Joe Paterno is dying in front of our eyes, and that is no overly dramatic statement. His body is beginning the inevitable decline he staved off for so many year by running, staying involved in his job, and leaning on the good credit his robust genes advanced him in his later years. This is not a sentimental judgment: it’s fact, as clear to the viewer as the cane he now requires to get from point A to point B or as obvious as his absence from the sidelines when he takes to the booth in the second half of games due to hip pain.

Brent Musberger may be annoying, predictable, and prone to over-excitement on the smallest play, but give him due credit for honesty in discussing the factors motivating Paterno’s insistence on remaining on the sideline.

He is fearful — and he looks back at Bear Bryant as the example — he is fearful that he would not be with us if he stepped away. He is a man that doesn’t fish, doesn’t play golf…he has no other interest other than his family and football. And he’s just afraid what would happen with the rest of his life if he walks away from it.

“What would happen” here is cloaked language for what happened to Bryant: death. If you feel a vague unease at all this, at watching Paterno slowly deteriorate physically, it should be a familiar creep: it is the same sensation the smell of hospital disinfectant gives us, since everyone we’ve ever known kicked off in the perpetually swabbed and sterile corners of a hospital. It’s the primate fear associated with anything reminding you of your own demise.

In the pilot of Six Feet Under, there’s a debate about how death is dealt with in America: that it is too sterile, too impersonal, too well-packaged to properly recognize the moment. Nate insists his father’s burial should be a more personal, emotional farewell than the standard packaged, gift-wrapped costume dramas they sell; David, the other brother, objects, but ultimately relents at the graveside.

We’re more on Nate’s side, as annoying as the character was, but would like to take it a step further: the unease surrounding Paterno is part of an overall gerontophobia, a fear of the old rooted in the fact that some deep, primal part of your brain recognizes that if you’re lucky, you’ll be tottering along in slip-ons and a robe at the end of the driveway as part of a four-minute ordeal just to get the mail. Many of you are scared of old people because they’re “creepy,” which we take to mean “close to death, and therefore death-y, and therefore ‘creepy.’

To be fair, some old people may scare you for legitimate reasons. Many in our part of the nation have both guns and cataracts, a great combination resulting in festive fun for the whole family. (”Don’t go over in the yard to get the ball, kid. That’s how people die.”) They do tend to be stubborn, they do remind you of death because they’re so much closer (by the odds, at least) than you are, and they do have a statistically significant propensity for causing horrific traffic accidents.

However, Joe Paterno, as morbid as it may seem, may be living the dream: he’s choosing both how to live, and potentially how to die. Most of our friends, when asked “how would you like to go,” usually choose the Willie Nelson route of “being shot climbing out of a woman’s window at 135 years old.” The more common answer, however, would be “doing what I do,” which in JoePa’s case is to die coaching football.

This may seem creepy, but the fault would not be on Paterno, who being a Classicist by education seems Stoic in his approach toward death. Musburger may have been plying inside information, but he may have also ignored another, more positive angle on this: Paterno’s fear of no longer being able to do what he loves, not what would happen if he stopped doing it. The fault is in the viewer, so insulated from aging and death that the sight of it in any real form obscures the fact that Paterno, in the form he’s chosen, is doing his job as well as anyone in the country right now…and happens to be very, very old.

This seems less like a man worried about death, and more worried about how he’s going to get through the rest of life in spite of the pain his body is experiencing–an Epicurean in the purest sense of the word to the end, and the current coach of the number three team in the nation. Let him live how he chooses. Whether anyone likes it or not, death will take care of the rest. The rest is useless worry, and a waste of precious life with the clock winding down.

We have no words of comfort. For comfort, go to mom, or better yet, Oprah. Or better yet, fire your motherfucking coach once the nadir turns into the midpoint when you lose to Michigan State by thirty, or (Jebus forbid!) Notre Dame next week, or to whomever else would snap the creaky back of the Carr Administration at this point. You’ll still suck, but you’ll have cut off someone’s head–and coachblood makes the wounded fan’s heart sing every time.

Instead of comfort, we focus on one seemingly cosmetic but terribly important thing. We watched the Oregon game, hoping to be that Oprah type person: rooting for the downtrodden, pulling for the wounded little meerkat, you know, falling prey to our national genetic predilection for the underdog/comeback kid. And for an instant we were there, until we saw this:

!!!!

This would be less appalling if it were alumni…but STUDENTS JINGLING KEYS? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Young, healthy people with clean, fully-functioning lungs JINGLING KEYS TO MAKE NOISE!!!! My god, why don’t you hire Salvadorans to come yell for you? Or better still, they could just come in and cheer for you while you watch the game in the parking lot in peace and quiet and save you the trouble of screaming “DOWN IN FRONT!!!” (Because that would hurt your lungs, wouldn’t it?)

