This is up late due to throwing things due to continued redzone frustrations and dinner. But it was an angry, grudge-y dinner! We ate two pieces of pizza, and almost ate a third, but it beat us. But it was close, so we’ll claim it as three and move on. <—-Kiffinthink.

Little is dumber than the story of Spurrier pointing out Alabama using tape to mark kicks. In case you haven’t noticed, South Carolina’s been using tape to improve Stephen Garcia’s aim, as seen in this EXCLUSIVE AND NOT DOCTORED AT ALL PHOTO WE SWEAR.

How else would one explain a leap from a 53% to a 57% completion percentage? It must be magical tape. As if a rivalry priding itself on pure hate didn’t need an additional spark to create a proper trailer park bonfire. Saban says Tiffin won’t use the tape since risking a five yard penalty would be too much, but let’s focus on the most impressive possibility here: in theory, the same crew assigned to LSU/Georgia and Arkansas Florida could end up working this game, too. Crazy Old Testament God is just begging for this to happen.

Getting away with it. All our lives. Complain about the officiating as much as you like, but if you look as odious as Florida’s offense looked for a half and still win, you did something right. This is what happens when you’ve emptied the hotel suite of all of its contents and stand looking them through the empty rectangle where a Vegas suite window once stood, shimmering under the blue water. It’s all about getting perspective, really. (We missed with the second flatscreen. It made a spectacular sound hitting the pavement from eleven stories up. Fortunately we registered under our pseudonym, Richard Reilly. )

The dazed aftermath doesn’t shield a few essentials about Florida, though. Something is terribly palsied in the offense, in the execution, and in the playcalling. Arkansas played like mad bastards, especially Dennis Johnson the rolling water buffalo on rails, last seen bowling through the entire Florida defense, and wideout Greg Childs. The playcalling is relentlessly uninventive, and the line buckled under pressure from the Razorbacks’ d-line, the other set of Ro-beasts hounding Tebow and sacking him six times. This offense is, in the words of Sophocles, “kinda shitty.”

Arkansas deserves not your pity, nor any opining about the officiating. If they hit two field goals, they win this game, horrific calls and all. The one irritating us most: another inane taunting penalty in the first half, moving SEC officiating further away from the application of rules from a handbook, and more towards the spontaneous review of interpretive dance.

They didn’t, and now Florida will fall to where they properly belong: number two at best, and possibly three if you’re partial to Texas. If they faced Alabama tomorrow, the Gators lose by ten. There’s time to improve, but the problems go deeper than Percy Harvin demonstrating his mutant skills in the NFL. For now, we’re the Iowa of the SEC, and like Iowa, we’re getting away with it for the moment. As dirty as it feels, it is better than the alternative.

(Excuse us. We have to leave the hotel, as “Mr. Reilly” is wanted for a conversation with the management he would rather not have.)

The underworld holds a certain romance for some people. We do not mean the criminal underworld, but instead the literal one, like the one depicted in Jean-Luc Besson’s movie Subway, where Besson took Jean Reno and made the poor man wear an Outback hat and safari suit while playing in the worst “rock music as the French imagined rock music in the 80s, and we don’t mean Stereolab.” It’s a moment of extreme cruelty, and the sensitive may want to shield their eyes.

Subway follows the exploits of those living in the Paris Metro, a subculture of misfits, artists, social outcasts who do outrageously French things like walk around filthy sewers wearing avante-garde fashion and holding flourescent light bulbs for hours at a time. You’re not really supposed to be down in les egouts, but that’s the point, just like you’re not supposed to be in alleys in Athens, Georgia. Okay, rephrase: just like you’re not supposed to every come out of an alley in Athens once you go into said alley. There, that’s better.

Georgia junior cornerback Vance Cuff was arrested Tuesday by university police on misdemeanor charges of having a suspended license and emerging from an alley.

We have no idea what Vance Cuff was doing going into an alley in the first place, but we can only assume it was to find his lost love, trapped by the cruel vagaries of poorly written civil code with the lovable, filthy outlanders who live in the alleys, forming terrible rock bands, making filthy love in the dumpster suites they’ve constructed from what “society” can’t use, and smelling artfully horrible. If that is what he was doing, then fight on, Vance. You remain a lonely but brave voice for those afraid of paying the fifty, possibly seventy-five dollar fine to emerge from those alleys, in addition to the suspended license charge.

That charge doesn’t matter either, though, right Vance? The courageous need no license for anything, something those people who see the sweet freedom of the sun every day won’t understand like the alley people do. Keep up the fight, brother. One day the big men in City Hall will pay for what they’ve done, and they’ll pass a law cutting through the bonds of alley-based prejudice as swift as a Jonathan Crompton pass through your secondary. Until that day, though: don’t let the bastards grind you down, warrior.

Oh, make fun of them if you like. That’s genuine affection, the kind you would feel for another man if you weren’t secretly afraid that you would get close and want to feel his rough stubble on your neck, his strong hands caressing your back, his muscular thighs grasping the horse you’re both riding through wine country, the…um…we’re sorry. You were saying?

