fellatio cabana from lowgrade hops and barley than in Columbus. If your happiness comes in a flimsy box with a convenient pulltab corner for machine-gun disbursal, you pull for the Buckeyes here.

IF: Bell’s Beer: THEN: Michigan.The craft beer thing was coming here and you knew it, but for posterity’s sake let’s get it right and say that like good beer snobs, Michiganders go local and pimp local brands like Bell’s Brewery.

Music

IF: Morrissey/Smiths: THEN: Michigan. That joke isn’t funny anymore, especially if it involves losing a sixth straight game to Ohio State.

IF: Nickelback: THEN: Ohio State. It’s less a specific prescription than an overall vibe. Arena rock never died, it just moved to Ohio, where it still sells like flyswatters in a refugee camp. Deny it if you like, but Nickelback will get the blood pumping, especially their live stuff. We’re especially fond of this one.

Philosophical School:

IF: Chuck Palahniuk:

“It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.”

THEN: Michigan.

IF: Red Foreman:

Well, it’s a tough world, Eric, and people don’t always get what they want. Especially you.

THEN: Ohio State.

The 1950s:

IF:“Thesis: The 1950s were a simmering cauldron of social change, an underexamined pressure cooker of cultural tension, political realignment, and economic expansion whose momentum was not merely a factor in the great upheaval of the 1960s, but a continuation of it. In this paper we will examine these changes as reflected in the music of Bob Seger, whose own compositions reflect this dichotomous sense/memory of the two decades: one held sacrosanct in the common memory for its alleged innocence (see “Night Moves” or “Down on Main Street,”), and another lauded for its freewheeling excesses and exotic leanings (see “Kathmandu.”) Through the eyes of one of America’s most neglected cultural icons, we will illustrate how music can form a tight emotional bond between a historical era and even the most inaccurate representations of its realities (and, indeed, its falsehoods.)

THEN: Michigan.

IF: “‘ ‘the fuck, dude?”

THEN: Ohio State.

The reason you have a goatee.

IF: “That’s an odd question…because it does give off a certain “don’t touch me” vibe, and because the beard isn’t growing in so well, and the goatee–prior to its appropriation by the middle classes as a sign of rebellion in the late 1980s and its subsequent slide into its current status as the mustache of the 2000s (not to be confused with the ironic mustache of the 2000s–what was I saying? Oh, my girlfriend likes it, and it gives me something to stroke when I’m thinking, that’s all. That’s the simple answer.”

THEN: Michigan.

IF: “Because it owns, pussy.”

THEN: Ohio State.

“I look at Daryl Clark and see the nightmares he can open for Ohio State. And if that happens, Penn State will win by 30.” For the Redneck Rocker, every game is a Hellraiser Box to be opened with someone being ripped apart by chains, usually you, you non-Buckeye bitch. If a hipster needs to have their soul crushed today, just play this entire video and wait for Justice’s “Genesis” to crank through. Yes, he probably got it from the Cadillac commercial, but it should still reduce them to a fine, shimmering cloud of dust in a matter of seconds.

Nittany Lion Drawn By Tom of Finland: Here, Terrelle. Take a tissue. I know how hard it can be.

Terrelle Pryor: Thanks, I just…I just try so hard.

Nittany Lion Drawn by Tom of Finland: I know, I know. Hey, have you been working out?

TP: Oh, like you wouldn’t believe. I’m so…sore. I just need someone to touch me and tell me it’s all gonna be all right.

Nittany: Oh, let’s just give those sore shoulders a rub and see what happens… [CUE MUSIC}

(The shirt’s been recalled, of course. But the Tom of Finland Nittany Lion attempting to turn Terrelle Pryor lives on in your hearts and in your pants.)

HAPPY MUSTACHE WEDNESDAY, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!

I wanna stand with you on a mountain…

Decker takes his 758 yards receiving and 5 TDs full of wan brilliance with him, meaning the burden of being the foremost honky skill athlete falls predictably to running back Toby Gerhart, who even more predictably plays for Stanford, is majoring in management, and has a profile that does not mention any of the following words: “nimble,” “fast”, or “speed.” Toby, you’re our only hope now. Take strength as thousands of slow-footed but determined white athletes have before you: in the completely plausible Rocky 3 training montage’s final sprint sequence.

