The same company must have been able to sell multiple schools on the same idea in a single offseason without alerting the other, since Arizona State University, Boston College, and now Colorado have all used the same interactive marketing app where you enter your name, phone number, and then get a virtual tour through the football offices where your name gets plastered onto welcome boards, a letter, and then the endzone.

And good for them: they managed to sell the same undoubtedly expensive product to three programs without altering the basic framework a lot, i.e. “having to do a lot of work.” The Colorado variation at least has two wrinkles in your name appearing on Ralphie’s blanket, and in Coach Dan Hawkins making what is by far the most JACKED AND ENTHUSED call to your phone. Making his third recruiting trip of the summer, Buttfuck McGee was impressed by the luxe facilities at CU, the array of impressive alumni appearing in the video (Hey! Joel Klatt! How many fingers am I holding up?), and the cameo by Bill McCartney. No, don’t be offended by the name. It’s pronounced “Philip,” a confusion created by the spelling in the original Icelandic.

Hawkins, by the way, just suffered a bout with kidney stones so tenacious they required surgery. Naturally, he refers to this episode as “a gift.” That’s usually the way we think about episodes involving tiny, barbed mineral deposits engaged in a slow, excruciating tumble through our urinary tract. Heck, that’s like Christmas, actually! A Christmas where blood comes out of your pee-pee and you put Dilaudid in your eggnog every ten minutes to keep from dying from the pain.

ESPN just released their announcer pairings for the fall, something we found via Pat Forde’s Twitter feed. We thank you and your majestic frontispiece of a hairstyle, Mr. Forde. It could cut a skirt steak dragged across it into fajita strips ready for the skillet.

The new arrangements for the fall:

Matt Millen’s Inexplicable Employment Continues. What Matt Millen has to offer to college football that Chris Spielman doesn’t is clear: the stigma of reeking, carrion-strong failure from being the worst GM in the history of the NFL. If the stench is real, his new broadcast partners Sean McDonough will have to wear a gas mask. This would probably be just as good as most in-game commentary, now that we think about it. Holly Rowe moves over from ESPN to join them for ABC Saturdays, and it will probably be a bit blander overall than the Spielman/McDonough combo since Millen’s not likely to say anything as cool as “hunt, dog, hunt!”

Spielman moves to work with Dave Pasch and Bob Griese, and they’ll be working the noon game on ESPN.

The Champagne Crew: Nessler, Blackledge, and Andrews keep the ESPN Saturday Prime Time slot, a.k.a. The Ron Franklin Suite. Musberger, Herbstreit, and Salters on Saturday’s Blue-Ribbon game stay strong, as well.

Caucasian Menudo: The trio of James, Fowler, and Palmer remain together, who for our buck were the most gregarious, entertaining, freewheeling, and surprising crew last year in how much fun they had in the booth together.

Palmer gets additional face time as an in-studio analyst on Saturdays, thus expanding the Gator Nation’s reach into even our most hallowed halls of power like College Football Live. The Jort Illuminati grows in power; we approve. Andrews remains with them, and should really just start brandishing a combat shotgun everywhere she goes.

James will also see a shuffle as he joins Mike Patrick and Heather Cox for Saturday broadcasts on ESPN. (more…)

CONSUME. Now available in selected regional newsstands across America, Gator Gridiron profiles the 2009 Florida Gators football team as only we can: WITH HUNDREDS OF NUDE PHOTOS. That’s right, nude photos of beautiful celebrities performing despicable but riveting acts with all manner of implements and other beautiful celebrities.

Sure, you like Dan Shanoff, but you’ll like him better when we take his piece Tebow: Great… Or Greatest? and pair it with a picture of Kristen Bell from her Veronica Mars days in a bikini soaping up a tranquilized American alligator! HEY-YAH!!! She’s a wiry one! Just wait until you get until the pieces by Chrison Charlie Strong’s defense and the evolution of Tim Tebow. They’re 100% genius, but wait until you see his brilliant analysis matched up against ACTUAL PICTURES OF NAKED ERIN ANDREWS NAKED ERIN ANDREWS.*

Order here: Holly, Joel, Scott, Ryan, T. Kyle, and some random anarchist named Spencer Hall are all included, and at 124 pages it is certainly more information than one might require about the 2009 Florida Gators.

*”NAKED ERIN ANDREWS” is Polish for “accurate diagrams of spread formations lining up against a standard 4-3 defense.” We apologize for any inconvenience. Also there are no other nude photos in the guide except for the author’s photo. You pay 12 bucks, you get exactly 12 bucks worth.

