Dan Hawkins’ blog sounds a bit like the sadly defunct Tressel’s World: an internet Potemkin Village actually constructed by a deranged college football fan with too much time on his/her hands and in the grip of a wicked fascination with home hovercraft technology. We were prepared for disappointment and the inevitable dwindling of the blog to nothing but a final post and sad internet silence.

Yet Coach Dan Hawkins’ blog is not only real–it will fucking change your life, brother. Because Dan Hawkins knows you’re not living life to the fullest, and he’s got the blinding html skills and excerpts from motivational handbooks and half-baked eastern philosophy texts to shoot gallons of metaphysical nitrous into those underperforming cylinders of yours, as evidenced by this awesome screenshot. Be the bow!

He quotes Clint Black at the top, something we’d make fun of if we didn’t earnestly love like at least ten Clint Black songs. That midget can rock, albeit in a countryish, paralyzed on one side of his mouth kind of way. We like to think of Clint Black as what Terry Bowden looks like in his wildest fantasies, where he’s tearing ass on a horse across the Western landscape with Catherine Bach on the back of his saddle and his shirt open to reveal ripped pecs and abs.

But don’t limit him to country, spirit-prison-warden:

Music? I am going with the ole standby, Van Morrison. Again, don’t listen to the top 40 stuff of Brown Eyed Girl. Dig a little deeper, some great soul searching going on there!

Oh, Coach Hawkins. You make us want to curl up on a brown couch in a brown house decorated in various shades of brown, eating fondue, listening to Van Morrison, and just enjoying the mellow vibe of our new, multilevel contemporary house, all soaked in before a drive in the new Audi, maybe a little raquetball at the club, and then a relaxing dip in the hot tub with some Riunite while Gaucho plays in the background.

(HT: MK)

Back without popular demand: The Golden Unicycle Diaries return, where Peter and Orson use the wonder of internet chat to spin mental detritus into gold! Or at the least, affordable cotton/rayon blends cut in contemporary patterns, cuts, and styles!

We discuss this week’s games. Enjoy? Yes. Enjoy.

Orson: wearing this to the game on Saturday.

Peter Bean: What’s up in your world?

Orson Swindle: I’m so Master Chief this week. It’s HALO-ween

PB: Ah, feeling violent. Was it Ole Miss?

OS: Oh, yes. We coudl have used something from the game. There’s this thing called an antigravity hammer in Halo 3. I call it the Tebow-rod. It doesn’t require ammo.

PB: Can it do four play action maneuvers all by itself?

me: Yes. But you hit things with it so hard and so many times, that at one point, you just can’t hammer any more. You’ve outbludgeoned bludgeoning, and you have to stop. Just like Tebow, who looks like he’s doing the electric slide back there on some plays.

PB: Let’s pull up this week’s schedule.

OS: Hold on, i can do that with my anti-grav hammer DONE!!! I also just repelled Beano Cook fifty feet into a brick wall through the portal of ESPN.com. He’s still asleep!

PB: And start with Friday - West Virginia-USF. There won’t be anti-gravity in Tampa. But there will be lots of hair gel.

OS:Yes, WVU. Noel Devine as Q-bert. He doesn’t sidestep, he edits the film to make himself go sideways.

PB: I was thinking Sonic the Hedgehog.

OS: That’s McFadden. Always forward. And craves gold coins.

Peter: I bet Nutt trains him like a greyhound. Coins and rabbits and hydraulics out in front of him. CHASE!

OS: I bet he tries that, and D-Mac has no clue what he’s doing. EAT ‘EM! THEY’RE COINS!

OS: “What the fuck, H-Nutz?”

PB: I imagine the Arkansas huddles are delightful. Play gets called in. D-Mac says, “Fuck all that. Gimme the fuckin pig, baby.”

OS: I bet Casey Dick just cries and nods. (more…)

Orson Swindle rummages around the EDSBS Bunker, flashlight and can of Pine-Sol in hand.

OS: Shit, we need to clean up around here. Old “Punt Bama Punt!” bumper stickers…an autographed Cecil Collins crowbar…Jesus, it’s like haven’t cleaned in here since the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl—

AAAAAAIIIIIGGGH!! What the fuck, Galoshes? You know we hate it when you sneak up on us like that.