(HT: FOTP, who was on the very same track mid-stream with us here.)

1. Iowa Hello. You’re looking beautiful tonight, little lady. Thought we’d swing by Outback in a while. Get some…hot meat. You may notice my my stellar resume. Bulging pants, check. 67th in the nation in total offense without a running attack of any sort? Oh, check. I don’t do it on the ground, though, baby. That’s for animals. I want it standing up right here, dishing it to you like Ricky Stanzi in the pocket. Oh, I’m only gonna put it in the right place one out of every three times.

When I do, though? Magic happens baby. With the kind of D I sling, you only need to hit it once out of every three times. You seem nervous, baby. Don’t fight this. You know you want it. Remember that you always feel dirty after three good things: an Iowa victory, a hard workout, and being rolled out of the door of my car into a ditch at 30 miles an hour. If you’re lucky, a Saturday night with me’s gonna feature all three.

You’re not feeling it? Whatever, lady. That Wisconsin chick is looking pretty tipsy over there. She looks like she wants a blast of Vitamin F, ifyaknowhattamean.

2. Ohio State. Grimly fingerbanging its way through its schedule without having to resort to actually using the designed implement for scoring, Ohio State is saving putting it in the endzone properly for marriage but using all kinds of football outercourse to protect its chastity. Jim Tressel’s defensive chastity belt has them allowing just 12 points a game. As bad as you may think they are offensively, they’re worse offensively: 86th in the nation, and 108th in the nation in passing offense. Date-rapin’ Iowa looks like Texas Tech comparatively, and Terrelle Pryor runs the passing attack with the verve and accuracy of a young point-shaving Art Schlicter. Kurt Coleman taking direct snaps and dare people to touch him might be more impressive, because he scares the bark off trees and leads the usual Ohio State defense. Boner time: 21st in punting!

3. Wisconsin, Who Puts Out Like Crazy. Wisconsin almost lost to Fresno State before PUTTING THE HURT ON WOFFORD, WOOOO!!! They have now lost to Ohio State, and will give it up in a drunken haze to Iowa before waking, realizing what’s happened, crying for a bit, and then recovering to win by slim margins in the remainder of their games, including the season finale at Hawaii, a.k.a. The “Wisconsinites Drink Honolulu Dry” Bowl. They remain the same diluted Barry Alvarez product you know and have come to expect: good offense, erratic defense, and a bid on a bowl game somewhere in central Florida waiting for them. Is their running back faster than Ron Dayne? Yes: John Clay allegedly runs a 4.58, or as they call it at Florida State, “a solid 3.94.” He’s quite good when not being held to 59 yards by OSU’s defense last week, or by anyone else with a modicum of speed.

4. Penn State. Penn State meekly allowed Ole Miss to push them out of the way for the most underwhelming debut thanks to the Rebels flopping in not one, but two games against major opponents. Comparing Houston Nutt to Joe Paterno in anything besides the need to breathe oxygen isn’t fair because a.) Paterno and Nutt should never be mentioned in the same breath is wrong, and b.) because Joe Paterno hasn’t required oxygen since the 17th century or so, subsisting solely off brains and the beauty of classical verse.

Aside from “Evan Royster=good,” there is still little to know here since they’ve been busy robbing the doorless houses of college football by beating Akron, Eastern Illinois, and Temple in miserably lopsided games. This is what happens when you allow Mike Leach to do your scheduling on a dare.

5. Michigan State Kirk Cousins has looked impressive for a first year starter sophomore, but he is a first year starter sophomore, and thus the late mistake against Notre Dame, the damaging turnovers against Wisconsin, and the all-night dorm bullshit sessions about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and its ramifications for the game of football. (”But how do you know a first down’s a first down, really?” [BONG RIP]) The same ol’ four, possibly five loss team you’ve come to know, a corrupted mimeograph of an Ohio State team with slightly better defense and inferior defense.

