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. The rule is a bad one, especially when called as insanely as it was against Jake Locker above, but it’s unmanageable not just in its content, but in its further clouding of the ol’ mental windshield for officials already trying to balance a zillion things at once. People’s cognition tends to suffer as more variables are thrown in, something that applies to both quarterbacks and officials. Add enough of them, and soon the rule book is as incomprehensible and unpracticeable as the Dave Clawson offense.

Thus Mack Brown’s fear of what may result from the new emphasis on ejecting players for above the neck contact from defenders: he’s terrified of the possibilities of officials being given one more thing to think about and interpret, and of watching the Texas program’s coaching scion, Will Muschamp, die on the sideline as his head explodes on a particularly ticky-tacky call against Sergio Kindle in a big game.

In the same Kirk Bohls article R.C. Slocum makes an even darker point: not only does an additional fuzzy and ultimately subjective rule make for official confusion, but it opens the door for corrupt officials to influence games even more than they might already:

“I’ve got nothing against officials,” Slocum said, “but we’ve got politicians who have less than perfect integrity. Bankers, doctors, preachers, lawyers all have problems, but we’ve got no crooked officials?

“We’ve got TV ministers and priests, some of them proven not to be (upstanding), and it’s unthinkable that a whole group of officials have total integrity? It’s an insult to our intelligence.”

This will get out hand, gentlemen. And when it does, you’ll experience rage untold. Even money on the most egregious being from the blind collection of random hankie machines called the Pac-10 Officiating Corps, since they’ve been the ones most likely to walk face-first into the logical bear traps of new rules. (Dan Fouts’ beard still deserves a group hug for making the “Horrible call!” judgment on the spot, and for doing this with his alma mater getting the upside of a demonstrably monstrous call.)

Relevant metaphor goes here.

In all fairness, he’s citing the NCAA’s Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Charlotte Westerhaus, who has a lengthy explanation why there isn’t a Rooney Rule–a rule requiring a team to interview at least one minority candidate–for a position. (And no, Bret Bielema, your claim to be “criminally hung” does not make you a minority, dude.)

Her long, long explanation includes this stat:

Dedicated social change agents and pundits who urge the NCAA to adopt the “Rooney Rule” may be unaware of of another important reality – more candidates of color are being interviewed for head coaching positions than ever before. The fact of the matter is that 27 candidates of color were interviewed for 22 vacancies at the Division I level last fall. These numbers far exceed the number of mandated head coaching interviews of minorities conducted by the NFL.

A useless stat, really. Of the 22 vacancies, only 4 went to minority coaches: Dewayne Walker, Mike Haywood, Mike Locksley, and Ron English. Of the nine post season switches in the NFL, three went to minority candidates. That’s a 33 percent to 18 percent difference in the small sample size of one year, proving nothing statistically but at least showing that Westerhaus’ numbers lean toward fig-leaf territory for this term’s hirings.

We’re not a quota person–let each school embarrass itself, since college football is open and lawless like that–but being economically inclined in terms of explaining things, the lack of minority head coaches relative to the number of minority players at the NCAA level has way more to do with the economic pressures faced by black players in particular, and way less to do with an overt institutionalized racism. GAs make next to nothing, and the post-grad safety net is simply not there as often for black players wanting to get into coaching as it is for white players.

(Note we said: “as often.” You paid off your student loans by working three jobs and scraping the barnacles off boats for extra money with your eyelids. Congratulations on being awesome. You did it all by yourself, right down to the oxygen you brought with you to breathe everyd day, white guy. You’re like John Galt, but with titanium nuts that taste like caramel! You’d care about this compliment/mockery, but others are irrelevant to your circumstances and outcomes, so you really shouldn’t even really be reading this Ayn Rand blows goats she bred by herself from thin air.)

Florida State will appeal the NCAA ruling in an academic fraud case including the vacating of 14 wins, but should the University lose the appeal Bowden will likely try a new tack. Rather than refuse to honor the NCAA, Florida State will instead lobby for the inclusion of several victories he participated in as a major in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

Bowden, seen here with Joe Paterno in happier times (i.e., the 1930s)

“Bowden wants that record badly enough to go that far,” said one administration source close to the situation who spoke to the AP anonymously. According to the source, Bowden is compiling documentation to back up claims of a share in at least 22 Confederate military victories, including the engagements of Bull Run (referred to as Manassas in FSU documents,) Fredericksburg, and Fort Sumter.

