LISA SALTERS:  Well, Bob, we’ve set up a series of motion-activated cameras and microphones throughout the stadium, in the hopes of capturing footage of the rare Syracuse football fans in their natural environment.  It’s a technique pioneered by–Bob!  [hissing]  BOB!!

BOB DAVIE [quietly, urgently]: Don’t move.  Their visual acuity is based on motion.
[cautiously reaches into pocket, removes bag of corn nuts, shakes it]
Hey.  Hey.  We’re not gonna hurt you.  C’mere, little guy.  C’mon.

SYRACUSE FAN [slumping into frame]: …Can I help you?

BOB DAVIE:  It’s all right.  Everything’s gonna be all right.  Want a corn nut?  Do ya?

SYRACUSE FAN:  Uh…sure?

BOB DAVIE:  There you go.  Isn’t that nice.  Oh, Lisa, look, he’s shaking!

LISA SALTERS [cooing]: It’s OK.  It’s OK.  You’ve had a rough month, haven’t you, little fella?

SYRACUSE FAN: Well, I mean, we lost our first three games by a combined total of over seventy points.  One of those losses was to Akron.  We just managed to hang on against Northeastern, of all places, so yeah, I feel like the bag’s pretty justified at this–

BOB DAVIE:  Bill!  Bill, are you getting this?  I think he’s trying to communicate!  Are we getting this, Bill?

SYRACUSE FAN:  …uh, anyway, like I was saying, Coach Robinson seems like a nice enough guy and all, but it’s come to a point where all this neverending positivity just seems almost farcical, y’know?

BOB DAVIE: Lisa?  Lisa, can you get close enough to touch him?

SYRACUSE FAN: Wait, what?

LISA SALTERS: I’m not gonna hurt you, sweetie.  Ssssshhhh.  Ssssshhhh.  [delicately pats paper bag]

SYRACUSE FAN:  I…I mean, I’m a rational guy.  I recognize there are rebuilding years in every program, but all we hear is “gradual improvement” this and “learning all the time” that, and at the end of the day, what kind of curve are we talking about?

BOB DAVIE:  Lisa!  See if he’ll eat a corn nut out of your hand!

SYRACUSE FAN: Because I don’t know about you, but I come here to watch football, not plate tectonics–hey!  HEY!!

LISA SALTERS [attempting to push corn nuts through hole in bag]:  Bill, are you getting this??

SYRACUSE FAN:  WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!    THIS ISN’T A FUCKING PETTING ZOO.

LISA SALTERS: Look, he’s sitting upright!

SYRACUSE FAN:  I’M A HUMAN BEING! SYRACUSE FANS ARE PEOPLE!  WE’RE PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU!

CAMERAMAN: See if it likes Fritos!

SYRACUSE FAN:  SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS [rips off paper bag, bolts for nearest wall, climbs with astonishing speed to rafters, where he perches, hissing and spitting]

BOB DAVIE [turning to camera]:  The Big East, ladies and gentlemen:  It’s bat country. I’m Bob Davie, EEEessPEEenn.

Stuff Black and Gold People Like

Fried anything. Holy shit do we like frying things. It’s not that only Iowans fry everything, but Iowans only fry everything. Go to the Iowa State Fair, but do so only at your own risk and with polarized lenses on your sunglasses; direct eye contact with too many fried confections will clog your arteries with Oreo paste.

Not meth. Sorry, Orson, but that’s something that Red and Yellow people enjoy far more than Hawkeye fans, along with other mind-numbing substances like Oxycontin and Rep. Steve King (R-IA). On the other hand…

Hawkeye Vodka. This brand exists, it’s about $11 for a handle, and it’s every bit as gut-wrenching as you can imagine. Only the saddest, most pickled citizens can stomach shots of the Hawkeye, and consuming large portions in mixed drinks leads to complete loss of pants, motor control, and stomach contents, in that order, and in the span of about 15 minutes. It’s a great way to spend a weekend, even if you only remember the world-altering hangover. Actually, it’s unfair to Iowans to restrict us to Hawkeye. Let’s broaden this out a bit:

All alcohol. Go to a Hawkeye tailgate sometime. It’s similar to SEC tailgates in terms of volume (both sound and attendance), but there’s a marked difference: SEC tailgaters cook. They socialize. They have fun. We stand around in 40 degree weather silently forcing Natty Ice down our throats and thinking to ourselves, “there’s more dew than usual.” This is a necessary result of having all our football games start at 11 a.m. Eventually, after 7 hangover-delaying Keystones, some asshole turns on his car and puts in his tailgate CD, which by default has…

THIS. FUCKING. SONG.

