Oh, Knights of Auldwyn! You shall ne’er triumph against our merry troupe, assembled from only the most enchanted wooded glens and dales? Forsooth, relent in thine advance or taste our magick, the strongest in all creation and Boone County!

Knaves of Auldwyn, more like it! The Tigers Templar hath a boot steak for your dinner, for this be our land you hath traipsed upon! We shall avenge the disastrous dealings of when last met, and reclaim the Sword of Everlasting Wisdom!

They brandish $55 broadsword purchased at flea market.

Nay! The Sword of Everlasting Wisdom remains ours thanks to our new and powerful wizard!

We see no new wizard among your ranks! And don’t be a dick, Steve. You know you can’t bring a new member in without advance warning. Total dick move, especially when by rule we’re playing a level down thanks to last week and with no real magical capabilities now that our elf broke his leg.

‘Tis not our fault your elf can’t hold his mead, and hath taken a grievous fall in the parking lot of yon Outback House of Steak. Indeed, if your elf were so magical he would heal himself, no?

THEY LAUGH A MERRY LAUGH.

So not cool, Steve. There’s fucking pins in it. He looks like a busted-ass cyborg.

Anachronism! That’s a one hit point foul on Knights of Auldwyn! Note it! Note it!

My children, please. A great wizard has come to bring harmony to these woods by whipping your asses. I CAST SNUGGIE OF IMMORTAL PROTECTION.

That’s not even a real magical item in our multiverse!

Oh, I don’t think you can get realer than this, bitch. I CAST ASTRAL ERECTION SPELL! BOOSH!

He waves his hands dramatically.

You mean “astral projection?”

No.

RETREAAAAAAAAAT!!!!

Huzzah! The Great Wizard hath made the Tigers Templar victorious again!

(HT: PunkOnDeck and Doc Saturday.)

Daddy Fat Stacks you would be if you wagered correctly.

It’s not just that it’s the coach’s son and two other football players who incurred the rather gentle charge of public intox, a misdemeanor charge handed out like pizza coupons on most college campuses. (We never got one, but that’s the advantage of being uncoordinated and mumbling all the time–no one notices when you fall down and start slurring your speech.) It’s the manner in which they got the charges.

According to University of Iowa Department of Public Safety Associate Director Bill Searls and criminal complaints, Zachary Merlin Derby, 19, and Tyler Allen Christensen, 19, both of Hillcrest Residence Hall, approached an off-duty UI police officer and attempted to pick a fight with him.

It’s akin to attempting sexual assault on a woman with a vagina dentata, and with figuratively similar results. There’s little else more embarrassing than having a program with a nagging discipline program get their PR dick bitten off by having their head coach’s son arrested on campus with a .160 BAC and attempting to fight a random stranger who turns out, funnily enough, to be a policeman.

They were at least courteous once arrested, or perhaps just hallucinating and imagined the policemen to be mermaids guiding them into their magical flashing light-laden carriage. Mermaids are mentioned intentionally here, as you’d have to be 18th century dehydrated sailor cranked on sour rum to match this level of CRUNK:

Police said Derby had a blood-alcohol level between .207 and .211 percent.

That’s called “Finnish Cruising Altitude,” and if you haven’t been there lately, it’s the kind of drunk that makes pants disappear, wraps cars around telephone poles, and has you waking up in Corsica when you began the night in Paris. T-Pain got that drunk once, and now his voice sounds that way all the time no matter what he says or does. It’s that serious.

The three charges are one measly point a piece, but a bonus point is awarded to Iowa for the whole “we’re Iowa and we get arrested” pattern for a grand total of four points. The FAA should probably file charges, too, as players did not file flight plans before floating in lazy, booze-fueled circles in regulated airspace for several hours prior to arrest.

CORRECTION: There’s a fifth-degree criminal mischief charge in there, so Iowa gets five points. Oops Pow would like to note that that charge wasn’t even awarded to the guy above Finnish Cruising Altitude.

Army’s tried a few of the tried and true measures to compete as a military academy: the option, hiring a retread pro coach with some name recognition, and using some ah those biologically engineered killbot mutants left over from Project Universal Soldier. Actually, they’re just getting to that last one, or attempting to make create-a-player a reality by putting 6′10″, 286 pound Ali Villanueva, former offensive lineman, at wideout this spring.

Villanueva has never played wide receiver at any level, but runs a 4.8, making him at least as fast as any of Mississippi State’s starting wide receivers last season. Coach Rich Ellerson is all but admitting that this is a longshot, but that it would be “fun” watching him block DBs and safeties. Ellerson wins you over for attempting one thing, at least: putting players at position by the “really fat goalie” theory of play, which you may as well do because you’re at Army, perpetually at a disadvantage, and may as well get some highlight reel time when VIllanueva falls on a DB and smashes him like a ripe banana beneath a bike tire sometime in November.

Between VIllanueva and Terrance Cody, we’re moving ever-so-much closer to our lifelong dream of fielding our 2003 Middle Tennessee State University National Title team from NCAA. now for the 5′0″, 280 pound running back who ran a 3.2 and jumped lineman like they were flabby hurdles.