Galoshes McGillicuddy, the Gold-Lusting Whoremouthed Leprechaun of Glories Past : OI HOI, Swindle! I NEED DAT GOLD, N*****!!!

OS: You’ve been spending too much time in Alabama, Galoshes. What’s up?

Galoshes: Fuck yo’ couch! All the gold be in the hands of Saban, and he guards it with a dragon. Burnt me motherfuckin’ hands to rare filets, it did!

OS: Those…those need medical attention, Galoshes. What are you doing here?

Galoshes: What I do best, Swindle. Bring ye the down ‘n durrty on me old boys, The Foightin’ Irish.

OS: (takes out Inserection receipt and old red crayon.) We’re listening.

Galoshes: Don’t gimme that “we” shit, punk! I NEED DAT GOLD N****!!!

OS: Those hands…is that what that smell is? By the way, I have no gold.

Galoshes: Nevermind me hands! Then fifteen thousand in doubloons then, Swindle, for what ye seek to know…

OS: I will give you a dollar fifty and you will tell me, or I will spray you with Pine-Sol until you leave or die a lemony, horrible death.

Galoshes: Demetrius Jones is the starting quarterback against Georgia Tech, boy-o. You need ask no more. NOW GIMME DAT PAPER OR POP GOES THE WEASEL BITCH!!!

OS: (Sprays Pine-Sol on Galoshes’ red, swollen hands. Cries of agony ensue.)

Galoshes: Meant to say: you’re welcome, sirrah.

OS: No problem. How’d you find this out?

Galoshes: Oh, I have mah ways with Charlie, ya know.

OS: Say no more. Seriously. I don’t want to…

Galoshes: No, really, it’s fascinatin’, see? First I gets me lucky ball gag…then I–AAAAIIIIGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!

OS: (Sprays Pine-Sol, dials 911.)

One source is here. We confirmed this with Galoshes, who’s as good a source as you can imagine.

P.S. And here. Facebook, again!

The Hayley Lafontaine Story ended up in the oddest of places: the lap of Lurch, one of the Sports Junkies, a sports talk show on WJFK in Washington, D.C. It enters the picture during their run through the morning’s stories, and they read as much of it as is acceptable under FCC rules before callers and a few of the crew begin to suspect they’ve stumbled into an “enhanced” story…which, of course, they have.

The audio’s posted below, lovingly assembled by Holly from Ladies…If this isn’t empirical proof that talk radio makes you a dumber person, we don’t know what would do it for you, Flat-Earther.

MP3 File

P.S. We do sympathize with them, as we almost pulled the trigger on a story from the Piedmont Gazette last week before it dawned on us that preventing anyone with a 0.08 BAC or higher on gameday in Tuscaloosa would effectively leave the Crimson Tide playing to empty bleachers, discarded shakers, and one prissy teetotalling asshole named Elmer. A last minute fact-check saved us from our mandatory glaring error of the day, proving once again that Caffeine’s a hell of a drug.

EDSBS Live! is going to focus on the Big East today, and with good reason: any and all Big East attention we might pay to the Big East has been clouded by our Owen Schmitt worship and the fact that trying to figure out what’s happening in the Big East is very, very difficult at the moment. So we’re going to air the thought process, talk to a few people, and settle the whole thing over cocktails tonight in ninety sloppy internet radio moments.

Owen Schmitt: clouding our thoughts on the Big East with his awesomeness.

But our ramshackle thinking of the moment on the conference goes:

The Big East is full of smallish, very well-run programs, and two biggish, very well-run programs. Consider the picture four years ago for the Big East: a conference with its two prime milkers taken to different pastures (wooo SEC agricultural metaphors!) (more…)

Waiting to get a read on Les Miles? We’ve got the word: flaaaaaky. Has sugar problems. Potentially born without a governor on his inner monologue, and not in that mad professor way like Mike Leach, but more like a sugar-crazed regional manager going nutsini at a quarterly reports meeting.
(”I WILL TEAR THIS PHONEBOOK IN HALF TO PROVE TO YOU HOW SERIOUS I TRULY AM ABOUT EXCELLENCE!!!”)

Miles dropped the F-bomb in reference to Alabama. And when we say the F-bomb, we mean fuck, as in “fucking Alabama,” the answer he gave to a question about LSU’s biggest rivalry. He can be confused for Godzilla. He lets it rip! He seems just a pace out of step with most public speaking situations, which leads us to our story.