Under the current ruling, Bowden will lose up to 14 games after Florida State athletes were found to have received unfair academic assistance in a music appreciation class. Bowden plans to offset this by claiming to have overseen key units in battle, an exercise the argument will creatively analogize to coaching a football team.

Experts are skeptical. When reached for comment, Civil War historian and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said: “No.” When pressed for clarification, she repeated: “No.” While historians may be suspicious, NCAA watchers believe the argument could pass for any number of reasons.

“They may approve it in a clerical error, accidentally set fire to the paperwork, or just simply forget about it and stare at a particularly arresting game of Minesweeper for three or four years,” said David Johnson, a longtime NCAA-watcher and public policy professor at the University of North Carolina. “There’s really no telling how they could screw it up, but the one certainty is that they will, and that Bowden will likely get the wins.”

Granting all 22 victories to Bowden would give the coach a nearly insurmountable seven game margin over Penn State coach Joe Paterno. Paterno had no comment on Wednesday, but sources did say if the Florida State petition is granted Paterno could counter by seeking to include victories from not only the Civil War, but also his contributions to the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, Lord Kitchener’s Sudanese Expedition, the Punic Wars, and his pivotal role in ending the Thirty Years’ War.

A source close to Paterno said “Bowden can bring it on. If he wants to go down that rabbit hole, we will. Joe was at the battle of Marathon, and has the missing eye and scars to prove it. Bowden will lose this game with Joe every time.”

–Empty stands. (University of Colorado and others as judged acceptable under this term. Hey, don’t blame us: blame Google’s first image result for “empty stands college football.” )

–Introduce football recruits over loudspeaker…at student parking office administration building.

–Refrain from saying the word “Football” in connection with anything. Instead, make references to “American strategy dashing,” “Collisionball,” “Smashypants,” “Oblate Spheroid Chase,” “Directed Tag,” “Concussery,” “Interesting Rugby,” and “Freedom Crushball.”

–Scoring touchdowns (Syracuse, Auburn, and Mississippi State Universities excepted from this by rule.)

–The presence of cheerleaders in uniform at any event, who must by rule be out of their uniforms. (And not like that, you sad, sad person you.)

–Screaming, incoherent drunks yelling at recruits full bore. (Only permitted if screaming, incoherent drunks are in fact boosters, and they usually are.)

Vidal Hazelton, the former USC wide receiver from Staten Island, has been barred from talking to any Pac-10 teams and Notre Dame in his search for a new school, the Torrance Daily Breeze reported on Thursday.

Well, transferring to Idaho is still on the table.

Hazelton’s from Staten Island, NY, so declaring West Coast verboten likely isn’t that big a deal for someone wanting to transfer closer to home. That’s not the point: Hazelton should have the right to transfer wherever he can get an offer, and USC shouldn’t be allowed to hold him once he’s made the decision to transfer. The year penalty–or some variation thereof–makes sense to discourage transfers, but restricting where a player goes after the transfer makes not using the word “chattel” very, very difficult when talking about players’ relationship with schools in the NCAA.

In sum, it is a crappy situation. (Hey, at least Florida crapped itself in an individual case, as opposed to 22 players doing it all at once on the field at home against Alabama and in Jacksonville.)

From Myles Brand’s bit in the Huffington Post on the role of profit in collegiate athletics:

Neither higher education, of which college sports is only a small part, nor intercollegiate athletics is truly capitalistic. They do not generate revenue to make a profit; they generate revenue to fulfill a purpose, to meet the mission of higher education.

From the Sports Business Journal:

The SEC’s total payout to its schools in 2007-08 was $63.6 million after the conference’s cut. TV revenue is distributed among the 12 universities and the league; each school received about $5.3 million this past fiscal year. Under the new deal, that annual number could leap to as much as $15 million per school, which is just shy of the projected average revenue Big Ten schools get from their TV deals each year.

Myles Brand: the Kofi Annan of college athletics. Please don’t shoot each other. Really. It’s quite poor form. We deplore this violence and violation of international law. Cease and desist or face sanction. No, that’s not a very polite thing to do with a tank. Heavens, are you throwing that woman into a deep-fryer? No, that’s not specifically against charter, but it’s certainly on the face a serious violation of her human rights. I fear you shall be receiving a sternly worded letter of rebuke from me, and a condemnation from the Security Council will narrowly pass, with China and Russia abstaining, of course…

Oh, and in unrelated news, Chile knows how to throw a death-party:

Either that’s a volcano and thunderstorm going off simultaneously, or we’ve just found exclusive pictures of Nick Saban’s new office. More photos here.

