Ours could be any number of things:

–”STILL MORE MOBILE THAN CHRIS WEINKE”
–”THERE WERE FLOWERS HERE BUT PHIL FULMER ATE THEM”
–”YOU’RE AT THE WRONG TOMBSTONE MIAMI’S SWAGGER IS FOUR SPOTS DOWN AND DIED IN 2002″
–”IF TIM’S RIGHT I’M IN HELL RIGHT NOW GO GATORS.”
–”CANCER: NATURE’S ORIGINAL UNSTOPPABLE SPREAD OFFENSE.”
–”NOT DEAD–JUST HIDING FROM ED ORGERON.”

Please leave your own personalized epitaphs below, and salute Mr. Smith, an American hero, and JBoxt1, who found this brilliance.

Appearing disinterested and unshaven, the star quarterback answered questions in a low mumble as reporters asked him about the upcoming matchup with historical rivals the Bulldogs.

“I don’t really see how this matchup is any different from any other matchup between two groups of athletes from adjacent and arbitrarily drawn geographic regions. It’s not going to be any more special, because football isn’t special. Nothing is special. Not even love, which is a lie. A dirty, filthy lie.”

Tebow dismissed last year’s 49-10 victory as “just another game.”

“I mean that. Just another game, a meaningless distraction I put myself at the center of to keep the boredom away. I’m so numb even the thrill of violence doesn’t do anything to me anymore. You think it meant something because they danced on the endzone two years ago? How do you remember what happened two days ago, much less two years ago? Every day is the same: hours and minutes shot to pieces by time’s arrow. I wish I cared enough to go on about how miserable this all makes me, but the only thing I hate more than explaining things to other people is listening to my own, despicable voice. Its the vanity of hate.”

Tebow, who has struggled this season as a passer and has appeared to press at times when Florida moves into the redzone, said the offensive coaching staff was not to blame for Florida’s scoring troubles.

“The staff isn’t to blame. Not the staff that’s here, anyway. It’s not like they’re going to be here next year, or you’ll be here next year, or even tomorrow. You could die right now. My voice could be the last thing you hear. How do you live second to second knowing the last thing you would be doing wouldn’t be looking into your child’s eyes, or watching the grass wave in the wind, but holding up a tape recorder so you can catch the empty, meaningless waves of sound coming from my voicebox? You might already be dead. Ever thought of that? Huh?”

“You probably haven’t. Most people don’t. BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.”

Urban Meyer attempted to interrupt on several occasions, only to be interrupted by long exhalations by the Heisman-winning senior quarterback.

Tebow also dismissed claims he was pressing and trying to hard to make things happen on the field.

“With our defense, I don’t even really have to try. I don’t have to be there. I could send in a body double. I could just take knees three times and then punt. Maybe I’ll do that. I could. You could do anything at any second. I could go open a bakery. Spend the rest of my life making pies. Feeding people until they’re so fat they can’t see out of their little piggie eyes. AND THEY’D THANK ME FOR IT. THEY’D THANK ME FOR IT!!!”

“Hell is other people.” He then shook his head, stayed silent for a moment, and left the room.

The play begins thusly. We play the part of the quarterback, labeled here as O/S. The idea: to successfully pitch our way through an evening of socializing at a party in DC with the pitchman, our friend the local DC-ite and aspiring political lizard-person, trailing the play. (You ask: how are you friends with a person-lizard? Simple. You just feed them lettuce just like an iguana, and they’ll be your friend forever.)

The design of the play is simple: the blockers here are played by our liver and ability to make small talk. They will block the dangerous elements of the defense in order to free movement throughout the party, and if needs be the pitchman will take the ball of conversation or social interaction when alcohol or the awkwardness of discussing anything with the half-reptiles at this largely politico-style party.

(We apologize to the non-reptiles reading this piece who dwell in DC. All seven of them. Stay frosty on the streets, as the business card assassins are forever on the prowl for fresh meat. Or lettuce. They’re not picky.)

So, with the consumption of four large solo cups of gin and tonic, we’re off the line. Note that alcohol and social awkwardness has been cleanly swept off the line at this stage in the play, and that everyone’s assumption that we work in the same field as they do (and thus can be of some benefit to them) serves as a fullback dive, bringing in the linebackers. We’re free and clear, and schmoozing our way towards the endzone of a comfortable night crashing on the living room couch slightly drunk with ease.

