Hey, kids. If you’re reading this, it’s because we were in the emergency room all night getting a pesky couple of broken transverse processes of the L1 and L2 lumbar vertebrae taken care of by the fine medical professionals at Emory Hospital. You ever had Dilaudid? It’s like morphine, but with robot arms, a trust fund, and a horrendous gambling problem. We met last night.

Play me off for 6-8 weeks, Keyboard Cat.

No permanent or lasting damage, as the piece of angry, disunited bones in my back aren’t load bearing. They do hurt like I swallowed a plugged-in soldering gun, which is why I’m waking up in a few hours to dust off some more delicious, nutritious Percocet.

Thanks to all the well-wishers on Twitter and Facebook. (Our phone doesn’t work, as the iPhone battery died last night, too.) It’s pill and sleep time, and we’ll see what “we” feel like tomorrow.

I mean, of course he is. If this coaching staff had anyone left in their corner at all after treating a reeling, gutted fanbase to a full quarter of Jonathan Crompton, I’d love to hear from them.

So, here we go. It’s time; there’s absolutely no arguing that, but for a city and a team threatened by the remotest hint of change the balance of the season looms dark and our natural pessimism has finally found purchase.  Even with both feet in the FIRE HIS ASS YESTERDAY camp, I was never going to be entirely comfortable when this day came.  He’s the coach of my childhood, the devil I know.  Six weeks ago, I wrote,  “It’s our time at the edge, and the stay will be neither brief nor pleasant.”  I had no idea.

But if there’s anything to celebrate here with complete joyful abandon (for me, campers, for me), it’s that Chris Low scooped the living hell out of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, a terrible paper with a simpering buffoon of a sports editor in John Adams.  Save your preening, sir—you’ve had a public, exhausting vendetta against the guy for years and today you got beat.  ABIGAIL Adams would’ve had that story first, and that bitch has been dead almost 200 years.

This week’s blogpoll is brought to you by hangovers. Kids, we’re gonna lecture you here for a second with a sad fact: drinking after thirty is not fun, and you know this is true because we began with “hey kids,” which is kind of condescending but fuck that THE HEAD IT HURTS AND TO HELL IF YOU DO–

Sorry. Apologies. It’s just…we’re so…emotional today. Because we’re hungover and 32.

Drinking before thirty is a grand adventure, filled with surprises and intrigue. Who’s that guy drinking on my tab? Does he really need that eyepatch? Hey, you’re the only guy in a bar full of black dudes! (Who all have eyepatches.) You really boxed a kangaroo once? Yes, my pants did disappear quite a while ago. Say, is that a real ultralight? Sure, I can fly one.

Look! A place that serves eggs at four in the morning! (Repeat; rinse vomit out of hair; repeat.)

Sometimes, drinking still retains its halcyon glow, its moments of beauty. Anthony Bourdain has described that moment when you should be asleep, an undefined time between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. when your work is done but you’re not, and you’re probably three drinks into the evening, and a song comes on and sets everything perfectly well on its axis. It’s still a wondrous moment.

This particularly evil egg sac of hangover around the eyes and forebrow right now? The lingering feeling of doom? This is not one of those wondrous moments. (more…)

Late last night, 1500 words on Jonathan Crompton Not Being The Guy were rendered hopefully irrelevant by this headline.  (You’re welcome.)  This is far, far from over—Tennessee does not promote young players lightly, easily, or without maddening deliberation at speeds too slow to deserve the term.  But an entrenched veteran, deserving or no, even catching a glimpse of a hook is a welcome sight, no less so for being completely fucking overdue.

The above article was followed shortly by a chaser of nightmare fuel.  He’s determined!  Good morning, sunshine!  Sleep well?  Did the football being  played around you last week and the week before disturb your nappytime in the pocket?  If there’s a delicious deep-fried lining to this clusterfuck, it’s that the Cromptonites, bottom-feeders in action and in onomatopoeia, are at last shaken free of their delusions of any modicum of competence on the part of their carp-faced idol.  Say what you will about Ainge, but the Bad Erik label wouldn’t have been necessary had there not been Good Erik to mirror it.  Occasionally, shit got done.  That is painfully and entirely no longer the case.

“I’m still gonna be the guy.”  Damn right you are.  The guy with three touchdowns and four INTs in four games.

(more…)

“’Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o’er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens.”