The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program (APP) is creating positive behavioral change among Division I institutions, according to new four-year data released May 6.

The multi-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) data – with four years of data collection available for the first time – show upward trends in several categories, especially from 2005-06 to 2006-07.

GET DOWN, PARTY PEOPLE! GET DOWN!

We’re still digging through the data for this year, made even more fun by the NCAA’s propensity for releasing a press release on one page, a commentary on another, a spreadsheet here, a comprehensive list hosted on a Russian Military server and only accessible via several hours of white-knuckle hackery. Fortunately, the Indy Star has them all compiled nicely for you so you can revel in the uproarious ironies of a system where the University of Florida’s football team is on par with the United States Military Academy’s team in academic performance, and where Eastern Kentucky pwnz them both.

In the meantime, the only penalties of any relevance to college football go to Kansas and Washington State, who will suffer scholarship losses due to underwhelming APR scores. NCAA, beware: Mark Mangino will have his real estate agent call you to voice his displeasure with your metrics!

The NCAA first has decided to pursue where the FBI has relented in the points-shaving scandal at Toledo, conducting its own investigation into the university’s handling of the Harvey “Scooter” McDougle case. McDougle, a running back, had been accused of taking money from a Detroit gambler to recruit others to shave points in football and basketball games at Toledo.

The charges against McDougle have been dropped, but the NCAA presses forward:

“We have had repeated contacts with the university … and have been working collaboratively, including a previous campus visit to interview an individual about a potential sports wagering issue that had been brought to our attention,” NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Meaning that doing this as a MAC school could get you fucking fried by the NCAA, especially on the heels of the stories of Toledo coaches taking the company card to pay for expenses during trips to Germany to go “recruiting.” In Germany. Where the only football played outside of NFL Europe involves guys named Beckenbauer, Voeller, and Ballack.

Second, the NCAA’s reconsidering its ban on text messaging and other forms of digital communication. OMG URBN IZ XCTED NCAA WUZ SO NF!!! More than thirty schools filed override complaints in regards to the ruling, meaning it will be reviewed.

(Pause. Inhale. Exhale.)

There’s plenty of monkey feces to hurl at everyone here–grab an umbrella, because we’re about to make it rain. First, poop on Gary Barnett for not hiring someone to notice the little things that kill or make management of something as large as a football program, or heaps of shit on him for letting little shitbag things like this fly under his extremely underpowered mental radar without considering the potential consequences cloud his thinking.

Sooper Genious Barnett strikes from beyond the career grave.

We now, more than ever, imagine Gary Barnett as the guy who fails to claim an elephant-size chunk of income from his taxes (”Hey, I never imagined the BurnLounge account would do so well, man.”) and then just hopes that sending the auditors out to his house to dig through piles of Vitamin Shoppe receipts costs more than the money they’d recoup off the audit.

Also, piles of feces hurled to the NCAA for the deepening mess that are its illegal benefits rules. The Colorado thing is most definitely a violation under the rules, but why stop with what you’ve got? Signal to Noise is thinking fierce when he suggests in a very Modest Proposal-ish way that it doesn’t go far enough–the NCAA should codify student behavior toward athletes, because surely the status and esteem they get affords unfair benefits to them in the form of especially forceful blowjobs, entry to private parties, and ultimately airtime on ESPN, a form of advertisement whose price far exceeds the $61,000 or so Colorado spent on extra calories for walk-ons.

And if you don’t think the cash value of especially forceful blowjobs and free advertising for your football skills exceeds $61,000 dollars and isn’t a benefit other students don’t get…well, like people who don’t smoke Tarrlytons, then fuck you. In the name of logic, we won’t be satisfied until Myles Brand spends a few minutes of the day writing a code stating that if a student athlete doesn’t get teeth and also gets a push on the dirty doorbell from a fellatrix, then a regular student should, too.

–Zybrowka Vodka. Drink of the gods. We could drink a half a bottle and run a 5K through the middle of Dekalb Avenue during rush hour IN the variable lane. Scratch that–“have” run a 5K through the middle of Dekalb Avenue during rush hour. With the police “pacing” us.

–Coffee. Jamaica Blue Mountain, Waffle House swill poured into a human skull straight off the crack of Mario Batali’s sweaty ass crack…whatever. Caffeine buzz GIMME GIMME GIMME.

