Never forget to twist the knife. Even in the article about his induction into the college football hall of fame, John Cooper gets this in his headlines in the Detroit Free Press.

Ohio columnist: John Cooper, despite 2-10-1 record vs. Michigan, deserves Hall of Fame nod.

“Thanks for the ringing endorsement, assface.”

Honey, love of my life, let us be buried together forever–even though that hot Cuban guy I slept with in Miami in college had a horsecock, and brought me pleasures you have never dreamed of giving me in bed. I really do love you best, Your Wife. Remember that one of the most savory points of fandom is never forgetting anything that happened ever unto death. Excuse us: as Florida fans, we have to work on taunting Miami fans about the only thing we can taunt them about, “The Flop.”

Myopic’s the only way we do, baby. Hunglikehussain on our SN APR piece:

Back to the subject at hand. Orson, it is easy to criticize and abase a statute.

Instead of myopic ranting, double the height of your soapbox. Really, if we are in a “Hyde Park cyberspace”, what are your proposals/solutions?

Welcome to one of the difficulties of column writing: at 700 words, you hit the ledge of formal limit and usually skitter some of your better stuff into the canyon below. The piece diagnoses the central problem of the APR, which is the eventual pruning of programs from Division One due to poor academic progress. (And to counter another comment, no, it’s not intentional. It’s the byproduct of many hands creating a compromise policy with unintended effects; see “no sinister volcano lair” qualifier in graf 10.)

Solutions? We’re not into silly metrics like the APR, especially when unevenly applied. However, if you insist on having one, make sure the mechanism includes viable mechanisms for recovery from poor academic performance and the ability to re-enter D-1 following a period of “demonstrated improvement.” Otherwise, we’d be fine not having one at all, or even–gasp–having a non-quantitative review process not dependent on one silly, easily manipulated metric.

This approach, however, requires both work and sense, commodities as rare as pickled unicorn eggs.

Analysis is for the bluecoats. When it comes to a color announcer, Bobby Bowden wants a PR man first.

“Your job is to be a PR man,” Bowden said. “You’re getting paid to boost FSU up. It’s not a high school offense. Some things, you don’t say.”

We suspect that if he had his way, Bowden would have Terry Bowden still pulling the strings of what he would like an announcer to call “a sophisticated but hard-nosed offensive scheme that has yielded amazing results for the ‘Noles.”

City Boyz, Inc.: gone, but not forgotten. We’ll mourn ya till we join ya, City Boyz, Inc: Iowa clamps down on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Kevin of Fanblogs almost died. Lessons learned: always carry aspirin, don’t ignore chest pains, and make sure your wife is awesomely composed. All of these will help you survive a heart attack along with some judicious use of Google at the right time. (We’re not joking when we type that, nor when we say we’re all too happy you made it, Kevin.)

The proletariat will rise, and you will beat the guts out of them at homecoming. San Jose State coach Dick Tomey called the APR “class warfare” on smaller schools like San Jose State, who will be docked nine scholarships and four hours of practice time weekly due to their struggling APR.

“There’s such a difference between the B.C.S. schools and those who are not,” Tomey said. “I don’t think it’s an intended difference, but it highlights financial things like not being able to throw money at the problem and solve it very quickly.”

To the streets, Dick Tomey! The midget corps has your back! Wait: widget corps? That’s not half as cool.

As part of college football’s Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, we light a cigar with a hundred dollar bill and tell you to get begging, urchins! Our carriage needs a lithe young rapscallion like yourself to clear the pigfilthy streets of this town for us, lest we get poor germs on our hansom! The little sweep-boy may have a point: of the 37 football programs hit with penalties by the NCAA, only two were from BCS conferences (Kansas and Washington State.

The apt metaphor for this may not be class warfare, even if Moscow’s involved. The better analogy for this may be No Child Left Behind: schools performing badly are sanctioned, then sanctioned again, and given little recourse–and even less if they have no swing or political clout within the NCAA. The Wiz is all over the particulars, including more Entertaining Fun with Mike Stoops, who loses football games and whose team has the lowest APR among BCS teams.

Pete Carroll thinks you’re lazy. Saban’s videoconferencing to get around the new recruiting rules, which Pete Carroll ascribes to sheer laziness rather than an interest in the recruits’ well-being:

“I don’t want to sound like a jerk,” Carroll told The Sporting News, “but other coaches… they’re just lazy.”

If Saban is videoconferencing, rest assured Pete Carroll is visiting recruits on the astral plane and bypassing this pesky technology.

Welcome to UCLA. Physical therapy included. UCLA’s having a positively Iowa-esque injury plague this spring, and it’s not just with the returning starters at quarterback. Walk-on running back Craig Sheppard had surgery to replace the AC joint in his shoulder and will be out 4-6 months. In addition to this, starting qb Ben Olson just had a screw put in his foot, backup Patrick Cowan is out for the season, and JUCO Kevin Craft will have to have his head bolted back to his shoulders sometime around the end of September.

