Welcome to our Factor Five Five Factor Preview of Colorado at Oklahoma State. The Factor Five Five Factor Preview examines the Thursday Night Game, the matinee where you get to feel the pre-boob and perhaps side boob of the college football week, but are thwarted when you go for anything below the belt. And with that bit of adolescent horror-memory, let’s get to the real collection of frustrated adolescents, the Colorado Buffaloes and the Oklahoma State Cowboys. One has trouble scoring, while the other can score, but found out that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be in the teen movies and love scenes from contemporary stag films JUST LIKE THE HEALTH FILMS TOLD US IT WAS GOING TO BE.

Category one: Nebulous Statistical Comparisons of Dubious Validity. Colorado has lost ten games in a row on the road, a streak surpassed only by Washington Generic and Washington State With Vibrating Rings For Your Pleasure and Most Definitely Not Theirs. They rank last or next to last in passing efficiency, punt returns, fumbles lost, rushing offense, scoring defense, scoring offense, total offense, turnovers lost, and turnover margin. This team allowed Toledo to score over fifty points on them. This team attempted to stop for a busy crosswalk, hit the gas, and is now wondering why there is a screaming old woman embedded in their windshield. This team is horrible beyond any concept words can convey, and thus we resort to song. Terrible, excruciating Chinese song:

Dan Hawkins’ recruiting is Chinese karaoke howl bad, and it is coming back for an encore thanks to the university being too broke to buy him out, meaning they’ll be sending out the Weber State Men’s Water Polo Team for another year of savage beatings at the hands of the Big 12, but without prize recruit Darrell Scott. (more…)

Link to listen is here; link to chat is here. It is a balla convention with free admission, but you have to bring your own bottle. See you at 9:00 p.m. EST, Bravehearts.

This week’s installment of “excellence in media guide typos” comes courtesy of UGA. You won’t like it, but as usual, the answer to everything is 42:

Photo: Mark Bradley, AJC.

The guide has the 45-42 Tech victory last year in Athens as a 42-42 tie. Please note that the Florida score is accurate, and still registers a full, sexy 39 point margin of victory. Mark Bradley also mentions the differing tallies between Tech and UGA in the series, and takes pains to mention Jasper Sanks’ fumble/non-fumble in the ‘99 game and thus double-Rochambeau Dawg fans. Remember this when you’re kicking Bradley in the balls in person, and feel justified.

That, if you’ll recall from last year’s BYU/Washington game, is what happens when you take apes, give them complex and sometimes poorly written rules, and ask them to navigate them 14 times a year under the live fire of crowd noise, bodies hurtling all over the place, and the confusion of real-life angles and blocked perspectives. Necessarily stated: officiating is hard, especially in football officiating, a job akin to being a traffic cop stuck without a car vainly trying to flag down speeders without the benefit of a radar gun or pistol.

There’s really just four sets of eyes out there to watch 22 players in motion, and this bad math leads to worse calls. Realistically, holding really could be called on every play, and every game contains a thousand variables being processed by very fallible brains working very quickly under immense pressure. Faced with an impossible job, most crews seem to stick to the big stuff, calling the most egregious penalties while letting little ones slide.

Unless, unless, unless: the crew is captained by Ron Cherry, the most annoying spotlight-slutty referee in the nation and a kidney stone of an official at best, or the crew actually decides to call the excessive celebration call. (more…)

Hey, kids. If you’re reading this, it’s because we were in the emergency room all night getting a pesky couple of broken transverse processes of the L1 and L2 lumbar vertebrae taken care of by the fine medical professionals at Emory Hospital. You ever had Dilaudid? It’s like morphine, but with robot arms, a trust fund, and a horrendous gambling problem. We met last night.

Play me off for 6-8 weeks, Keyboard Cat.

No permanent or lasting damage, as the piece of angry, disunited bones in my back aren’t load bearing. They do hurt like I swallowed a plugged-in soldering gun, which is why I’m waking up in a few hours to dust off some more delicious, nutritious Percocet.