Things take a while to get to our fair state, so yes, it’s hot and fresh to us. This is Iowa, after all.

Making you watch us while we do politics. We’re not actually interested in politics. At all. Our governor is just as stupid as your governor. But every four years, CNN shows up and we get to travel to downtown Des Moines and say things like “is that Shepard Smith crossing the street?” and listen to desperate politicians tell us things that not even they themselves believe. We are attention whores, pure and simple, and when you follow the cycle of one month prom queen, 47 months drag queen, you’ll understand too.

The one-finger raised from the steering wheel salute when you’re on a gravel road. We don’t wave. We point up. Of course, Jimmy Bluecollar’s not about to acknowledge you in return if you’re driving an import, because his (male relative) didn’t die in (war that may or may not have had any bearing on American security) just so you could ride around in a god-damn Toyota, son. Why can’t you just drive a Chevy like normal people? You on marijuana or somethin?

Corn. Oh god, the corn. It’s everywhere. Also, sadly, Children of the Corn was not a documentary, because this state would be a lot more interesting if unsuspecting teenagers were beheaded by rogue corn vines (which may or may not, you know, exist) every time they set foot in a cornfield at night. That’d make for some unforgettable yearbook pages every spring, wouldn’t it? “IN MEMORIAL: Jared Carver, 1990-2007, car accident; D.J. Thompson, 1989-2007, evil corn demons ripped off skull. You will be missed.”

No, Charlize, the corn vines! Noooooooo!

The Drake Bulldogs. They do things the right way, which is a nice way of saying their point guard is white. We’re not racist, we just don’t care much for the showboating and hollering and the rap music and gangs. That Adam Emmenecker, he just plays ball the way it was meant to be played, you know?

Nile Kinnick. Plain and simple, he’s the Iowa football Jesus. He saved us from mediocrity. He defeated the unholy Catholics. He won the Heisman. And sure enough, he was cut down in his prime, dying in a plane crash as he trained for WWII off the coast of Venezuela two years after graduation. Sure, it’s debatable whether he ascended from the Atlantic–his body, like Jesus’, was never recovered–but we at least got his plane back. Fortunately, the plans to put his wrecked plane on display at the stadium were shelved, because when Nile comes back in the Rapture, that’s the last thing He’ll want to see, but we revere him nonetheless. Talk crap about Nile in the Hawkeye state and you will be ripped asunder, even by people who barely even know who he is.

Hayden Fry. If Nile Kinnick is Hawkeye Jesus (he is), Hayden is our patron saint. Sure, he was openly Texan (not that there’s anything wrong with that, either), but we like to think that his down-home sensibilities applied to Iowa as well too. We like to pretend that anybody of decent character has that in common with us, though that’s hardly the domain of Iowans. Still, the man in the aviators and the moustache built the football from nearly nothing, as well as training others to do the same at Wisconsin, Kansas State, Iowa State and South Florida. Again, any ill word of Hayden within the Iowa borders is cause for completely legal assault and dismemberment. It’s what we do.

The missionary position. In the dark, without the distraction of music, and under at least two blankets. It’s more intimate that way, you see, and we don’t want to deal with all these freak show details that you see on the pornos and the internet. It’s sex, not a goddamn circus.

Moderate obesity. This is not entirely unrelated to the previous item, since there’s nothing appetizing about acrobatic sexplay coming from two people who resemble clean-shaven Saint Bernards engaging in Greco-Roman wrestling. The slobber gets everywhere, it’s awkward and uncoordinated, and… yeah. Anyhoo, whenever the Hawkeyes go to bowl games, it’s painfully obvious who the Iowa fans are in the city beforehand; not only are we wearing only bright yellow (”It’s gold!” No, it’s yellow. Gold is this and don’t let us catch you wearing that) , but we’re universally 40-80 pounds overweight and loving it. A steady diet of Bennigans and 4-month bitter cold winters does that to you. You wouldn’t understand, Gator fans. We hibernate with mozzarella sticks.