6. Michigan: It would great, evil fun if they went on a rip for the rest of the season and beat Ohio State. It would also be fun if they did not surrender 3rd and 24 to Iowa on a throw to a tight end, but GERG demands some satisfaction for his mediocrity tooth every now and then. Forcier’s been far better than expected, but he’s concussed, the option game still isn’t fully molded, the safeties (while not Georgia bad) still chase particularly fat moths they confuse for the ball, and the defensive side of the ball sometimes decides to get their implode on for no reason in particular. Zoltan Mesko, you’re our only hope: 3rd in the nation in punting, bitches! Bow to your Space Emperor on his final tour of your puny universe before he leaves to seek adventure elsewhere.

7. Minnesota. Eric Decker and 21 other people perforaing various functions superfluous to Eric Decker’s awesomeness=Minny football 2009. Do we want to devote more words here? No? Moving on.

8. Northwestern. Lost to Syracuse. There should be penalties for this, like playing the next game with your helmets on backwards for a quarter.

9. Indiana. Losing 47-7 to Virginia should also force a team to play with their helmets on backwards. Ooh! No, wait! They can wear their shoulder pads on their hips like a hula skirt and dance at halftime, where each movement has a meaning like “We beat Akron at least,” or “Watching the upcoming game between us and Illinois will be like having your nose hairs plucked out slowing with blazing-hot tongs.”

10. Purdue. The Big Ten is a deep conference in one sense: like a film of scuba diving beneath polar ice, there is a tiny porthole of sunlight at the top above, and a sprawling expanse of bottom below. This abundance of bottom includes Purdue, whose only victory came against Toledo in week one. This makes them transitively better than Colorado, so at least they’re not sitting in that bad a section in Bottomland.

11. Illinoise. The proper spelling, per Name Redacted. What can be said about this team that does not involve graphic descriptions of small animals being fed into the maw of smelting furnace? They do not have a winnable game on the remainder of their schedule, and could see a full return to Ron Turner’s 1-11 masterpiece of 2003 at this rate. Their next to last game comes against Cincinnati. Their next to last game may feature Tony Pike throwing 8 TDs in a quarter.

Down? Tryin’ to get a spark? Goshdangit, what you need is a canned Garage Band beat with some of [NAME REDACTED]’s finest cuts from his Monday morning interview following another intense, passionate loss to a Big Ten team. Illinois faces Michigan State this Saturday with new starting qb Eddie McGee, who will likely be benched for deposed starter qb Juice Williams in the third quarter because Illinois is dead last in scoring defense and scoring offense in the Big Ten, and that makes you a terrible, terrible football team no matter who is cluelessly slapping the controls of a plane in flat spin.

GET DOWN.


MP3 File

Minnesota linebacker “Hacksaw” Gary Tinsley, you earn the award for “Finishing the Drill, Resisting Arrest Exercise” for the week at the least for your outstanding performance after Saturday’s game with Northwestern. Is Tim Brewster recruiting speed? Hell yes he is:

Scouts take notice: Tinsley ran from the scene “extremely fast” when a uniformed University police officer arrived.

BIG TEN SPEED BABY. Clearly a different caliber of athlete has arrived in the Twin Cities to lead the Gophers to the promised land if even the police note your street speed. Put that in cleats, and it’s tipsy lightning ready to roll. Tinsley was cited for underage drinking, however, even if the police report did provide a glowing review of his afterburning capability. The same report includes details from the arrest of RB Kevin Whaley, who punched a bouncer in November and struggled with police afterwards in a violent fight spilling over into gridlocked traffic and featuring many censored quote balloons appearing in real time above Whaley’s head.

Whaley at one point hit an officer in the top of the head with his elbow, stating *&^@#*&^@#*&^@#*&^@# you bit*^. He repeated those words multiple times.

We want audio, since we’re wondering what 20 letter profanity is sitting there. “Bastardassholefucker,” perhaps? That’s our favorite, but profanity is a very personal choice.

Adam Rittenberg of ESPN, the resident Big Ten blogger, wonders why Ohio State gets the national Cleveland Steamer treatment for their performance in big games while Oklahoma receives little of the same treatment for their even worse performance record in big games, a bias reflected in this week’s polls and their inequal treatment of both teams.

