Jim Harbaugh needed his own bathroom. Badly.

Jim Harbaugh fears no man! Digesting legumes, though, was a problem.

The Stanford coach says he had the $50-70K bathroom built on the tab of donor John Arrillaga because it “cuts down on drag.” The drag came from using a shower two floors down and a bathroom located 20 steps down the hall, according to Harbaugh, but we suspect something else. Harbaugh is most likely a shy shitter, and prefers to download his Stanford Trees in his own private nature reserve where no one can hear them fall.

None of this would be any problem if Stanford hadn’t given Harbaugh his own private litter box and a $1.25 million extension at a time when the Stanford athletic department was running deep in the red and cutting 20 jobs to save cash. The timing is bad, but the context is worse since this is the Pac-10, where a package like Nick Saban’s private fiefdom/contract is considered heresy unless you’re USC, and even he doesn’t have an equivalent to the Captain Comeback Crappin’ Closet:

And it’s not like Stanford was denying Harbaugh a perk enjoyed by all his peers. Among the coaches who don’t have private bathrooms: San Jose State’s Dick Tomey, Cal’s Jeff Tedford, UCLA’s Rick Neuheisel and USC’s Pete Carroll.

“Pete uses the same men’s room as everyone else,’’ a USC spokesman said.

…and when he does, it smells like cinnamon buns, happiness, and victory. Stanford opens their season at Pullman against Washington State, where Paul Wulff has to defecate in an improvised outhouse not because Wazzu is budget-deprived, but because Cougar football players stole the plumbing and sold it for beer money.

With just a shade under four weeks left to go before the 2009 season finally, mercifully kicks off, the coaches — or, rather, their poor, put-upon assistants, with the exception of Steve Spurrier’s, who isn’t even being allowed to call in the OBC’s take-out orders anymore after the Tim Tebow/All-SEC foofaraw — have issued their preseason Top 25. The rankings are as follows:

1. Florida (53 first-place votes)
2. Texas (4)
3. Oklahoma (1)
4. Southern California (1)
5. Alabama
6. Ohio State
7. Virginia Tech
8. Penn State
9. LSU
10. Ole Miss
11. Oklahoma State
12. California
13. Georgia
14. Oregon
15. Georgia Tech
16. Boise State
17. Texas Christian
18. Utah
19. Florida State
20. North Carolina
21. Iowa
22. Nebraska
23. Notre Dame
24. Brigham Young
25. Oregon State

Others receiving votes: Kansas, Michigan State, Texas Tech, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Rutgers, Miami (Florida), Missouri, Illinois, Clemson, South Carolina, UCLA, Auburn, Nevada, South Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina State, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Southern Miss, Wake Forest, Arizona, Boston College, Central Michigan, East Carolina, Colorado, Maryland, Navy, Tennessee, Houston, Michigan, Minnesota, Troy.

Curiosities, travesties, and other things that struck me after the jump — along with y’all’s chance to tear this thing up yourselves. (more…)

I’ve always wanted to hunt the most dangerous game . . . Ohio State fans.

Senator Blutarsky laid down the challenge, and T. Kyle King, who hates Auburn — boy, does he ever hate Auburn — responded with every bit of the gusto you’d expect and then some. So now the only question is, is 100 Things Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die just an Auburn thing, or is this book part of a series? Naturally, it’s the latter, meaning that in addition to a team-specific tailgating tent, leather sofa, or casket, you can now have a bucket list tailored to the college football team of your choice.

Even leaving out all the baseball-themed volumes — is “Stay awake through an entire MLB game” on any of those lists? It should be — we don’t have the time to slog through every one of these books, much less the resources to buy all of ‘em. But that ain’t gonna stop us from making some educated guesses as to what’s on each list. Here’s what we’d include, if we were instructing individual fan bases as to how they can optimize their respective fandoms before shuffling off their respective mortal coils:

ALABAMA
* Pick three random years out of the past century and make a case for Alabama deserving a share of the national title in each of those years in a letter to the editor, comment on a rival blog, or graffito spray-painted on an opposing team’s stadium.
* Get a houndstooth-patterned prosthesis or medical implant (i.e. hip replacement, pacemaker, or IUD).
* Cut off an Auburn fan’s ear whilst listening to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

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GIMMEH STARS!.

Chad Lindsay, according to Rivals, is an unranked prospect too obese to consider in the Rivals 250. Chad Lindsay is also a University of Alabama commit who chose the Tide over 19 other scholarship offers. The reason for the discrepancy? Lindsay is listed at 6′ 2″, 307, and as seen in his photo to the right, is a bit of a fat bastard. Or, should you like the faithless scientific term, “is morbidly obese.” Use it all you like, godless cretins. We’ll just call him “aggressively fluffy” and leave it at that.

We mention this to point out two things. First, coaches generally don’t give a shit what Rivals or Scouts think, as evidenced by the passionate pursuit of a human bomb blast barrier by twenty schools. Second, it confirms what you may have begun suspecting with the appearance of Terrence Cody at Alabama: Nick Saban is building his own personal Deadwood of freaks, future gastric bypass candidates, and refugees from Dr. Moreau’s island in order to win a national title at Alabama.

He doesn’t care how many liquid diets or food rangers it takes: he will take every morbidly obese line mutant in the nation under his wing, and ensure they get down to a manageable half-ton or so in order to fall forward, crush opposing linemen with a fart, THUD!, and whimper, and thus wear teams down into forfeit by roster depletion. We approve, especially now that he’s gotten Terrence Cody down to a svelte 350.