UPDATE TO UPDATE: Thanks to the gents at Duck Sports, it’s back up.

Yes, this happened:

Points awarded:

–Rhymed “Masoli” with “holy-moly,” “ravioli,” “Spicoli,” and “E. Coli.”
–Zoinked out beginning that wouldn’t be out of place in a Gnarls Barkley
–Ref’d the Yin Yang Twins, which is always acceptable HEEEENNNNNNNNGHHHHH
–Rapper one dances with a rubbery-legged gusto reminiscent of a young Ray Bolger.

Points deducted:

–Yanked drum beat straight from J-Kwon’s “Tipsy”

–”Wait ’till you see my O” is creepy, especially coming from a dude with a backwards baseball cap, since we naturally assume “guy with sports jersey on” and “guy talking in terms of strong sexual innuendo” equals “guy who is a rapist, and not the tender variety”

Still Alphabeticalizing, but in the meantime..he’s baaaaaaaaaaack.

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…

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.)

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.

We called Seminary, who runs an IT company in the Portland area. He happily confirmed the story.

“I wasn’t happy with the team’s performance, and it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I think most of the Duck contingent felt the same way, and that was even before the post-game shennanigans. I just felt like I needed to reach out to Coach Kelly and give him my two cents about how I felt about the performance.”

Seminary then emailed Kelly, and did what most fans only talk about doing. He attached an invoice in jest detailing his expenses from the game.

“The invoice was sent in jest. I run a business and I invoice customers, and I have an invoice at my disposal. I just took all the company information and made it out to Tony Seminary, Incorporated. It was definitely sent in jest. Sometimes you send an email, and you just feel better after you sent it? That’s kind of how it felt.”

Then the jesting bluff got called by Chip Kelly.

“When Chip replied and said ‘What is your address?’–that was all he said–I replied with my address, and a few days later I had a check in the mail.”

Seminary was understandably dumbfounded by the response.

“As a sales guy, it’s really hard to shut me up. When I received that check, I was literally speechless.”

The check came from one Charles Kelly, and was made out in the amount of $439 to one Anthony Seminary, the exact amount listed on the invoice for the Boise trip. Here it is:

Seminary did not cash the check, though he did make copies. (He’ll probably frame them.) The original went back to Kelly, along with a thank you note and a business card.

“I think of Coach Kelly as a totally different person now, I have a different bond with him now thanks to what happened. Let’s just say he lost every game as an Oregon coach. You would never hear me calling for his head. It just wouldn’t happen. The guy showed an incredible amount of class”

“I now know why his kids would run through a wall for that guy, because who does what he did, right? That is simply amazing.”

Agreed in total. (For the record, the Oregon media relations department will neither confirm nor deny this, as they “don’t deal with dot-com,” and don’t want to comment on Kelly’s private dealings with fans.)

Seminary would also like to stop a run on football-related invoices peppering the Oregon Athletic department, even if Phil Knight and his mountains of gold bullion could fund the program for the next century. Creating a market for football-based refunds is not and never was what this was about for Seminary.

“If you go down to Autzen Stadium and we lose by three points, please don’t start sending invoices down there. The intent is to show how much of a class act that guy is. What he did is simply amazing, and blew me away.”

“He could lose every game 50-0 and he’d still be my coach, our coach, through thick and thin.”

Chip Kelly, a man of his word, and like his bank, “Nice. Remarkably nice.”

Thanks to Joe.

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.)

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.

1. The angle we call “BITCHES GET STITCHES:”

2. The angle we call “Disturbing Involuntary Facial Expressions”

In review: Oregon is as bad as Phil Steele says they would be, and don’t ever, ever fuck with Legarrette Blount.

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 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.

O’Dowd will return to score a crucial touchdown on a tackle-eligible play, no doubt, and ride off on the shoulders of his teammates as he points to his father in the stands, who will finally be able to express the stifled love he felt for his son all these years as result of the episode. And cue your jealousy vomit: in the meantime, the Trojans will just have to muddle through with senior Alex Parsons, who made USC’s team despite starting the last ten games of the season at right guard in 2008, and overcame the crippling curse of being a Super Prep All-American to make the team. Somehow they’ll survive the opener against San Jose State. Somehow.