–Japanese bar mix. Oooh, god-kissed little soy sauce-encrusted soulfuckers, we will inhale you like you were strapped to our face in a feed bag.

–Pure Protein Shakes. You only think we drink these for healthy reasons, made with the mix, ice, buffalo milk yogurt (because buffalo are hardcore and cows aren’t, bitches) and whatever fruit/meat/spare postal packaging is lying on the counter. In truth, it’s for when you’re too lazy to actually fix a meal, much less going to the trouble of chewing one.

Which one of these Swindle staples does the NCAA ban? If you threw a few steak nuggests in, the protein shake might be out of the running as something a strength coach could give to an athlete. Coffee, too, thanks to the caffeine. (Zybrowka’s out too, along with hero-…wait. What fucking genius said we couldn’t give the kids heroin anymore? Jesus, these people…)

Demon java! Our second favorite Colombian import and NCAA bugbear. The first is Shakira, you devious, devious people…

Via the Fanhouse:

“The NCAA came out with rules which say that we can’t give muscle-building products.

“If we give [the athletes] weight-gain products, there must be a limit of 30 percent protein. That means all the rest, 70 percent, is bad stuff like sugar. Really, we couldn’t give them peanut butter or milk. I’ve never understood that rule.”

Again, when faced with the hydra of writing coherent policy, the NCAA swung its dull broadsword and beheaded itself in the process. (Which means the score is hydra, 20 or so heads, you, NCAA member institution, none.) Athletes seek out supplements on their own now, usually doing so with the expertise one can expect from an untrained 18 year old doing anything complex and difficult: shoddily, haphazardly, and often purchasing supplements prohibited by the NCAA’s banned substances list.

This list includes caffeine down to trace amounts in tests, meaning coaches might not be able to give players so much as a strong cup of coffee pre-game. Deacon Jones, for one, would be appalled. The L.A. Rams legend’s pregame ritual before every game: two cups of black coffee on an empty stomach.

(Throw a donut on top of that, and that’ll make you want to skin a troop of Boy Scouts alive for so much as breathing in your direction.)

Bennett went on anyway until the Dorkstapo found him:

I continued blogging until the bottom of the fifth inning, an NCAA representative came to my seat on press row and asked for my credential and asked me to leave. I complied.

Blogging patriot? Brian Bennett, now-rebel blogger.

Somewhere, Walter Benjamin is wandering the streets of the afterlife in a leisurely fashion and laughing to himself. Everyone in the stadium holding a Blackberry or cell phone who said as much as a peep about the game in a digital medium stands guilty of what Bennett did–relaying live information about a copyrighted event. As the Courier-Journal pointed out, the semantic triple lindy here is this: the NCAA seeks not to protect its broadcast rights, but to copyright the actual live facts of the event:

Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV, everybody sees it. They (the NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.

Thus…our liveblogs of games could be verboten. Along with any updates we send to friends over the internet, any discussion, a picture we snap at the game that gets posted a website with fifteen readers and .38 cents of monthly revenue…all sacrosanct property of the NCAA, or possibly ESPN, or Fox, or whomever holds the broadcast rights to the event. It’s a stance only the finest minds of the 18th century could have invented.

We didn’t care at all about the College World Series now, but just to piss off the NCAA we’ll post a live update while watching the game just to chafe their harbls right good. This is the glorious age of amateurs, and not its centripetal phase, either. Until the NCAA starts taking away cell phones at the gate, Brian Bennett or any other blogger can perform the nastiest of protests: they can buy a seat and immediately start texting away.

Unless the next step is cell phone jammers at stadiums. Don’t put it past them.

And then, the children run down the street, clutching white papers with baby blue print on the letterhead: THE APR’S OUT! THE APR’s OUT!!!

Jump for joy, piglet! The APR’s out!

The NCAA’s attempt to quantify the reconciliation of athletics and academics did indeed come out yesterday, and it lives up to its reputation again as being one of the sternest, least forgiving gauges of academic performance in small schools never hoping to even play in a bowl game or sell a single piece of NCAA merchandise. The letters stand for Academic Progress Rate, but we can substitute any number of better source words for the acronym APR:

Abstruse Pedantic Ruse

Auburn? Pretty Ridiculous.

