I’m Richie Cunningham, and this is my lovely wife Oprah. Allow myself to introduce . . . myself: I’m Doug Gillett, proprietor of Hey Jenny Slater, occasional contributor to Dr. Saturday, and jet-setting international jewel thief; along with the lovely Holly — fellow Doc Saturday contributor, EDSBS associate editor, and L.A. Times Kitten With A Whip Award winner three years running — I’ll be gingerly manning the controls of this blog for the next week and trying like hell not to wrap it around the very first tree I come across. As a gesture of goodwill, I hereby promise to be at least 70-75% as funny as Orson at all times; if you’d like to send me tips, love/hate mail, or grainy boob shots, shoot them to heyjennyslater.blog at gmail.

You call it a “low bar”; we call it “reasonable goals.” UCLA linebacker Reggie Carter is happy with the play of redshirt-freshman QB Kevin Prince in spring practice, as evidenced by this glowing praise:

“He doesn’t move around a lot and he doesn’t flinch,” Carter said. “He stays in the pocket and he makes the right decision. If it’s there, he throws it, if it’s not, he keeps it. That’s all I need. I don’t want him to throw the ball to other people. As long as somebody on our team has the ball, I’m happy.”

Even the venerable Los Angeles Times can’t resist snarking off a bit at this comment, but there’s a marketing opportunity here for UCLA if they want it: Give out “STOP FLINCHIN’” T-shirts at games and make that the theme of the 2009 season. It’ll become the must-have wannabe-gangsta accessory in SoCal within days.

“Is this heaven?” “No. It’s Waco.” The buzz is slightly, uh, buzzier in central Texas, where Baylor fans are being treated not only to non-backhanded, genuinely optimistic projections for their football team this year but also to the delicious catnip no true CFB fan can resist: NEW UNIFORMS! Oh, to be in Waco, now that new unis and realistic bowl expectations are here!

He’s so laid-back, it’s intense, man. Things are equally sunny in Ames, Iowa, where first-year head coach Paul Rhoads “has transformed the button-down, strait-laced approach favored by Chizik and embraced a more relaxed, high-energy style.” That seems like a bit of a tightrope walk there, and we have no idea how Rhoads is managing it, but either way he already seems to be more invested in the Cyclone program than Chizik, who, to hear his former players tell it, was frequently “relaxed” to the point of complete apathy. In other news, Rhoads says that teaching his “single-wing pro-style spread offense” has been a challenge, but that he’s still trying to maintain an “intensely involved, hands-off” relationship with his players.

The University of Arizona: Slightly less desirable than a nut house. Accusations of having an “inferiority complex” get lobbed at places like Auburn and Michigan State and Georgia Tech all the time, but take heart, kids — at least your alma maters weren’t literally a consolation prize. According to the U of A’s student paper:

“The University of Arizona didn’t start out in a traditional fashion,” said Theodore Gatchell, an aerospace engineering junior and campus ambassador.

Gatchell explained that the UA was born in Tucson in 1885 only because the Tucson representative of the Arizona Territorial legislature showed up late to a meeting.

“The city of Tucson had hoped to receive the appropriation for the state’s mental hospital, which ended up going to Phoenix,” Gatchell said.

The town was so mad that it got stuck with the university, that the Tucson representative to the Arizona Legislature was greeted with a barrage of rotten fruit on his return home.

Ouch! Tucsonians, take a lesson from the city of Tempe, which was faced with similar disappointment. They were chosen as the home of Arizona State University even though what they really wanted was Arizona’s first legal brothel, but they managed to make it work for them, and in the end they got both.

I’M A MAN! I’M 220!!! Okie State QB Zac Robinson is bigger, more muscular, and more option-y heading into the 2009 season, says coach Mike Gundy. Other than kicking a puppy, Bobby Reid had no comment on these developments.

No, dammit, we want CONFLICT! Colt McCoy and Sam Bradford are friends. Yeah, that’s real great for them and everything, but kinda anticlimactic, no? When one of them is caught banging the other’s girlfriend, call us. ]]> http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2009/08/03/curious-index-832009/feed/ 15 http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2008/08/26/calling-your-own-plays-like-a-man/ http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2008/08/26/calling-your-own-plays-like-a-man/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:22:24 +0000 Orson Swindle http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/?p=5993 Mike Gundy will call his own offensive plays this fall like a man, who is forty-one. This always seems to loom larger–and generate a tad more angst among fans–for offensive coaches than those head coaches with their fingers in the defensive mix, as if it took so much more brainpower to score points than to prevent them. (An unfair prejudice in both directions: see Will Muschamp and Mike Debord as examples to the contrary in both departments.)