Signs of trouble appear, though:

“C” must be blocked here. “C” here denotes “Potential Love Interest and Good-Looking Political Type Guy,” and will be played by the head of Rahm “Rahmbo” Emanuel. (It wasn’t Rahm Emanuel, for the record.) Our pitchman, a single female friend from way back in high school, is suddenly interested. We’ve lost our blocker, and as qb must deal with an option that has suddenly become an option keeper whether we like it or not. Solo in the defensive backfield with defenders bearing down on us, the situation quickly becomes one of survival.

A savvy qb would step out of bounds at this point and get off the playing field of drunk socializing, living to play another down. This was not what we did, which was to double down on the speed and hope to outrun defenders. On this play, that means accelerating gin consumption and attempting conversation about something humorous and non-political in an party in DC.

As the following diagram shows, we neglected to notice the safety of our gin threshold bearing down on us from the periphery. Working alone in the backfield without a pitchman, we make it just a few steps into a conversation with a Navy demolition diver before disaster strikes:

The safety–imbalanced blood chemistry and ill-advised powerdrinking on an empty stomach, played here by the very embodiment of gin itself, Peter O’Toole–hammers into us like Andy Katzenmoyer powdering Corby Jones’ jaw. The quarterback spends the next 45 minutes retching on his knees in the bathroom, a victim of poor play-execution and tenacious defense by basic physiology and awkward socializing.

The option, when run effectively, is unstoppable: but a moment’s lapse in the scheme can lead to disaster, as it clearly did for our hero here, who woke up the next morning looking for a city bus to crawl under and die, but found that direct sunlight caused unbearable pain preventing this plan from occurring.

If you have a play from your life you’d like us to plot out, please email us at harumphharumph of the gmail variety. Perhaps we’ll use it.

Promise me you’ll always love me best.

Oh, fine, just fine. Why?

_____
This late-afternoon dose of total plausibility brought to you by LSUFreek. Honor him.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1920.

“Michiganders of all stripes, behold our new mascot!

SCREAMYBLOODAGONYUNSUITEDFORHUMANEYES.

“Well, now that was a hoo-dilly, now wasn’t it? Who wants a brandy?”

Others: Right, then.

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.

They should keep swinging until teeth fly from skulls, and then continue kicking ribs until the whistle blows.*

They should follow this pattern in the rest of their games because The Big Ten is playing several hands down in any national title contention because of the twin pillars of lack of a title game and Ohio State’s FAILboat Party** in the last two national title games…not to mention a crucial point Michael makes abundantly clear hyah:

With that caveat out of the way, the Big Ten and Pac Ten need to be punished for being the primary roadblocks against a plus-one playoff. Those two conferences will change their minds when there is sufficient pressure from their member institutions to do so. An unbeaten Penn State team sitting on the sidelines in January while Texas and Alabama duke it out for the national title would be exactly the tonic to cause the stodgy Big Ten to stop opposing evolution.

The Doomsday Scenarios are not limited to the aluminum headgear-wearers of our beloved blogosphere: Tony Barnhart outlined the same scenario this morning in the AJC.

1. Penn State gets left out: No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Alabama both finish 13-0 and win their respective conference championship games. Like Auburn in 2004, a 12-0 Penn State, which has not played a game since Nov. 22, finishes No. 3 because it played a weaker schedule. Joe Paterno, 81, is denied the chance to end his career with a national championship game. Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, one of the strongest opponents to a four-team playoff, gets an earful from Paterno.

It could happen (then again, as Barnhart points out, so could every other scenario,) meaning the only recourse Penn State has any control over whatsoever is points, points, points, which have to happen frequently and without mercy for the remainder of the season. Ohio State could upset them straight-up, and will likely hold them under twenty (since your oft-repeated stat of the week is the “ten point max” that Penn State has scored at the ‘Shoe historically.)

Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan State best look into burn clinics, though; JoePa’s coming with a flamethrower-equipped Rascal in the best senior citizen revenge film this side of Death Wish 3 if Alabama and Texas go undefeated. With no conference championship to buffer the schedule, laying waste to their opponents is all Penn State has left to make their argument.

(P.S. Fuck Jim Delany in the ear. Again.)

*Thank you, Matt and Trey, for having us now imagining Butters yelling “Fuck ‘em up!” during every blowout from now on.

**Cartman is Ohio State. There’s little doubt of this: loud, powerful, profane, and ultimately slow in the clutch. Also: both are associated with shitting in inappropriate places.

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.