Get in on the ground floor of UGA hype: Tony Barnhart has them at number one. No pressure! [/hurling cursing mindbolts with all our might and watching Knowshon Moreno dodge them effortlessly.]

Is Army going to run the bone? And if they are, as this article guesses, will they have the brutal downfield blocking demostrated by these young gridiron warrior/poets?

We encourage this move and support its existence heartily. Especially the three-card monte handoff fake sequence on run plays. That never fails to crack us up.

UCLA ditches a whole practice, causing outrage generators everywhere to spike. Brian Dohn of the L.A. Daily News starts:

Rather than continue the process of learning a new offense and working toward improvement, UCLA’s football players, led by its senior class, elected to blow off Tuesday’s practice.

Or Brian Grummell over at Das Fanhaus:

In one swift act, Neuheisel willingly undermined himself before his players, his coaches and the lifeblood of any program: recruits. Nice work.

Oh, and that’s just about the most pathetic school tradition I’ve ever heard of. The NCAA limits the hours and number of practices schools can arrange, so for UCLA to be wasting a practice like that is troubling.

Gutty Little Bruins didn’t seem to care–deeming the whole thing “AWESOME”–
while the reasoned, level heads over at Bruins Nation express deep feely hurt and disappointment at the seniors who kept the Ditch tradition alive while remaining convinced that COACH Rick Neuheisel will fix the culture at UCLA.

In all of this, we’re reminded that Jim Grobe at Wake Forest didn’t even use all of his allotted days of spring practice last year. Oh, and Neuheisel may petition the NCAA to get that practice day back. Good luck explaining that one, counselor.

Pat White will get the push as a Heisman candidate from the West Virginia coaching staff. No pressure, sir.

Mark Sanchez officially gets the nod as the starting qb at USC. Shelley Smith just awoke and switched into stalk mode, tapping mutely at the glowing electrodes in the side of her head and rising from her rest pod somewhere beneath Bristol.

Brennan Carroll, Office Special Teams Coach. It’s OPS on that Tussin, or something like it. He doesn’t have a whistle, he just says whistle.

EXAMINE MY IMPECCABLE ORTHODONTURE!!!!

SI also fronts a rehashed story by Rick Bragg, who talks about how Nick Saban bought his momma a house, how good fried pies are, and other non-threatening cornpone truths wrapped around a story about the hard-drinking, no count bastard that was his daddy.

Oh, no, no, no, no. This makes our gorge rise just reading it: details from the death of Ereck Plancher, the UCF freshman who died suddenly following conditioning drills last month.

One of the four players who spoke with the Sentinel, a veteran, disagreed, saying: “It was the toughest workout since I’ve been here. It definitely was not a light workout…

Plancher was noticeably woozy and staggering as he tried to participate in the final jumping-jacks drill, the players said. The team finished those exercises, then huddled one final time. Plancher collapsed while walking away from the huddle, the players said.

There’s tragedy of multiple brands and tastes here. There’s also a quantity sure to become all too abundant for Plancher’s family and UCF: thousands and thousands of billable hours for attorneys.

Corn Nation informs us that the playbook at Nebraska–the 820,992 page Callahan-era monster–is still the playbook, only with the option, a few changes in terminology, some tweaks in the blocking scheme, and curly fries thrown in. Yay, complexity and curly fries!

Terrelle Pryor, bring hell with you. Because Todd Boeckman won’t go without a fight. That’s right, THE Todd Boeckman! You bring the beef, lawya, bettah bring you best, because TB is contagious, and there ain’t no cure once you get him, homey.

JoePa has not contract, and everyone’s okay with that. Did Julius Caesar have a contract? No, and that worked out awesomely for him.

We are now all Mustangs. From the Wiz: If this video does not make you root for SMU this year, you are beyond hope.

As seen in the previous video clippins’, you…well, you must love them. It’s a moral imperative.

Kyle was on EDSBS Live last night, and had so many notes he compiled them into a post on why Georgia will win the MNC this year. He’s right on one thing: striking a team off the list based on schedule alone is rank foolishness, especially when some of the surefire roadblocks on the schedule will likely curdle into disastrous pushovers before the end of the season. The gut pick for this year in the rolling disaster department in the SEC, at least in our minds, would be Auburn, who’s immensely talented but installing new defenses and offenses, and that usually equals some early stumbles. Plus Tommy Tuberville looks entirely too comfortable for his own good over there: it ain’t Auburn football without the knife at the coach’s throat every five years or so.

