These are the facts: this is the visualization of why Wolverines did not work as the official mascots for Michigan football.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1920.

“Michiganders of all stripes, behold our new mascot!

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#11 Ohio St. at #24 Northwestern

HOLLY, QUASI-RATIONAL: Relax your bedtime grip on your Glocks, America. Ohio State has two losses, and the universe can breathe easy, safe from the specter of a third-straight Buckeyes champblahblahblahBig10bashing. Statistically, these teams are surprisingly well-matched, but….look, we’d all love to pick Northwestern, adorably ranked after a victory over Minnesota, but if pluck guaranteed wins, we’d be celebrating the single-digit ranking of Texas Christian (HOW DARE YOU PUSH US TO ACCEPT UTAH AS A LEGIT TEAM, HORNED FROGS).

ORSON, IRRATIONAL. The force is strong in the young one…

…but this is episode five, and he loses his hand to the Dark Lord.

Baylor at #4 Texas

ORSON, QUASI-RATIONAL. If Baylor had the chops on defense to hold Colt McCoy in check, we’d happily tiptoe over to the pond of tribute bets and salute Art Briles and Robert Griffin for revivifying Baylor football. (more…)

Presented without comment:

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B.

Exhibit C:

And to all a good night.

The following is an excerpt from our upcoming memoir, Song of the Lukewarm Potsticker. It is about the father shared by both Matt Ufford and Spencer Hall: a poet, a madman, a city bus driver, a man fond of grooming himself with a soldering iron, the color orange, and the man who made us who we are today. For the first time, we share excerpts from the intensely personal story of our father, who is currently fighting a mail fraud charge we are sure he is innocent of in every way.

My father would drink. He liked to drink. When he became drunk, he became mean. He would curse at only the brown tiles on the floor, because he was a racist, and would slap my mother until she bled. And by my mother, I mean my father. He would slap himself.

It was indescribably brutal.

To please him, I played sports. At first, I tried diving. I remember my first diving match event. My father screamed at me from the stands. “Where’s your helmet?” I tried to explain to him that in diving, you didn’t need a helmet.

“The little man in the aquarium has a helmet!” he insisted.

“We’re not in an aquarium!” I screamed back.

“Don’t question me in front of your mother!” he said, pointing to a man in his mid-fifties named Harold sitting in the stands.

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Monday’s profile of Alabama athletic director Mal Moore listed online roleplaying games among his many hobbies and described him as a “tenth level Elf-Dragon”. Mr. Moore is actually an extremely accomplished paladin, and there is also no such thing as an Elf-Dragon. We regret the error.

Roll Tide!

On Tuesday, we reported that the University of Tennessee had, following the firing of Johnny Majors, considered attempting to hire Florida coach Steve Spurrier to replace the longtime Vol coach. This was inaccurate; Tennessee made no such attempt, a point clarified to us at great length in a phone call from Tennessee officials earlier this week. The candidate Tennessee wanted most to replace Johnny Majors was not Spurrier, but rather country music legend David Allen Coe. We regret the error.

Monday’s continuing series on the struggle to rebuild Columbus following last year’s Ohio State-Michigan victory celebrations misidentified an image as a neighborhood just south of campus. The photo in question is actually of a Beirut bomb crater. We regret the error.

O-H!

Monday’s “Where Are They Now?” segment featured a collection of inaccuracies we would like to address here. Purdue is located in West Lafayette, Indiana, not Louisiana. The Heisman Trophy was, until 2001, awarded annually not at Radio City Music Hall, but at the Downtown Athletic Club. And finally, Eric Crouch played at Nebraska, not at Iowa State, and at no point in his adult life fought a crippling addiction to drinking window cleaner he consumed to quiet the voices of relentless murder in his head. We regret the error.

He does, however, have unusually silky dark brown hair and particularly delicate, almost feminine eyelashes his female friends just can’t stop gushing over. His secret pride in this forces him to question his understanding of his own masculinity.

The Tuesday Grid-Iron Crossword had an ambiguous clue under “14 letter word for former coach at Texas A&M and Mississippi State.” Both the words “Jackie Sherrill” and “Piglickingcheat” fit the slot in the puzzle, causing some consternation among our readers, especially as “piglickingcheat” contains more letters than “Jackie Sherrill.” We regret the error, and clearly have no place assembling crossword puzzles in the first place.

A Wednesday evening news flash reported that former Kentucky coach Hal Mumme was among a band of notorious pirates captured by peacekeeping troops in April off the coast of Mozambique. Mr. Mumme has since been located, and apparently serves as the head football coach at “New Mexico State University”. We regret the error.