Us: “Yes, the current food shortage in Somalia does hint at some serious instability outside of Puntland.”

Management: “You don’t say? [/attends useless 3 hour meeting]”

Field office: “Thanks. We’ll use this report to paper the walls of our bombed-out office.”

Thus leading us to the only logical way to rank the relative values of the USA Today Coaches Poll preseason top 25, an exercise we’ve become increasingly opposed to as time wears on. (See: extensive arguments about the inflexibility of rankings, the need to rank teams after week three or so, etc.) Each team will therefore be ranked in terms of stability, and correlated to the country of their choice.

Benny Beaver, jacked on over-the-counter cough syrup. Again.

25. Oregon State. Taiwan. The Asian Tiger of the Pac-10, Oregon State is always a nice bid for a 25 spot, especially because most voters not named Steve Spurrier are completely out of ideas by the time they get to 25. Like the Tropical New Jersey of the South China Sea, Oregon State makes diamonds from the coal surrounding them, somehow remaining competitive and managing power transitions well. (The Riley-Erickson-Riley switch progressed without the usual “Dennis Erickson Implosion,” a move of underplayed skill on OSU’s part.) They run the daylights out of the ball, win eight or nine games a year with frequency, and generally manage their limited resources well. A solid 25 pick by any standards, especially with a healthy Jacquizz Rodgers.

Internal Stability: Good, save for the continual qb hedging between senior qbs Sean Canfield, who can throw the ball well, and Lyle Moevao, who can throw the ball well and good through the chest of a receiver, but has the man-bear willingness to take hits and dish them out on occasion.

Surprising thing you did not know about the team and the country: Both thrive despite the constant threat of nuclear destruction: Taiwan by China, and Oregon State by the periodic rumors of Mike Riley being hired away from Corvallis. Also, the Beavers lose eight starters on defense, but that defense allowed 694 yards to Oregon in the final game of the season, so yeah: losing 72.7272% of nothing means you’ve lost nothing, even if this was the same defense that baffled USC into last year’s upset.

The IMF says: Credit rating is strong, leadership in place, and policies seem sound. Approve loans to conservative limits, and authorize futures no higher than #18, the highest ranking the Beavers have ever finished with under Riley.

24. BYU.

Ah, the celebratory gay dancing of the Mormon Haka! And by gay, well, we obviously just mean “festive”

Companion country: Iran. Forever rumored to be lying in the weeds and ready to explode, but in reality behind their peers in terms of real threat. The question for BYU is, like their Mountain West compatriots Utah and TCU, will they finally rise up and, in an ever-so-polite Mormon kind of way, bite competition on the ass in a serious, toothsome manner? Beating Washington last year can’t possibly count towards this goal, especially since officials denied Washington overtime on the worst technicality ever. (Call it the aborted weapons inspection of unsportsmanlike calls.) Also run by religious fundamentalists in search of greater weaponry, i.e. nukes for Iran, and black players for BYU who won’t date their daughters.

Internal Stability: Strong, even if Bronco Mendenhall uses a fake name, and cannot possibly really seriously named “Bronco.” Regime continuity is strong: Lavell Edwards was at BYU for 83 years, and Mendenhall looks poised for a Methuselan run after the unfortunate Gary Crowton interregnum.

Surprising thing you did not know about this team: Like Iran, their graduates thrive largely on single commodity economy. Iran runs almost entirely on oil and natural gas, while Utah’s economy is mostly dependent on Wilford Brimley and the industry of diabeetus testing supplies dependent on his constant, grizzled endorsement.

The IMF says: Rock-steady internals look good, especially with Utah rebuilding a bit, a move with serious upside for regional dominance prospects for the Cougars. 24 for the year is a guess based solely on past performance and the few dull spots in the twenties reserved for Mountain West teams by pollsters. As Utah proved last year, this is both unfair and inaccurate, and makes picking BYU here the equivalent of lowballing a potential high-teens pick. #24 is conservative, especially if you have comparable teams Utah and TCU floating six or seven spots above them–which exactly what the preseason USA Today Coaches’ Poll has.

