That bear: it eats pizza. And sometimes coaches.

Art Briles used to coach at Houston and win games. He now coaches at Baylor, where he will–for one year at the least–lose tremendous amounts of football games. Briles is no rube: he’s clawed his way up from the petri dish in his coaching career, starting as an assistant at a high school and working his way alllllll the way up the coaching ladder. This will make and keep someone very, very humble, and Briles’ quote about spring practice certainly oozes that:

“First of all, we didn’t get anyone injured; that was our number one goal,” said Baylor head football coach Art Briles.

They’ve gone 7-33 the past five years, meaning they’ve had “not getting anyone injured” as the mission statement for a while now, coach. We are just discussing spring practice here, and we wouldn’t want to unfairly excerpt him. (We never do that.) Briles did get financial candy to move to Waco–a 1.8 million dollar contract will do that–but we wonder what kind of naked BASE-jumping while wrestling over a single chute with a Spetznaz assassin does Briles indulge in? The Baylor job is straight fiendish danger for coaches and their careers; Guy Morriss, calling from a high school, would like to reinforce this point vigorously.

Bullshit…fucking drop step….Bullshit go again…you’re fucking killing me…get off the fucking line with your left foot…

WE’RE FUCKING PRACTICING! Aw, shit couldn’t crack a fucking egg.

This is Jon Tenuta practicing at Notre Dame. You should watch it before they take it down. As they say at the beginning, it’s not suitable for children or work, just like most of the good things in life.

And now, a weirdass commercial from Judy Tenuta in 1989, who is of no relation and curses less that Jon.

(HT: Matt.)

Rich Rodriguez thought the first attempt to resign went so badly, well, he’d just try it again:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — More than two weeks after he was sued over a $4 million buyout clause in his contract at West Virginia, Rich Rodriguez turned in a second resignation letter, claiming university president Mike Garrison reneged on a deal to reduce and possibly eliminate that clause.

Jeffrey Wakefield, the school’s attorney in the case, denied Friday that such a promise was made.

And that’s your story, essentially unchanged from day one: he said/we said. Oh, and your obilgatory, never piss off a West Virginian item of the day.

Ever have one of those days where you wake up convinced you’ve killed someone? Or robbed a house? And you’re covered in blood and lying naked in the park, a human femur lodged in your mouth? That’s precisely what every day is like for us.

Again? Dammit.

Therefore we welcome UCLA WR coach Eric Scott to the damn club, son. He probably woke up this a.m. and thought, “Man, did I allegedly break into a house yesterday and get arrested for burglary? Nah, that didn’t…oh, shit.” And like us in the park, he has to spend the rest of the day dealing with that fact (though fortunately for him, he’s likely clothed and doesn’t have to do the American Werewolf in London thing we have to do all the time. Do you know how few men in this world own a decent pair of 35 inch waist pants?)

The details are burbling up through the L.A. Times, and they’re not very flattering to Karl Dorrell and the hiring process at UCLA. Scott had priors, including a misdemeanor concealed weapons charge and a disturbing the peace charge. Both charges could and are easily picked up on a lively weekend, but they look worse than they perhaps should in light of this police report snippet:

Authorities said Scott was arrested with Jesus DeAlba, 23, and Timothy Williams, 23, Tuesday afternoon after deputies received a 911 call about a possible burglary in the 11600 block of Pioneer Blvd. in Norwalk, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. Sgt. Craig Harmon said.

“A neighbor saw the three suspects on the porch of a single-family home, then saw them force their way in,” Harmon said. “When deputies arrived, the three were seen walking from the location, and were found with property from the house they admitted to taking.”

Scott’s attorney issued this statement:

“From my preliminary investigation, it appears that a mistake was made by the Los Angeles Sheriff Deputies that should be cleared up within a few days. There is no evidence that any crime was committed by Eric Scott or anyone with him.”

Which is entirely possible–this is the LAPD we’re talking about here. Scott’s been placed on administrative leave for the time being while the charges are sorted out. Dorrell’s standing by his man, but at a safe distance of a few feet just in case this turns out to have merit. Scott’s been an inner-city recruiting force for UCLA–perhaps he just succumbed to that infamous inner-city pressure we’ve been hearing about.

We constantly underestimate the influence of naked irrationality in our world. You know the “BOOKS OF THE FUTURE” you may have perused as a second grader? The ones where people toodled around well-planned Seattle-esque cities in flying cars, all the while talking on videophones with their trim, jumpsuit-wearing friends? One of those books is still the naieve, stupid root-code for any and all simulations of the future running in our brain.