But another national powerhouse deserves the same treatment. Another big-name has been just as disappointing in big games, if not worse. And yet that team continues to escape the hate. Meet the Oklahoma Sooners. They’re apparently made out of Teflon.

Untrue. This has nothing to do with anyone’s dislike of Tressel, or a curious anti-Buckeye slant to national coverage. As usual, this can be explained with some handy statistics and the visual scalpel wielded by truth itself on our planet, MS Paint. (Or as seen here, Mac Paintbrush. Same thing, more pompous platform.)

This is the United States. Most people live on the coasts, as indicated by the extremely scientific arrows.

There are more eyeballs toward the coasts, and thus more people to see your failures, document them, and mock you for them when they happen. Oklahoma has a far more impressive resume in the department of championship fail, and mimics OU’s pattern of winning their conference, getting to a BCS bowl, and then depositing a shovelful of ass vindaloo into their collective shorts on national television.

Why the especially harsh rhetoric towards Ohio State? Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs, something illustrated in our handy experiment.

Step one: Assume a dick. Let us assume a total dick exists. A person who dings car doors with you sitting in the car, looks at you, and who just walks away. A person who drives 50 mph in the fast lane with eight ladders loosely secured to the roof of their car. A person who leaves fork marks in your ice cream. In other words, a total dick.

Assume absolute dickishness: their level of average dickitude does not change with geography. They will attempt to pressure you into their gasoline-selling pyramid scheme in Topeka or in Tacoma; they will put their ATM card in the machine four times and act visibly frustrated while you wait behind them, but never understand that what they are doing is both stupid and impossible. (”Why can’t I get a cash advance in Euros? FUCK THIS MACHINE!! /putsincardforfifthtime.)

For the purposes of this study, this dick will be represented by Jason Statham. Note the distance between this total dick and most people.

Place him in small community like Oklahoma, and his reputation as a dick will be lower-case at best due to the distance from the majority of those writing about college football and viewing it.

This happens with other things, too. Take a serial killer, for instance. You don’t want to be a serial killer in New York City if you really love your work. Oh, the publicity’s great, sure, and people will write OMG THE SCARIEST SERIAL KILLER EVAR, and you’ll be caught in three weeks at best. (The rent is a bitch, too.) Do it in Oklahoma or Kansas, though, and you can work for years until someone finds you because so many fewer people are paying attention. There are fewer people to hear the epic tales, and thus less of a myth.

Now, let’s place this total dick in a place closer to large groups of people and media.

Note this dick’s sudden proximity to larger groups of people, who will observe him talking about himself constantly, popping multiple collars, leaving his beer at a four-top you’re waiting on and walk away only to claim it when you swoop in saying “it’s taken,” and being his usual epic dick self. Suddenly, observe the growth in this dick’s overall community rating as a complete dick:

In our simulation, he has reached the level of EPIC DICKISHNESS simply because of the weight of public opinion, a general verdict consisting of multiplied opinions reaching a consensus. (One that may be completely erroneous.)

As our Paint experiment clearly shows, your reputation as “X” gets larger the closer you move to the coasts, which is why habitual debtor Donald Trump is considered a genius in New York while Warren Buffett quietly squats atop a platinum throne out in Fargo. (Yes, Buffett is considered a genius in New York, too, but the difference between their public presences can only be explained by attitude and proximity to large media outlets.) Ohio State has been less of a failure overall than OU in big games, but their geography is their curse in the end, not a lack of talent or gumption in big games.

This universal truth has been brought to you by Paint: helping explain the world since 1995 or thereaboutish. We would like to take this opportunity to state that Jason Statham is not a dick, and is used here as a dick strictly for entertainment purposes. Please don’t harm us.

I have been stabbed by Texas, shot by Florida, poisoned by LSU, frozen by USC, hung, electrocuted, and burned by the media…and every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender… I am an immortal.

(See Chris’s post on Sweatervest at Doc Saturday. Jeremiad-y in its intensity, cold science in its accuracy.)