Superiority. Despite everything that you may interpret as inferior qualities, readers, we wake up every day happy. We know it could be worse. We could be Cyclone fans.

Oh, denim. Is there anything you can’t ruin?

Yup. Thankin’ ’bout makin’ a top 25.

The upside is that when it comes to prognostication, we’re all Hills Have Eyes mutants looking for a fresh meal for daddy, since we all uniformly suck at predicting the future. It’s a great trick of the human brain: we’re terrible psychics, but we’re superb editors, giving ourselves credit for things largely acheived by outrageous fortune, a little hard work, and the endless combinatorials of fate. This explains why you can tell yourself you did not, in fact, want that promotion, you are, in fact, quite happy with the way your body looks, and that you think that despite having no offensive line, a quarterback you’ve personally seen vomiting up a 12 pack in a Quik Trip parking lot, and a coach with the IQ of a salamander, that you think [INSERT TEAM HERE] has a great chance to [ACHIEVE SOMETHING THEY MOST DEFINITELY CANNOT, PUNY HUMAN.]

And yet despite the innate futility of predicting the future value of college football teams in the upcoming season, it’s a great time-killer, and not an entirely inaccurate one thanks to inequities within college football. The advantages even the most gin-poisoned college football prognosticator (raising hand, looking around tentatively) has are numerous:

1. The nature of the sample. How anyone picks the winner in the NFL defies our comprehension, since the league has installed so many economic doohickeys (profit-sharing, most notably) into the system that parity’s the expected rule in the league, not elite dominance. In fact, it’s almost more remarkable to not make the playoffs eventually in the NFL than to make them, since so many advantages are given to struggling teams. (Note: seek creation of Bidwell Award for Most Persistent Failure in the Face of Imminent, Impending Success immediately, Roger Goodell! It can be named after no other.)

College football, on the other hand, is a classic “giants and dwarves” sample. There are reaaaaalllly big programs whose food budget could fund an entire small program for a year. Only thirty or so teams may realistically compete for the national title, and of those you may whittle down more based on coaching turnover, lost starters, and other relatively locktight factors.

College football has plentiful dwarves. One lives in Buffalo.

2. Consistent good management is a safe bet, too. When picking, it never hurts to roll over last year’s top ten in slightly distressed fashion. The good tend to remain good in college football, since so much of what affects performance on the field occurs off-stage: coaching contracts, recruiting budgets, the established paths to getting less-than-qualified students into school.

In fact, changing management should be a seabird thrown right into your windscreen of prognostication about a team. Players cycle through college in very little time (unless you’re Asad Abdul Khaliq, who played at Minnesota for 16 years, and had a very thorough understanding of Glen Mason’s system by the time he left.)

Asad Abdul Khaliq, seen here in his 12 year at Minnesota, understood the importance of consistent management.

Systems, procedures, and the ability to mold players quickly and effectively matter. Only qualified people do that, and there aren’t many with the gift–see Nick Saban’s 5 million dollar salary as evidence of just how rare and expensive a commodity that truly can be.

When things change at the top, they will change on the field, with how slowly or quickly they change being the only question. Take Les Miles, the most misread of all major coaches: LSU’s played significantly differently under Miles than they did under Saban, with the primary difference being that under Miles, LSU’s lost fewer games, proof that “new” does not necessarly constitute “6-6 and a spot in the Federated Trucking Bowl.”

This year, Miami and Louisville both try on new heads. The challenge for the murderous redneck prognosticator is not to issue a blanket “HOLD” judgment on them, but rather to feel out whether the move takes them up, down, or sideways. And then, of course, remain unsurprised when you’re totally wrong.

However, overall you can follow the patterns of brain drain from the mid-majors into college football’s Premier League and make reasoned, solid guesses at who’ll be or remain successful. Pete Carroll’s probably not going to suck this year. Neither will Urban Meyer, and neither will Charlie Weis, even given the fact that Notre Dame’s depth chart will be riding out the bottom curve of Willinghamization this year.

Good management equals good results. (Unless we’re talking about Tennessee ‘05. But that would complicate our already clause-ridden guidelines! Goddamn what hanging out with lawyers has done to our once-purely irrational psyche!)