Could be better than this by three spots or potentially more, especially if the offensive line bones up for the big games against TCU and Utah. Poor Max Hall ended up ripped by wolves in both games, taking 6 sacks in the TCU game and throwing 5 picks against Utah. With this provision, approve futures to #18, and possibly higher if they take alpha dog status in the Mountain West as they did in 2007 over TCU and Utah. (This assumes Hall survives whatever horrors await him at the hands of the Sooner defense.)

‘Cause it’s Friday, you ain’t got no football, and you ain’t got s#!t to do. Break yo’ self, fool — the preseason USA Today Coaches’ Poll has been released in all its premature, ghostvoted glory. Rest assured Holly and I will get around to a withering dissection of everything that’s wrong with the coaches’ rankings later on today, not the least of which is the fact that some of the teams they ranked may not have even started fall practice yet, but for right now let us rejoice in a sign that the college football season truly is a-comin’. Kind of like when they start putting up the Christmas-sale banners in the first week of October.

This has been “Scary Thoughts” with Eric Berry. The battle has begun at Tennessee for the title of Other Safety Besides Eric Berry, and no less than Berry himself says both Janzen Jackson and Darren Myles Jr. have “a lot more natural ability” than he did when he stepped onto the Tennessee campus. Here’s a thought for Lane Kiffin: Why not just let the other team’s offense have the ball every series and play defense the whole game? Can anyone honestly say Berry isn’t the biggest scoring threat the Vols have on their entire roster?

It must be the winning record. It’s very slimming on you. Don’t look now, but Stoops might actually have whipped Arizona into a solid team — so solid, in fact, that Stoops himself has unloaded 20 pounds his Wildcats upset BYU in last year’s Las Vegas Bowl. In other nutritionally healthy news, there’s nothing spectacularly shocking about this Alabama notebook, we’re just amused by anything applauding a 354-pound man for his weight-loss diligence.

Do not taunt Happy Fun Bronco. Boise State says they’re not dwelling on their home opener against Oregon this season, but who’d blame them if they did? You can’t really accuse someone of “looking ahead” when the game they’re looking ahead to is their first game of the season, particularly when their opponent’s QB promised to “take it to them” a couple weeks ago. If you’re scoring at home, BSU punked Oregon 37-32 in Eugene last September, and host the Ducks on the Smurf Turf on Sept. 3.

Rolling with the Neu. Rick Neuheisel’s son Jerry, a presumptive member of the class of 2011, is starting to get some recruiting buzz, and though he looks sort of like how we imagine a member of the Swedish women’s track and field team might look, we know better than to bet against anyone with Neuheisel DNA. (Presumably, as a student at Los Angeles’s Loyola High School, Jerry will be at least an ancillary beneficiary of the breakup of the infamous Los Angeles Football Monopoly, though we can’t say for sure until we’ve seen the documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

It’s going to be an interesting family Thanksgiving in the Bowden household. For the first time in ages, the only member of the Bowden family fielding any questions about national-title expectations is — Terry, despite bringing back only one offensive starter on his (Division II) North Alabama team. Imagine Stephen being the lone member of the Baldwin family to get any Emmy buzz in a given year and you’ve pretty much approximated the head-scratching factor here.

Profiles in headline understatement. The Virginia Cavaliers are looking for big-play wideouts, says the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Or, you know, big-play anybody, that’d be good too. (Cue my dad, UVA undergrad ‘71, Med ‘77: “We’re still the closest thing to a public Ivy in the country, Thomas Jefferson founded us, GRRRR ARRRGGGHH.”)

File under “Longtime rumors confirmed.” It’s official: Joe Kines “speaks another language.” The city of Tuscaloosa just collapsed under the weight of its collective lack of shock.

What? Oh, yeah, star QB, football, blah blah whatever. Ex-Longhorn hero and current Tennessee Titans QB Vince Young makes a very edifying appearance in the “What I’ve Learned” feature of this month’s Esquire, and while some of you are sure to beef with his promise to “be the next black quarterback to win a Super Bowl,” I’m not commenting on that one way or the other, mainly because I’m too distracted by the feature on Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men” immediately preceding the Young article.

Yes, I know that’s about as lazy as segues get, but y’all have been very good this week, and the very least I can throw your way as a show of gratitude is a little bunda. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.