Possession receivers, gutty linebackers, all-heart fullbacks, that one weird fast dude Iowa always pulls out of a cornfield, and kickers unite in mourning: Minnesota wide receiver Eric Decker will miss the rest of the regular season with a sprained arch in his left foot, presumably strained while running too fast and exceeding the factory specifications laid out in the Caucasian Model Owner’s Guide. A moment of silence, please.

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.)

The Daily Oregonian has a fun widget on making your own nightmare of an Oregon Ducks uniform, which is a fine way to kill ten potentially productive and therefore harmful minutes of your day. The only uniforms we’ve ever been truly appalled by were the “Iron Duck” unis, and that’s just because the iron-grip pattern on the shoulders looked dated and ersatz macho the minute it came off the presses. The all-whites, though? Stunning.

Whatever the combo, they can’t possibly beat whatever those gentlemen have had vomited up on them by the soccer rugby fashion gods. Egads, my lad, that will take a gang of penicillin, some prayer, and possibly a pressure washer to clean up.

Oregon student newspaper writer Alex Beard makes no compelling case aside from the love of the absurd and the low cost associated with keeping a live duck for putting a live mascot on the sidelines at Oregon. That is enough for us, especially since once you get its waddly, absurd duckiness out of your brain, an actual live, hungry duck is meanass bird more than willing to swat wings at toddlers horning in on their breadcrumbs. If they could hold knives, they’d cut you. Additionally, the utility of the duck meets standards Jeremy Bentham himself would be proud of, as it can always be “retired” to a lovely spot on the plates of an Oregon booster dinner. Personally, we’d pay to eat slices of Renegade, since cheval cooks up nicely in a red wine reduction sauce, but will bypass UGA, Smokey, and all other dog-related mascots for sentimental reasons. (Don’t deny it: you’d eat a hunk of Bevo even if you didn’t have to, because a bull that pampered has to be deliciously marbled.)

Oh, and on a minor, teeny, little insignificant note, Sam Bradford will start for Oklahoma against Baylor on Saturday.

But back to the important thing: does white wine go with Ibis? And what about Baylor? Bearmeat is a culinary challenge thanks to its oiliness, something the pioneers always cut with a blackberry sauce. South Carolina probably presents the easiest option, but also no real challenge. Now NC State? That’s a challenge, since technically we’re talking a wolfpack worth of oddball meat to dress. For the health conscious there’s always Marshall…

Stoics sound great when you quote them. Take Seneca, for instance:

Scorn pain: either it will go away or you will

Cool, right? Works really well when you twist your ankle in a minor fashion on a run, or when you pull a shoulder muscle reaching for a bottle of scotch in the back of the liquor cabinet.

Hi, I’m Seneca. Full of bullshit advice.

Rarely do you have to face an injury that might actually give you option two here, but thanks to compartment syndrome, it is something football players can face on the field. Case in point: Washington State running back James Montgomery, who could have lost his leg or even died if he hadn’t gotten a speedy operation to relieve pressure in his leg caused by compartment syndrome.

Close friend Dwight Tardy, a senior running back, said team doctor Ed Tingstad told him Montgomery “probably could have died” if a Sunday morning operation had been delayed too long. A wait of one to two hours might have led to amputation, Tardy said Tingstad told him.

“He (Tingstad) was pretty rattled and shook up,” Tardy said. “He started crying.”

(HT: CFT.) Compartment syndrome is fairly rare, and can be caused by a wide array of possible factors. It also has varying degrees of badness, thus ranging from Jason Taylor’s relatively minor case to Montgomery’s extremely serious one where it will take 6-12 months to figure out if he’ll even play again.

If you’re morbidly curious and have a strong stomach, it looks like this. Scorn pain all you like, but respect it when it’s talking to you, since it might save your leg (or your life.)

(Also, don’t listen to Seneca, a notorious suckup to Nero. That Nero.)

Chip Kelly is a wonderful human being. Keep reading. Img source: Oregon Live.

Tony Seminary is a 1996 graduate of the University of Oregon and a season ticket holder for the Ducks football team. He attended the Boise State game, and witnessed the loss to the Broncos and LeGarrette Blount’s PunchGate up close and personal. After the game, Seminary wrote an email to Chip Kelly, and did what you may have dreamt of doing after traveling to watch your team put in an embarrassing performance on the road: he asked for a refund, and attached an invoice bureaucrat-style. From the original email:

I was so angry with the game (even before the post-game melee) I am sending you an invoice for my trip to Boise. The product on the field Thursday night is not something I was at all proud of, and I feel as though I’m entitled to my money back for the trip. Please see my invoice attached in this email. I will happily send along receipts if need be.

Unlike most fans, he actually wrote this up and sent it. Unlike most coaches, Chip Kelly responded with a personal check written to one Anthony Seminary. (more…)

Arizona State beat the Idaho State Bengals 50-3 in their opener, paying the Bengals $400,000 for the privilege of getting a 47 point beating. The Bengals piled up 37 yards of net yardage on the night, and not all at once because you have to spread those out over the course of an evening just to be fair. They averaged 0.8 yards a play, but not on this play.

