Ohio State, we knight you as an honorary member of the SEC:

“Tressel Hayes Huffines — sounds as sweet as an OSU victory over Michigan,” Brent Huffines, 27, said Sunday while cradling the 3-day-old boy in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ohio State University Medical Center.

The parents actually named their child after not one, but two Ohio State coaches, something so completely deranged we’ll go ahead and accuse the attending medical staff at the hospital of negligence for not immediately testing the father for tertiary syphilis. We’ll also predict that the child will take their first steps at age two, whereupon he will be tackled savagely by a helmetless Earl Everett.

Honey, get down! Get down Tressel Hayes!

Aside from serving as an argument as to why couples with an aggregate age under 50 should NOT have children, the birth also served as the occasion for a whole array of strange incidents:

1. Afterbirth contained lint roller and gambling chit signed by Art Schlicter.

2. Child’s first diaper stain? (more…)

Short attention span theatre, the radio version, returns tonight with EDSBS Live!, the show so exciting it requires unnecessary! punctuation! just to capture its excitement! Our guest tonight will be Michael David Smith of Football Outsiders, who will discuss the upcoming NFL Draft. We’re talking about the draft because no one, repeat, no one is more knowledgeable than you when it comes to draft predictions, and NFL executives can listen to tonight’s broadcast and save millions of misspent signing bonuses actually listening to people who watched these people play for four years.

What: EDSBS Radio

When: 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m. EST

Where: On the EDSBS channel at Now Live.

How: To call in? (310) 984-7600. You may also register at Now Live and participate in the live chat, where we’ll be taking comments and working them into the broadcast. Even if they make fun of our heavy breathing into the mike and audible belching.

Why: To put your “Adrian Peterson is the next Curtis Enis” boast on the record for posterity, sucka.

Who: Peter Bean of Burnt Orange Nation and Orson from this website, along with special guest Michael David Smith of Football Outsiders.

To prepare ahead of time, your study list appears below. The four questions for this week:

1. Who’s your favorite, non-obvious pick in the draft this year who you actually watched play?

2. Who’s your RADIOACTIVE BIOHAZARD DO NOT TOUCH AAAIIIIGGGHHH pick to avoid in this draft? We troy smith have no troy smith definite opinions on this. troy smith

3. Who’s your favorite college stud who failed to find success in the pros? Again, we have no leanings here.

Cough cough WUERFFEL cough cough

4. In the big draft board of life, where were you? Are you a first round bust right now? An unsigned camp invitee turned all-pro? An Arena League legend doing well in your niche? We want to know.

Orson’s totally sure he knows what he is, but you’ll have to listen tonight to find out.

Credit to those who saw this coming: Facebook was going to blow up and do some damage of an irrevocable sort eventually. Now that USC’s White Power page has made Jarvis Moss’s “Heisemens” page look like, well, what it was (um, totally and absolutely correct and innocuous,) watch for the inevitable prohibitions on Facebook content by the more tightassed universities, or just bans outright by even more controlling institutions.

The root of the joke, however, is pretty funny. It allegedly stems from the fact that the black guys on the team call the group, which includes Dallas Sartz and Brian Cushing, “white power.” And as we all know, “white power” as a repeated comic phrase is bankable funny, whether it’s out of the mouth of Clayton Bigsby, Dave Chappelle’s black, blind white supremacist, or as yelled by “White Power Bill” after he shivs someone in the yard on “Arrested Development.” It’s mostly funny because the concept itself is absurd, mockable, and espoused by people who don’t exactly “sell the sizzle” of their chosen lifestyle.

But it’s funny when he says it!

However, in order for this to be funny, you have to be operating at the least in what we’d call the high ironic mode, and preferably in an environment of zero taboo (like we imagine a football lockerroom to be), which means you have to accept the following premises.

1. Your audience has to know that you think white power is bad.

2. It has to be presented in a demonstrably absurd fashion. The more over-the-top, the better.

3. Your audience, preferably, should trust you.

4. You should trust your audience.

So really, this entire brouhaha is not a matter of racism, but bad comic design and placement. Clearly, these guys will not be on the writing staff of 30 Rock any time soon, since their design was sloppy, they didn’t realize their whole audience wouldn’t know that they were kidding, and the joke itself (”arresting black children before they commit crimes”) is offensive without providing any cutting insight. Again: not racist, but certainly reeking of dumb-ist.

(Compare this to the scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where a guy asks a black guy if his child, when born, is already on probation. This wouldn’t be funny coming from an older white guy; it comes, however, from the mouth of an older Indian man, a transgressive and savvy choice because a.) Indian guys are supposed to be polite! And good at math!, and b.) minorities are supposed to stick together, like the Minoriteam!)

