We WILL be liveblogging this game at 7:30 p.m. Join us then and taste the chaos of an EDSBS liveblog of a middling between an inconsistent but talented team and an inconsistent and untalented team. Adventure has a thousand flavors!

Welcome to our Factor Five Five Factor Preview Colorado at West Virginia. The Factor Five Five Factor Preview examines the necessaries and completely arbitraries of the official beginning of your weekend, the Thursday Night special. This week’s special puts the “special” in Thursday Night Special, because Colorado is playing, and as part of their continued sponsorship of slow kids who like to play football, they will lose this game by a substantial margin.

Enjoy.

Category one: Nebulous Statistical Comparisons of Dubious Validity. Colorado’s defensive numbers, presented as one would show slides of a murder, cakewreck, or explicit slides of cheap hotel infidelity in a divorce trial: (more…)

Oh, you’ve done it now: Sam Bradford will not start against Miami, yielding the way for Landry Jones to step forward, unleash mustache hell on the Hurricanes, and then triumphantly ride his President Camacho motortrike to South Beach for a case of Busch Light and a six pack of ladies to finish the night off right.

Wassup, ’scro. Don’t be a pussy and pass me a beer.

No, leave the Dragonball-Z and Pokemon posters on the wall behind you in your smack-talking video to Miami fans. They’ll be too distracted by your blazing commentary and the acid burn of your caustic LAUGH OF DEEP KNOWING SARCASM, right?

No? (more…)

Mike Leach has issued an edict that the crew of the Red Raider shall not, under any circumstances at all, tweet. This follows the linebacker and leading tackler Marlon Williams tweeting about Leach not being on time, which is definitely not the way to tweet about you coach. Williams would probably still have a Twitter page if he’d taken the Pete Carroll Tweeting Forever: Living Like a Champion in 140 Characters or Less pamphlet to heart (a publication with 140 character chapters, of course.)

Or he could have done something like this if he was going to tweet about his coach:

Now that Leach and his pirate navy of grad assistants have blockaded his players from Tweeting, we won’t find out the fate of Brandon Carter from his Twitter feed, which also disappeared after Carter posted about his dissatisfaction with the beginning of the season. Carter posted he was suspended, a suspension confirmed by Mike Leach in terms so icy a hitman might cringe at them:

Asked how much the offensive line will miss Carter, Leach said, “Not at all.”

Don’t fall off the side of the boat, Red Raider. Ships don’t have brakes, and it’s a long way to swim to Aruba if you’re tossed off the side “accidentally.”

Every Wednesday Chris Brown from Smart Football lowers his IQ by hanging out here and deconstructing the football issues of the day. This week’s fox, hunted down via Twitter: What the hell are Houston and Texas Tech going to throw at each other in this week’s most likely candidate for betting the over successfully? Submit your questions to Chris via the EDSBS Twitter account, twitter.com/edsbs. Enjoy.

The detestable Mr. Leach will run the same play until you stop it, sir.

If actions speak louder than words, then the biggest proponent of Mike Leach’s Airraid offense might be the Bob Stoops coaching tree. While defensive coordinator at the University of Florida, Bob Stoops said there was only one school in the SEC that he truly felt he had a difficult time defending, in a way not at all commensurate with the relative talent between that school and his: The Hal Mumme led Kentucky Wildcats. When Oklahoma hired him to be its head coach, he hired Mumme’s offensive coordinator, some guy named Mike Leach.

Leach left after a season at Oklahoma to become the head coach at Texas Tech, and so, from 2000 on, Leach and Stoops have faced each other every year; OU’s defensive coaches have up-close and personal experience with Leach’s offense. (more…)

If it can’t be explained in five minutes with Paintbrush and graphics found on the internet, it cannot be known. This week’s question comes courtesy of…

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? (more…)

School: Oklahoma. Not the first school you might think of when you consider the topic of rap music, but not without its moments in the history of the genre.

Theme: Boomer, the OU mascot, falls asleep in the library and has a fantasy about the ice cream paint job applied to the Sooner Schooner. This is entirely plausible for several reasons. First, a covered wagon is still used as a form of transportation in many hamlets and villages in Oklahoma, and would thus be coveted by both people and the horses residents let ride in the front seats. Second, sleeping in the libraries in Norman has been a tradition ever since the days of Barry Switzer, who would send his starting lineup to sleep there in lieu of playing a futile second half against an opponent they’d already beaten by fifty in a half.

It’s the little things, really: The “ice cream” gesture the dancers make; the literal “check” mark the Rufneks and Boomer make on a yellow legal pad during the verse’s checklist; the rim hung off Boomer’s neck like a Flavor Flav clock-alace. We also never noticed before what beautiful blue eyes Boomer has. He’s like the Alexander Skarsgard of mascots, only with hooves.