The next time an announcer reminds you that an overmatched opponent needs to “Move the pocket around, get the quarterback on the run, etc,” you can suggest back to him that the defense “Needs to send a screaming hellbeast like Vontaze Burfict in there to make the quarterback flinch at loud noises for the next three months.” Burfict just qualified academically last week to join ASU, but if the clip is any indication he has already chosen a major of criminal justice, and plans to be very hands on about administering it. (HT: Sean.)

Legarrette Blount FALCON PUNCH!!!

Video after the jump. He’s as completely suspended as Byron Hout was completely bitchmade by Blount’s sucker punch. Unsportsmanlike? Oh, certainly. Dirty? Completely, yes, but shit, would you so much as step on Blount’s shadow without his permission now? Somewhere he and Ron Artest are walking through a suburban mall right now punching people in the face randomly and talking about how awesome smoothies are.

“They’re the shit.” BLA-DOW!!!

[/concussed fifth grader punched into fountain]

“No doubt. And with the immune blast? I gotta have my immune blast, dawg.” SPLA-KOW!!!

[/48 year old science teacher punched into Banana Republic plate glass window]

It’s terrible, but if Blount’s intent was to walk a-feared through this world like Mike Tyson and Ray Liotta forever, earning calls for the National Guard for routine traffic stops because this motherfucker is totally crazy, then yeah: mission accomplished, baby. That’s WWE heel script-reading portrayed perfectly.

(more…)

The announcement of the Fulmer Cup championship is coming up shortly, but in the meantime here is a reminder for college football fans everywhere that no matter what you are doing, Pete Carroll will come along, do it better, and then hug you before kindly challenging you to be a better person and leaving you smelling like puppies, victory, and the spice of fulfilled human potential. (Also you will be five pounds lighter, since Pete Carroll is currently under review by the FDA as a powerful herbal weight loss supplement. CALL NOW.)

We have no idea why the Song Girls manage to stay so tastefully cheescakey. The skirts are short, but still white and pleated like vintage fifties skirts hiked up to sixties length, the sweaters form-fitting but not wetsuit tight, the women picked for legs three clicks long and chipper smiles, the very embodiment of what the pomaded hairdos at Sterling Cooper would draw up as the peach-slice smiled ideal of the USC cheerleader. Set it all to the Pixies “Gouge Away,” and it somehow gels with the sight of blue chip footballers sucking in passes on effortless fades and knocking years off the lives of opposing, less glamorous players.

College football, mon amour. Ça commence ce soir!

Jim Harbaugh needed his own bathroom. Badly.

Jim Harbaugh fears no man! Digesting legumes, though, was a problem.

The Stanford coach says he had the $50-70K bathroom built on the tab of donor John Arrillaga because it “cuts down on drag.” The drag came from using a shower two floors down and a bathroom located 20 steps down the hall, according to Harbaugh, but we suspect something else. Harbaugh is most likely a shy shitter, and prefers to download his Stanford Trees in his own private nature reserve where no one can hear them fall.

None of this would be any problem if Stanford hadn’t given Harbaugh his own private litter box and a $1.25 million extension at a time when the Stanford athletic department was running deep in the red and cutting 20 jobs to save cash. The timing is bad, but the context is worse since this is the Pac-10, where a package like Nick Saban’s private fiefdom/contract is considered heresy unless you’re USC, and even he doesn’t have an equivalent to the Captain Comeback Crappin’ Closet:

And it’s not like Stanford was denying Harbaugh a perk enjoyed by all his peers. Among the coaches who don’t have private bathrooms: San Jose State’s Dick Tomey, Cal’s Jeff Tedford, UCLA’s Rick Neuheisel and USC’s Pete Carroll.

“Pete uses the same men’s room as everyone else,’’ a USC spokesman said.

…and when he does, it smells like cinnamon buns, happiness, and victory. Stanford opens their season at Pullman against Washington State, where Paul Wulff has to defecate in an improvised outhouse not because Wazzu is budget-deprived, but because Cougar football players stole the plumbing and sold it for beer money.

Perhaps still miffed at being upstaged on GameDay by Puddles, the Harley-riding, ass-kicking mascot who works offseasons in full regalia as a Northwestern smokejumper, Kirk Herbstreit allegedly said this on College Football Live regarding the Oregon football program on Wednesday.

“Ducks are the college football version of Paris Hilton…they’re famous for no reason, they look pretty and they got a rich daddy.”

That’s a big alleged, since it comes off a “hey I heard that on College Football Live” bit no one has captured, and a nice orange man from Ohio really wouldn’t say that, would he? It is also inaccuarate. Oregon is 42-25 in the Pac-10 in this millennium, good for second in the Pac-10and has only been caught performing oral sex on tape once during the 2006 Las Vegas bowl in a humilating 38-8 loss to BYU. Oral may be moral, but not in a brutal, extramarital case like this, even if it was in Las Vegas.