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.

The Tailgate Review of the Vol Navy is hyah. A few additional notes:

1. Tennessee women are beautiful, and our favorite outside of Florida (natch) because they seem to be there to actually eat, drink, and look casually and effortlessly hot while actually paying attention to the football game. We don’t mean this in the “Yo, brah! LOOK AT THE COCK-KNOCKERS ON THAT ONE!”

No, we mean this in the most respectful, loving way imaginable: you’re all beautiful, even the one with the fake tits who was clearly on her way to committing some form of life-altering mistake in the boat a row over. We wanted to give each of you a Lush bath product of some sort, a single flower, and just tell you how much we appreciated you all being gorgeous, football-loving women that you are.

2. We also mean this: the nicest fucking people you could ever hope for at a tailgate. Expletive included for emphasis, not to suggest they were actually copulating while handing us free beers: just absurdly nice, and nicer than we deserved, of course. Normally I’m jittery and ready to start a Viking axe party before Florida/Tennessee, but it’s hard to get your war on in such a gorgeous setting.

3. We want this shirt. We don’t even know what it means, but we love it:

4. Yes, they duped the picture, but chicks is page views. We didn’t use this one, because it didn’t really fit but still deserves mention for astonishingly misused quotations:

School officials from both NMSU and UTEP have issued warnings against going across the border from El Paso to the ever more charming city of Juarez, Mexico, where any gameday tailgating may inclue authentic Mexican cuisine (love those simple corn tortillas and green salsa!), the purchase of high grade pharmaceuticals from any number of cross-border pharmacies (ay, papi, love that percocet!) and perhaps being killed where you stand for no reason.

The travel warnings come as government officials and residents are asking the Mexican federal government to do more to stop a wave of killings across the state of Chihuahua believed to be linked to a raging drug cartel war.

More than 850 homicides have occurred in Juárez so far this year, including four killed in a shootout Wednesday afternoon and four men killed execution-style late Tuesday when they were handcuffed to each other, lined up and shot.

Students from both schools have traditionally gone over to Juarez to participate in “Drink and Drown,” which in the best of years sounds like a recipe for blanked memories covering Grand Guignol horrors and transactions involving STDs, stolen credit cards, and weapons with the serial numbers filed off them.

Throw in a city in the spasms of open public executions by drug gangs, and this is probably a very, very good year to skip this whole thing. Unless you’re stupid, and by all means, stupid finds its own level, meaning we couldn’t stop you if we wanted to, brah. Go ahead and tape three hundred dollars to yourself and walk across the bridge like William T. Vollmann on holiday. When a pit bull is chasing you across the river on your drunken, bleeding swim back to America, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Nowhere is there a more spectacular chance to exercise this fundamental American right than in the field of college football fandom, where you can take your hard-earned inheritances and trust funds and pour them directly into RVs, walls coated in blazing flatscreen televisions, and barbecues large enough to cook other barbecues in while simultaneously prepping a whole brisket on the side. Ante up, skinflint bitches, and break out the plastic. It’s time to put a little red into your team colors in the form of debt-funded tailgate fodder for the fall.

Necessary things include, but are not limited to:

The Hitch ‘n View. Are you tired of hammering nails into your largest friend’s back in order to hang your flatscreen at your tailgate? Ashamed of the cost of all those vandalism citations from drilling holes in campus bulidings and trees for a good tv mount? Want a football-related excuse to follow someone at the NASCAR-approved distance of 3 inches from their rear bumper?

Enter your solution, the miraculous Hitch ‘n View.

RUMSFEEEEEEELD!!!

You could watch the game from a lawn chair with a cold one in hand, sure. Or you could stop being a pussy and watch College Gameday at eighty miles an hour from the driver’s seat of your car, pounding hot coffee, Mao-ing down on Ripped Fuel, and shaking with glee just a single brake pump away from certain disaster. That’s how a Viking would do it with bits of brain in his beard the whole time.

Your own chicken leg flash drive. Two variations on this one. First, you could keep your data secure in the chicken foot variant, a must for all South Carolina fans who want to bring the Cock ‘n Fire sputter to computers they infect with viruses stored in their files, or just want to make it look like they’ve crammed their an entire cock into their usb drive.