Checking your calendar helps. A hedgy bet here, since your 11-1 Hawaii team could enter their bowl game and dent your eventual luster by facing an extremely pissed-off 10-2 Texas team in a 66-3 razing. However, schedule-peeking can help ensure some modicum of reality to the top ten. Hawaii remains a perfect example: gusting on a good dose of preseason hype, their sweet, condensed-milk covered confection of a schedule is way high on the glycemic index, and should have them riding into the last few weeks of 2007 with a “BCS-buster”-worthy ranking.

Conversely, Miami faces Oklahoma and Texas A&M out of conference, two games that could deal early losses to a potentially talented team. Note that this, the “good, consistent management” trend and other logics (Patrick Nix, offensive coordinator? O RLY?) have kept Miami out of many preseason polls; if they are listed, they’re usually in the Georgia Techish range of 20-15, desultory territory for Da U.

Then again, Florida had cancer of the schedule last year, too. They did all right, we guess.

Trends are the wobby bannister of predictions. When all else fails, just size up the most immediate trends of a program and go with instinct. No one could have predicted Tennessee’s 5-6 2005, USC’s bizarre loss to Oregon State last year, or the improbably continued relevance of Penn State in the face of Joe Paterno’s continual struggle with the Solanum virus and its devastating effects.

Any of the other “anomalies” that happen every year in college football can happen for a reason: when 30 or so teams are competing with roughly comparable resources, shit happens and will continue to happen. In fact, if you want a forecast for the college football season, just imagine a weather map. Everywhere it says rain, just replace with “SHIT.” That’s your map, and stick with it, because that’s just how it’ll turn out.

Your 2007 college football forecast done honestly: you won’t believe this shit. Illustration by House Rock Built, as most of the good ones seen here lately are.

This was equally true in 2006, and will be true again in 2008 when we do this again. Ohio State was supposed to blow Florida off the board. USC was supposed to beat Oregon State. Oklahoma was supposed to embarrass Boise State, and for the fourth year running we hopped aboard the Ferentz-wagon at Iowa and called for them to do something championship-esque in the Big Ten. (Though we still picked Ohio State as our preseason number one–again, bet good management, scheduling, and your sample size. You’ll likely be in the neighborhood.)

But you saw all that coming, of course. Or at least you did in retrospect, now that you’ve had a few months to process, rewrite, and edit your memory a bit. And that wedding you called off? Totally the right decision, like the time you quit law school to become a guitarist in that Christian nu-metal band “rapturrD.” (Too bad everyone missed the Biblical reference and just pronounced it “rap-turd,” an appropriate name given how the band sounded.)

It all worked out for the best, really. And if it didn’t, just give it some “perspective.” Or as your brain might more honestly label it, a nice coating of ameliorative untruth. It certainly works for us when we think about the 2001 Florida team, now doesn’t it? (Looking around, searching for the bottle of “perspective” with the words “ZYBROWKA” in big letters on the label.)

What: EDSBS LIVE online radio Click that or the banner thingy to your right to listen.

Where: At NowLive, where you can chat with each other and the show hosts throughout the broadcast in the online forum (which has gotten damn lively). To phone in to the show, just call (310) 984-7600. LISTEN AND YOUR PENIS AND OR BOOBS WILL GROW!!!

What: Tonight’s special guest is…Bill from ATLEagle, who we’ll ask exactly who this Jeff Jaogdadzknginski guy is, and how he ended up coaching the Boston College Eagles. We’ll also be taking your calls and e-messages, which if you send them to us will MAKE YOUR PENIS AND OR BOOBS GROW LARGER!!!

Four Questions: As always, our four questions for the night.

1. What is your favorite football play/scheme/thing that goes boom.

The ‘bone. It’s like a square dance breaking out in the backfield.

2. Tell us your favorite football movie.

There’s a whole series to be done here, but only one answer for the college ranks really matters: The Program. Starting defense! Place at the table!

3. Are you blitzing? A philosophical and literal question, really.

4. Most suggestive piece of football terminology? Besides the ‘bone, since we’re claiming that. Getting deep penetration is just too easy, y’all, so we expect creative answers.

Hear you then.