Minoriteam-unite!

Nor will they be receiving Fulmer points, since technically they did nothing wrong. However, any of the players concerned will be referred to as First Name “White Power” Last Name as punishment for the next year for their atrocious comic execution. The Punchline is just down the street, white players of USC. Just don’t go there on a night when Michael Richards is playing.

Warning: Long.

Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten, does his job well. His job is to represent the interests of the corporation known as the Big Ten, something he’s done admirably. He integrated Penn State into the conference, made sure the fine Midwestern hog that is the Big Ten got a wide berth when he was helping build the BCS, and has helped usher in new revenue streams via “the Big Ten Network,” a football content provider coming to DirectTV only this fall. Jim Delany’s being proactive and visionary. Jim Delany’s turning in his TPS reports on time. He’s harmonizing synergies and being a charismatic problem-solver and self-starter.

Hi. I work for a failing mid-size paper company.

He’s also, to the average college football fan, a faceless powermonger with a rank list of heinous policy decisions to his credit, a few of which would be hanging offenses in a court of tailgaters. His big quote in a Yahoo! Sports article a while back was “I don’t work for college football at large.” His work in stitching together the mixed gristle and organs of college football into the BCS stands as a perfect example of his best and worst work: a skillfully negotiated pact between large partners with diverse interests generating huge piles of cash that almost everyone of any sense hates, a Frankenstein that almost resembles a living entity.

At least the old bowl system, corrupt and bucolic as it was, had some charm to it, and made few real claims to being a national title system. The BCS instead does it through a melange of computers and open politicking not dissimilar in tone to a four beer discussion at your local swillhole of choice. Its benefit relies more on enforcement of rules benefitting vested interests (especially the Big Ten) and less on creating the shiniest, most alluring carrot of all for the fan: truly open competition for a national title. Instead of a playoff bracket, you get the BCS: faceless, three letters as faceless and meaningless as a government bureaucracy, a simultaneous failure of imagination and vision lurching along like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein, minus the invigorating dance number.

That’s Delaney on the left, BCS on the right. They never do this, btw.

Delany adds to the list of hanging offenses with a hilariously frivolous broadside on the Big Ten’s website this week. (more…)

Beer, the hospitality of tailgaters, and impending obsolescence do add up: we missed prime a.m. blogging due to a doctor’s visit to have a trained professional look at the official right knee of EDSBS. Prior to today’s diagnosis, we’d been relying on Dr. Stoical McDumbass, who’d been telling us that singing pain in the right knee was a good thing, and that we weren’t reading our Marcus Aurelius with enough diligence:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Did we mention that Marcus Aurelius was an emperor? Anyway, the diagnosis didn’t even give the comfort of man points in the form of “It’s a torn ACL. I’ve been walking on it like it was nothing.” Runner’s knee at thirty: now officially and indubitably a yuppie blogger type.

We’ll be along in a bit with Jim Delany being a dick about the SEC. BTW, Jarvis Moss just sacked Troy Smith again in the shoe section of a Dillard’s in Columbus, causing him to fumble a pair of Tims he was buying, which were recovered by Derrick Harvey who promptly returned them for in-store credit.

We’re calling it blogger’s knee. Oh, the glamour!

You don’t make mosaics without breaking a little pottery. Here’s today’s fine tilework.

Before Photoshop, life was a dull, grey waste, filled with marauding hyenas and only the chill of the north wind to keep you company. Via the standard chain of labyrinthine links (Heisgirl to BurntOrangeNation to hyah) we have Reggie Bush’s latest fumble, again proving that life before Photoshop for the cartoonishly-minded fan was a dark, cold place with little comfort besides food and the promise of a peaceful suicide on the desolate steppes.

Heisgirl’s headline is the winning side dish to the image: “This morning I woke up to a Reggie Bush probe.”

Reggie’s latest fumble: to be recovered by VY, or just vacated?

Muppet News reports. The ND Nation suicide alert has, in light of Trattou’s defecting to the United States of Florida,
been raised to Orange, citizens. Take note and avoid sidewalks around tall office buildings in the Chicago area.

And you can go to prom! With the high school girlfriend you’ve thought about marrying! Why miss that when you can be dating college girls who want no attachments, right? Colin Dunlap of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks what’s so great about early enrollment, anyway?

Maybe I’m just too “old school” for my own good…Nonetheless, I’ll go on record and say it — I’m not a big fan of the latest craze in college football recruiting. This whole “graduating early and enrolling in college in January” business puzzles me to the core.

Somewhere, Colin’s got an old school letter jacket in a closet, and a class ring we’d wager, too. If he’s as old-school as he says, he’s also definitely writing this poised over his Tandy 300, dookie roll perched around his neck, drinking ginseng tea and pondering the mysteries of the universe while sipping some Old Gold.