Miles missed a trip to Monroe, Louisiana last week due to bad weather. Being the nice professional that he is, Miles addressed the crowd gathered at the dinner via cellphone. (Again, non-SEC sports fans. These are adults standing rapt around a cell phone talking about football. You don’t take this shit as seriously. You just. Can’t.)

Miles opening line to the crowd he couldn’t see? “I look forward to getting to Shreveport to see a lot of friends.”

HELLLOOOOOOO CLEVELAND!!!!

It’s ok, Les. Dangerous Toys did the same thing during the Monsters of Rock tour in Shreveport, and everyone was so hammered no one noticed. And they were HUGE, man.

Blogtoberfest: a tureen of other people’s information wrapped in fresh EDSBS field bacon. Mmm…tureen.

Erik’s got his own All-Name team for the SEC, and it’s strong, strong stuff. As for the king of all monikers, there can only one winner, and it’s special, indeed.

Be gentle with him…at first.

I want your job, Donaghy. Ted Miller takes SpeculativA!, the medication designed especially for columnists seeking material, in this week’s column on Jim Mora on the loose in Seattle as an overqualified secondary coach for the Seahawks. (more…)

DC Trojan , though we swear up and down that we were on the same track and merely slower with the Gimp and Google Image search: the infection of college football bloggery by the lolcats craze was only a matter of time.

(If you have no idea what this is, a better explanation may be found at I Can Haz Cheeseburger than any we could possibly concoct. Even then, there’s no real explanation besides the ol’ eyeball test. You find it funny, or you don’t. Don’t talk, watch!)

Our first humble attempts at LOLFTBL follow. We will preface this by saying that we have seen Brian’s initial attempt at this art form, and that it is funnier than anything we’ve put together here.

Perhaps it’s a broken verbal agreement with a wannabe sports agent? That’s our guess.

(more…)

Blogtoberfest! We’ll let you transfer wherever you want to go, baby.

Brandon Warren cannot play this Division 1 football you speak of, sir. Beginning the long list of things we’d at least like to mention…Bobby Bowden refuses to grant a release of scholarship to TE Brandon Warren, who initially signed on with the Seminoles before flaking out mid-semester and leaving school to take care of his ailing mother.

Google Image: making the symbolism just a bit too easy.

Seminolians claim Warren’s just homesick and dredging up his mother’s illness to excuse himself from his contractual obligations to FSU, all the while convincing the only recruit he was in charge of showing around the campus to make a firm commitment to the University of Tennessee. (more…)

It’s only a minute long! It’s practically boosting your productivity as we speak. Play it anyway, since it’s short, it’s the soundtrack to this entry, and someone gets knocked the fuck out by what appears to be a brick at the end of the video.

UConn football player Brandon McLean was arrested twice in four days last week, having a few bad days in a row, singing a sad song and not turning it around at all, if his behavior’s any indication. Two incidents both of the largish domestic variety got him the pair of arrests, putting him squarely in line for anger management classes behind Andy Bernard and Alec Baldwin.

Note this, as well, from the Hartford Courant article:

UConn police charged McLean, 21, with one count each of threatening, criminal trespass and breach of peace after Wednesday’s incident. He faces a second breach of peace charge for the Saturday incident.

Threatening? Nice pick, UConn police. This ordinance must be unenforced in Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Alan Branch would have gotten several a day just walking around looking like himself. A point for each offense and a bonus point for two arrests in four days takes UConn to five points total.

Game Daily has a blurb or two on NCAA 2008: It’s like Madden, but with a built-in fumble button. This new wrinkles to come in ’08’s iteration of the game that makes us frightened of looking at the “hours played” menu on our XBox, followed by our suggested improvements.

It’s time to let your inner sex cannon out: NCAA 2008 is on the way.

–This year’s edition includes a “psychological factor.” Score a touchdown, everyone gets points for being happy. Fumble on the one, and your team goes up in flames like a Spanish religious effigy.

Improvements: Bonuses should include points for injuring opponents’ qb, decking mascot, or wasting coach on a tackle and spinning him stumbling into the bench. Since you can do this on every play anyway, you might as well build it into the incentives system.

Bonuses should also include: impregnating teammate’s girlfriend on the low, earning unsportsmanlike conduct penalties (sure sign of a winner,) and successfully running fake punt for a td on first down.