Athletes Placed in Remedials

Annual Pipsqueak Reaming

The last one is particularly apt. The schools receiving the most serious scholarship penalties and Myles Brand finger-wagging all come from college sport’s Christmas Islands: Northern Arizona University, Texas Southern, Tennessee-Chattanooga, San Jose State…and most snidely, HBCUs and schools affected by Hurricane Katrina. (Myles Brand doesn’t care about black people! ) Oh, and FIU and Georgia Southern. Those puppies got kicked, too.

The only big school of note in anything resembling trouble is the University of Arizona, which will lose four scholarships
next year following a dismal APR score. Everyone else skates, and will likely continue to. Why? Let Myles “the Hammer” Brand answer that query:

“It is important … to understand that the faculty of each college or university, rather than the NCAA, determines courses that will be taught, the standards for instruction and the requirements for degrees. They are also responsible for monitoring against academic abuse or fraud, and they take these responsibilities seriously. It is unlikely that any intrusion by the NCAA into this realm would be either practical, successful or welcome.”

Hello, prized linebacker. That D is being changed to a “C”, and as long as the University’s not looking or caring, no one else is going to sniff around no matter how rank the smell gets. The NCAA pads the natural loophole in the policy with yet another loophole cannily spotted by the vigilant attorneys over at Miami HawkTalk: the NCAA takes away the “squad size adjustment” next year, which makes next year’s APR look like a potential killing floor for dumbish teams, right?

You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir! The teams in question have to have a workable plan in place to improve–a plan and nothing more, really, creating a garage-door sized hole in the policy for schools to run whole convoys through. In truth, all a school needs to invest in to keep athletics free and clear of suspicion is a robust compliance office capable of running interference.

This post is therefore sponsored by the burgeoning field of NCAA compliance and the American Union of NCAA Compliance Officers. Through an increasingly incoherent and flexible policy, the NCAA’s done little more than subsidize the growth of an industry devoted solely to countering its own policies, and one that will likely require the services of that most pricey and ornery of professionals: the attorney. Schools unable to afford representation will gradually be razed out of sport, since the market will clip the weaker competition (HBCUs and San Jose States of the world) out of business.

In the future, the best defense in college football won’t be wearing a mouth guard and eyeblack. They’ll be carrying a valise and a J.D. from a top 25 law school, and their playbook will be much, much more complicated than that of its opposition for one very good reason: the other team faxed them the game plan before kickoff.

Brandon Warren cannot play this Division 1 football you speak of, sir. Beginning the long list of things we’d at least like to mention…Bobby Bowden refuses to grant a release of scholarship to TE Brandon Warren, who initially signed on with the Seminoles before flaking out mid-semester and leaving school to take care of his ailing mother.

Google Image: making the symbolism just a bit too easy.

Seminolians claim Warren’s just homesick and dredging up his mother’s illness to excuse himself from his contractual obligations to FSU, all the while convincing the only recruit he was in charge of showing around the campus to make a firm commitment to the University of Tennessee. That, for the record, is not Florida State, the school he played a smidge of football at this past year.

Warren…um, Warren-ites claim he’s got a legitimate case. An FSU review board didn’t think so, so Warren’s on to pleading his case with the NCAA for a hardship (prognosis: meh) or to playing for a D-1AA or NAIA team. Carson-Newman, raise up!

Sit down: we’re actually going to give Bobby Bowden the benefit of the doubt here, since we’re unsure on whether FSU as a whole are being dicks to a kid who just wants out of a place he obviously didn’t like very much. We are sure, though, that today will involve a nap for Bowden under a soft blanket in a quiet, cool room. That’s a certainty.

Las Cronicas… continue for Boss Hawg. Hootens has a video interview with Nutt. His mannerisms are something a reader captured better than we can:

Just watch it. I’m a cop and I’m telling you his nervous mannerisims reek of deception.

Houston, don’t take the poly. Just don’t you may think you can beat the machine by flexing your ass muscles, but it won’t work. Trust us here. A drug charge in Malaysia’s hard to beat, but we only did it with a suitcase full of cash and the help of wily Nigerian we only knew as “Harabe.” The lie detector, though, worked just fine.

Michiganders and Vicodin. No charges, but two Michigan football players pulled over in a car with marijuana and Vicodin (the capital v is for “Very, very numb”) only adds a nettle to the thorny offseason Michigan’s endured already. Lloyd presumably closed practice in order to strip search players for contraband. Lab results are pending, but according to Jim Delany, Big Ten football players are smart enough to do their own lab work, and will have them processed shortly. Too bad SEC players steal the lab equipment in plain sight and then outrun them.

