We’re attempting to do about seventy different things at once this morning–packing, filing a column, various bureaucratic tasks of a a nature so mundane they don’t bear specifying, dissolving bones in lye huh?–that we almost didn’t notice this:

(Note: Read in Foghorn Leghorn voice for maximum effect.)

If Iowa State fans are buzzing about ex-Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer, Bobby Bowden asked, then why not another former coach who built up a winner in the Southeastern Conference? Why not his son, Terry?

“The thing about it,” the Florida State football coach told The Des Moines Register on Thursday afternoon, “is that even though he hasn’t been coaching in the last eight or nine years, he’s still been (covering) ballgames every Saturday and he sees what people are doing and knows what the trends are and he’s kept up with it. Being out of (the profession) for so long, everybody’s scared of him, (but) it’s not because he’s lost any of his knowledge of the game.”

Look. He wore a tie and everything.

It is STUNNING that Bobby Bowden, when discussing a coaching vacancy, would suggest one of his sons. He has three unemployed football coaching sons to suggest, so perhaps Terry seemed the most needy at the moment, but it is hard to evaluate Bowden’s midnight departure from Auburn in the same light now that we’ve watched Auburn’s failed 2003 putsch of Tuberville and his chaotic ouster this year. It simply doesn’t seem as insane as it once did to suggest that Bowden–who actually won games at Auburn and, like Tuberville, got the axe after one bad season–might deserve another shot.

It is Friday, because we are agreeing with Bobby Bowden, and surely hallucinating from lack of sleep. Where’s our afghan? And our comforting mid-morning pudding? (HT: OPS.)

Live long enough, and you will see your hero become your oppressor, and then morph into your doppelganger, and then just at the end will change into your demon tormentor just long enough to reach through a wall, grab you with its ferocious claws, and scream until its head falls off just like the witch’s does in the horror classic Witchboard. Er…

What we’re really trying to say is that if you live long enough, you will see Bobby Bowden become Steve Spurrier who becomes Bobby Bowden. Spurrier will cede certain playcalling duties this fall to his son, Steve Spurrier, Jr. No relation there. Unless you count being his son as “relation.” Which we do.

What we didn’t really know was just how monomaniacal Spurrier was, right down to writing the plays on the wristbands of his qbs himself.

“So, I’m going to try to help the entire offense and the entire team a little bit better (now) maybe by creating a little bit more time away from the play calling,” he said, adding that last year he was the one who filled out the wristbands his quarterbacks wore. “Everybody’s sitting there looking at me and I said, ‘I’m doing everything around here, right?’ (The assistants) said, ‘That’s how you do it, Coach.’ I said, ‘You know what? It’s time maybe for you guys to get a little more involved in it.’ “

Clearly, delegation of duties was an issue.

But now, in 2008, Steve Spurrier is giving his son a plum play-calling gig a la Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden. We’d critique this as further evidence of the scourge of nepotism rearing its head again in coaching…and we do. There’s no avoiding it, even if the words SYSTEM FAIL pop up in our head when we try to critique the beloved OB. Want to play along at home? Orson as a robot. Just look at us and say, “I am a liar, everything I say is a lie.” The smoke coming from our ears is just the beginning of the mainframe damage.

You don’t make mosaics without breaking a little pottery. Here’s today’s fine tilework.

Before Photoshop, life was a dull, grey waste, filled with marauding hyenas and only the chill of the north wind to keep you company. Via the standard chain of labyrinthine links (Heisgirl to BurntOrangeNation to hyah) we have Reggie Bush’s latest fumble, again proving that life before Photoshop for the cartoonishly-minded fan was a dark, cold place with little comfort besides food and the promise of a peaceful suicide on the desolate steppes.

Heisgirl’s headline is the winning side dish to the image: “This morning I woke up to a Reggie Bush probe.”

Reggie’s latest fumble: to be recovered by VY, or just vacated?

Muppet News reports. The ND Nation suicide alert has, in light of Trattou’s defecting to the United States of Florida,
been raised to Orange, citizens. Take note and avoid sidewalks around tall office buildings in the Chicago area.

And you can go to prom! With the high school girlfriend you’ve thought about marrying! Why miss that when you can be dating college girls who want no attachments, right? Colin Dunlap of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks what’s so great about early enrollment, anyway?

Maybe I’m just too “old school” for my own good…Nonetheless, I’ll go on record and say it — I’m not a big fan of the latest craze in college football recruiting. This whole “graduating early and enrolling in college in January” business puzzles me to the core.

Somewhere, Colin’s got an old school letter jacket in a closet, and a class ring we’d wager, too. If he’s as old-school as he says, he’s also definitely writing this poised over his Tandy 300, dookie roll perched around his neck, drinking ginseng tea and pondering the mysteries of the universe while sipping some Old Gold.