There are differences, of course: defenses won’t resort to quite as many alignments and variable assignments as offenses, and therefore the slightly higher level of potential complexity. Defenses have to read them, of course, meaning it’s just as mentally complex, if not more so for players actually on the field.

Nevertheless, scheme has its own romance, and therein lies the public teeth-gnashing over Spurrier devolving play-calling to his son, or Friedgen going back for what seems like the nth time and handing off play-calling to the loving arms of James Franklin, who will run the most affectionate practices in all of college football , or to the continual praise given to Mike Bobo, who took over from Mark Richt at UGA.

The move allowed Richt to be the emotional manbear and not so much of the cerebral field general, thus generating the precise response Richt was hoping for: a sea change in how the team related to him and to each other, and thus the Jacksonville Dance Party, Bowl Annihilation Drill, and everything else good that happened to UGA in 2007.

This is not always the outcome: Friedgen called his own plays for four years, then switched course for three years, and is now reversing field again after a middling outcome pulling the strings himself. Gundy’s own move could yield equally mixed results, hopefully generating not only fodder for healthy, well-reasoned online discussion (”FUCK YOU, SHITEATER!”) but a second and more spectacular still implosion of Coach Krakatoa on camera.

We’re not of any particular mind on the matter, an attitude thus bringing us to Notre Dame, who in terms of antipathy/sympathy we’re not of any particular mind on, either. Charlie Weis cashed in on the Godlike CEO theory of coaching value before Nick Saban broke the standard for Godlike CEO pay, banking on his playcalling ability to give them the “decided strategic advantage” leading Notre Dame back to echoey greatness. His is the second most surprising (next to Spurrier’s, whose ego is just a few hemispheres larger than the OBC’s) given his initial sell and Weis’ obvious zeal for play-calling.

The good news for Weis is that the move will work brilliantly, or will at least appear to work brilliantly, due to the timing. Notre Dame, having hit bottom, will improve against an easier schedule and with the benefit of a healthier, less concussed Jimmy Clausen at qb. Whatever luster is lost by the play-calling move will shift and grow in the Program Manager stock, thus planting the seeds for “Charlie Weis Becomes A Head Coach” stories sure to pop up somewhere around mid-October in the press.

(We’ll bet you whole infant relatives on these surfacing. Seriously. Your cash; our live infant relatives. Consider it a deal.)

You get the baby. We keep the box.

The fun part will be the inevitable reversal when, in an ironic twist, Weis retakes play-calling duties at one point in the future. Pulling the management lever once means you’ll pull it twice, or three times if necessary in order to placate the natives. The only bet to make isn’t whether it will happen, but whether it will be faster than Spurrier’s rush to the clipboard. (It won’t be. Spurrier may take over play-calling during warm-ups against NC State on Thursday afternoon. He’ll look like a man who rolled in poison oak and powdered glass if he doesn’t have some hand in play-calling.)

We prefer to think of them as an entrepreneurial youth group. Missouri redshirt freshman safety Gilbert Moye has interests including networking with other young urban youth, the color blue, and interpretive hand signal exchange. David Boren just told Bob Stoops to kick him off the team, and wants none of these excuses about him going to another university with an entirely different football team.

SMQ kindly points out to Stoops that no significant members of “the internet culture” called for Josh Jarboe’s removal; in fact, prior to the day of Josh Jarboe’s dismissal, neither did Stoops. The unsubstantiated but persistent rumor you will hear on the internets culture is that the order came directly from OU President David Boren, which makes sense. You would have to deliberate for days to come up with a response as harebrained and trigger-happy (get it?) as the decision to boot Jarboe; being a former Senator, bad decision-making and nitwit policy flow from him naturally.

(Big ups to Boren for the Boren National Security Language Fellowship, though. Let’s not be totally unfair, here…just slightly unfair.)

I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS. All-Caps Mike Gundy ENJOYS THE TASTE OF RED BULL. He says he sticks to coffee until around 11 in the morning. We assume “coffee” means “espresso poured directly into eyeball because HE IS MAN 40 ETCETERA RAAAARRRGGH.

Ed Orgeron was the last coach we could remember being an avowed Red Bull drinker. If Gundy loses his job after the season, we’ll call it a trend of two: declare love for Red Bull publicly as a coach, and then immediately lose job.

It also explains some things of course. Contrast exhibit A:

“When you combine those two together, you always have a risk,” he said. According to Clemens, some major concerns with mixing these two drinks include, but are not limited to, cardiovascular risk, impaired judgment, shortness of breath, dizziness, disorientation and rapid heart beat.

Exhibit B:

It gives you STROOOOOOOOOOOOOKES!!!