(The flying car is not, repeat, is not just a naieve futurist thing, though. Blade Runner has them, and if you think Blade Runner is optimistic, then you are a current resident of Detroit. Orlando is ready when you are. )

Even if we do get our walk in turbo-showers, benign robot servants, and tasty insta-food ready and loaded, know that the grip of superstition will never fully release its moldy grip on humanity because we will never, ever cease to be fascinated with drama we cannot control. Someone, presumably after parking their flying car with the “HONK IF YOU SACKED BRODIE” bumper sticker on it, will still be doing the 27th Century version of the Needham Hex.

There’s a ball of energy in my hand right now, and….HEX! The only thing dorkier would be shouting “EXPELLIARMUS!” when you really need the other team to fumble in a tight spot. We’ll let you know if it works, because you know we’ll be doing it at one desperate point in the season.

Some of you had typical, idyllic fathers. Some of us, on the other hand, had Reece Bobby.

Drive with the fear! Our own father put us through the Swindle Tradition “The Month of the Wolf,” where we we turned loose in the woods as a five year old to survive or die, and thus allowing the gods to pass judgment on our virtue with life…or death. Fortunately for us, we were discovered by Irish Travelers on day two, passed into a human trafficking ring, and became the houseboy for powerful Guangzhou Triad boss with a predilection for kite-fighting and the works of Gino Vanelli between the years of 1983–1987. Happiness, for us, will always be the sound of kites blowing in the wind to the mellow sounds of mediocre balllads.

So Father’s Day’s always fraught with emotions, some of them requiring therapy of the professional or the amateur chemical variety. Thus we sympathize a bit with the pressured quarterbacks of the world whose fathers unfortunately turned the spotlight on themselves.

The list of our top 5 malevolent college football fathers includes both the negative effect they had on their son AND the deleterious effects they had on the fanbases.

5. Ken Wright, Miami. There’s little documentation of what he was like to his son, Kyle Wright of the Miami Hurricanes, but there’s plenty of evidence of Ken Wright completely flipping out after his son’s two picks doomed Miami in a game against Virginia Tech and becoming an ugly spectacle of a sports dad on tape. (more…)

Start your week off right, reader. We give you all the necessary vitamins to start your day off right:

Vitamin F–as in Facenda, John.

Vitamin P–as in play-action bootlegs galore from the 1982 Texas Tech Red Raiders.

Vitamin J–as in the wanky guitar ridden Jazz fusion which was the soundtrack for every sports film made between 1975 and 1985.

Vitamin H–as in Home Run Throwback, the most improbable of special teams plays, executed in the finest of pulled-from-the-ass fashions by SMU in the waning moments of the game.

There! Nutrition of the highest order. You’re more than welcome, unless you’re an SMU fan who, like the flabby ex-jock twenty years out of washboard abs wondering where his feet went, watches this with the bitterest of sorrows. For you, there is no consolation. Umm…sorry?

Bret Bielema, EDSBS Man of the Year 2006, takes on the most controversial assumptions of the 20th century in an AP interview earlier this week. Say what you will about him–he’s a man of range and intellectual depth.

“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? (more…)

Following last week’s announcement of Jared Zabransky as the NCAA cover boy for this year, we went to work trying to parse out the single thread cursing all NCAA cover dwellers. Unlike the famed Madden Curse, however, no single diabolical streak of malicious fortune unites all of the anointed NCAA cover guys. Believe us: we graphed it out.

Click here to the full NCAA CURSE CHART

The interesting, sure to land you bar legend status when you answer the question as the only guy who knows sports on your team for trivia night: the only player to appear on the cover of both the NCAA and Madden franchises? Shaun Alexander.

PS: the personal hygiene is just a guess. Desmond Howard misses it because we bet he’s still got pieces of lunch in the ’stache.

Last week, if you missed it, a huge asteroid of stupidity sailed by the planet, narrowly avoiding contact with the planet that would have extinguished life as we know it forever. This particular asteroid of imbecility only missed placing a large and well-defined period on the sentence of human existence because it appeared on CBS Sportsline without a Clay Travis byline, and therefore whiffed past most of us without a sound.

Only brave men and online status keep us safe from the menace of asteroids.

Dennis Dodd authored the piece entitled “Smoke but no fire: Banished Barnett blackballed.” Its topic: shocking enough, the alleged (we’re using that word as hard as we can) “conspiracy” against the rehiring of Gary Barnett, former coach at Northwestern and Colorado.

SMQ responded (pre-vacay/oasis/sabbatical to do “real life stuff” whatever) by first gimpifying, then bullwhipping the case into the corner with logic, and then forbidding it from speaking for a year in conclusion before renaming it “Howie.” His demolition–and we mean complete, total, laying waste to-age of the piece--is all you’ll need to read regarding the monumental, colossal, Lawrence Of Arabia style epicness of the piece. Dodd should have exited the Barnett interview with a twenty in his pocket for his troubles, or at least a crisp Alexander Hamilton and some Teriyaki Flavored Coach Barnett Buffalo Jerky.