Oh, and Georgia’s o-line looks suspect and Matt Stafford completes around half of his passes as a college qb. Hell, the Sex Cannon himself did better than that. All of that may not matter, though: Knowshon Moreno exists in five dimensions, and is capable of disappearing into two of them at will. (He keeps the other one for storage. Handy, it is.)

The Big Ten network plans a springapalooza of its own, highlighting the conference’s spring practices. The show is booked for three hours, but should come in more around the nine hour mark on the stopwatch.

Penn State boots Kahlil Chris Bell off the team for flashing a knife at a teammate, and that’s probably all for the best. He wants to cut people, his teammates clearly object to being cut, and when you’re dealing with incompatibilities like that a relationship will never work. Emo kids of the world! Kahlil Bell wants to cut you. You want to be cut! See? A foot for every slipper in this garden of earthly delights.

Buy Mark Mangino’s house. Avoiding all jokes at his expense, we will just point out one detail from the virtual tour of the Kansas coach’s house: like the Velvet Thunder should, he has the champizzle chillin’ at the ready 24/7.

Image removed due to complaint. Yes, from you know who.

Balla!

Freshman abuse at USC! Pete Carroll won’t tolerate it.

That’s all a prank on senior defensive end Everson Griffen, who “physically abused” freshman Matt Meyer on the practice tape shown in the clip. Matt Meyer, All-American offensive lineman 2010. Book it. Get dogged like that in front of the team, and he’ll either be lifting weights till his eyebrows bulge, or he’ll be off the team, getting a music degree and doing yoga just to stay limber, man.

Ryan Perriloux, terrorist hunter, is to be honored along with the rest of the LSU Tigers when they visit the White House in honor of their BCS title game. President Bush will…there’s not even a joke here we can make. In lieu of rational thought, we will just say that we hope RP takes offense to something, sets fire to a set of drapes, and is then appointed Czar of the War on Terrorism, a war he will prosecute by harassing every Arab-American waitron and barkeep in America.

And now, a picture of Al Davis shaking hands with Darth Vader.

You don’t dump Fresno State without feeling the burn, dude. Fresno State quarterback Tom Brandstadter thinks you’re skurred, Ron Prince, after dumping Fresno State from K-State’s schedule for 2008.

“They’re probably tired of getting whooped by us,” said Brandstater, who led Fresno State to a 45-29 win against Kansas State last season. The Bulldogs also beat the Wildcats 45-21 in 2004. “I don’t blame them.

“So, I wish them the best. We got the better of them two times in a row.”

Pat Hill’s mustache is taunting you as we speak, Ron Prince. It’s also drinking a beer and riding a Harley across the nation trying to find itself and the wild spirit of the highway, man.

Man, what a hose that kid has. Tommy Bowden’s not the only guy capable of making slightly awkward comments about his players. Thunderlegged freshman kicker Caleb Sturgis gets a profile piece in the Alligator, and in the course of detailing just what a massive leg the dude has this quote dropped in there.

“Oh my gosh, does he have a hose,” Meyer said. “He’s got a bomb. It sounds the way it’s supposed to when it hits his foot.”

Analyst? Apologies. The job description read “Cheerleader.” Peter Tom Willis, radio color guy for FSU broadcasts, is out after two years of being “too critical,” in his own estimation, of Florida State’s slide into mediocrity.

“I don’t know how you say things are going good when they are not.”

You just do! Even if they’re not true. That’s what a color analyst for Florida has to do, especially one looking at the offense. You know we’re smiling as we type this, right? And holding sparklers and champagne?

Joe Tiller is tired when he didn’t used to be. Oatmeal, Joe! Oatmeal!

“I feel my energy level slipping a little bit,” Tiller said Monday after Purdue’s workout at the Mollenkopf Athletic Center. “I still feel like I have energy, and I look forward to these practices and coming out here, but I don’t mind going home anymore. I used to want to stay up all night, watching tape. So if that’s slipping, then that’s me.

Notice he doesn’t say what kind of tapes, mind you. We take Joe to be a John Ford fan over a Howard Hawks guy, with a special affection for the gritty existentialism of The Searchers. (You were expecting a porno joke there well TOO BAD. He’s not Tommy Bowden, man.) This will be Tiller’s last season, which Joe plans to celebrate by going 7-0, then losing five in a row to finish at 7-5. He will be replaced by Danny Hope, the former Eastern Kentucky coach who’s in the Dauphin spot to succeed Tiller next year.

We spoke with a jail official in Lincoln County, Tennessee, and the story here is completely true: they really are wearing pink uniforms instead of orange so as not to blend in with all the Tennessee Vol orange on the street in Lincoln County. (HT: Ethan.)

Thank God Houston Nutt’s pink jerseys never took a practice session in Lincoln County, lest they be arrested on the spot and pepper-sprayed within an inch of their lives.