The only visual remix of OMC’s “How Bizarre” you’ll ever need follows after the jump.

Or, to concatenate that bit of praise and turn this into Connections with James Burke for football: did any single performance which led to a singular defeat that then led to the even bigger upset of undefeated Texas? Without Orakpo disintegrating the Oklahoma line and Colt McCoy being devilishly accurate, there is no undefeated Texas rolling into this game, where Michael Crabtree spontaneously generated the one moment this year that had us springing to our feet.

Musberger’s bellowing call–so enthused he fucks up the pronunciation a bit, blurting out something that sounds like “CROBB-TRAAAAAAYYY”–is all you need. We don’t even hear Herbstreit after that; the delirium of the moment still lingers and obliterates all commentary. There is a moment in each season you remember with a clarity bordering on the surreal , as if a South American writer had gotten a hold of the script and written floating women and feathered angels speaking odd tongues into the background. There’s more than a little Marquez in Crabtree’s catch, and not just in its mythical content; the tragic side kept Texas from the national title game, and put Bob Stoops’ toes in the surf of Biscayne Bay.

Berry inspires men and weakens women’s wills. He pleases the eyes of children and the noses of dogs. He is awesome, and you should tip your hat as he passes, even if it means stealing someone’s hat to do it–even if it is a policeman’s hat. He’ll understand what you’re doing once you explain it to him. Trust us.

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 song is rapped and produced by none other than USF’s kicker Delbert Alvarado, the same one who missed three field goals against Auburn. Alvarado made the song for mattgrothe.com, mentioned a demure seventeen times or so in the song (check the website!), and according to Grothe “It’s a dang good song.”

The word dang just isn’t used enough as a modifier, dang it. As for the song, we must deliver some due credit to Alvarado, whose ten-cent street beats are pure Third Coast car-trunk-entrepreneur material–the song’s not terrible, though being an ode to Matt Grothe it does get a bit repetitive. We’ll know if it’s done the job if you hear Scott Van Pelt or Neil Everett drop a “G to the R-O-T-H-E” reference on Sportscenter.

Massive HT: Holly for working the transistors and vacuum tube to make this happen.

YAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY TAFFY!!!!

I’m here today to introduce our special uniforms for the game against Tulane University. They really are special uniforms. And by this, I mean that they’re magical. Our players will go faster, tackle harder, and make bigger plays. And this all happens because we’ll be wearing our white magic pants.

Magicpants!

Revealliarrmus!

Clap! CLAP, ALL OF YOU!!!

(Reporter clap awkwardly, sporadically. Miles claps and jumps up and down.)

YAYYYYYYYYYY!!! Taffy break! (Unwraps taffy slowly, chews, moans.) Oh, butterscotch, old friend. You never bring the blues with you, do you.

(Continues.)

My players complain sometimes. WAAAAAA!!! we don’t want to watch The Return of the King again, or WAAAAAAA!!! we don’t want to wear white pants because it makes us look fat. Whatever, chuckles! We’re talking about magic, the kind that wizards use and that dreams are made of, like when you dream about a national championship, or taffy, or even flying along through the sky on a flying millipede named Steve. Like, magic spelled with a ‘k’ at the end, just like old Merlin would have said it.

Magickal!

That’s the kind of magic you need to give people and make them believe in, just like my mentor Doug Henning believed him. He believed in the magic inside us all, and that it wore white pants and purple shirts. I wanted Nike to go and put three different kinds of purple on the shirt, but nooooo, they’re all like “this money has to go to New Orleans, and these are the colors, Les”.

Whatever. It’s not my fault terrorists flew a hurricane into it nine years ago.

Oh, but look! There’s a pelican sewn onto the sleeve, too. I have no idea why, but pelicans are badasses just like my team is. MY team. No one else’s, no matter who recruited them–

–I SEE YOU COMING IN LATE, KLEINPETER!!! YOU OWE ME TWO STICKS OF TAFFY, YOU CHEAP CHEAPIE FATTIE MAN!!! IN THE BOWL!!! NOW!!!!–

–and they’re gonna be badasses just like this pelican. Because pelicans eat other birds.

They can also fly, just like Doug Henning. They’re also fireproof, something most people don’t know, and can read trees’ thoughts, which is why you always see them on docks, and never in trees. Because trees hate it when you sit in them–that’s what the pelicans have taught me, and what you should learn from them, too.

Also, while I’m just kind of riffing up here–can we actually paint all the players white like this dummy? Not because I hate black people or white people or whatever, but just because–well, don’t you all think that would be awesome? AGREE!!! NOD!!! YES, YES, ALL OF YOU!!!! We’d be like a bunch of albino cyborg warriors out there, sent to save the human race from self-destruction, evil aliens, and Nick Saban.

Especially Dorsey. Man, he’d look like the Pillsbury Doughboy out there, but evil and strong. We’d have to call him something like…”the Killsbury Woeboy.” Yeah! Write that one down! That’s some magick right there. I should start wearing my cape to these things, people!

Anyway, we’re going to honor Tulane by beating them by fifty points this weekend. I will open the floor to question to the first person who brings me a stick of delicious saltwater taffy. The wizard refuses to speak until he gets some.