Thanks to all the well-wishers on Twitter and Facebook. (Our phone doesn’t work, as the iPhone battery died last night, too.) It’s pill and sleep time, and we’ll see what “we” feel like tomorrow.

Disappointment has five flavors in 2008. Numbers five and four are available for your inevitable disappointment, too.

Three: Auburn/Your New Diet. French ladies don’t get fat. Nor do they fire Tony Franklin.

Both are mysteries involving long walks, various forms of starvation, and cultural differences it would take years of dodgy research to fully flesh out. In fact, we suggest you contact the Ford Foundation and other luxurious research institutions fond of giving out fat grant money to let us research these. We, in turn, will take that money, move to Thailand, and do all of our important research on both topics from there face-down in a bowl of pad thai and with an IV of Chang Beer planted firmly in our arm. Trust us: it sounds unconventional, but all new science at first is indistinguishable from fraud. Or magic. We forget the quote.

Anyway, Auburn began 2008 as a consensus top tenth and a half team, getting ten in the AP and eleven in the USA Today poll on the basis of their fierce defense and the introduction of the Tigerbonesplitwhateverthefuckitwas Tony Franklin spread attack, which was double awesome because the Tigers had installed it early for the Peach Bowl to end the previous season. You were were ready, because you were doing this the sensible way, no?

Just like when you switched to sugar-free candy, or light beer, and began tapering into the diet–you didn’t have to start all at once! Just easing into it in a sensible way, and not like the time you just started eating nothing but bacon for three months back in 1997. Man, you smelled like one big piece of pig ass. (But my god, you could almost see that little D’Angelo man dent! It was there, you swear!)

Lookin’ good, Auburn. Just a few more pounds and you’ll be perfect.

Yet…something was wrong from the start. (more…)

So there’s that, which preceded Georgia decimating Florida in the Cocktail Party last year. A gag order has been issued to his team by Urban Meyer, presumably to avoid bulletin board material and keep the team focused, but he did talk about the dance by not talking about it, which is talking about it but DAMN YOU AND YOUR LOGIC:

“I think it’s old news … and it has no bearing on this year’s game,” Meyer said Sunday. “It’s two teams battling for the SEC East.”

Meaning a spectacular choreographed retribution is planned for Saturday. Our proposals for how Florida will attempt to one-up Georgia in the excessive celebration department follow, listed from least likely to most likely and by mode of celebration:

Tex Avery: A horde of walk-ons and mascots hoisting anvils, safes, and grand pianos on pulleys above the endzone waits for Georgia’s first score.

Busby Berkley: The endzone rolls back, a pool emerges, and a wedding cake rises from the pool lined with leggy dames! The rest goes just like this, but with Tim Tebow playing the part of Miss Piggy:

Batman-style: Jeff Demps scores, throws a smoke bomb down on the ground, and disappears in a fog, only to reappear suspended in a glass box over the student section, peacefully napping upside down.

Palin-style: Tim Tebow scores, turns to camera, winks and makes cutesy little “pyew! pyew!” gun shots at the camera.

Strauss-style: Counters UGA’s 2007 sponsorship of “Soulja Boy” with tasteful group minuet.

Hot Rod-Style Fifty huge dudes in orange and blue do this on the sidelines–not on the field, mind you–when Florida scores.

SAW-style. At first score, Dave Matthews is dropped screaming from lights, thus breaking the collective will of the UGA fanbase. Or should we say he CRASHES INTO THE GROUND BWAHAHAHAHAHAA

Leave your own suggestions for further Florida or Georgia dance-off routines or celebrations below.

Splish splash, campers.  This’ll be our home until 5 PM Pacific, 8 PM God’s Time, when we will all be thoroughly relieved to see kickoff in the Coliseum just so we won’t have to hear about it anymore.

Matt Grothe, football hero.  We’re as spooked as you are.

GRRRRRRRRR! Kettlebells! Tires! Puke! Chapter two of the Humiliation Diet is up at the Sporting Blog, and it is tire-fliptastic.

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.