Alabama’s flipping a few guys around, which happens when you’re still having depth chart/personnel issues. If you’re the kind of person who likes stuffing an open container of milk deep in the file cabinet when leaving a miserable job and you happen to be a head coach some day, do this: recruit terribly in your last two years in the job, and then get fired. Watch the fun as your successor loses years off their life! (Last year, at the end of the season, you could see the outline of Nick Saban’s skull under his skin. He looked dessicated by the strain.)

Segue: Iowa football! Feel it! 15 of the 39 players signed from 2005 to 2006 have left the program, meaning Iowa’s APR score next round will be somewhere between zero and FAAAAAHHHHCK!

James Johnson, wide receiver for Georgia Tech, has quit the team because he’s sick of football. According to Paul Johnson, he quit once before, was talked into returning, and is now just done with the whole thing. Somehow, we don’t think he’ll suffer the pangs of regret like a John Ed Bradley–the afterglow of the Chan Gailey era won’t quite raise the goosebumps like that.

Tennessee versus UCLA in LA: there’s your Labor Day evening entertainment. That, and getting the cat drunk on cheap beer, of course…like, Jeff Goldblum drunk.

(HT: Macenstein.)

Male or feeeeeemale! Idaho promises athletic dominance and ignores the transgendered in their promo song, produced as part of a fundraising campaign to boost the budget of the Vandals athletic program.

MP3 File

Idaho and rap: back together for the first time!

On blocks. Percy Harvin’s going into the shop for the spring with all due haste: his heel injury is worse than anticipated, and as heel injuries tend to go has affected his knee and possibly his hip. An untreated heel injury is a mother: we didn’t have knee problems until we seriously bruised our heel in a bike wreck, ran on it too soon, and then wobbled the whole leg out of alignment.

And we’re not athletic. At all. A performance yardage machine like Harvin with a heel injury is worth calling in the out-of-state specialists in addition to Florida staff member Dr. Pete Indelicato, who has the most ironic of names for a sports medicine specialist.

Fresno State will play you and a squad full of bobcats in uniform, sir. Kansas State, despite promises of “aggressive scheduling,” has booted Fresno State from the 2008 football schedule and replaced them with Montana State, who will surely show them the LIVING HELL OF BIG SKY FOOTBALL in person. Fresno State, nonplussed, picked up a game with Rutgers like it was nothing and soldiers on. Pat Hill ain’t skurred, son–and he’s got $250K from K-State for the schedule change, too. Which is nice.

Jahvid Best, the leading candidate for the instant NFL paycheck that comes with being the starting tailback at Cal, worked out in practice yesterday for the first time this spring. Best was wonky with a hip injury from last year but ran agility drills and cut on the injured leg with ease. Tedfordbot registered signs of pleasure at this news.

You sexy Vandals, you. Idaho is getting GRRRR tough this offseason. How do you know? Because they’re COVERING THEMSELVES IN BABY OIL.

We would love to do a photo like this of all the bloggers we know covered in baby oil, if only because people continue to have too many children, and if we’ve ever heard of effective birth control, that would be it. (HT: Fight, Fight BSU.)

Steele speaks! In lists, of course, because he’s Phil Steele, but we listen nonetheless. The winningest program overall and on the road over the past five years is USC, something that should surprise exactly zero and none of you reading this. The second-winningest program on the road is LSU, while the fourth-winningest on the road is Georgia, something that really shouldn’t count since Georgia doesn’t go anywhere they can’t get to on a single tank of gas.

(That’s changing!/no more Dooley homebody stuff/Florida doesn’t travel either/etc! We know, we know.)

Perrilloux out. Again. Ryan Perrilloux, presumably somewhere in a Baton Rouge apartment yelling at the wall about his future as a sixty million motherfucking man, is missing from LSU’s practices, meaning that after Miles let him back on the team and spelled out precisely what the terms of his obligations would be, Perrilloux nodded, turned around, and did the opposite. Smrt! If anyone needs him, Perrilloux will be working the tables down at the Hollywood Casino. You know, just watching.

Houston Nutt is happy, contented, excited, fluff piece all things green and not pear-shaped, etc.

Tennessee’s ticket prices are going up due to fatter asses. Tennessee ticket prices are soaring up $19 a ticket on average, with peak prices of $70 for the Florida and Alabama games. “We spent endless hours looking at ways to make this happen without raising the prices of tickets, but the facts haven’t changed. People are just bigger now, and we need to make sure we put as many people in the stadium as we can without the whole thing getting ridiculous,” says AD Mike Hamilton, who refused to attribute the ticket price raise to obesity. “We just have big fans, and that’s not a bad thing. It just means you have to pay more per seat for that size.”