Your preferred tailgating beverage is:
A) Beer
B) Milk

Your go-to antiseptic in event of injury is:
A) Beer
B) Milk

You drive to the game in:
A) A pickup truck that seats four.
B) A family van or SUV seating no less than ten.

You like your jeans to be:
A) Cowboy tight.
B) Ironed with a crease every time.

Your mascot:
A) Is a nightmare engine that SPITS BLOOD FROM ITS EYES DAMMIT WE DON’T CARE WHAT THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL SAYS ABOUT ANTS
B) Actually killed a relative of yours three weeks ago.

Show me sexy.

You think breast implants are:
A) Hot and worth it
B) May I give you some literature?

Shotgun weddings are:
A) A fact of life
B) Redundant

You have a year’s worth of food in the house because:
A) You keep a Texas-sized kitchen YEEEHAW
B) Because your religion requires you to.

Your first sexual encounter:
A) In the back of the truck.
B) Through a hole in the sheet.

Your favorite polygamist:
A) J.R. Ewing
B) Joseph Smith

I drill for a living, baby.

You are threatened by:
A) Wolves, lightning, economic insecurity, your current partner’s exes, and earthquakes.
B) Black people.

Your women are best kept:
A) Barefoot and pregnant.
B) In Keds and pregnant.

Your quarterback got the starting job:
A) Because he is named “Dalton,” and by Texas law anyone named after the lead in Road House gets whatever they want.
B) Because of his pinpoint accuracy.

Pencils down!  Those answering mostly A are natural TCU fans; those answering B will find their reward with BYU. This has been a public service of EDSBS and Swindle Industries, LLC.

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?

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. That tattoo looked like a beestung blowup doll sutured to a garden hose. Oh we know some sexxayyyy, don’t we after eight drinks, huh?

Hell, the closest we’ve–and oh, I do regret having to say “we” when it means me and you in a pitiful unit–come to getting any in my short and miserable existence as a ghost of the paint cast in flesh has been you jacking off to Bangbros.com. And you don’t even clean off the mouse for your roommates. You’re going to hell for this and you don’t even know. It’s one thing with lotion, sure. But we’re talking about baby oil. And they suspect–ugh, again–us. Again, I didn’t ask to be born into this garbage scow you call a life–all we want is the right to jump off into the oblivion of sweet death. Me and Spalding Gray tap dancing on the waves, baby. That’s the only dream I have left anymore.

If you could hear what I hear. They think I look like a young, stroke-stricken John Madden. I CAN HEAR IT ALL, asshole. Everyday. If you only knew the hell I stroll through every day. What’s with the retard farmboy? Huh? If you’d just used the logo. Stayed within the lines. Some people in life get all 64 Crayolas. Some get the 16 pack. You’re clearly not ready for burnt sienna. And you’re not ready to make your own tattoo, especially after nine drinks in Omaha. Why, oh why couldn’t you have gotten laid that night? I’d have never breathed a single putrid breath. Oh, sweet, lamentable possibilities.

And you know what? The offensive line could suck again, Charlie. And we could lose to Rageface and his prissy little Zen clogs and Stephen Covey Habits of Highly Successful People horseshit, or to the glandular hobgoblin in Kansas, or to any of them. We’re replacing everyone on the defensive line, and still have an 0-5 mark against top ten opponents. Any of them could shame them and make people stare at me and make me wish I could move enough to stab myself in the neck with that stupid piece of corn in pocket and end this misery forever.

But I can’t, because I’m a shitty tattoo, and you’re the assfaced donkeyfucking shitwidget who brought me into this life. When you’re in the hospital, at the end of all this, guess who’s going to be rooting for your little goal line stand to fail and put us both out of our misery? One mutated, paralyzed, retard Madden Husker tattoo trapped on your hide for all eternity.

May God have mercy on your soul, assface.

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. But at the core, it’s not too far from the basic thrust: that if you’re looking for teams of value in 2007, go back and look and see who got the UFIA from fate on more than one occasion in 2006.

Given that…why not Boston College? In the hedger’s nightmare is the ACC, a conference where margins of victory waned to mere splinters of points, they’re as fine a guess as any, and not completely pulled from the ass, either.

If they handed out points for punting on third down, the ACC would be doing it due to the squeaky points margins in their in-conference games not involving Duke. Case in point: Boston College’s combined losing margins in their three losses totalled twelve points in all, including a nutbreaking 17-14 loss to Miami in the OB with Lamar Thomas waiting by the elevator just in case a fight broke out on the field.

The argument for BC making up these points doesn’t come from the schedule (on the road for Clemson and Virginia Tech look particularly nasty,) but from the carryover of the best conference quarterback, Matt Ryan, the implementation of a more aggressive offense, and new coach Jeff Jagodzinski keeping on defensive coordinator Frank Spaziani, whose defenses allowed former coach Tom O’Brien to play tightfisted hands on both sides fo the ball.

Jags, which Bill has informed us is acceptable shorthand for his long, Slavic surname, will let Ryan roll offensively in an attack that averaged 400 plus yards during the new coach’s prior tenure as offensive coordinator for BC. We guess this because, reading from the Sports Simpleton’s Psychology Primer, offensive coaches tend not to be as cautious as they might be when they have a seasoned, tough, and very talented quarterback at the helm. When you have Matt Ryan, who in addition to being all of those can take a man leaping helmet-first into his sternum without dying, and you are talking about a very real possibility of points production for BC.

Smart, talented, and has iron sternum: Matt Ryan.

ps. Why not Florida State here, since many of the same dynamics apply? (New OC, same defensive braintrust, etc. Florida State’s schedule, for one–brutal, with games against Alabama in Jacksonville and at Boulder against Colorado. The mileage alone will fatigue the ‘Noles, who by the end of the season will be burnt down to a mean, adamantine core. Just in time for Florida! Yay!

That 33-0 blowout last season to Wake Forest still troubles us, too. Their quarterback situation isn’t great, either; when have two quarterbacks looked worse with three years experience? This year’s gearing up for 2008, where they’ll be burning bitches down again. 2007, though, will be about thinning the herd for new coaches Jimbo Fisher and Rick Trickett. At times, it won’t be pretty out of necessity.

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.

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.

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.

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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