You may also take this chicken themed flash drive, which in piles left on tables at the Tennessee football complex could be loads of fun! (Fun=choking hazard.)

Your own blimp. For the extremely exact figure of somewhere between two thousand and ten thousand dollars a month, you can rent your own blimp, depending on the amount of flight time you use, the amount of advertising you put on the beast, and how many kegs of beer you want haul up there with you. (”It’s ballast and booze! Yes!”)

We’ll be charging the Hornet L2V to the Swindle Industries card, a swanky little sportster made for you, one fine lady, and the bags of fake money you plan to shower the crowd with during the third quarter. For just a few thousand more, have an LED installation put on the side to flash useful messages like “NICE CALL, SHIT FOR BRAINS” and “GRAVITY IS STUNTING YOUR PERSONAL GROWTH” to the masses.

Oh, and don’t bother to make a flight plan. DHS hates it when you make those.

A Fathead for your windshield. Vision is for the faithless. Pop that Fathead right over the windscreen, hit the gas, and let victory do the rest. Champions find a way, and you will, too, even if you have to take that way through buildings, shrubbery, and public parks filled with screaming pedestrians. There are no shortcuts for excellence here.

The Vantare Platinum Plus. We have some issues with the name. Must luxury brands continually pile adjectives and lustrous nouns into meaningless piles of wording? “Emperor’s Club,” “Platinum Plus,” “The Virgin Atlanta Largesse Silverwhore Ultraluxe Suite, Home of the World’s Only Sanctioned In-Air Prostate Massage”…the price tag and Italian marble counters on wheels speak for themselves, don’t they?

The Vantare doesn’t even have a bedroom: it has a state room, which is like a bedroom, but for dignitaries, admirals, and emperors. If you have 2.5 million dollars to spend on an RV, chances are you can purchase a title to being either of these from a third world nation for far less than the price of the RV.

In the midst of all the multinational descriptions of the RV’s plush furnishings, though, sits a sentence that confuses us slightly:

The galley and dining area comes fully stocked with utensils with an international feel.

When we think “international utensils,” we think of a drawer full of AK-47s, Hello Kitty plush dolls, and filthy packages of UNHCR high-energy biscuits. Which, for 2.5 mil, should come standard with the RV anyway.

The bathroom of the Vantare looks like this:

Rest assured when you let a trashed 19 year old hurl up a twelve pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a meatball sub all over the bathroom at a tailgate, you’ll have them doing it on only the finest mobile bathroom fixtures imaginable.

Mesmerizing! Tommy Tuberville doesn’t even have to be in the same moment and place to hypnotize you with a bag of potato chips: all he need do is call, and you will hear his plea from across space and time.

P.S. Just because we’re having fun with Sir Charles today over at the Sporting Blog, a few Auburn relevant quotes from barkleyquotes.com that should convince you not only that Charles is one of the great bon vivants of our time, but also confirm any and all stereotypes about SEC and Auburn athletes and academics:

“When I was recruited at Auburn [university], they took me to a strip joint. When I saw those titties on Buffy, I knew that Auburn met my academic requirements.”

Those titties. An area of study no young male college student can fail to appreciate.

Jean shorts Robert Edwards still leading series Lindsay Scott Buck Belue Spurrier gay mullet!

With that out of the way, we re-present Reggie Nelson scaring Mohammed Massaquoi onto the ground. Sit, Mo, sit! Good dog.

Agenda:

1. Drive to Gainesville

2. DRINK. KILL. GLORY.

3. Come home in time for EDSBS Live on Sunday.

Enjoy your weekend and root for Florida. The choice is yours: root for the Gators, and you root for boobs on the internet. Root for Tennessee, and you get us singing “Rocky Top.” And no one wins there.

See below for details.

me: I, Orson Swindle, being of mind and body, do promise to record a version of “Rocky Top” upon the event of a loss to the Tennessee Volunteers for the Florida Gators football team on Saturday.

Holly: Get your banjo strung up real nice now, you filthy fuckin’ reprobate.

We give you chapter two of the Chairman’s manual with Reasons 1-25 Florida Rules and Tennessee Sucks Forever. Because they do, indeed, suck forever, sometimes as a football team, sometimes as a state, but most pleasingly to the Florida fan, when they suck together all at the same time in one sorrowful, audible slurp.