1. Uniforms. Columbus, Ohio is the kind of place where people, in one regard or another, still respect the notion of a uniform. This makes sense; this is where Professor Hayes wore a short sleeve white button down, a tie that appeared to be fitted for a man a full foot shorter than Hayes, geek glasses, a black hat, and pants pulled up to his navel no matter the weather, all the while wondering what particular handbasket the world had decided to go to hell in, and how he could put the hippies in it and send it to Gay Commie China or wherever the hell they wanted to take this fine, red-blooded America to in the first place.

Columbus is still the kind of place where people wear a uniform, and not just a code. In the SEC, sure, there’s a code. There are floppy-haired Alabamian fraternarians in white oxfords, ties, and slacks, accompanied by women in the sundress of the moment, the bubble dress, and wearing equally bubbly sunglasses.

(If I may have a Project Runway moment: the bubble dress is the least flattering dress we’ve ever seen adopted en masse by large groups of women. On a woman with curves, the dress bunches into the great divide, something that should be titillating for a male viewer, but is instead just calls attention to swamp ass, or worse still, the notion that your ass is devouring the dress in whole bites. On skinny women, it looks like you’ve just wrapped them in a tablecloth.)

There is a difference, though, between a code and an out and out uniform. The cops wear the uniforms featured on policemen in children’s books, a white-capped, well-ironed ensemble just beaming with civic responsibility. Contrast this with a Sun Belt city like Atlanta or Miami, where police uniforms make the Protect and Servers of this world look like HVAC repair techs with guns.

These are people who like uniforms, formality, order. Buckeye fans follow suit: nine out of every ten Buckeye fans wear a not-inexpensive Buckeye jersey, a scarlet OSU kit with a custom number. The number matters: within the uniformity of it all, the digits tell a lot about you. A “36″ implies Spielman-type tenacity and grit, while the more classically-minded don the “45″ or Archie Griffin. A woman in our group had on a Herbstreit, met with a jovial “What the fuck are you wearing that for?” by another group of Buckeye fans. To the man we saw with the Clarett “13,” well, cheers to your immense testicularity and devotion. The guy in the Art Schicter jersey salutes you in brotherhood.

2. The Wash ‘n Tan in Columbus is ready when you are, cracker. Consider the infinite loop created here: greasy and smeary from fake tanner or the residue from a fresh broasting in a tanning bed, you carry your clean clothes home and wear them, thus covering them in a thick layer of bronzer or suntan lotion. So you go back to the laundry, then decide to tan while you’re bored and soon you’ve lost your house to your unfortunate obsession with tanning and hyper-clean laundry. These people will own their own gold mines filled with charismatic dwarves soon enough.

3. Columbus is second in the nation in “number of sketchy men of questionable means orbiting the city center on bicycles.” The first is St. Petersburg, Florida. Columbus has a fair number of sketchy men period hanging out on the street, including two gentlemen we passed on the way into campus who had this conversation/piece of street theatre in front of us:

Man One: Say something smart like that I will bust your fucking lip open, motherfucker.

Man Two: [ICY GAZE]

Man One: Yeah. Bitch.

Man Two: [ICIER GAZE]

We could all assume this was genuine, or we can assume this was a stirring rendition of a scene from The Wire practiced by a plucky street improv troupe. We’ll assume the latter.

4. Buckeye fans are, on the whole, a civil militia in all senses of the word civil. Civil in their adherence to rule, to order, to their devotion to Ohio State football. It is complete and undying, as anyone who saw the red horde bellowing for four quarters against USC would attest. We couldn’t get into the game for less than a wallet-scorching sum, so we ended up trekking the two miles back to the house off King street where a complete stranger had invited us to stay. (Again: civil, see definition. He had bathrobes and meth-grade coffee ready in the morning. This was not atypical of the treatment.)

From the front porch you could hear the missed field goal by USC in the first half. Despite a subdued pregame environment, they showed up in fierce, committed, and organized numbers, even when we suspect many of them knew Jim Tressel would get a five point lead and work it like he was sitting on fifty points against Tulane. (And he did.)

Civil can also mean friendly, cordial, which the man in the picture above certainly was. Buckeye fans as a rule are either young, iron-pumping men who wear baseball caps backward and look suspiciously at men who say more than ten words at a time, or they are the older, thicker-necked, cigar-smoking men those younger men become in their middle age. This guy was the latter, and was quite nice when we asked him to take a picture with us. How nice? This was the conversation we had during the taking of this photo.

