The blades come to a slow crawl: four coaches exit from the left side of the plane. All wear black fleece vests and cargo pants. One coach remains in the helicopter, visibly rocking the chopper from the inside as the machine sags to the right.

(A muffled voice yells from the inside:) A little fuckin’ help here? Huh?

Randy Shannon: This place is NICE.

Tommy Tuberville: Smells like…Afghanistan.

Mark Richt: Guys, maybe we should go back and help Charlie.

Tommy Tuberville: Hell, no, padre. I didn’t fry fish in backwoods Tennessee for years just to help some gravity whore yank his whale-sized kiester out of a helicopter.

Randy Shannon: No, I mean it, y’all. This place is really, really nice.

Mark Richt: I’m going back, guys. He really needs help.

Soldiers, looking slightly alarmed at the rocking helicopter: Coach, with all due respect, you are about to damage $5.9 million of taxpayer property.

Weis: So fucking what? I’LL BUY YOU A NEW ONE I’M SIGNED FOR THREE HUNDRED YEARS. Get me a fucking crowbar!

Tuberville: Have fun, Boy Scout. Me and Shannon are going on patrol.

Shannon: That sounds so much more pleasant than living in Miami, Tommy. And: safer.

Tuberville: Fuckin’ right, man. (They fist pound.)

Richt: Language, guys. Language.

Weis: Crowbar! CROWBAR!!! And a hot pressed sandwich, assholes. Doesn’t anyone have a hot pressed sandwich in this bullet-infested dustcrotch of a country? AND WHY IS THERE NO HAM TO BE FOUND???

Tuberville: Have fun. We’re going to blast some terrorist ass. HEY, CHARLIE! If you make it in five minutes, I won’t make you do the Truffle Shuffle later!

Weis: Up your ass, Tuberville! I hope you eat an RPG!

Tuberville: You could!

Shannon: Let him go, man.

Weis: Go to hell, TUBERVILLE! Who made these seats so frickin’ small….

Richt goes back to help extract Weis. Shannon and Tuberville suit up and join a battalion of Rangers on patrol. They creep through a ravine choked with boulders, guns at the ready. The icy caps of mountains are visible over the tops of the ravine, and pine trees on its edge whistle slightly in the wind.

Shannon: This is so relaxing.

Tuberville: Are you kidding me—oh, yeah. Forgot.

Shannon: I’m learning things this trip, Tommy. I think I’m meant to be an artist.

TT: Really?

Shannon: Yup. Mixed media, I’m thinking ceramics, fireworks, and woodcut. Perhaps with some old lithography thrown in there.

TT: Sounds like you’re collaging there, Randy.

Shannon: Damn right I’m collaging. I’ve never told you this, but Dada’s always been one of my faves. Not the fruity Dali dorm-poster surrealism, either: I’m talking straight Duchamp, man.

TT: Of course. You’re no dillettante.

Shannon: If they only knew what we really talk about in Miami coaches’ meetings, man. Remember Dave Wannstedt’s presentation on Volition, Will, and Chance in the works of JM Coetzee?

TT: I found it too precious. He’s such a close reader. No room for me as the subjective reader? Please. It’s—

Shannon: SHHH!!!

The soldiers stand at the ready, crouched over the lip of a huge boulder. Before them sits a camp. There are five men: four in traditional tribal dress and combat boots, and one in white, a tall man with an immense beard shot through with gray hair.

TT: Holy shit.

Shannon: It’s—

Soldiers: Lock and load, boys. Coaches, stay behind me.

Gunfire erupts, and the four tribesmen drop to the ground dead. The lone man in white looks around, panics, and then begins to run toward the dark mouth of a cave in the wall of the ravine.

Officer: Anyone feel like hauling some ass and capturing the most wanted man in the world? HUH?

TT: Lemme take him, lieutenant. I know just how to take someone down for good.

Officer: All yours, coach.

TT: CLICK CLACK, OSAMA!!!

Capture, Tuberville. Photo: LSUFreek.