The least Barnett could have done: a Hamilton.

What we didn’t expect following this, though: the fountain of support for Barnett following the piece. It’s been an outpouring, really, of testimonials and advocacy from a diverse group of professionals, world leaders, cultural figures, and celebrities we didn’t even know watched college football, much less knew who Barnett was. They’ve been emailing us and calling non-stop, and we thought that in the interest of fairness, we’d let them talk.

Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia.

“Gary is obviously an exceptional leader, a gifted communicator, and just the kind of individual with a proven track record of success to lead a Division-1 football team to success. I would not hesitate to cut off this man sitting next to me’s arms to prove my deep and abiding respect for him. (more…)

Yeah, it’s early…but how can one sleep after looking at Eva Green’s dress at the Oscars, which didn’t resemble a dress so much as a dress that had, after suffering grievous injury, been covered in several rolls of cheap gauze after suffering severe burns. Either that, or the oft-naked Green appeared naked at the Oscars sporting one wicked fungal skin condition.

Eva Green, seen here wearing the sewn-together corpse of three disparate dresses, is often naked in her movies.

We’re pounding Two Buck Chuck right now (curiously sold for three dollars at our local Green’s Liquor) trying to get the vision out of our head. Call it alcoholism, but at least we have bad Oscar dresses to blame. Poor University of Georgia naif Akeem Hebron has no such excuse–he was arrested for underage possession of alcohol at 7:59 a.m. Sunday morning in Athens.

Hebron may additionally claim in his debut rap jam that his party indeed does not stop ’til eight in the mownin’.

The score gives the Bulldogs their entry in the Fulmer Cup with one point,, and is indicative of the down-home variety misdemeanors cuddly Georgia tends to rack up in college football’s second most dubious award. (The first? Troy Smith, Gino Torretta, and, um…Danny Wuerffel.) Bulldog fans take solace in the fact that this did not involve the perennial bugbear of UGA football players, the suspended license charge, and that Mudcat Elmore’s cursed car was not involved.

Mike Leach has been trawling us about the harbor, mateys, and a fine net of fishy goodness we’ve found. And how appropriate a word is fishy for whatever you’re finding on the internet, aye? Aye.

–Eric Wilbur lived up to the flaky pedigree of most punters by mocking a flaky punter. On the final punt of the SEC Championship, Wilbur lined up and performed what resembled a parody of Arkansas punter Jacob Skinner’s pre-kick visualization routine, which to those of you who’ve fallen and grunted your way through a few Rodney Yee videos should look a lot like a Sun Salutation from yoga. (HT: Allhegator.)

Zoom in on Wilbur to get the full effect.

–Texas no tiene un quarterback, since Jevan Snead is transferring and Colt McCoy’s still waiting for some Texas fan to show up and give him a new shoulder for the bowl game. (Again, Longhorns: Lowe’s, aisle 7.)

Texas is also shopping for new defensive coordinators and looking down Aisle 11, where they keep all the defensive guys with ties to the state of Georgia. He has the mustache. He has the talent. And when Bryan Van Gorder took over at Georgia, Georgia players suddenly became very, very mean. Put with Duane Akina and Texas trainer Jeff Madden, and you’ve got the makings of a mandatory mustache Super Troopers style staff.

Jesus, Jeff Madden scares the shit out of us.

–Moving a bit north up the Lonesome Dove trail to Nebraska… (more…)

Georgia/Georgia Tech had a lot of interesting moments, but like spectators on the highway, the attention tends to focus on the obvious disasters. Like Reggie Ball playing the University of Georgia at quarterback, a role of such abject misery and incompetence as to paralyze any conventional comparisons we’d care to make. For the past four years, him under center against UGA has been like looking at the fresh wreckage of a car crash for four hours straight and waiting for the gas tank to go off in a ball of flame and sizzled flesh.

Reggie Ball: set to go off at any instant.

For four years running, it went off with unreal frequency and regularity. Which means we’ve got to dig into the Douglas Adams archives to find just the right blend of unreal bad luck, shoddy execution, and futile self-mutilating rage to capture the career of Reggie Ball properly. (Warning: two minutes of internet research required. Gird that attention span, ADDers!)

First, the numbers: For his career against UGA, Ball went 45-104 with one touchdown and five interceptions. He was sacked at least six times, and tackled for losses on hopeless scrambles on innumerable occasions. He also lost four fumbles, including Tony Taylor’s squirrel/nut run giving UGA their first score in 2006 and signalling the beginning of the final catastrophe.

