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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Sure. You thought it was a good idea, just like all the mad geniuses do. I’ll bring something into the world that no one’s seen before, and just leave it to rot here, to fend for itself, like some kind of half-frog, half-man. It’s new! Bigger! Stronger! Faster! We had to be…different, didn’t we?

You couldn’t just use the classic Nebraska logo, right? That’s be nasty. Square. Uncool. You couldn’t just be a pigeon–you had to be a peacock, didn’t you, Strutty McFeatherass? Nooooo, you have Sam Keller promising to complete 65% of his passes. You’ve got an offensive line promising not to give up 68 sacks in two yearsYou have the Big 12 North sitting there wide open like the legs of a giddy, strapping, whiskey-drunk farmgirl who climbed down off that Husqvarna just for little old you. . You’ve got old Rageface in Boulder taking his team paintballing and listening to him tell fucked-up Zen koans. WAAAAaaaahhhh Nansen kills a kitten. Big shittin’ deal–I’d thank the Zen monk that would scrape me off your cursed, sweaty epidermis. No one’s offering to put me out of my misery in the name of Zen.

You asshole. You don’t even know what I go through. Everyone will know what it is, dude! Oh, that sounded like a peachy idea back at the tattoo shop in Omaha, where you picked the man to do it based on that AWESOME skull with the snake crawling through the eyes, except the snake turned into a woman? A Vargas girl, right? You wouldn’t recognize a Vargas girl if one woke up sitting on your face, Captain Strikeout. (more…)

Every year, Phil Steele holes up in the television hive he calls his offices, watches tape until his eyeballs bleed, and comes out with his guide to college football. And most years, Phil picks a team to beat somewhere in college football that exceeds expectations, most often based on the fact that the team, while holding a losing record for the year, improved enough over the offseason to warrant an expectation of marginal improvement. And at those margins, the points will tip their way, and voila–winning season.

Margins are a bitch. Ask Ryan Succop.

It should be stated that what we just said is a gross oversimplification of Steele’s methodology, a morass of calculations, formulas, intense film study, differential equations, animal sacrifice, and more than a few occult ceremonies. (more…)

Nudists never are who they should be. Ideally, nudists would be people you want to see in the buff. We can report that from hard experience (umm, unfortunate choice of words there) that they are not the people you’d like to strip off and cavort pantsless. They also, fortunately, are not the people you would elect not to remove so much as a sock off their body in your presence.

Ladies and gentlemen…Kenny G!

Based on our experience one intrepid afternoon in the early 2000s, nudists come mostly from the soft middle of American demography: middle-aged, middle-tempered, and middle-heavy. They’re also exceedingly pleasant, even when you’re obviously rubbing sunscreen on your testicles for the awkward first time. Do not, however, walk leisurely into one of their volleyball games. It is a fact universally acknowledged tbat nudists make savage, pitiless volleyballers.

Even in Berkeley, this seems to be true, since the nude protest against the University’s plan to raze a grove of oak trees brought out not the troll squad nor the Berkeley Hottz0rz team, but rather average-looking people bent on dropping trou in order to…well, we think in order to save some trees.

Racist hippies allow only naked white flesh in their protest against better football.

The removal of the trees to build a new training center for Cal football remains part of a larger plan to bolster the literally shaky construction of Memorial Stadium, which stands on a fault line and could collapse in event of an earthquake.* The rationale behind the protest, as described by coordinating photographer Jack Gescheidt:

“What I do is show people at the most vulnerable — naked — with trees to illustrate the relationship and beauty of nature,” he said. “I hope to do a quiet, reverential photo of people and trees. . . . Humans are drawn to trees…”

…for firewood, in order to barbecue animals they’ve caught and slaughtered…

The people up in those trees are not crazy, they are doing something beautiful and important,” Gescheidt said. “They don’t need to destroy this grove.”

No–but they really, really want to destroy it. The only hold-up to the plan comes via an Alameda Superior Court Ruling claiming Cal did not properly assess the risks of building on a fault line. (Just write “MAY FUCKING FALL DOWN AT ANY INSTANT” on every inch of the structure. Does that cover liability? Um, no.–EDSBS legal. Killjoy.–ed.) Once Cal addresses that small issue, the plans for stadium expansion and the slaughter of the trees will continue apace.

One quote of worth from the SFGate article bears memorization, however:

Shawn Alexander, who came from Fresno to visit her daughter Madison at Cal, was a bit surprised to see naked people in trees.

“I can confirm there is nothing like this going on Fresno,” she said with a laugh.

We’ll only pay further attention to this story from this point on if and only if hotter people get naked to support the demolition of the trees. Hot naked people with chainsaws and hardhats–just another example of how the universe in our heads leaves the real one in smoking shame in comparison. Trust us on this.