TT: This terrorist capture was sponsored by Under Armour, motherfucker.

Osama Bin Laden, in Arabic: Oh, god! My knee! You’ve permanently mangled my knee!

TT: Oh, did I? Purely unintentional. I apologize.

Shannon: Yes, Osama. Purely unintentional. Won’t happen again.

Osama: Infidel scum, that’s clearly an illegal technique! I’m maimed now! MAIMED!

(They fist pound.)

Randy Shannon, Charlie Weis, Mark Richt, Tommy Tuberville, and Yale coach Jack Siedlecki will be touring the Middle East this May. This may or may not happen, but if it does it will be purely unintentional.

–Spurrier is now going to Alabama, having hypothetically spurned the ‘Canes and President Bush’s entreaties to join him as the Secretary of Defense, and will now be joining Bill Oliver in Tuscaloosa along with other classics of the early nineties like Naughty by Nature, Rollerblades, and Mortal Kombat. Scorpion would make an awesome safety, man. Get over here! (None of this is true. Except for the bit about Scorpion, since a safety with a sharp grappling hook would be awesome.)

Scorpion: would be almost as intimidating as George Teague.

–Go Yang, indeed.

–The SEC will be outside looking in again in the BCS, which is precisely what happens when you schedule crapulence in your out of conference schedule and watch your offense throw a piston at the Auburn game. Florida’s schedule was rough on paper, but one more OOC game not involving a team you give your brother in a pick ‘em matchup in NCAA 2007 game would have made an overwhelming case for Florida’s inclusion.

Either way, Mike Slive will boldly shrug in protest.

–Fightin’ Amish introduces us to Pete Carroll’s website. We really, truly wish he hadn’t.

–Speaking of USC…Boi From Troy has his own mini-catch on the Cal/USC game. Brian Cushing evidently played a nasty role for DeSean Jackson, being one of two or three players the Trojans assigned to jam him off the line. From what we saw of the game, USC’s “jam” technique involves knocking the eyebrows off someone on every snap.

–BULLET BULLET BULLET!! INVEST IN TONGAN LINEMAN SHARES!!! Since the supply may be erratic for a while thanks to rioting and civil disorder in Tonga. Again, we repeat to Urban Meyer: recruit gay Polynesian linemen now and we will be rolling in Sears Trophies in no time.

–Peter admits that the Longhorns can’t win ‘em all: Texas A&M’s Meat Judging Team took home its fourth title in a row. We’re looking to field an EDSBS Meat Judging team, so female readers and gay boys, step on down and submit your qualifications below. We can’t have Dennis Franchione beating us at anything, especially judging fine pieces of meat of any gender.

Meat judge Morrissey would approve of A&M’s fine efforts.

–John Lopez, meanwhile, thinks A&M is dead meat in the game, which is but a shadow of its former self.

–Ivy Leaguers learn quick!

Ivy League leaders say they have protected the academic stature of their institutions, avoided the stain of recruiting and classroom scandals, and nurtured athletics as a truly amateur endeavor.

“Thank goodness,” said Derek Bok, Harvard’s president in 1981 and its interim president now. “The quality of football is not the primary objective of the institution.”

And that’s why you’ll never win SEC championships, Har-vahhhrrd: lack of dedication, dammit. (And, er, not belonging to the SEC.) That forty percent legacy admission rate doesn’t help, either: weak aristocratic blood will ruin a good blocking scheme every time. If you can get Yale alum and motivational master Aleksey Vayner, though, then do it: impossible is nothing for that guy.

The alleged victim told police she went to her room despite receiving a call warning her to stay away because Thomas was there. Police said she discovered Thomas passed out on the floor.

“She woke him to confront him about a relationship that he was involved in with another woman,” the report said. “She stated she poked him and yelling ensued between the two. He then jumped up and began to strike her about the body.”