Dunlap’s also likely not thinking about the fact that you could skip all the hokey high school crap, jump straight to college, start lifting weights, getting on with your life, and immediately begin your new life as a relatively independent collegiate manwhore/D-1 recruit instead of combing through the perfunctory dregs of your high school for another six months obeying curfew, sleeping in your parents’ house, and clocking meaningless hours in the same rat-trap you’ve already spent three and a half years pacing around in. But we’re just new school, we guess.

–The Annual Lloyd Carr Retirement Rumor Surfaces–SHOOT IT, SHOOOOOOT IT! This time via In The Bleachers, where a tweak to Carr’s compensation is noted in the Ann Arbor News as making a hypothetical Carr departure easier. That Carr’s in a position as a respected coach in a program emphatic about stability and tradition to retweak should be noted; in effect, no evidence of anyone but Carr having any sway over the decision has emerged. In the Big Ten, a coach like Carr could likely stay as long as he likes. Slap four zillion pounds on him, squeeze him into some cheap khakis and an orange golf shirt, and put him at Tennessee, and we’re talking about some entirely different produce, here.

This be some bull shit. SMQ tops his Chris Fowler diary with a revealing interview with Arrelious Benn. The payoff’s worth the whole article.

Really. We’re totally 8th. Perhaps you could take an interest in basketball? Frank Broyles, AD at Arkansas, lays out a persuasive case for Arkansas football in a Dallas alumni meeting. (Summary message: “Hey, assholes, we’re eighth in the conference at best! Back off!”) Teapot hysteria as only local news can give follows:

The sperm lottery pays out again. Mike Shula gets another job. Completely on his own merits using only the evidence represented by his resume and professional record. No other influences. At all. Nope.

Completely unrelated and screamingly funny terminology grab. Should we ever suspect someone of taking cocaine, we will simply refer to them as “partying with Dr. Rockso.”

They say it’s gonna snow! Gonna put White Christmas up mah nose…

When did FSU begin this long, slow, and sad descent into mediocrity? Who cares? It really doesn’t matter, as long as it’s dead, right?

For historical purposes, we think the long slide to tonight’s Emerald Bowl loss (positive thinking positive thinking positive thinking) began long, long ago with the Oklahoma/Florida State game in 2001’s Orange Bowl. Richt left. Amato was gone. Jeff Bowden would soon take Chris Rix to hell, along with the whole formerly juketastic Florida State offense, and leaving a blinded Bobby to act out a sad little redneck Shakespeare until the denouement this year–Jeff Bowden’s resignation and cashout, where he’ll wipe the tears away with Seminole booster money until the year 2012, when his annual payout will finally end, and he will have to find honest work as a barista somewhere.

Flash back with us, and remind yourself that once a badass, always a badass, as is very much the case with Roy Williams here.

Name: The Emerald Bowl. Our fingers really just wanted to keep typing here–whaaa? No improbably clunky secondary sponsor? No long modifiers? No Pioneer Purevision Bell Helicopteredness?–but that’s it. The Emerald Bowl, brought to you by Chan Gailey.

Actually, as we’ll remind you several times during this preview, Chan Gailey is not involved in this game. Florida State is playing in this game. The Emerald Bowl. Without their band, whom they’ve outsourced.

Motto: Umm…”We’re nuts about football?” None visible on their respectable website, which does mention that Florida State is playing in the game. The website also brags about being the only matchup between the ACC and the Pac-10, and, well, good for them for that, since prior Emerald Bowls featured the Mountain West versus the ACC, games either serving as grim confirmation of the Mountain West’s drastic talent deficit (losses to Boston College, Virginia Tech, and Navy) or nasty revelation re: a major program’s ability to show up for a bowl two thousand miles away from home (Georgia Tech’s humiliation in 2005.)

Since it doesn’t have a motto, we’ll just supply one free for them: “Featuring Florida State!” They already have the t-shirt, which we’ve already purchased and framed in our bathroom:

Did we mention Florida State’s playing in the Emerald Bowl?

Fake Bowl? Not really–think of it as the Chik-Fil-A Peach Bowl of the West Coast, an upstart bowl whose competent management, slick promotion, and sound invite strategy give it a robust profile for a bowl game only five years in existence. (In retrospect, the Utah/Georgia Tech invite of last year was brilliant. It helps that Utah won, of course.) The corporate partners list features just what you would expect of a well-run bowl game in the Bay Area: a newspaper, luxury hotel, gourmet food supplier, IT company, and a rubber fist emporium.
(That’s what Portal One is, right?)

On a side note, we’d give our left kidney to make the trophy for this game a rubber fist awarded by ten men in hot pants wearing angel wings. In fact, we’d even root for FSU just to see this trophy handed to a vomiting and pale Bobby Bowden.

