If you’re an SEC fan of a certain vintage, you probably have vivid memories of former Kentucky head coach Hal Mumme: looked like Ted Danson’s awkward younger brother, called plays like a desperate bizarro-world Steve Spurrier, and was characterized by the near-constant presence of a jaunty neck towel that had to have been perpetually sodden with the floppiest of flop sweats. His four-year tenure at UK read like the Cliffs Notes version of a Scorsese mafia epic — lifted the Wildcats up out of decades-long obscurity to only their third back-to-back bowl appearances in program history, but painted this veneer of success on a rickety structure of malfeasance and staff infighting, and flamed out in the third act as player payments were exposed and the ‘Cats were pile-driven into 2-9 embarrassment. Mumme is now the head coach at Division III McMurry University, which currently does not have a name or mascot for any of its athletic teams as a result of the NCAA striking down its former nickname, the Indians, on the basis that it could be seen as offensive to Native Americans.

I’ve got my towel, I’ve cut all the checks . . . let’s light this candle.

As Mumme prepares for his first season at McMurry, Lexington Herald-Leader columnist John Clay took it upon himself to track down Mumme’s UK staff and find out where they’d ended up. What he found was less than inspiring: Of Mumme and his 11 original assistants from 1997, only five are employed at D-IA programs in any capacity; four are college head coaches; two are coaching at the high-school level; and two are out of coaching entirely (though one of them has the convenient excuse of being dead since 2006).

The most successful of these gentlemen, obviously, is Mike Leach, currently leading his rowdy band of pirates at Texas Tech to regular bowl appearances; oddly enough, the guys with the next most prestigious jobs on the list were mere graduate assistants under Mumme. Chris Hatcher is the head coach at Georgia Southern (and being mentioned with increasing frequency as a candidate for D-IA jobs), while Sonny Dykes is breathing life into a formerly moribund passing attack as Arizona’s offensive coordinator.

There is, of course, one guy who still rates a grade of “incomplete”: Tony Franklin, running backs coach under Mumme and currently offensive coordinator at MTSU. At the moment, Franklin is known primarily for being the catalyst that started the Tommy Tuberville administration down the road to doom in its last year at Auburn, a dubious distinction indeed; but if he can work the same wonders at MTSU that he did at Troy, who knows, he might have a D-IA coaching gig in him yet, thereby eclipsing both his old bosses something fierce. The spread offense indeed works in mysterious ways.

Breaking news out of Honolulu, and obviously important enough to merit its own post: Hawaii head coach Greg McMackin has been docked a month’s pay for his uncharitable, sexual-preference-based characterization of Notre Dame’s pre-Hawaii Bowl rug-cuttin’. Officially, McMackin will be coaching the team for the next 30 days on a “volunteer” basis, with the money he would be getting paid instead being detoured to fund an intern for a campus LGBT group.

(Pre-emptive righteous-indignation stifling: McMackin’s free-speech rights aren’t being violated by any of this. The 1st Amendment prevents the federal government from prosecuting you for something you’ve said; it doesn’t bar your employers from fining you for making them look like a bunch of troglodytes. Thanks, carry on.)

With that out of the way, all that’s left is to sweep up the pieces. Can we expect an Obama-style “beer summit” between McMackin, the UH president, and Charlie Weis? Or would a “cosmo summit” with McMackin and the head of the Human Rights Campaign be more appropriate? We’re confident that any institution whose athletic teams were once nicknamed the “Rainbow Warriors” can be trusted to do the right thing here.

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.

AWWWW. So cute when a seagull does it, so not when it’s a 200 pound linebacker doing it. Arkansas linebackr Ryan Powers engaged in illegull activity when he stole something of value in Fayetteville, Arkansas on Tuesday. Condoms? A flat-screen television? Thank you notes? Batteries for his metal detector, which has helped him lose weight and led him to countless buried treasures on the beaches of…Arkansas? There’s no telling, really, at least not until we get a detailed police report. This being Arkansas, we know that the full burden of the amateur legal community is being brought to bear on a FOIA request for this very document.

One point for Arkansas in the Fulmer Cup standings, building on the point total amassed by Ryan Mallett, who will be up at 6 in the morning and in bed by 11 p.m. according to Bobby Petrino thank to his public intox arrest. (Early bird specials, Ryan. They’re a lifesaver.)

My gun is this big.

A powerful high-caliber recruit who shot into the starting lineup as a left guard on the 2006 national title team, Ronnie Wilson will be reinstated at Florida as a walk-on on the defensive tackle position*.

Wilson, who spent over a year away from the team following an incident where the lineman discharged an AK-47 in a downtown Gainesville parking lot**, aims to help the Gators reload on the defensive line. The d-line will need significant firepower this season to assist a secondary still reeling from being shot to pieces by opposing quarterbacks in 2007. Wilson, a 6′4″, 310 pound former starting guard, could provide some substantial fire along the line, though there is a firefight of competition surrounding the spot.*** He’ll have to acquire all the skills d-lineman need: looking down the barrel of an onrushing offensive lineman, shooting the gap, and strafing through blocks in rapid-fire fashion to bring down his target.