Don’t poke Harvard! Because they will allegedly choke you, lift you off the ground, and knee you in the stomach, which is what the young woman in question says Thomas did to her. Thomas has been indefinitely suspended from the team, which we’re sure will prompt Dan Shaughnessy’s one and only column of the year on Harvard football where he announces the end of modern civilization as evidenced by the incident which he saw coming a long, long time before anyone else did. And though we’re sure they’re used to getting As–you don’t pay that much to get Cs unless your last name is Kennedy–they will pick up a mere blip of 2 points for assault/drankin’/girlfriend stuff.

Harvard alum Franklin Sherman is so appalled he’s singing.

Make-Your-Own Top 25!

1. Number one. WHEW! Hard one here. Make things easier on yourself by just putting a.) last year’s champion here if they’ve got the same quarterback, or b.) Grab a team that won a BCS game last year and still has the same quarterback. You won’t look too crazy by doing either. If last year’s champ has lost their quarterback, move to slot 5 AUTOMATICALLY.

“Texas has to be the preseason favorite with Vince Young returning. Wait, we mean…um…they’re fifth. Yeah, fifth.”

2. Another easy one! Remember number two at the end of the year last year? You got it: just slide ‘em in here and keep rolling, rockstar.

3. Okay, tricky one at three, one that might require one or two GOOGLE SEARCHES. The team that won their big BCS bowl game last year by a shocker? Roll ‘em right in. SPECIAL NEW YORK TIMES PROVISION: this is where you put Michigan. Because you know a guy who went there, and he was pretty smart and cool and all that, and you didn’t really have a good football team where you went to school since lacrosse was really the thing there.

4. Another research one: take a team that’s a traditional power in the top ten. Did they go 8-4 last year? Or something like it? Okay, that’s your pick!

5. (RESERVED FOR LAST YEAR’S CHAMP MINUS QUARTERBACK. IF ABSENT, INSERT TENNESSEE.)

Fulmer sez: gimme five! Corndogs, that is.

6. A really easy one for the ol’ seis-spot: NOTRE DAME. They’re on television all the time and they had that movie with the kid from Goonies in it, plus they score like crazy these days. Even if they fall from the top ten you’re actually creating content for yourself, since you can then write one of your standard pairs of filler columns, the “wake up the echoes” preseason Notre Dame column/ “what the hell happened to the goddamn echoes” post-season Notre Dame column.

Notre Dame’s at 6. They’ve got Sean Astin on their side, and he was in White Water Summer, for god’s sake. You can’t deal with that, son.

7. Time to get bold here. Got a program that’s won a ton of games but never a big one? An offensive juggernaut whose almost beat significant opponents on a national stage but racks up fifty and sixty points on the midgets of the world? Seven is the place for them. It gives you BOLD pundit points and must be accompanied by a phrase of great certainty, like “This is the year they get it done.” If you hedge, just put Michigan in here and move on.

Boise’s good for easy BOLD points, especially after they beat lost horribly to Georgia.

8. Find out who the SEC champion was last year. Go ahead and put them here.

9. This is always a good place to put a Larry Coker-era Miami team. If not, have you considered putting Florida State here? They’re always a nice place holder, too.

10. Have you put all your Florida teams in the top ten? It’s essential to put them all in your to ten, if only to put them lower in your post-season poll, which then–thinking ahead!–gives you still more column filler in the form of “Sunshine State ain’t so sunny anymore” piece. If you hesitate to do this, again, just put Michigan here if you havent’ used them already.

One. Ten. We’re somewhere in there, guys. Where’s the friggin’s scotch around here…

11-25: A little secret of the trade….no one reads these. No one. The only people who will read them in total are basement-dwelling slobboids who will then write 13 page screeds in response to your critical underestimation of Clemson/Cal/Northwestern/Louisville/Tech/Florida/etc..

Plebe! Your ignorance regarding the worth of the (insert my team here) has forced me to answer at length on my blog. Prepare for a fisking!!!

In reality, you will simply take the next fifteen teams you can name off the top of your head and rattle them off on the page, just listing them in no particular order and tagging each one with the only thing you can remember about them at the time. Example:

#22: Fresno State: Bulldogs’ tough schedule will keep Pat Hill twiddling his mustache all year long.

