That, if you’ll recall from last year’s BYU/Washington game, is what happens when you take apes, give them complex and sometimes poorly written rules, and ask them to navigate them 14 times a year under the live fire of crowd noise, bodies hurtling all over the place, and the confusion of real-life angles and blocked perspectives. Necessarily stated: officiating is hard, especially in football officiating, a job akin to being a traffic cop stuck without a car vainly trying to flag down speeders without the benefit of a radar gun or pistol.

There’s really just four sets of eyes out there to watch 22 players in motion, and this bad math leads to worse calls. Realistically, holding really could be called on every play, and every game contains a thousand variables being processed by very fallible brains working very quickly under immense pressure. Faced with an impossible job, most crews seem to stick to the big stuff, calling the most egregious penalties while letting little ones slide.

Unless, unless, unless: the crew is captained by Ron Cherry, the most annoying spotlight-slutty referee in the nation and a kidney stone of an official at best, or the crew actually decides to call the excessive celebration call. (more…)

Football is like life: it has a playbook, and when it breaks down, people get hurt. The first installment of this series appeared here as “Football Analogizing;” it appears here under a slimmer title.

Reads are important on this play, which we’ll call CAREER JET BANDIT X FLY D-BO OVER 2. We’re expecting good protection through a solid zone scheme of a middle class upbringing and lack of obvious physical or mental defect. We’re running four routes on the play. You’ll note the slot receiver is not accounted for in the playbook; this is by design, since you need one career option to forget, and then mourn as your lost ideal once it’s too late to choose it in the progression.

Let’s go through the reads, son.

First read: ASTRONAUT. The quarterback (you) takes the ball in the shotgun and surveys the defense. On this play, your first option is the X receiver, on this play known as ASTRONAUT.

ASTRONAUT is double covered by LACK OF MATH SKILLS AND DISCIPLINE. (Also, you find out you don’t like enclosed places when you go to Mammoth Cave as a nine year old.) It’s important to recognize this early and not force this ball prematurely, as you may end up in the military not flying jets, but instead handing out fresh underwear for hours at a time to new recruits as a logistics man. (more…)

That will be half a million, please.

Kansans, known for being bold pioneers in the field of anti-evolutionary biology and tornado-enabled interdimensional travel, may claim another title: the first state to attempt to stake out an entire color as a copyrighted entity.

You may recall a t-shirt last season that read “Our Coach Can Eat Your Coach,” a bit of innocuous, non-name specific piece of puffery probably defensible under the First Amendment. (Lawyas, form of inveterate debate club! Lodge your depositions in the comment sections, since you will anyway.) The company producing the shirts, a small outfit called Joe-College.com, made the shirts along with a haul of others. Standard small-time American commerce.

Joe-College.com made one crucial error: they used the color blue, a tint apparently owned by Kansas, meaning we owe them a shitload of money for toting around these baby blues all these years. (Estimated cash value of our entire life’s work: $282.50. Come get some, counselor! We dare you!)

For some reason, the owner Larry Sinks was told by a Kansas judge yesterday to pay Kansas a sum of money we find positively redonkulous: $127,337, a stupendously idiotic number a good bit reduced from the $500,000 originally requested by Kansas. (more…)