Yes, this is coming from a boorish, decorum-free SEC fan whose fellow fans bring cowbells to games and set off seismometers at the geology department during games in between handing out sociology and leisure management degrees to illiterate, well-muscled athletes. It is also directed at a school in a conference where some schools actually cheer their asses off and force teams into penalties with crowd noise. And some Michigan fans have been railing about this for way, way longer than we have.

Don’t blame the architecture either. Instead, scream. At this point, you should be screaming, anyway. Who cares if it’s at your coach? Notre Dame doesn’t have to know that. This is football. Blood. Screaming. Tribal violence. Bizarre rites and rituals. Put away the keys. Pick up the torches. Less Roman, more Vandal, dammit!

“I understand why certain teams get exemptions.

Oh, and Fermat’s Last Theorem? Someone’s solving that bitch someday, and that someone is gonna be me.”***

And…INCOMING!!!

Most anyone paying attention to college football tends to get postmodernish about Notre Dame. They’re football Russia: once great, hit by a long, long, long slide, and now building for a comeback using their single natural resource (the brand) with a skilled despot at the helm. (Unfamiliar with Russian petrochemical diplomacy? Good on ya for having a life.)

Bashing them for easy ins to the BCS, though…that’s so 1999, no? We know why Notre Dame gets in–Lucini, lucre, loot, simoleons, yuan. That’s passe, given. Kevin’s got the valid points re: Wisconsin’s weak in-conference schedule and their worse out-of-conference slate, but we’re far more interested in why people still get furious about this when nothing changes without a playoff.

And getting even more postmodern, hasn’t the richest postmodernish storyline of post-2000 football been the perpetual comeback/death/comeback of zombie Notre Dame football? For the fan, it may be better to have Notre Dame continually on the cusp of return, since the annual Irish Bowl Game sponsored by “When Animals Attack!!!” and the Discovery Channel’s Huge Predators Toying With Prey in Sick Slow-Motion Fashion makes for some of the more extreme viewing of the largely irrelevant postseason.

Barring a sensible system, a fan has to mine absurdity for entertainment. We actually fault the BCS for setting up such poor matchups for Notre Dame. After all, they’re working on it. Improving facilities. Upgrading coaches. Going to counseling. Attending 12-step meetings. Installing a whole new CRM system. Not cheating on you at the convention by giving a sales rep from Kokomo the Shaky Fireman after seven Long Island Iced Teas. They’re really, really trying here.

But you keep setting them up against teams they cannot possibly beat for the amusement of the masses, which is…awfully and horribly entertaining at times. We got no joy from OSU/Notre Dame last year. Yet we would be lying if we said we did not enjoy watching huge, fast SEC overlords LSU run Notre Dame off the field, most notably because we love watching predation done right.

(Apologies to Big Daddy Drew for moving in on his “kill kill kill” territory.)

It’s just an excuse to work them in because people will watch, and the absurd system allows them in the front door. And that’s just fine, because people know what they’re getting. We predict the introduction of the 2nd seed in the AFC playoffs into the BCS equation any day now just to boost the ratings. (Notre Dame versus the Patriots! Now that’s entertainment! Is that young man broken in half? Get that fucking Dr. Pepper challenge asshole now before someone zooms in…)

Therefore: until the playoff Leviathan arrives and the absurd quotient ramps down a bit, long live the Irish exception. The only thing more entertaining than watching public schools run vert routes with impunity on them in bowl games would be watching them irk the universe by actually winning a bowl game. This is an idea which after nine straight losses seems just as absurd as any.

*Bret Bielema did not say this.
**And he definitely did NOT say this.
***Have you seen his hair? No way he said this.

For historical purposes, we think the long slide to tonight’s Emerald Bowl loss (positive thinking positive thinking positive thinking) began long, long ago with the Oklahoma/Florida State game in 2001’s Orange Bowl. Richt left. Amato was gone. Jeff Bowden would soon take Chris Rix to hell, along with the whole formerly juketastic Florida State offense, and leaving a blinded Bobby to act out a sad little redneck Shakespeare until the denouement this year–Jeff Bowden’s resignation and cashout, where he’ll wipe the tears away with Seminole booster money until the year 2012, when his annual payout will finally end, and he will have to find honest work as a barista somewhere.

Flash back with us, and remind yourself that once a badass, always a badass, as is very much the case with Roy Williams here.

As for why things didn’t work out, he didn’t point to statistics or won-lost records.

“Because you all ignited it,” he said to a small room of reporters. “You listen to eBay and e-mail and all that junk, and you all kept writing about it and that fans it and makes it grow and grow, and it becomes a cancer. That’s why.”

Jeff Bowden’s playbook for sale. Opening bid: $550,000 from user exasperatedboosternfla.