It’s an ingenious piece of marketing, yes (HT: Ted Miller): you type in your name, and you not only get a personalized video tour through the Sun Devils football offices, but also a phone call from Dennis Erickson telling you how important you are, and about the time he ran the Angry Post-Hole Digger drill with a one-armed woman in Saskatchewan for two hours straight once in a Comfort Inn. (”Had to burn the sheets afterwards that time!”)

It is all very well done, though we might suggest one modification, brilliant marketing people at Arizona State: a filter. These are all screencaps from various submissions, and are not photoshopped. (Holly, of course, contributed mightily.)

(more…)

The Mark Bradley Experiment is an attempt to cobble together every cliche and needlessly inflammatory hack bored columnists use to piece together offseason pieces. It takes its name from a master of the form, Mark Bradley of the AJC. Enjoy.

Just a few things you can MARK my words about this college offseason…

Nick Saban’s Alabama team flopped down the stretch last year. If they go the wrong kind of 10-2 again, what stops a tide of unhappiness from sweeping Saban away? HMMMMM??? MARK my words, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better in Tuscaloosa.

Terrelle Pryor is a prima donna waiting to happen. Someone get him a tiara…MARK my words.

Poke!

If Dabo Swinney fails to be competitive, he won’t be given a lot of time by Clemson boosters, who’ll say “Yabba Dabo Don’t” to a contract extension. (more…)

If you’d like to see us tap out, there’s plenty of hot choking action here. Sure, it’s about ten minutes of action condensed into one, but we looked just as bad getting into submission holds as we looked succumbing to them.

Also, we wrote this up, because it is the greatest video ever in the history of videos featuring dudes with mullets getting KTFO’d, and because it teaches us all a valuable lesson about the importance of not getting punched in the head.

OHHHHH, Monsieur.

Hopefully a generous new asshole has been torn for the craptacular moron-drama networks like to set up around sporting events. Remember, it’s not a fairy tale until someone dies, is put into a trance, is transformed into some kind of hideous beast, or is trapped in a bottle forever. And if all of these happens in a single person’s life…well, you could only call him by one name, then.

He is…the most interesting man in the world: Schnellenberger. Stay thirsty, my friends.

According to David Whitley, you’re lucky you get any Florida State coverage at all:

It used to be the same in Tallahassee. Now when Bobby Bowden walks off the practice field, he is usually greeted by the Sentinel’s Andrew Carter, someone from the Tallahassee Democrat and maybe a couple of students working part-time for state papers.

Whitley then goes on to bemoan how this is a result of Florida moving the needle more than the Seminoles at the moment, and how this will lead to the end of democracy as we know it, dogs driving limousines over fields of innocent babies, and the sun turning purple and winking at all of us shortly before exploding and obliterating the entire universe.

It is surely it is all exactly this serious without exaggeration, but if you would like Florida State coverage, we have the perfect solution. Just go to Rivals.com or Scout, who are more than happy to share the evolving depth chart, complimentary team news, and bits of interesting but non-threatening team gossip, and then throw in random quotes from a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. See, it works:

FSU’s quarterbacks performed well in the scrimmage, something coach Bobby Bowden said was a result of all the hard work the Seminoles had put in over the course of the spring.

Florida State’s spring game is on Saturday.

See? You’re missing nothing. It reads like every other article on Florida State football you’ve ever read. As for the accusation that Florida State fans won’t ever read anything honestly critical about their program, two points. One: fans typically don’t believe anything negative written about their program anyway. Two: anyone who thinks fans themselves aren’t critical of their teams and more than willing to traffic in rumor despite the best efforts of administration and media to quell those rumors missed the entire Houston Nutt debacle.

We join Jim Tressel in mid-press conference on the Big Ten Network. Let’s pop in and see what he’s saying!

Jim Tressel: We’ve got a lot of people to replace on this team. Can you imagine how you guys would feel if you lost a third of the people in your company?

Tressel: Yeah, except we can replace our guys.

Reporters: [silence]

Tressel: Wait, there really are fewer of you. I just thought you were all out filling out law school applications, getting gastric bypass surgery, but good great googly moogly–it looks like someone served plague for dinner last week in here.

Reporter1: It’s been hard. (more…)

Occasionally, even we think the Church of Tebow goes into Cultsylvania. But the chance to put some Tebow in your Tebow was too much to resist, we suppose.