Intrusive Corporate Sponsor: Emerald Nuts, the snack-food subsidiary of Diamond Foods, which is itself a joint venture between Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern. We give the crown of least intrusive sponsor to Emerald, since their name doubles nicely as a sponsor and title. They also do not insist on shoehorning their name and product into the full title like some people we know. (Pioneer Pure Vision Whores.)

The wonder of corporate copywriting does strike again on the site:

The Emerald Bowl exemplifies the spirit of exercise and vitality — just like the healthful, contemporary products brought to consumers by Diamond Foods.

We love contemporary products. Especially canned food and penicillin, though the day we quit drinking mead is the day you can revoke our Viking license, friend.

Tradition Rating: Around since 2002, a youngster, for sure, but still more venerable than the New Orleans Bowl. Since 2002 was announced as the year of autism, we give the Emerald Bowl a tradition rating of Hug Machine.

And you thought Mike Tirico was “the hug machine.”

Setup: ACC vs. Pac-10. One of the real value buys of the bowl season, not only does the Emerald Bowl pair an ACC and Pac-10 matchup rarely seen, it does what bowls are best for: pairing two teams of similar profile who’ve never actually played each other before. One of those teams, in case you didn’t realize, is Florida State. The other is a UCLA team still buzzing from a desperate choke-out of USC, the game allowing Florida to play in the national title game. While Florida State plays in the Emerald Bowl.

Location. San Francisco, a name not synonymous with college football but, instead, with the consumption of one’s own farts.

Matchup quality: Gourmet almond quality for half the price, here. We kept waiting for Jarvis Moss and company to incinerate the turnstile tackles of Florida State in the Florida/FSU game. This never happened, but those wanting to see a nearly grown man yanked down by the collar ten times in a night may want to tune in: UCLA’s pair of defensive ends, Justin Hickman and Bruce Davis, each have 12.5 sacks. Xavier Weatherford–the two headed tackling dummy under center for Florida State–will get abused to the degree of second-degree felony tonight. Florida State’s offensive disorder has killed qb productivity with bad protection and predictable routes all year. If Hickman presents a shadow of the menace he displayed when we saw him at Notre Dame–he vaulted a lineman on one play, a sight lesser quarterbacks than Brady Quinn would have crapped pants at–FSU’s woes will continue.

We would type something here about a running game if they had one, but Florida State does not have one and has not for three years. Did we mention they’re playing in the Emerald Bowl? UCLA’s mini-line is light in the weight department, and could in theory get pushed around. Florida State is incapable of such brawn, though, and their offensive coordinator doesn’t like to worry about petty things like blocking and such.

UCLA’s completed the handiwork of a coach who doesn’t quite have a handle on how to headcoach properlike just yet: an offensive juggernaut in ‘05 became a defensive team long on pop and shy on points in ‘06. A middling offensive team at best, they’re saddled with another problem in a mild but persistent case of quarterback surplus. Ben Olson is back for the bowl game. Patrick Cowan, his backup, beat USC in a game decided largely by his refusal to make mistakes and his ability to scramble for key third-down yardage. Either one will get serious punishment dealt out to them by Florida State’s defense, the lone unit on the team with any semblance of past Seminole glories.

What to watch for: Concussions and punting, most likely. Florida State’s offense will hand UCLA ten points easy; combine that with Patrick Cowan’s scrambling, tons of dumpoff passes to the versatile Chris Markey at running back, and a game plan designed to eke out yards and dare Florida State to score, and UCLA will nab the Pac-10’s first bowl victory. FSU should score a few points off the legendary Jeff Bowden rainbow jump ball pass–so pretty!–but UCLA should be able to thrill to the site of FSU’s offense drowning slowly in the second half. No worries on entertainment value, though: they’ll be plenty of extremely violent hits between the two superb defenses, which is all one can ask for in a bowl game the day after Christmas. It should be fine viewing, even for those of you not addicted to FSU snuff films like we are.

Did we mention Florida State’s playing in the Emerald Bowl?

No supplements needed on Bobby Bowden’s explanation for his son’s inability to call anything besides a square-in, jump ball, or blown-up screen as an offensive coordinator:

As for why things didn’t work out, he didn’t point to statistics or won-lost records.

“Because you all ignited it,” he said to a small room of reporters. “You listen to eBay and e-mail and all that junk, and you all kept writing about it and that fans it and makes it grow and grow, and it becomes a cancer. That’s why.”

Jeff Bowden’s playbook for sale. Opening bid: $550,000 from user exasperatedboosternfla.

Two things:

1. Don’t even try to purchase wemustignitethiscoach.com, because if you do our lawyaz iz strong and multifarious, yo.

2. Ebay actually does destroy coaches. Especially when they’re shopping for other coaches’ playbooks in a last-ditch attempt to properly call a game. In the middle of a game. (HT: Jeremy, WATB.)