Given the current state of Florida’s defensive line, we predict Wilson will rise with a bullet to the top of the depth chart!**** Go Gators!*****

*Really? Reeeeeeeeally? Agog. Agape. Not with surprise, but with disgust, since we sort of expected him to be back on the team in November of 2007. By that standard, we should be happy, if that “standard” didn’t mean “bitter sarcasm,” and it does.

Really?

Kendall Washington, redshirt freshman, puts West Virginia in a tie for the Fulmer Cup.

CANTON The man told police the masked robber came to his bedroom as he slept, demanded money and jewelry, then shot him twice.

The victim couldn’t see the gunman’s face, but city police have charged former St. Thomas Aquinas High School football star Kendall M. Washington with aggravated robbery and felonious assault. A grand jury now will take a look at the evidence to see if he should stand trial.

Blanket allegedlys all around, but: breaking into someone’s house, stealing things at gunpoint, and then shooting someone in the head in front of their five year-old means large, large points no matter what the charges. Currently, as it stands, Washington’s charged with aggravated burglary and felonious assault. Under FC rules as they stand:

Grand Larceny: 4 points. We use this as a catchall for players being involved in crime so outrageous and well-planned it can only be described as ‘nefarious,’ ‘professional,’ or ‘legislation.’ Applies to large drug rings, chop shop operations, and the Haitian human trafficking ring that’s been run out of the Miami locker room since ‘93. (We kid! They didn’t get that thing humming ’til ‘95 at the earliest.)

Assault doesn’t seem to cover this; nor does generic burglary charges. Therefore, we award four points for each charge, and a bonus point for, well, HOLY HELL IN FRONT OF A FIVE-YEAR OLD CHILD? That’s Killing Joke Joker territory, there.

The total comes to nine points total, a sum which places in WVU in a tie for the lead in the Fulmer Cup. That’s not score manipulation to tie things up and make some excitement in the idle days of late July; if anything, that’s some circumspect scoring for a crime of astonishingly random, nasty cruelty.

Our Continental Award goes to Zachary Marshall of Miami of Ohio.

The “not da U” Miami football player accused of aggravated burglary and assault, Zachary Marshall, has a waterproof, game-tight excuse for his barging into a strange apartment and allegedly placing a pillow over the face of one of the apartment’s female occupants.

The lawyer representing a Miami of Ohio football player accused of assaulting a female student in her dorm room says the player was drunk and entered the woman’s room thinking it was his own.

So, it’s customary for him to arrive in his own apartment and then smother whomever’s lying in his bed with a pillow. In the Jerramy Stevens guide to love, this is customary, but we suspect he might have just panicked, tried to shut up the girl once he realized he had a live screaming girl on his hands, and then realized he was actually suffocating someone before doing a mad Andre the Giant wind sprint out of the place.

All in all, the Continental would have been proud of the mucho suave way this was executed and handled. Jason Bourne would have handled it the same way, with the possible addition of killing someone with a phone book on the way out (but only in the most involuntary and remorse-inducing of ways, of course.)

(P.S. The Cincinnati Enquirer adds insult to self-inflicted injury:

Police say his bulky physique helped distinguish him from other suspects.

When he’s a tiny 180 pounds and in the throes of manorexia, we’ll blame your toxic sizism, you bastards at the Enquirer.)

Don’t borrow, steal: an offseason requires desperate measures, and in a pinch we’ll be happy to do the pinching. We present a running series: Stuff _____ People Like, based on the painfully accurate Stuff White People Like. Today’s episode deals with fans of the Iowa Hawkeyes, mind you, not black people and this guy. Worth noting, especially since there are no black people in Iowa.

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…
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We’re off to Vegas to cover the first weekend of the tournament for The Sporting News, and it promises to be Con Air awesome, minus the Nicholas Cage Skynrd locks. Follow our descent into madness–and really, the aim is to destroy this gig and never, ever let anyone come close to our rapid mad post rate ever again–one of several ways.

The Sporting Blog. Not only does it have our interview with Ric Flair, but it will have our posts on what Vegas during the first weekend of March Madness looks, feels, smells, and feels like, including the part where we wind up drinking $2000/bottle cognac from goatskins with the sheikhs of Dubai at a live man versus panther death match in the hills of Nevada.

Step One, this. Step Two, fire up laptop. Step three: MASSIVE PROFITS.

Flickr. I’ll be posting photos live from the fracas, as well, so keep up by following here.

Twitter. For those too ADDled to even get through this blog post, we’ll be posting on the EDSBS Twitter feed muy rapido all day and most of the night.

Your guest host will be Oops Pow Surprise from Black Heart, Gold Pants , a demented gent who promises to not only provide the Curious Index, but an installment of “Things Black and Gold People Like,” the latest in our series of fan profiles. We will usurp the Iowa jokes by saying the only one we know for sure: meth.

Godspeed. And wish the same to us. If we fail to come back from this mission, know that we went to bat country happily.