Worse than the number was the timing of Ball’s mistakes:

–2003: knocked out with concussion caused by running into own teammate.

–2004: throws ball away on 4th down on potential game-winning drive.

–2005: throws game-ending interception five yards shy of tying td.

–2006: loses crucial fumble for score AND throws game ending pick into triple coverage on final drive with over a minute left on clock.

Ball was a master–in fact, he got worse with each game he played against Georgia. The more the pressure mounted, the more success Ball enjoyed as a starter, the worse he played against the Bulldogs. He came back stronger each time, and yet could not stop improving on his masterwork of disaster. In fact, his senior year capped his artistry: not only did he lose a game-killing fumble, he also tossed his signature game-losing pick, a Matisse of malicious fortune and bad execution made worse with a 6 for 22 performance killing any potential of consistent passing offense.

The simile: Reggie Ball : Georgia as Agrajag : Arthur Dent. The story:

Agrajag is a piteous creature that is continually reincarnated and subsequently killed unknowingly by Arthur Dent each time. Agrajag first appears in the series as a falling bowl of petunias (although, if the books are read in sequence, the reader doesn’t know it at the time). In another incarnation, he was a prehistoric rabbit who was killed by Arthur for breakfast and whose skin was fashioned into a pouch, which is then used to swat a fly who happened to be Agrajag. In yet another, he dies of a heart attack after seeing Arthur and Ford materialize, seated on a Chesterfield sofa, in the midst of a cricket match at Lord’s Cricket Ground.

If there’s any harmony in this universe, Reggie Ball will end up in his next life as a pot of petunias, which will be dropped from a windowsill by an offspring of Paul Oliver.

Reggie, seen here in his next life plotting his soon-to-be-thwarted revenge.

Every now and then, something in the news cycle that has nothing whatsoever to do with college football breaks but is so important that we feel compelled to let our readers know about it.  Not since finding out that Santa Clause was… well, I can’t even bring myself to talk about that one… anyway, not in a long time has our faith in humanity been shaken to this degree.  We are no longer sure that love exists.  What is it that causes us this angst?  Britinay and Kevin are calling it quits.  The fairy tale is over. 

How can we be expected to vote after hearing this news?

The most terrifying bits of absolutely evil but necessary information that will haunt you for the rest of the late morning/early afternoon. Call a priest…if you dare.

–Charlie Weis manages to be completely horrifying, even in a puff piece on 60 Minutes. Follow linkage to listen to Weis as he’s possessed by spirits, spits malignant incantations on inept underlings, and works black magic on the sidelines in his attempt to reanimate the corpse of Notre Dame football. It’s aliiiiiive!!!

I send the players on the field! That’s my job.

–The tasty meat of Big Ten deep threat and its dark secret returns to your football plate sooner than expected: Mario Manningham to return. His dark secret? HE’S MADE OF PEOPLE!!! PEOPLE I TELL YOU…

–Another person gets drunk and dies at the Cocktail Party, bringing the grand, bloody total of the menace posed by the game to…three people over the past three years, meaning that the scourge of lightning still poses a greater danger to the combined student bodies of UGA and UF than drinking at the cocktail party. What are you doing to protect the student body against the scourge of lightning, Michael Adams? Huh?

–Rich Rodriguez kind of sort of is everyone’s boyfriend right now. UNC wants him, FSU wants him, Miami’s batting eyelashes, he’s not exactly turning the whole idea down. A murderous backwoods betrayal lurks if he really is thinking of leaving his alma mater! Where you goin’ city boy?

You ain’t leaving West Virginia, boy.

–Bruins Nation may be overshooting on their short list for coaches, but hey, you gotta dream, right? Unless a murderous, finger-bladed madman is stalking your dreams, that is…

–Urban stumps for Florida, since that’s what you have to do when there’s no playoff or fair way of comparing teams at the end of the season…unless you count the many armed beast who cannot be named who you may call the BCS…Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn…

–Speaking of monstrous tentacles…that’s some gnarly math you got there. (Cue math geek saying “that’s not so bad” in 3…2…1…)

–The spectre of the On Notice Board returns! Once your name is written on it, you will die in 24 hours unless you spread the curse to someone else by creating your own!*

Settle down. That curse is an extremely flexible one.

–San Diego State suffers the Curse Of the Former Bob Stoops Assistant As Your Head Coach! This only confirms that he is the Daywalker, and will suck your talent dry before tossing you to a struggling program to flail.

–The undead rise! They need no sleep, or people skills, actually.

–A Rutgers blog? And a Baylor one too that compares A&M to North Korea? Shocking monsters on this internet, indeed! Information beasts…truly the food of the gods…

This one’s for you, TCOAN.

*Margin of error=+/- 100 years.