Two things:

1. Don’t even try to purchase wemustignitethiscoach.com, because if you do our lawyaz iz strong and multifarious, yo.

2. Ebay actually does destroy coaches. Especially when they’re shopping for other coaches’ playbooks in a last-ditch attempt to properly call a game. In the middle of a game. (HT: Jeremy, WATB.)

3. Bowden’s actually pissed because Jeff totally got this notice about a real live confederate army vintage flintlock musket he was trying to buy that said he needed to give EBay his credit card information and then OMG! some huge charges on Dad’s Visa at a jewelry shop in Istanbul showed up so Dad had to spend like six hours on the phone straightening the whole thing out and that made him so tired that Jeff had to go put him to bed which sucked because then Jeff missed the episode of JAG he’d been waiting to see on USA. That TiVo think is wayyyy too complex to mess with, in Jeff’s opinion.

Stranko, is this where we put cheesecake? This is what happens when you have instant access to porn–you just go right to it and bypass cheesecake! And thus lose all cheesecake skills! DAMN YOU INTERNETS!!!
(This is Catherine Bell of JAG, who keeps Jeffy coming back for military courtroom drama with her Farsi skills.

1. Things will go wrong.
2. People never change, and never will.
3. People continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
4. When your favorite uncle is eaten by a tiger, don’t ask “Why?”, ask “Why not?”
5. Attempt to ignore rules 1-4 at all times.

Given that, we bring up the rumor of Norm Chow, the Greatest College Offensive Coordinator Ever ™ and the currently a mediocre NFL OC for the talent-rupt Titans. This rumor comes to us courtesy of Horseface, who thinks a job-hungry Chow would find an ideal transitional job in the situation at Florida State. Chow comes in as an assistant, gives Bowden one last “dadgum,”, and then takes over for Bowden when he leaves.

Chow: no scheme, no system. Just hot, nasty, badass scoring. We think Eleanor Roosevelt said that first.

We’re not going to think about Hayes’ penchant for turning fever-dream fan-fiction into “interesting official speculation,” or about him writing college football fan fiction at all. (See: Yahoo Groups “Holly Rowe BDSM Tales,” chapter six for some of that.) In fact, if you’re looking for tasty reliable speculation, it’s in there: Chow to North Carolina or Miami, which makes sense even taking into account a set of rules about humanity so skeptical only someone raised in the hardknock life surroundings of..um…the suburban sun belt could come up with them. Yeah.

Chow wouldn’t engage in Matt3576HorseyNeigh@yahoo.com’s fevered scenario because it violates several of Orson’s Sad But Reliable Rules for humanity. The indictment, point by point:

1. Something will go wrong. Chow’s from the West Coast, and enjoyed his greatest success there. Why wouldn’t he go back? Arizona State’s football program will likely have an opening, and Oregon State and UCLA are also up there for potential jobs. All of these are more likely than Norm Chow to Tallahassee, where he’d be replacing a legend in an area of the country he’s never really worked before.

2. People never change, and never will. Bowden won’t admit mistakes, and has no reason to: in a single person, he represents the successful heritage of Florida State football. He’s also got that history of rank nepotism, which won’t change. Get Jeff Bowden a shiny new brass nameplate and fasten it into the door with the big screws, because his biggest resume line is never going away.

3. People continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. See number two. Jeff’s just learning. He’s young. The other boys turned out okay, except for the embezzler, right? Sick with dolor as Seminole fans are right now, we have to ask an even more sickening question: what makes anyone in the fanbase think that Bowden doesn’t have fantasies of putting Jeffy in charge once he’s gone? What in his behavior has shown an inclination that he wouldn’t do this?

4. When your favorite uncle is eaten by a tiger, don’t ask “Why?”, ask “Why not?”

The second greatest coach of all time wins-wise (we refuse to count the Samford wins in that total, and just like JoePa better anyway, especially after his “Run For Two” earlier this year) becomes a laughing stock of a country sheriff by promoting his inept son to a position of responsibility. Why not? Why can’t a formerly brilliant coach be completely anti-brilliant towards the end of his career? It happens all the time. Woody Hayes punches Charlie Bauman. Dennis Erickson goes from coaching Miami in the national championship to play-calling in an airplane hangar in Moscow, Idaho. Smart people do dumb things, like trust someone simply because they have half the same genes as they do. Ask King Birendra–not always the soundest thinking. Don’t ask “Why would FSU make a bad decision on the next coach?” Instead, ask “Why not?”

King Birendra of Nepal: ask him how mixing family and upper management worked out.

Supplemental evidence: [NAME REDACTED]’s entire hiring and tenure. Why not?

5. Attempt to ignore rules 1-4 at all times. The only ray of hope here for Seminole fans: rules 1-4 collapse, and someone makes sound decisions in hiring the next coach. Of course, this implies betting on people being competent, which is a big, big risk. Perhaps we need a rule six…