1. Tennessee is shaped like a parallelogram. Florida, however, is “America’s Wang.” And where would America be without its wang?

2. Florida great Steve Spurrier is a Volunteer State exile (Johnson City), meaning that the greatest coach ever born in Tennessee ran screaming from it the first chance he got, and never came back. There’s no humor there. It just really sucks for you, Vol fan, and makes us warm and happy inside.

3. Even after thirty years of government interdiction, Florida’s still putting the yayo on your glass coffee tables in piles, America. You’re welcome (sniff).

4. We gave you Creed in order to make you feel good about your own life in a fun way, as in “I’m not Scott Stapp, and that’s great, really.” Nashville gives you music to help you justify your sad, tobacco-stained penniless existence, prole…um, we mean ain’t it great scraping by on 22K with three kids in a place with terrible public schools! WOOOO!!! VOTE PAPPY FOR GUVNAH!!!

5. Our coach has won a championship in the 21st century.

6. Our fans are loud, rude, uncouth, classless, urine-tossing, sunburned, drunk, foulmouthed smartasses from the dregs of America’s sketchiest state. Tennessee’s root for Tennessee.

Advantage: Florida.

7. Miami Vice. Empty Nest. Golden Girls. Nip/Tuck. Florida’s rolling in television shows. Tennessee couldn’t even get fucking Evening Shade over for a few roadtrip episodes.

8. This is the first thing you see after the Florida state line sign driving south on I-75.

9. Dangerous wildlife in Florida includes alligators, several types of poisonous snake, sharks, and jellyfish. Dangerous wildlife in Tennessee consists of Pac-Man Jones, who would totally lose to any of these except the jellyfish, who Pac-Man could probably have a henchman paralyze with a stray gunshot or two.

10. Tennessee state flower: the Iris. Oh, that’s so quaint. Florida state flower: the gasoline fire ball from something blowing up in Miami due to civil unrest. Oh, that’s so…routine, actually.

11. Florida’s high murder rate explained? We’re outgoing! And armed to the teeth. And really, really hot and irritated at the moment. What? WHAT?

12. Bilingual culture ensures that Floridians speak two languages very poorly, rather than one as in Tennesseans’ case.

13. Tennesseans born knowing how to electric slide and boot-scoot; Floridians born knowing how to salsa, meringue, and file down the firing pin of an AR-15 so that that thing will blow doors on full-auto, motherfucker.

14. Our governor’s gay. There are no gay people in Tennessee, so Florida’s instantly more stylish by far on points automatically.

15. Florida Senator Bill Nelson is a former astronaut. Tennessee Senator Bill Frist adopted cats from the Humane Society and dissected them for “practice” during med school. Meow.

16. The weather sucks for five months straight in Tennessee during this bizarre thing called “winter.” From November to March it’s like living underneath Bea Arthur’s pubic hair: cold, gray, barren, and soggy.

Yes. A very accurate description you have there.

17. Danny Wuerffel never lost a game to Peyton Manning in college. Peyton Manning is the best quarterback of his generation. This should indicate that if Manning had played for Spurrier, he would have had nine Super Bowls by now, thrown for 237,000 yards, and impregnated a line of supermodels that would make Tom Brady look like a mediocre polygamist in comparison.

18. Our mascot has the unique quality of being something that eats you and that you can eat, in theory.

19. Speaking of…Smokey loses in the Mascot War. Unless it’s cold, and then we’d get torpid, and even then Smokey would likely break his teeth on Albert’s hide. And who wants to live when it’s below sixty degrees anyway.

20. Haven’t lost to Vanderbilt recently, have we?

21. No one does cancer like we do. Especially skin cancer. And cockroaches. In fact, the mayor of Apopka, Florida was at one time a huge, talking tumor who rode a tremendous Palmetto bug around on his daily rounds. Charismatic. Great with reforming local zoning laws. Helluva golfer, he was.

22. Corporate home of Outback Steakhouse, who brought you 36 percent of Phil Fulmer’s body mass courtesy of the chain’s trademark appetizer, the Bloomin’ Onion.