We have to get ourselves into some kind of shape to get to Louisiana. There are so many things to pack: raingear, the tropical medicine kit, satellite phone, rescue beacons, butter-scented cologne, and the stacks of cash to purchase the weapons we will need and the baksheesh we will have to pay to get through the numerous layers of bribery surrounding even the simplest of actions in Lousiana. (Average cost of public urination: $7 in NOLA, $4 in Baton Rouge, encouraged in Shreveport and free!)

There is no sense in trying to keep this game in proportion. The drama of whether a concussed Tim Tebow starts or not will become a sideshow, a pitiable afterthought the instant the Four Corners Salute hits the crowd at Tiger Stadium. The horns hit, the bourbon in the bloodstream and natural hysteria in the air combusts, and for a solid ten seconds or so everything in the stadium levitates and vibrates against the inky backdrop of what, with the lights of the stadium at full shine, appears to be jungle-level darkness. The noise is a howl, a disconcerting, blood-curdling and exhilarating ruckus of a festive boozy hell. It will and should take the top of your goddamn head off the first time you hear it.

Surround it with a purple and gold-clad Mardi Gras on the move, and there is quiet literally no place on the planet we’d rather be this weekend. We will see you there, documenting the daylight madness during the day. Then night falls, and the world gets set on vibrate for three hours or so. Let’s throw some gas on it, cover it in Christmas lights, set the whole thing on fire and see what happens.

Myth: Les Miles is doing it again! Getting whole term life insurance! Driving without a seatbelt! Going for it on 4th and a bajillion!

LSU is a program surrounded by a fog of mythos and mystery, with mythos being the Greek word for “pollution, the faint whiff of a fetid grease pit, bay leaves, and bourbon fumes.” Spray this mixture into a Tiger household, and every member of the household instantly leaps to their feet and begins gyrating wildly, eating dirt, and talking about “the God Who Comes.” By that, they mean a young 1985 Les Miles returning from the past to the present wearing a half-tucked Michigan shirt and looking rumple fresh from going for his fourth “conversion attempt” of the night with an Ann Arbor Betty.

Les Miles is Mary Ann Forrester. He’d agree as long as he actually watched True Blood, and if you admitted he had a better ass.

If Saban was the architect who built the Mardi Gras float, decorated it, and then bolted the wheels on smoothly, Les Miles is the man who then took the float, loaded the thing up with boobs and beads, and took the wheel for a wobbly and occasionally irresponsibly fast and bumpy ride. Saban maintained a good steady level of total dickishness while at LSU; Miles, in contrast, is an engaging, gregarious sort happy to jaw with the media on a small level while shutting up on the big stage. (With notable and quotable exceptions.) Saban’s brand of football, while effective, has the feel of someone killing someone for money; Miles, on the other hand, would be the kind of dashing rooftop chase scene where one opponent, down to their last bullet, kills the villain mid-monologue while clinging one-handed off the nose of a gargoyle. It’s fun, but it will take years off your already bourbon and butter-shortened life.

LSU fans know what you’re going to say: Les Miles was just winning with Saban’s players, and woooo aren’t you bullfucked now, sonny boy! To Miles’ credit, he did not lose with Saban’s players, winning 34 games in three years and winning the most bass-ackwards of all BCS titles, the 2007 National Championship where Miles went for 895 4th and shorts, made 895 of them, put his salary on black on a riverboat casino, doubled it, and then pointed a fully loaded Glock to his head, pulled the trigger, and giggled as the hammer clicked down harmlessly without firing.

He also had sex with a Snapper lawnmower on full blast just to prove a point. The blade on that thing was shredded.

It was that kind of year in 2007, but history only repeats itself as farce, not as duplicate. (more…)

Pick one. What could go wrong?

Give Urban Meyer a pile of thumbtacks, and the man makes thumbtack salad and chomps down down on it happily.

“We’re game-planning as if there’s a chance Tim could play, and there’s a chance he won’t play,” Meyer said Wednesday morning. “And that’s going to be pretty much the response until the foot hits the ball.”

Ah, Belichick-y. Belichikian. Belichickois. Take the adjective form of your choice, but leveraging the two gameplans and forcing John Chavis to divide his attentions between two divergent strategies certainly salvages some good from the shitty situation of having your star battering-ram/quarterback as a question mark just three days before the most important game on the schedule. New defensive coordinator John Chavis is 4-11 versus Florida; Urban Meyer is 0-2 in Baton Rouge. SOME FORM OF GEOGRAPHICALLY DETERMINED FAIL MUST GIVE HERE.

He returns to practice in full pads but with no contact, presumably wearing a special Nike-sponsored Nerf Helmet to protect his noggin. Oh, the joys of listening to swampstained LSU troglodytes hollering jokes about our brain-damaged quarterback! We can’t wait, especially since the fun has already started with LSU fans getting Urban Meyer’s and Riley Cooper’s phone numbers and leaving what we can only assume are helpful words of encouragement, love, and not-at-all veiled murder threats on their voicemail.

Let’s pay ‘em back, shall we? 318-681-4564. That’s Les Miles number.* Let’s make some memories, lovers.

*If Les Miles runs a hospital cafeteria with the most consistently entertaining menu announcements ever.

We would lobby full-bore for an Eric Berry Heisman if he can actually talk in a super-low distorted voice on command. (HT: Brent)