Dunlap’s also likely not thinking about the fact that you could skip all the hokey high school crap, jump straight to college, start lifting weights, getting on with your life, and immediately begin your new life as a relatively independent collegiate manwhore/D-1 recruit instead of combing through the perfunctory dregs of your high school for another six months obeying curfew, sleeping in your parents’ house, and clocking meaningless hours in the same rat-trap you’ve already spent three and a half years pacing around in. But we’re just new school, we guess.

–The Annual Lloyd Carr Retirement Rumor Surfaces–SHOOT IT, SHOOOOOOT IT! This time via In The Bleachers, where a tweak to Carr’s compensation is noted in the Ann Arbor News as making a hypothetical Carr departure easier. That Carr’s in a position as a respected coach in a program emphatic about stability and tradition to retweak should be noted; in effect, no evidence of anyone but Carr having any sway over the decision has emerged. In the Big Ten, a coach like Carr could likely stay as long as he likes. Slap four zillion pounds on him, squeeze him into some cheap khakis and an orange golf shirt, and put him at Tennessee, and we’re talking about some entirely different produce, here.

This be some bull shit. SMQ tops his Chris Fowler diary with a revealing interview with Arrelious Benn. The payoff’s worth the whole article.

Really. We’re totally 8th. Perhaps you could take an interest in basketball? Frank Broyles, AD at Arkansas, lays out a persuasive case for Arkansas football in a Dallas alumni meeting. (Summary message: “Hey, assholes, we’re eighth in the conference at best! Back off!”) Teapot hysteria as only local news can give follows:

The sperm lottery pays out again. Mike Shula gets another job. Completely on his own merits using only the evidence represented by his resume and professional record. No other influences. At all. Nope.

Completely unrelated and screamingly funny terminology grab. Should we ever suspect someone of taking cocaine, we will simply refer to them as “partying with Dr. Rockso.”

They say it’s gonna snow! Gonna put White Christmas up mah nose…

Greg Seamon of the Cincinnati Bengals on Troy Smith in the draft:

“Really, he’s not that fast,” Seamon said of Smith. “He gets run down by defensive ends. He’s not real big. He kind of stares down his targets. You didn’t see those breathtaking, thread-the-needle throws [against Florida] that you’d hope to see from a top-of-the-draft quarterback.”

Nope. The same process of devaluation began for Chris Leak, as well, when a fateful number was announced during the combine: Five feet, eleven inches and seven-tenths. Not officially being six feet tall, Leak may now begin putting in his application to CSTV, right? Why even try?

Smith: tends to stare, right?

The greatest college quarterback ever and four time Heisman winner , Ron Paowlus, is coming back to Notre Dame according to recent reports. Powlus, who arrived at Notre Dame with with more expectations than … hmmm…. Charlie Weis in his second year, is coming back home and hopes to guide another extraordinarily sexy and highly touted quarterback recruit, Jimmy Clausen, to attain close to more than his extraordinary level of success at the college level. Domers everywhere are invigorated curious about the hire.

For those combing through their respective bowl games frame-by-frame, there’s always little tidbits of joy you missed. A gnarly block; a particularly amusing expression on a play; or even a USC Song Girl’s bare ass on television for a blink’s worth of softcore cheesecake.

(Nothing in this category beats what we spied in the stands during the NFL playoffs this weekend: a drunk blonde woman in New Orleans who, for a full five wondrous seconds, showed off her “FUCK DA EAGLES” t-shirt center frame before Fox hurriedly switched shots. Which they most certainly did not show on purpose. Rememember: Fox hates you, which is why they’re debuting Ow! My Balls! on Thursday night. You can’t–and won’t–miss it.)

One of those nuggets for Gator fans has been this moment of delight, where we find out that any and all guilt associated with giving Ohio State a grievous and overdone death roll on national television evaporates in the viewing of a single gesture. Watch #55 Curtis Terry at the end of the play here. He should be easy to find– he’s the one elbowing Tebow in the head.

There’s a Zapruder style and sadly unembeddable copy here. The incident illustrates just how off OSU’s scouting reports on the Gators were, since scientists concur that blunt force trauma only makes Tim Tebow stronger and larger–as Andy James Lauranaitis, the BEST LINEBACKER IN THE WORLD1111 found out in the same game.

Curiously enough, an angry Tim Tebow also emits pheramones that smell of cinnamon buns to his friends, and of burning metal, cordite, and sorrow to his enemies.

Mmm…cinnamon buns.

…because we want three, express mail.

We think that’s the bumper to a Honda, no?