Facepaint guy: Are you an Ohio State fan?

Orson: No. I went to Florida.

Facepaint guy: Ahhh. I punched a Florida fan once.

Orson: Ah. [/desperately tries to remember anything he might have learned from getting ass kicked by an MMA guy, discovers jackshit on hardrive under this tab.]

Facepaint guy: Don’t worry. I’m not gonna punch you.

See? Perfectly civil people in every respect of the word. They didn’t even punch a Florida fan. (The t-shirt also came courtesy of Peter, who insisted we wear it. It got rave reviews, though we questioned the approving looks, which either meant “Yeah, Wahoo is a racist mascot!” or “Yeah, white people!” It came from here, if you’re interested.)

5. An immense, Bowling Green-orange H2 sat gorging premium gasoline from a pump at a gas station near campus. On the way out from purchasing hideous amounts of low-grade American beer in cans, we peeked into the cab and noticed this:

I was about to ask him what he was doing with a bottle of premium vodka and champagne sitting in the front seat. (After all, the champagne goes in the glove compartment in a bag of ice.) This question died in my mouth before I could really ask it, but the owner beat me to it, pointed at them, and said “That’s what cupholders are for.”

6. The aforementioned hideous amounts of beer in cans consumed in a single weekend at Ohio State.

Wisconsin fans probably consume more alcohol in a single weekend per capita, but that’s because they are from Wisconsin, and thus drinking industrial grade solvents stolen from local businesses after they run out of beer. Ohio State fans have to lead the nation in canned domestic beer, something Michigan fans will mock by asking you when you tell them you’re bound for Columbus “You gonna get a suitcase of Bud Light?” This is because Michigan fans are obviously the commies Professor Hayes shook his fist at from his fiefdom in Columbus, consuming fancy microbrews from bottles expensively purchased at the rate of six at a time.

Ohio State fans buy beer in bulk, and lug 12 and 24 packs to the tailgate like Tokyo salarymen checking into the office for the day. They also drink it like marathoners chugging electrolyte solution, albeit in red cups, because for some reason the police insist on playing wink-wink, nod-nod by enforcing open container on cans, but not on “the mysterious red solo cup of plausible deniability.” This creates twice the trash for no reason whatsoever, but remember: order is the theme here, until it’s not, of course, which is why Buckeye fans sometimes get pepper-sprayed by police, and why Germans (otherwise staid, orderly people) make the worst soccer hooligans.

7. USC fans have expensive eyewear. In fact, take the photo above to be an illustrated guide to the younger USC fan, albeit in a strange, foreign ecosystem where they get called “fag” a bit for that carefully chosen expensive eyewear.

(Ohio State fans lag behind the kings of homosexual taunting, Miami Hurricanes fans. If you were in a duel with a Canes fan and got the draw on him–which you would, because they would be toting a gun far too large to pull quickly, and most likely tucking it in the band of some shiny gym shorts–his last words clutching his mortal wound would be, quietly and with his last breath, a hissed “…fag…” before expiring. No one calls you a homosexual with greater frequency or intensity than a Miami fan, a special delight since they come from a city where they are surrounded by flamboyant and unapologetic homosexuals.)

The USC fans above display what happens when Los Angeles meets college football.

a.) Designer eyewear. Straight men unapologetically wearing designer eyewear. There’s Dolce and Gabbana on them there noggins, something Ohio State fans would, when not being totally polite 90% of the time and saying things like “Welcome to Ohio!”, point and note by suggesting they were gay for wearing. The Buckeye fan next to these guys held up his own knockoff Oakleys, took the cigar out of his mouth, and proudly announced “Fiftten dollars at a gas station!” That’s how men buy sunglasses, dammit.

b.) Campy but fashionable individualized wear. The older Trojan fans stuck to what older guys wear to games–golf shirts, windbreakers, or branded hats–but younger SC fans had to carve out their own brahsomeness with custom gear: a USC scarf worn out of the back pocket of hundred dollar jeans, customized t-shirts, a spendy fitted worn Soulja Boy style. If Ohio State fans dress for service in the Buckeye militia, USC fans think of the game as an opportunity to accessorize.