Points deducted for: Boomer being a traitor to his species by driving two horses at the reins of the wagon. Bad form, really. Additional points removed for covering up those entrancing baby blues, too. They’re really Boomer’s best feature.

Overall rating: 8/10. Well done, Sooners. If this gets big enough the streets of Norman will be flooded with donked-out Conestoga Wagons. (Well, you know. More than usual.)

The Ginger Ninja has flu-like symptoms, according to Mark Schlabach, whose bond ratings re: Bulldog sources and info are A++ locktight awesome and solid. It’s not clear whether he traveled with the team, or whether he began sprouting unusually thick back hairs, having a lot more sex with his girlfriend, and breaking rubes’ arms in arm-wrestling matches in seedy bars. Ah, fun with typos. You never disappoint an English major.

The Ginger Ninja confuses enemies with explosive powders and cold, clammy sweats, though! When Joe Cox savages Oklahoma State’s secondary on Saturday night and steals the sacred scroll Mike Gundy gets his crazed rage from, you’ll know he’s struck again with his mighty plague-chuks. The obvious answer to his absence from the team plane on the way to Stillwater? He was there, but you couldn’t see him, because ninjas are invisible, especially Ginger Ninjas, who are close to transparent to start with, after all.

This is so wonderful you’ll have to click over to see it, but TNIAAM goes far toward proving that blogging about a bad football team is usually far more entertaining than blogging about a good football team. Or, failing that, blogging about football players doing stupid things against the laws of most municipalities, states, nations, and common sense in general.

Segway! Segue! Thing transitioning you from one topic to another!

LAST MINUTE FULMER CUPDATES

Gary Pinkel will send you to hell, child. “Future Chase Daniel” Blaine Dalton now becomes “future D-11 quarterback” with his dismissal from Missouri for an on-campus DWI. The incident is the second incident for Dalton, who was charged with driving with an open container earlier this summer. He also had a third incident where no charges were filed when pills belonging to a friend were found in his car, so three made a trend for Pinkel, who gave his qb of the future the boot from campus. (Soft boot or hard boot remains to be seen; he may be able to get back on the team with good behavior and time, but DWI with no style points (i.e. hitting a donkey, ridiculously high BAC, etc.) gets you two points in the Fulmer Cup.

Stealing Georgia’s thunder already. Oklahoma State is already attempting to pre-empt Georgia scoring, and is doing it by biting their style, too: senior DB Perrish Cox pulled a page from the Bulldog playbook by picking up a measly one-point suspended license charge in Stillwater. Let us congratulate the Dawgs, btw, on an offseason free of license-related foolishness or other driving charges. Either they hired the driving paperwork coordinator we’d always said they needed, or more likely than not someone performed an exorcism to rid the roads of the spirit of Mudcat Elmore’s car. For the 20 Georgia fans who got that reference: you’re welcome.

The Fulmer Cup ends at noon on Wednesday. If anyone’s going to rob a bank or pistol-whip an elephant, now’s the time to do these things.

We don’t know what secrets reside in Howard Schnellenberger’s voice, particularly in its lower registers: the location of German submarines loaded with Nazi gold, the authorship of the Nazca lines, and the point where Amelia Earhart was abducted by aliens. Admit that you believe Schnellenberger could be holding onto all three, and also responsible for the events leading up to them, or you are a liar.

The question had Howard Schnellenberger lowering his signature baritone voice to a level where deep, dark secrets reside.

“I have one rented,” rasped Florida Atlantic’s 75-year-old football coach, “in Oklahoma.”

You think he’s lying, but when the Dapper Don swoops in like a Green Beret clad in Brooks Brothers into the stadium Saturday, you’ll all be at your knees for the number one stunna of the class of 1857. Schnellenberger did actually fly in a helicopter into a press conference at the 1984 Orange Bowl when his Miami team faced Nebraska and eventually spoiled an undefeated season for the Huskers, because if you give people money in South Florida, they like to do things like burn it in piles and take helicopters everywhere.

Also, please bow at the awesome contained here:

Next on the list after that might be how his wife of 50 years, Beverlee, wore a full-length white mink coat atop a fire engine while reveling in the ticker-tape parade for the Hurricanes down Biscayne Boulevard after they’d delivered Nebraska with arguably its most emotional defeat ever, a 31-30 outcome that spoiled an unbeaten season.

“She looks good in white mink,” crowed Schnellenberger, who since 1982 has worn a suit during games.

And a flurry of women’s panties hit the stage.