Click here for a video of the protest where absolutely nothing you see or hear will surprise you. (NSFW, technically, but boring as all hell anyway.)

What’s Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff doing there?

*Applicable to anything in California except Barry Bonds.

Credit to those who saw this coming: Facebook was going to blow up and do some damage of an irrevocable sort eventually. Now that USC’s White Power page has made Jarvis Moss’s “Heisemens” page look like, well, what it was (um, totally and absolutely correct and innocuous,) watch for the inevitable prohibitions on Facebook content by the more tightassed universities, or just bans outright by even more controlling institutions.

The root of the joke, however, is pretty funny. It allegedly stems from the fact that the black guys on the team call the group, which includes Dallas Sartz and Brian Cushing, “white power.” And as we all know, “white power” as a repeated comic phrase is bankable funny, whether it’s out of the mouth of Clayton Bigsby, Dave Chappelle’s black, blind white supremacist, or as yelled by “White Power Bill” after he shivs someone in the yard on “Arrested Development.” It’s mostly funny because the concept itself is absurd, mockable, and espoused by people who don’t exactly “sell the sizzle” of their chosen lifestyle.

But it’s funny when he says it!

However, in order for this to be funny, you have to be operating at the least in what we’d call the high ironic mode, and preferably in an environment of zero taboo (like we imagine a football lockerroom to be), which means you have to accept the following premises.

1. Your audience has to know that you think white power is bad.

2. It has to be presented in a demonstrably absurd fashion. The more over-the-top, the better.

3. Your audience, preferably, should trust you.

4. You should trust your audience.

So really, this entire brouhaha is not a matter of racism, but bad comic design and placement. Clearly, these guys will not be on the writing staff of 30 Rock any time soon, since their design was sloppy, they didn’t realize their whole audience wouldn’t know that they were kidding, and the joke itself (”arresting black children before they commit crimes”) is offensive without providing any cutting insight. Again: not racist, but certainly reeking of dumb-ist.

(Compare this to the scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where a guy asks a black guy if his child, when born, is already on probation. This wouldn’t be funny coming from an older white guy; it comes, however, from the mouth of an older Indian man, a transgressive and savvy choice because a.) Indian guys are supposed to be polite! And good at math!, and b.) minorities are supposed to stick together, like the Minoriteam!)

Minoriteam-unite!

Nor will they be receiving Fulmer points, since technically they did nothing wrong. However, any of the players concerned will be referred to as First Name “White Power” Last Name as punishment for the next year for their atrocious comic execution. The Punchline is just down the street, white players of USC. Just don’t go there on a night when Michael Richards is playing.

Dirk Koetter may have been dumped. But he has girlfriends, Arizona State. There’ll be another you in a minute, Arizona State. As a matter of fact, there will be five of them here in a minute.

Koetter says he’s gotten five job offers, and not just from the all-cash, can’t miss home marketing opportunity we get five of a day in the spambox.(HT: The Wiz.) The Miami Herald reports he’s a mention for the Miami Hurricanes offensive coordinator slot, which would be nasteeeeeeeee should he get it, since he’d be bringing the novel concept of scoring points to the ACC and using some of Miami’s F-22 speed to do it.

How far have negotiations for any of these jobs gotten, you ask? (Or Arizona State asks, trying to preen at the party with new boyfriend Dennis Erickson, telling him I bet he hasn’t even sent his resume in yet. He’s such a wimp, not like he-man you, Dennis. Spank me again!) Koetter says there’s a time and place for it, but we’ll make an educated guess using terminology only the most dedicated of Arrested Development could love: they’ve probably only gotten to second base, but considering the whole five-jobs-and-waiting-thing, have done so headfirst and sliding:

In a weird bit of coacing circularity, outgoing Miami OC Rich Olson is reuniting with former boss Dennis Erickson at his new job at…Arizona State. You may remember Olson as the man who did not call a pass over seven yards in length for the entire year of 2006, which shows that if you can get one D-1 coaching job in your life, you’ve got one for life.

Meanwhile, Charlie Strong’s totally just hanging out, y’all. Really. Just hanging out, watching The Wire, you know, catching up and prepping for the Buckeyes and working on his pecs. Just a random mention without any insinuations or subtext. At all.

We…Are…Drunk. And dancing. Someone please save this separately on a different YouTube account fast, because they will pull it as soon as this gets posted.

Our favorite part is the guy pelvic thrusting in a manner that has to make every other man watching it wince for the women he sleeps with(I particulary like that he gets enthusiastic high fives from his friends following the display, as if he just busted out the moonwalk on the Motown 25 celebration–Stranko). Lee Corso wouldn’t put it down like that and you know it.

Shocking video after the jump:
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