c.) Hurr, did. USC guys have exactly as much metrosexual hairdo on their skulls as you would expect from Los Angelenos. By contrast, Ohio State fans seemed to depend on a hairdo we would call “a baseball cap.” This consists of mashing a baseball cap over your bedhead, cracking a can of beer, and pronouncing yourself armed for the day’s action.

d.) A deserved amount of noblesse oblige. They really do approach the game as a kind of polo match between betters and inferiors, cruising along with a brahsome cool garnered from years of watching Pete Carroll teams roll into exotic locales, get on their horses, and decimate the competition. To their credit, they are no more or less gloaty before or after the game; the USC fans we saw congratulated Ohio State fans and vice versa, though in USC’s case it came in the manner of a British general taking a surrender while sipping a glass of sherry. “Oh, nice show. Now if you would, please…your full surrender, sir.

8. God looked down and said, “O-H, I-am going to keep you on the Job track, fortune-wise.” Usually following a loss, a college town is filled with an ambient sullen rage. Columbus after the game seemed resigned to fate, however; around Short North, OSU and USC fans drank and ate contentedly. Down toward campus, no tear gas, no hooligan anger, no riot police wandering suspiciously, no incidents of dumpsters bearing the brunt of raging fans after the game. The result was clearly not offensive, if not satisfactory, to Ohio State fans, who took the whole thing in stride.

The following morning, scrambling to make the last flight out, I threw myself into a yellow Chevy Aveo and sped toward the airport. On the steps of a slightly dingy apartment house, an OSU student stood in his underwear with a fellow student in a Buckeye t-shirt. He’d just gotten something out of his car, but for a moment he stood like Woody Hayes did from time to time in the locker room after a loss, naked to the world and just daring you to ask him something.

I was clearly the interloper here, like a reporter pestering the pantsless Woody after a loss. There are things as an outsider I clearly didn’t understand about Ohio State. That there are rules to be respected, a way for thing to be done, iso runs to call up the middle, sweatervests and ties to be worn. That in an army, nothing changes but the names. That’s how you keep the troops marching, no matter the weather or outcome. Ohio State fans march on in straight rows, no matter the weather, because that is precisely how the Professor would have wanted it.

(HT: Brian.) There’s a few other stunners in there, including a few bordering on art or complete mania. Whichever one they are depends on your opinion on MS Paint-based artwork, which we endorse heartily as being the medium of our time. Well, the second-best medium of our time:

Rich Rodriguez have press conference, make emotional statement, water get fall from eye.

Michigan football Rich Rodriguez appeared tear up as he talked about his program during his weekly news conference in Ann Arbor.

He sad. Say they follow rules. Not make player tow bus or work too hard. Go against everything RichRod teach and say. Rich Rod then discuss Western Michigan. Why you make Rich Rod sad, Freep? He appeared tear up! You feel shame Freepy. Man not made of stone. He made from man!

(Also, we have no video of the press conference yet, so the footage from Michigan’s practices will have to do.)

This is how you get Switzeriguez and Barwis running from rooftop to rooftop on campus, dodging huge, man-eating mutant worms Barwis shoots with an elephant gun. Also starring Reba McEntire, Michael Gross, and Lloyd Carr as “Grizzled Man with Golf Club Eaten in Opening Scene.” (HT: Keo)

21. Iowa.

Companion Country: Singapore. Or if you think it strange, clearly you’ve never been to Iowa City:

We’ll sail tonight for Iowa
The city’s made of Bud Light cans
Rode my moped through some cops
Stacked my cheese and ate it
Got drunk with THE COACH-US SON
Beat Cocks in the Outback Bowl
Our quarterback’s efficient yes,
Our road schedule says, “Go see Jim Tress”
We hope for a Nine. And. Three.