NCAA cracking down on prep schools. More Pete Thamel digdugging through the pay-to-play prep system used very successfully by basketball schools and to a lesser extent by football programs. The greatest beneficiary? Junior colleges, who already salivating over the chance to pick up the slack:

Byrnes also said those benefiting the most from this rule were junior colleges.

“They went from eating Caesar salad to prime rib,” Byrnes said.

Prime rib’s awfully fatty. Then again, so are many linemen moving slowly up the juco ladder to big programs, so the metaphorical fit is an apt one.

Finally, a chance to read half-assed commentary about cricket. We’re slowly but surely starting up the Fanhaus, the cosmopolitan freakshow section of AOL’s Fanhouse focusing exclusively on the wild, wacky, and often virally contagious world of international sport.
Did you know that a funeral service sponsors the World Lawn Bowling Championships? Or that Aussie cricket players live like Colin Farrell, minus the herpes and half-assed homemade porno? You do now.

Love has stepped on both of these people with a hobnailed boot. Larry Munson is the sole property of the Georgia Bulldogs we envy openly and shamelessly, an announcer with just a pinch of Minnesota nose to him who sounds like an ages old tortoise sipping whiskey while broadcasting the game from somewhere deep inside Mammoth Cave. He’s a national treasure, he broadcasts Georgia football, and the combination of the two facts is proof that God blesses even the wretchedest on this planet with something good and pure.

Paul brings us the news and audio behind someone paying Munson to do a voiceover for their wedding. Personally, we think given the divine desperation Munson can summon up in his best moments, his narration of a divorce would be even better.

For the uninitiated, here’s a compilation of Munson’s finest lunacy. Even with all that blasted, scabrous red all over the screen, it’s still run-flat awesome. OH MY GOD A TOUCHDOWN MY GOD A TOUCHDOWN–even the teetotalingest finger-wagging Baptist forgave him for that, which you may see around the 2:07 mark.

NCAA officially files their mea culpa. Rule 3-2-5-e, which suffered a severe aneurysm in March, gets the official DNR order signed and approved by the NCAA. Spit on the ground twice in its memory.

Way more effective than that old ‘G’ Formation. It’s the offseason–help yourself to a little football history as Corn Nation examines the history of the wacky ‘T’ Formation. Not explained in the article: why the hell the Seahawks have it in Madden.

SMQ is Jacob wrestling the angel, and you’re not even watching. Sunday Morning Quarterback is rolling through every team in the land again and you’re not even paying attention. You owe him makeup sex, a nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and at least two romantic comedies for your negligence. And no, The 13th Warrior is not a romantic comedy, even if we told you it was. (Because nothing gets us in the mood like Viking Death,, but we’re not normal.)

Best. Shirts. Ever. Take sporting debate on the road with you with Dan Shanoff’s stellar array of Gator/Duke debate shirts. Or, if you’re less inclined to debate, you could just wear one of ours (click to go to the shop and buy, say, thirty of them for your friends:)

Tang still double-entendre funny! Gravity pulls down! And Nick Saban? Still a raving asshole to everyone and anyone around him. He’d try to talk to you a bit about this, but he hasn’t got time for this shit, even if he made time later to make time for this shit.

An anonymous tipster who did get a peek in Saban’s practices though says the coach is livid with the front seven’s lack of…well, just general lackness. But how could that be? You hired a coach who is the son of a great coach? Greatness is genetic! Look at Freddie Prinze Jr. if you don’t believe us, or Robin Thicke.

Again, repetition is the key to communication again. Pete Carroll: again, not going anywhere. Ever. For any reason. Except he’s got to stop by Whole Foods for some Newman-O’s, because they’re the best organic cookies everywhere. If you need him, he’s taking the golden unicycle.

Fuck your couch, Ed Orgeron. Via the Wiz, the best walkoff decision we’ve ever seen comes from Cliff Davis, now former backup qb at Ole Miss:

“I gave it up since they didn’t put me in the damn game,” Davis said Monday in a telephone interview. “Fed up. Football’s not paying my damn bills, so it’s time to get my education, join the working world.”

Davis left the game early in the fourth quarter, walked into the locker room, and then walked out of football for good. Coach Ed Orgeron was so shocked he didn’t even burn his house down in retaliation for his disloyalty.

Nigella Lawson: We’d still ride it like the MARTA. Cheesecake is coming, but we’d like to reiterate that Nigella may still use us for medical experiments any day of the week.