Orgeron. Perrilloux. SLOCUM? One by one, our best material has gone gently into that good night of jucos and position coaching, and today we hear rumblings that an EDSBS Most Favored Son is an academic casualty and a Wolverine no more.

In his own words, we give you Marques Slocum, remixed in sonnet-ish form. Read, remember, and mourn.

got a fuck lion now come fuck wit me
i hope my wife know ima be man! fuck dat spider
I like 2 licky licky licky licky
My mom CARLA i think she da realest bitch alive

i dont give a fuck i just want 2 get on
sprint/nextel bitch! dey got da best phones

What have we been doing today to excuse a relative absence from the blogosphere? This:

We’re at Division One Sports in Franklin, Tennessee getting foot placed to ass by trainers who, in the name of journalistic science for the Sporting News, are doing unholy things to us in order to convey exactly how much pain it takes to get in college football shape. That is an EDSBS shirt, and we do have a rubber band between the legs, and yes, we gave up on dignity somewhere around age seven.

Fun fact: football programs want speed more than anything else! And ponies! Pretty, pretty ponies.

(P.S. Small victories: they told us we did better than Clay Travis on day one, so we’ve got that going for us.)

Via Dawg Sports, of course, comes the side-splittingest breaking tale of the entire offseason: UGA mutant star Knowshon Moreno being forced to write a two-page essay last year on noise pollution following a writeup for loud music in the dorms. I cannot encourage you strongly enough to click through to the documentation itself. Before we even get to what he wrote, there’s the hyperreaction of the Boss Queen of the Conduct Review Board (naturally named “Brad”), who announced—go on, say this out loud without sneering: “…that Knowshon had not fulfilled the original conditions of the sanction regarding formatting of the research paper”. It gets better (emphasis added for spite):

On October 31, 2006, Knowshon responded to Brad but resubmitted the same incorrect sanction. Brad once again informed Knowshon that he needed to format the paper correctly and resubmit the sanction. In addition, he warned Knowshon about the possibility of having his record flagged…

And then there’s the essay itself. From the conclusion:

To show the responsibility that I have gained over this situation I was recently asked in my room one night after quiet hours if I could do a back flip. My answer to this was yes because I can, but I kindly stated that I would not be able to perform this act at the time because I did not want to disturb my fellow neighbors below and around me.

He goes on to state that he will resolve this issue by living off-campus next year. The document further informs us that Knowshon’s record “remains flagged.” Knowshon himself….does not.

Clearly, the wrath of Brad has had devastating and far-reaching consequences.

We all make mistakes. In fact, some of us specialize in them. Thus, we present the EDSBS Corrections for the week through 3/28/08.

Mistakes: we make ‘em.

On Tuesday, we mentioned that Bo Pelini’s middle name was “Steven.” This is incorrect: Pelini’s middle name is Wrathhammer. We regret the error.

On Monday, we quoted the number of sacks allowed by Notre Dame last year as 58. This was correct, but left out the other stat lines.

Pressures: 324

Disembowelments: 15

Decapitations: 7

Drawn and Quartered: 9

Thrown off cliff in Iraq by U.S. soldiers: 3

Strapped in chair and forced to watch Ang Lee’s The Hulk: 1

Again, we regret the error.

On Wednesday, we referred to Bobby Bowden as a former lover of Rudolf Nuryev and “one of the most notorious power bottoms in the Castro’s jet-set weekend crew in the 70s” This was based on false information and bad sourcing, and we regret the error.

Also on Wednesday, we implicated Bobby Bowden in the shooting of Tupac Shakur. This, too, was based on bad information. (Thank god we didn’t actually do that…unlike the LA Times actually did to someone.)

On Tuesday, we referred to our consumption of Tylenol Orange Flavored Cough Medicine in Las Vegas. This was a misrepresentation. We were actually smoking moonrock and huffing benzene at the time and chasing it with the Orange Drank. We regret the error.

On Monday, we suggested that Rutgers coach Greg Schiano was lactose-intolerant. This is not accurate. He is just naturally gassy and has a problem processing complex starches. We regret the error.

On Thursday, we reported on the death of Brent Musberger in a Texas hotel room following a squabble with Mexican drug dealers and an unstoppable, shadowy killer fond of coin flips. This did not actually happen, and was instead the plot of the Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men with the words “Brent Musburger” put in place of “Josh Brolin.” Again, we regret the error.