Iowa is its own little island of football success despite the odds: only 3 million people in the entire state, and fewer still capable of running a 40 yard dash in less than 5 seconds. (Actually, Singapore with 4.5 million is bigger.) Yet like the tiniest of Asian tigers, Singapore managed to find success thanks to the strong hand of a dynamic leader who spawned a generation of young technocrats–including his lesser successor, Kirk Ferentz. Relying chiefly on hustle and brainpower, Singapore punches well above its weight in terms of regional impact, has problems with a lack of creativity, and while generally well-behaved, its citizens do their crimes in spectacular, press-worthy fashion when they do them. The comparisons only grow stronger when you consider the beneficial kleptocracy the leaders of both Singapore and the Iowa football program seem to be running, taking slightly more than one might think they should. Also, Americans cannot find either on a map, and you can be caned for almost anything in either. (Though in Iowa, it’s more the kind of thing that happens behind closed doors with kinky, strapping, and strangely attractive farmgirls.)

Internal Stability: Middling to good: after three straight years of double digit wins, Ferentz then hit a cold patch with 7, 6, and 6 win season through ‘05-’07, turning him from “coach continually cited as NFL to-be-poached coaching item number 1″ to “the man who charges $450,000 per win, maximum offer includes 7 wins.” A nine win season was nice, but you earn reprieve from further grumbling for an additional year for improving your record against top ten teams to 4-12 with this:

Finding a patchable quarterback to operate behind an offensive line returning three starters? Good, though Ricky Stanzi isn’t going to flutter anyone’s jumblies in a nice fashion under center, and that’s not really what Iowa asks their quarterbacks to do in their scheme, anyway. (Oh, Brad Banks, where art thou, besides hoping to latch back onto a CFL roster and sitting at a table tossing Canadabucks at a bored stripper with fellow CFL hopeful Chris Leak? The program’s real stability at the moment comes not from the hope that Jewel Hampton can replace Shonn Greene’s massive year last year (he can’t,) but that he stays healthy enough to hold the ball and let the defense take over, since they’re the ones with eight of nine coming back.

Additional bonus for stability: the team has a middle linebacker named Pat Angerer. You know you’ve sprung from a long line of badasses when your initial, nameless ancestor came before the Saxon naming committee, and their consensus was “One who pisses you off to the point of murderous rage.” You’re an even bigger badass when your ancestor hears that, beats everyone in the room senseless with the arm that wasn’t ripped off in a fight to the death with a swamp monster, and then happily accepts the name before taking to the marital pallet to pound out an endless stream of equally fierce man-pups, one of whom was second in the Big Ten in interceptions last year. (His teammate, Tyler Sash, was first. They don’t force fumbles with pressure, but they’re happy to let you throw the ball to them all day.)

Surprising thing you did not know about this team: That for some reason or another, they play Arizona at home in week three in what we don’t want to call the Meth Bowl, but METH BOWL METH BOWL METH BOWL. Iowa has their Big Ten schedule set on Heroic: Their enemies are as numerous as they are ferocious; their attacks are devastating. Survival is not guaranteed. At Penn State in week four isn’t very nice, and neither are trips to Michigan State, Ohio State, and Wisconsin on the road in-conference. Also, they have a backup running back named “Paki O’Meara,” a character ready-made for a terrible Guy Ritchie movie if we’ve ever seen it.

The IMF says: Stay right where you are, pirate. That four game stretch could realistically/ optimistically split .500 in a partly sunny projection; dropping one in a home slate puts them at 9-3 on the season, and that’s looking at the home games as dead locks all around, which is a big assumption given Northwestern’s victory over them last year in Iowa City. Iowa, like Singapore, has its structural limits, especially when it comes to the fast-twitchy playmaking types who turn teams from being efficient machines and turn them into flamethrowing death blossoms on the college football horizon. (The team doesn’t have many of them, not even the requisite Tim Dwight Clone/ Erroneously Fast White Wide Receiver and Punt Returner.) A steady tussler gets 9-3 in a good run, 10-2 at the outside, and returns to 7-5 territory if Jewel Hampton doesn’t hold up and replace at least some of Greene’s production. Hold at 21, and do not approve any higher in a murky, chaotic Big Ten. Like Singapore, they’re among the best in a chaotic neighborhood, but you probably don’t want to make them any bigger than they are, either.