The lead story “Sean McDonough: Announcer at Large” on Monday inaccurately described McDonough as being “three apples high.” This refers to the apocryphal height of smurfs, not McDonough. The announcer himself is easily five apples high, and will kick a fucking Smurf in the teeth without hesitation, especially if shirtless white-pant wearing punk suckas walk up on him and take him seven-on-one again like they did after the Continental Tire Bowl BECAUSE THAT’S JUST THE KIND OF PUNK SHIT YOU FRENCH SURRENDER MIDGETS PULL, DON’T YOU SMURFS? WHAT? HUH? YEAH! GARGAMEL AIN’T GOT SHIT ON THIS! BRANG YO BEST, LAWYA!

We regret the error.

Our lead post on Thursday stated that an EDSBS staffer was critically injured after being lured into an open rain gutter with promises of a shiny balloon. The report further named the assailant as Ole Miss head coach Houston Nutt. The perpetrator has since been correctly identified as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The Turtle cannot help us, and we regret the error.

We rarely pre-empt the Curious Index. Today, there is a reason. Read on, because Holly found something majestic.

Raise ya glasses, shake ya asses, Vol Nation: For unto us is given this day that greatest of football blogosphere treasures—a Catlab masterpiece of our very own. It’s like staring into the sun, but it’ll get you drunk. Behold:

Have you ever seen anything ring so true? I’m about 85% sure the guy holding the pennant is my cousin Maxie. Had this wondrous creation hatched just a scant few days earlier, we would’ve been hard-pressed not to scrap the Tennessee list entirely—because this is, perfectly encapsulated, what Orange And White People Like.

The Cronicas roll on…

Our theory of SEC football scandals involves several stages, outlined below.

First: the spurning! At one point someone pisses someone off about something. This is then aired on a message board, blurted out on talk radio, or vented in a drunken boosters luncheon so virulent it’s spoken of in hushed tones years later.

Second: the infection. The story spreads as people circulate emails from trainers, guys who wash cars for the university spill their innermost secrets (”I saw him calling someone real sneaky-like in the parking lot of his office last night!”) and talk radio begins to hint boldly around the story. That asshole on your message board with an endless well of “insider information” claims to know the real story, which he wishes he could tell you but WHOOO! would that be trouble.

Third: Thermidorian Period. The raging peak of the scandal, where even the coach and administration get too stupid to just shut up and let the lawyers enter the fray for them. We just passed this in the Nutt case last week, where everyone’s issuing fevered press releases (including university car wash guy) and the “inside info” asshole on your board disappears just for effect.

Fourth: Enter the lawyers. The scandal putters out in a succession of frivolous lawsuits, legal proceedings, and increased billable hours for every scheisty lawyer in arms’ reach of the case.

We have officially entered the Fourth Stage of Las Cronicas de Boss Hawg, as John David Terry, bold taxpayer, has filed the first legal salvo in the Houston Nutt Saga by accusing university bigwigs of not adequately investigating the Teresa Prewett emails to Mitch Mustain, the ones showing a grown woman calling a 19 year-old a “fag” and gently suggesting that he transfer from the University.

Mr. “I’m not named Richard Dean Anderson and I still have the gall to use three names” then, after filing the lawsuit, presumably went back to his rustic cabin for lunch.*

*Yes, we’re calling you hillbillies. Because this whole thing makes Arkansas look like bone-sucking, muscadine-wine sippin’, knuckle-dragging goatfuckers. And that’s sad because we come from Tennessee and Florida, two places with similar PR issues. Fortunately, the lawyers are in force now, which means the worst thing you can accuse anyone of now is being overly litigious–this is ouuuuuuuuuurrrrrr counnnnntreeeeee…

Recruiting is creepy–therefore, you knew you’d be watching Chris Hansen sneak-attack-interviewing Pete Carroll eventually.

Dateline Presents: To Catch a Recruiter. (WARNING!!! Scene containing the Orgeron may be too intense for children or young adults.)

Kyle Wright unfortunately will miss Miami’s next game against Maryland. Which will be magical. And special. Like all Miami football games. Especially the ones with 41K in the stands for a conference game.

Wright’s injury is to the bone on the inside of his right thumb. He totally didn’t break it slamming it in a drawer, or having a teammate pound on it with the butt of his Glock. He most definitely didn’t injure it in an attack at the hands of an enraged and…especially alert and enthusiastic Michael Irvin, who did not attempt to bite off Kyle’s hand after the VT game.

“You’re terrible, son! Just terrible! Playmaker gonna make a roster move all by himself here…Give me that hand reearrrrrgghhhhhAIIIIIGGGHHH…WE READY! WE READY!”

But as with any place that when spelled backwards reads “I MAIM,” you don’t have to make anything up. Here’s audio of Kyle Wright’s dad, for example, getting into a shouting match with Miami fans displeased with his son’s performance. (HT:Eye on the U.) Florida: the state of nature! Like the one Hobbes wrote about, not the cuddly type that doesn’t bite or shoot you for crack money.

Welcome to Miami! Your time here will be nasty, brutish, and short.

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.