23. Tennessee brought you writers such as James Agee, who wrote depressing books about poor people. Florida has Carl Hiaasen, who writes about middle-aged white guy journalists getting ass way hotter than they should reasonably get and about people getting fucked to death by dolphins. (The best part is that this actually happened.) Boooo poor people! Yayyyy dolphin sodomy! Advantage: Florida.

24. Lost last year’s bowl game to a team coached by a zombie.

25. Beat Dennis Franchione in a bowl game prior to that, which may or may not count as a win, really.

26. In case of the Rapture, Tennesseans’ cars will be unmanned. Florida fans will totally steal them all and take them to this guy we know out in Bartow who’ll give us mad cash for them. Especially Lexuses, man.

More to come! Viva hate!

We don’t think that with a wife and a dog, we could eat the deadliest catch of all football tailgate foods, brought to us by Run Up The Score: the deep-fried White Castle cheeseburger.

My god, man. Do you want to die?

By mighty Bacharach’s Piano Keys! You should go do something else with a similar danger rating, like playing Russian roulette, or taunting an angry Jon Lovitz, for example. If these existed in Australia, Steve Irwin would have been killed by one. If they were African, mythical oral histories would surround them. If these existed in Tennessee…well, they will, in a matter of minutes, we’re guessing, so scratch that. Someone’s running at a dead sprint to a deep fryer as we speak.

Yours for only $15, the Chickel commemorates the upcoming 2007 season by putting Chizik in profile on antique gold. Looking at the picture, we’ve never noticed what a striking similarity there is between Coach Chizik and Chief Sitting Bull, were one to cut his hair and place him in a three-piece suit.

As compared to other coach-emblazoned swag, it’s impressive. For example, this completely kicks the ass of the [NAME REDACTED] seat cushions they handed out two years ago at Illinois. They were unpopular with reason, however, as they tended to get soft and give out somewhere around the early fourth quarter.

The yellow caution tape? That’s to keep his sexiness from stunning you cold.

Florida International has now added a new line to their resume as a program of esteem and worth: putting on the greatest single spread of pork seen in South Florida since Connie Mack the third was in office. From El Herald:

The ambience — which included complimentary food featuring six roasted pigs, a sale of retro FIU athletic uniforms and gear and the unveiling of the new football stadium design — didn’t disappoint the crowd.

”I have never seen an atmosphere like this at any previous FIU event with the exception of the inaugural football game in 2002,” FIU radio broadcaster Jerry Del Castillo said. “These fans are really soaking up the changes to this football program.”

Hold on…let’s crack out the red pen, Deadspin commenter-style.

“‘These fans are really soaking up the changes to this football program all the greasy, delicious, heart-destroying porkfat they possibly can in 25 minutes without foundering like sick mules.‘”

There! So much better, and likely more accurate. Free pig and all, FIU turned out just 2,500 for their spring scrimmage, approximately the same number as those who volunteered to die if necessary to make Nick Saban the next governor of Alabama that same afternoon on Saturday in Tuscaloosa, bayonets and tear gas be damned.

The wave at Alabama’s spring game looks like this:

Ninety-five! I tooooooooooold yuh! The guy overheard in the video overshoots the actual attendance number by a bit less than three thousand: 92,138 fans showed up to A-Day, Alabama’s spring game, this past Saturday. (Alabama, math, insert joke here.) And look around the stands–these weren’t ne’er-do-wells and collegians loafing in the sun for free and paying lackadaisical attention to the events on the field. There’s grown-ass men in full Alabama garb who likely brought the barbecue, the Direct TV dish, the backup mustache…the whole kit and caboodle.

This was no accident, people. Todd Jones of Roll Bama Roll talked to us on Saturday Night immediately after the game, sounding sun-blasted, tired, and quite happy despite the crowd making more news than the vanilla offense/defense on display on the field.

MP3 File

One thing mentioned in the interview we’ll repeat here is that Saban made fashion news by bringing starchy back to the SEC, appearing in the sweltering heat wearing a grey suit and red tie. We heartily encourage this move toward more idiosyncratic vintage coaching wear, especially because it means Urban’s going to be coaching in Bike-brand coach shorts, high white socks, and wearing Woody Hayes horn rims with a shiny metal whistle around his neck if the trend continues. And that would rule.