3. Bowden’s actually pissed because Jeff totally got this notice about a real live confederate army vintage flintlock musket he was trying to buy that said he needed to give EBay his credit card information and then OMG! some huge charges on Dad’s Visa at a jewelry shop in Istanbul showed up so Dad had to spend like six hours on the phone straightening the whole thing out and that made him so tired that Jeff had to go put him to bed which sucked because then Jeff missed the episode of JAG he’d been waiting to see on USA. That TiVo think is wayyyy too complex to mess with, in Jeff’s opinion.

Stranko, is this where we put cheesecake? This is what happens when you have instant access to porn–you just go right to it and bypass cheesecake! And thus lose all cheesecake skills! DAMN YOU INTERNETS!!!
(This is Catherine Bell of JAG, who keeps Jeffy coming back for military courtroom drama with her Farsi skills.

We have five simple rules to life. They are based upon observation, experiment, and peer reviewed statements made in numerous bars across the world between the hours of seven p.m. and 4 a.m. They are:

1. Things will go wrong.
2. People never change, and never will.
3. People continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
4. When your favorite uncle is eaten by a tiger, don’t ask “Why?”, ask “Why not?”
5. Attempt to ignore rules 1-4 at all times.

Given that, we bring up the rumor of Norm Chow, the Greatest College Offensive Coordinator Ever ™ and the currently a mediocre NFL OC for the talent-rupt Titans. This rumor comes to us courtesy of Horseface, who thinks a job-hungry Chow would find an ideal transitional job in the situation at Florida State. Chow comes in as an assistant, gives Bowden one last “dadgum,”, and then takes over for Bowden when he leaves.

Chow: no scheme, no system. Just hot, nasty, badass scoring. We think Eleanor Roosevelt said that first.

We’re not going to think about Hayes’ penchant for turning fever-dream fan-fiction into “interesting official speculation,” or about him writing college football fan fiction at all. (See: Yahoo Groups “Holly Rowe BDSM Tales,” chapter six for some of that.) In fact, if you’re looking for tasty reliable speculation, it’s in there: Chow to North Carolina or Miami, which makes sense even taking into account a set of rules about humanity so skeptical only someone raised in the hardknock life surroundings of..um…the suburban sun belt could come up with them. Yeah.

Chow wouldn’t engage in Matt3576HorseyNeigh@yahoo.com’s fevered scenario because it violates several of Orson’s Sad But Reliable Rules for humanity. The indictment, point by point:

1. Something will go wrong. Chow’s from the West Coast, and enjoyed his greatest success there. Why wouldn’t he go back? Arizona State’s football program will likely have an opening, and Oregon State and UCLA are also up there for potential jobs. All of these are more likely than Norm Chow to Tallahassee, where he’d be replacing a legend in an area of the country he’s never really worked before.

2. People never change, and never will. Bowden won’t admit mistakes, and has no reason to: in a single person, he represents the successful heritage of Florida State football. He’s also got that history of rank nepotism, which won’t change. Get Jeff Bowden a shiny new brass nameplate and fasten it into the door with the big screws, because his biggest resume line is never going away.

3. People continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. See number two. Jeff’s just learning. He’s young. The other boys turned out okay, except for the embezzler, right? Sick with dolor as Seminole fans are right now, we have to ask an even more sickening question: what makes anyone in the fanbase think that Bowden doesn’t have fantasies of putting Jeffy in charge once he’s gone? What in his behavior has shown an inclination that he wouldn’t do this?

4. When your favorite uncle is eaten by a tiger, don’t ask “Why?”, ask “Why not?”

The second greatest coach of all time wins-wise (we refuse to count the Samford wins in that total, and just like JoePa better anyway, especially after his “Run For Two” earlier this year) becomes a laughing stock of a country sheriff by promoting his inept son to a position of responsibility. Why not? Why can’t a formerly brilliant coach be completely anti-brilliant towards the end of his career? It happens all the time. Woody Hayes punches Charlie Bauman. Dennis Erickson goes from coaching Miami in the national championship to play-calling in an airplane hangar in Moscow, Idaho. Smart people do dumb things, like trust someone simply because they have half the same genes as they do. Ask King Birendra–not always the soundest thinking. Don’t ask “Why would FSU make a bad decision on the next coach?” Instead, ask “Why not?”

King Birendra of Nepal: ask him how mixing family and upper management worked out.

Supplemental evidence: [NAME REDACTED]’s entire hiring and tenure. Why not?

5. Attempt to ignore rules 1-4 at all times. The only ray of hope here for Seminole fans: rules 1-4 collapse, and someone makes sound decisions in hiring the next coach. Of course, this implies betting on people being competent, which is a big, big risk. Perhaps we need a rule six…