Negative points for impregnating teammate’s girlfriend and being caught, allowing camera to catch you shaking out cobwebs, and performing opponent’s signature cheer mockingly to camera. (This should actually guarantee a loss, judging from our studies.)

We’d also tag points for a player being a total and irredeemable dick. If he’s on your team, everyone loses points. If he’s on the other team, everyone gains points for hitting him. Florida fans will identify this as the “Doug Johnson Rule,” and the rating will appear as “DF” under the rankings for “Dick Factor.”

Dick Factor: 93, thank you very much.

–NCAA’s revamped career mode — also called Campus Legend mode — makes a comeback this year, letting gamers create a player and start building their skills in four rounds of high school football, Friday Night Lights-style. Perform well, and get recruited to play football at a top college.

Suggestions: If the menu doesn’t include “rob liquor store” or “run a train on an underage girl,” then EA is already counting the Marcus Vick fans of the world out of the purchasing audience. We cry foul if they’re not menu options in this stage. (more…)

ANOTHER IMPORTANT AS HELL ANNOUNCEMENT!!! GIMME A FUCKIN’ SIREN!!!

Dorking out to unacceptable degrees on the fact that tonight we’ll be launching our career as a 456-pound sports talk host tonight. (We’ve got the show thing down–now time to start pounding the cheesecake to build ourselves a proper gunt.)

The particulars:

How to listen:: EDSBS Radio. Like you’ve got anything better to do, so click on this link to listen.

When: 8:00 EST–9:00 EST.

How to participate in a thrillingly interactive online community: To call in, you mean? But of course. Live calling is a feature on BlogTalkRadio, and you should call in. In fact, we’ll be having a contest to see who can make the most cliched sports talk radio call-in tomorrow night.

The number: (718) 664-6532

We’ll hopefully have a few surprise guests along the way. Click the banner below to go to our channel.

Ripping off our favorite radio show of all time, we’re taking The Bottom Line’s “Five Questions segment and making it…well, quality stolen property. Our five questions for the geeks who like time to prepare:

1. Make one prediction about next season pulled straight from the deepest recesses of your ass.

2. Who’s your shameshag? Someone keeps telling us that, for example, Christiane Amanpour is not hot. They are wrong, of course, but this would for a normal person constitute a “shameshag,” the celebrity only you find irresistable.

There’s something about a woman in a safari jacket who speaks Arabic.

3. Tweak one thing about college football. Prohibiting the wearing of pants on Erin Andrews does not count. Okay, it might.

4. Hire one coach, fire one coach. Simple enough.

5. Sweaters with ties: yes or no? It was our new year’s resolution to wear more sweaters with ties. What are your feelings here?

We’ll hear from all fifteen of you tonight. ‘Till then, we’re off the grid.

ANNOUNCEMENT!!! GIMME A FUCKIN’ SIREN!!!

We’ll be boldly testing the theory of whether doing sports radio causes instantaneous weight gain tomorrow night as EDSBS Radio on BlogTalkRadio gets underway.

It promises to be a trainwreck, so tune in as we run through survival techniques of the offseason and also discuss anything and everything leaping into our minds at any given moment.

Who: Us, of course. Peter Bean of Burnt Orange Nation has been intrepid enough to join us for the trainwreck of an inaugural broadcast, as well. Both of us are on prescription medication. Be afraid.

The particulars:

What: EDSBS Radio. Like you’ve got anything better to do.

When: 8:00 EST–9:00 EST.

How: To call in, you mean? But of course. Live calling is a feature on BlogTalkRadio, and you should call in. In fact, we’ll be having a contest to see who can make the most cliched sports talk radio call-in tomorrow night.

The number: (718) 664-6532

You won’t be able to call in until showtime. Until then, feel free to submit topics for discussion in the comments, or click the BlogTalkRadio Button to visit our channel’s site.

It will probably sound a lot like this looks:

We made it to our appointment with Rivals Radio’s Bill King early this a.m. despite having nary a drop of coffee in our system. Coherence reigned, though we continued our bull-in-a-china-shop streak of talking over our host yet again. (That’s twenty-two in a row, we think.)

Listen here. Bill is a very prepared and together guy, period; however, he’s particularly together for someone with eight kids.