See? No research required. You know Fresno plays a tough schedule every year, and that Pat Hill has a bitchin’ mustache. Combine the two and presto! Instant content.

For the full list, check out this page, which has the beautiful sidebars complete with a new feature, “TEAMS ON THE BUBBLE.” Mike does, for the record, have a penis so large he can block out the sun, a talent he’s used to extort billions from helpless world leaders. (As part of his retainer fees for creating and maintaining the board, we have to say nice things about him on the blog, so there you go, Mike.)

Delaware, as you can see, is clearly the George Mason of our tourney, heads and shoulders above everyone else for the combined “breaking and entering/armed robbery/steroid robbery” incident they obviously cribbed from the lost drafts of a Tarantino or Darren Aronofsky script. Purdue’s small but determined pattern of incidents still has them sky-high in the standings, but even now at the end of March we’ve yet to see major substantiated incidents from Tennessee, Florida State, or Miami. Brian noted the other day that this year’s race for the BCS was “the most wide open college football has been.” It appears this applies to the Fulmer Cup, as well, though any crimes that unseat Delaware at this point may require the calling of the National Guard, a raising of the DHS Alert Level, or the announcement of Defcon-1 by the Strategic Air Command.

Enjoy your weekend, and please do Football Outsiders a favor by stopping by and reading their story on NHL athletes and their very, very personal involvement with autism research.

Alabama fans, enjoy A-Day–it’ll be the last time you see John Parker Wilson go through an entire game unharmed–we wish we could be there for the barbecue.

IVY League Preview: Dartmouth College looking players (open tryouts) : by Doc Pedro

After a few months of intensely investigating the steroid trade in Tijuana; I am back to for EDSBS.com’s annual profile of the IVY League.

Doc Pedro didn’t find the steroids, but Viagra was aplenty.

We begin with the storied tradition of Dartmouth College. The Dartmouth College football team kicked off spring practice on Monday, April 18; attempting to return to its championship ways that have garnered 17 Ivy League football championships. The last title however, came with a 10-0 season in 1996. That’s a long time ago in an era when only short-term memory matters. Around the Hanover, N.H., campus the question was, “What championship tradition?” Over the past seven seasons, Dartmouth won 16 games and lost 53 including a 1-9 record last fall. This was the catalyst for the (re)hiring of new Big Green Football coach Eugene F. (Buddy) Teevens III, who as a player led Dartmouth to the 1978 Ivy League championship and as a coach led Dartmouth football to back-to-back Ivy League titles in 1990 and 1991. Most recently, Buddy T was the head coach at Stanford University from 2002 through 2004 where he was, shall we say, less than successful. Prior to that, Buddy T was on Steve ?the ole ball coach? Spurrier’s staff at the University of Florida from 1998 to 2001.
At the start of spring ball Buddy T was quick to say to his team and the media (me) “There’s work to be done but the goal is to win the Ivy League championship. Philosophically, I like to throw the football. To do so, you need a quarterback and guys to protect the quarterback. You need some running backs to distract people, and some people to catch the ball. Defensively, I believe in pressure.” Allowing us here at EDSBS.com to dub him the ?the ole ball coach? of the Ivy League.
After watching a week of practice I know Buddy T probably will be using every hour until the opener against Colgate on Sept. 17 to evaluate returning talent from a 2004 team that lost five games by a total of 20 points. Dartmouth has 34 returning lettermen (28 lost) including three starters on offense and six on defense. Clearly, they need help. If you are interested in playing for Dartmouth football, have the eligibility and think you can get the SAT score to get in click here. Summer Prospect Day will be held, June 25th for more information contact Chris Micale in the football office at 603-646-2475 to reserve your spot.
One step–make that one pass–at a time. At Dartmouth, “Buddy Ball” is back and I for one am looking forward to the return of the Big Greens storied tradition.
Open Tryouts Set To Begin.