Joel, who has a thing for fonts and logos, analyzes both the scariest (eep!) and the blandest of logos. Air Force really deserves better, but our suggestion of a mushroom-cloud font would have only flown through the approval process at the peak of the cold war.

Cocaine is funny except when it isn’t. John Reaves, the one-time Gator great, is arrested for cocaine possession, but only after pointing a gun at two men in an altercation. How the hell do you get to 58 being a cocaine addict? Do you have a heart you use only on weekends and a removable septum?

George O’Leary speaks to the Orlando Sentinel for UCF’s Media Day. That’s so nice of him.

Feedback and pain. We bought the Who bundle of songs on Rock Band last night, and have already spectacularly failed out of no less than three of the songs on multiple instruments. IBitePrettyHard, the internet’s majordomo of Rock Band drumming, even struggles on the sightread of “Young Man’s Blues,” which is kind of like saying George Selvie was held to just two sacks by a line of elementary schoolers in a Pop Warner game.

You know a band was preternaturally talented when even the bass parts are impossible. We came down in Icarus-like flames this morning off the bass solo in the live version of “My Generation;” we’re typing this with our nose, so nasty were the runs. Then again, we’re not hopped up on Peruvian Pep Powder like John Entwistle, so there’s always trade-offs.

“Is simply not tenable.” The Duke lacrosse case explains much of the extreme skepticism by media even thinking about covering Iowa’s sexual assault debacle, but at this point that’s not the issue: though the university president Sally Mason says no protocols were violated in the case, the decision to not inform the regents of the two letters sent by the mother “is simply not tenable.” Anytime the regents call the university president to actually report on something not involving a balance sheet, though, it ain’t good. Without comment from Ferentz or the AD, it looks murkier by the day for Iowa’s football program and their ongoing “management crisis.”

The Mayor has some suggestions for questions to be asked at SEC Media days, including this pithy query for Houston Nutt:

Houston Nutt: “Assuming for the sake of argument that you will be cast in the role of the Joker in the sequel to �The Dark Knight,� would you decline an Oscar nomination out of principle or would you follow in Henry Fonda�s footsteps by accepting an Academy Award nomination for a role in which you essentially played yourself?”

Thanks, T. Kyle. When we’re at SEC Media Days tomorrow–which we will be, bright and early so as to catch the spiritual procession that will be Nick Saban’s entry–we’ll be too busy imagining Houston Nutt in a nurse’s uniform and Joker makeup talking to a half-faced Les Miles saying, “Now Harvey, it wasn’t personal. I don’t want there to be any…hard feelings between us…”

Mike Gundy is still 40! But not for long, since he turns 41 in a few weeks, though he retains his man-ness. Monsieur Volume does not favor these internets, though, unless it pertains to his fine Oklahoma fescue:

�I�m not a big computer guy,� Gundy said. �I�ve not once in my life been on YouTube. I don�t know how to get on it.

�I guess you could Google it. Sometimes I Google things. Like fertilizer and stuff that I want to put on my lawn.�

This means Mike Gundy is a man who has never seen this, this, or this. We tell you, Mike Gundy: eventually this will hurt your recruiting in the crucial “slow nerd” department. We promise you.

Feed the fever! With blaring house music! Oregon state has a glut of commercials, and Building the Dam sums them up nicely. Our favorite: the “Feed The Fever” ad, which until about 20 seconds in could be an ad for a gay gym, what with all the shirtless men, mood lighting, and lingering shots of oily back muscles. We say “a gay gym” because they look cut and fit, as opposed to “a straight gym,” where the guys look bloated and pec-forward, and the women look “screaming-for-help-growing-white-waxy-fur-on-my-skin-anorexic.”

T. Boone’s also at the forefront of cutting-edge energy policy, a convenience for him that he can afford since he amassed the bricks for his solid platinum manor with lucre from the dirty, evil, no good very bad oil industry. (The Oil Industry: serving as your generic straw man villain since 1883.)

Now, to further this site’s commitment to fine, balanced journalism, we provide a unique opportunity for readers to engage in an important national debate. On one side, new economy booster and wannabe Greenzo T. Boone Pickens, who will present a summary of his plan to forge a new economy for the 21st century; and for the con side, his employee and current Oklahoma State football coach, Mike Gundy.

Mike Gundy thinks coal is just fine, thank you, and eats whole chunks of it for breakfast. He burns it in his children’s rooms to make them strong. You would understand that, if you had children. But you don’t, and that’s obvious.

Mileage reading until joke fatigue sets in on Mike Gundy rant jokes: infinite. It’s the Prius of football humor memes!

LSUFreek, as always.