Orson Swindle: poorly trained radio livestock.

Also, we cobbled together the following math for creating Dan Hawkins:

Add Jerry Glanville: (more…)

Blogtoberfest: it’s got the Hi-Pro Glow of an intellectual dog fed only the finest of horsemeats.

Rutgers football destroys Scarlet Knights fencing, seven people outraged. Rutgers gets to taste the sweet flavor of football success: cutting the bejeezus out of sports not producing revenue. Following Rutgers’ most successful season ever, the Board of Governors has elected to remove six sports from the state uni of New Jersey’s varsity sports list, reducing sports such as fencing, tennis, and anything else played by fancy lads to club level. The cuts come a year after Rutgers’ state contributions were gutted by the state government, forcing layoffs and a reduction in class offerings, so the surprise and outrage really isn’t quite there.

Football has yet to make significant profits yet despite recent success, but is on television a lot and has allegedly upped applications to the university. Note that we, like any cutting-edge hipster, declined to make a Sopranos joke here. Cookies and kudos for this may be sent to harumphharumph of the yahoo variety for our restraint.

Blatant shilling never hurt anyone. Unless we’re talking about the Bluth Cornballer. Buy something, slave! Or the terrorists win.

Well, who hasn’t. Nebraska tailback Marlon Lucky lives up to his name by surviving an alleged overdose of something or other. Overdosing on something can happen when you least expect it; we did it while chewing bin-lang, a.k.a. betel nut, in a Taiwanese bowling alley. (We were sold a “loaded” betel nut, which could have been anything from methamphetamine to horse tranquilizers, for all we know.) We hope Marlon didn’t wake up thinking it was his turn to bowl, because that sucked.

My other offer is in Lincoln? Aloha, Hawaii. Who produced more D-1 prospects than Nebraska this year? Hawaii did.

Massive internal hemorrhaging is something he consented to, your honor. Our legions of lawyerly readers will begin salivating on reading this story, so we suggest barristers cover their keyboards: Charlie Weis’ malpractice suit stemming from a botched gastric bypass surgery begins today. People go to three years of school after undergrad in order to say this in defense to the fact that Weis was allowed to bleed internally for 30 hours after the initial surgery:

William J. Dailey Jr., an attorney for the doctors, told jurors the doctors acted appropriately and that Weis was believed to be in good condition the morning of the second procedure.

“There was no carelessness,” Dailey said. “Unfortunately, Mr. Weis experienced one of the complications that is known to exist.”

Hey, we watch House, and we can see that Charlie Weis is still, like, totally gunt-level fat. Give him 20 mil and call it a day! Medmal defense attorneys must have some Heinrich Himmler-level bad karma coming into this life to have to defend cases like this in front of jurors who probably get wigged out by the bloody story and then just settle so they won’t have to hear about arterial blood spraying out in gouts from Weis’ body. Good luck to all concerned. In the interests of keeping a chicken salad down, we’d like to stop discussion of this…um, now.

We’re not not breaking recruiting rules. Joe Pa and Penn State have recruits visiting ex-players without violating recruiting rules in the same week USC’s getting shitfanned over Joe McKnight meeting with Reggie Bush which may have been a violation of recruiting rules. Why? Uh…um…quick! Find charismatically cranky picture of Paterno looking codger-y!

This is not the coach you’re looking for.

Math, schmath. The MAC is cutting its in-conference schedule to seven games. There are 13 teams in the MAC. For the 95 percent of you who, like us, just prole along purchasing consumer goods and driving the country towards a “handjobs-at-Starbucks-steady-state,” we just lost you. Fortunately the mathematically minded have figured out that not only is this an outrage to the college football fan, it’s an offense to Gauss and every other legendary chalk-encrusted mathematician on the planet because it’s technically impossible. Devil Grad explains the snafu and resulting mid-major misery here.

Clay Travis never slip, he never fall. Clay Travis confesses his recruiting obsession in the usual precise, guffaw-worthy manner.

7. You pepper your normal conversations with phrases like “soft verbal” “high three-star” and “medium interest.”

Soft verbal is a phrase with great portability in all spheres of life, wethinks.

We’ve found our Halloween costume eight months ahead of time this year. You may hate the song, but the Brazilian Girls doing “Jique” isn’t complete without a fake black-barred nude woman singing it. (SFW)