You, too, may be the next Louis Elbel: the University of Washington is seeking a new fight song and is holding an open contest for submissions. Off the top of head, the first song coming to mind when thinking of Willingham’s repeated references to his “system” is, well, this, because ever since his first year at Notre Dame the “system” has been most definitely down:

It would have to go with some nice Fenerbahce-stand-hopping, of course, but we think it would be perfect, especially with a lyric sheet reading “buh-DOO-do-DOO-do-DEH” over and over again.

Handler One: Ralphie, that’s a good girl.

Handler Two: Man, she’s flipping me out right now.

Ralphie: Trample. Kill. Ram. Trample. Gore. Crush crush trample. Fear. Two legs everywhere. Trample them all. Desperate hunger for grass. Kill.

Handler Three: We’ve got to go in two.

Handler One: Look at her eyes. It’s just one pit of black surrounded by white fear. God, that’s unnerving.

Ralphie V: Hunger. All that grass. Must crush, then eat. Sun. Buffalo in heaven. Demand blood. Ram. Stomp. Run. Kick. Destroy two legs.

Hander Two: Where’s Trey? He’s supposed to be here. We can’t do this with just three handlers.

Handler Three: We ready to go?

Trey, Handler Four: Hey, guys, when are we—AAAIIIIGGGHHHHH

Handler one, hanging on for dear life: OH GOD HER EYES HAAAAIIIIIILLLLLP!

Ralphie: OPEN SPACE RUN KILL.

Handler Four: My insides feels leaky and warm…I can’t feel…my…hands…

Handler One: I CAN’T HOLD ON JESUS CHRIST WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE A BUFFALO THEY DON’T LIKE LEASHES!!!!

Dan Hawkins: Well done, boys! That’s a division one football mascot!

Ralphie: Sun. Grass. Trampled. Yes. Suddenly tired. Hungry. Stop.

Handler One: MY SHOULDER! OH GOD MY SHOULDER!

Hawkins: Can we get her to skydive onto the field? And then trample someone? That would be EPIC.

(HT: Rashaan Salaam)

Don’t borrow, steal: an offseason requires desperate measures, and in a pinch we’ll be happy to do the pinching. We present what will hopefully be a running series: Stuff _____ People Like, based on the painfully accurate Stuff White People Like. We begin, to be fair, with our own alma mater, Florida.

Stuff Orange and Blue People Like

Law school. Perhaps biasing the study with our own personal experiences, but everyone who graduates from Florida goes to law school, is thinking about going to law school, or has considered going to law school. They may also be in the process of applying to go to law school, or just getting over the thought of going to law school. At the least, the Gator fan you encounter has had sex with someone who went to law school. (This is a requirement for graduation. Go look. )

O, just-a like the Italian breads my a-mama made!

Panera. We have never, ever, ever seen a demographic spread their financial legs more whorishly for a business than Gator fans for Panera, the bread and coffee chain out of Atlanta that specializes in selling sugary breads for two to three times what you might actually pay for them at a real bakery. And that’s right, Florida fans, we said that: Panera’s not a real bakery. It’s a goddamn cookie shop with coffee and shitty wireless–that’s it. A sugar cookie the size of a roofing shingle is still compacted sugar, butter, and flour, even if you’re eating it in a pleasant place with healthy wheat stalks woven into all of their ersatz rustico! Italian decorating. The pleasant decor and clean floors will keep the calories off, right? No, it won’t, but walk in there on a Saturday and you’ll swear the place was giving away free crack and fistfuls of Tebowbucks in little orange and blue baggies.

Speaking of bland, tasteless, and overpackaged…. (more…)

Little light-headed, sure. But yeah, otherwise, Boulder’s awesome. I mean, the beer, the scenery, the vibe, the complete lack of humidity…it’s gorgeous. And look at this! This is insanity, man.

Wait. What the hell are they doing with that…is that a buffalo? A live goddamn buffalo? They’re not going to…

Oh, my. They are.

Mike V, who was really, really old by Tiger standards, died sometime during the night at his habitat at LSU. Mike was seventeen, and hopefully is now shredding muntjac and wild boar on the hunting fields of the afterlife.

Considering the $25 million LSU shelled out for the mascot’s habitat, they’re undoubtedly looking for a new Mike as we speak. Animal rights activists be damned–having a live tiger on campus is just badassness no matter how you cast it, and no one’s gone more out of their way than LSU, which has constructed what amounts to a mini-zoo for their pampered mascot.

There’s a Roy Horn joke somewhere in here, but we just can’t find it. RIP, Mike.

Always nice to begin a piece with a bit of self-endorsement, which is precisely what we’ll do: if you haven’t listened to the Tony Barnhart interview from EDSBS Live this past Tuesday, you should, and not just to hear us on the tail end of an epic caffeine bender.

The best line in the whole thing doesn’t come from any of the participants, but rather from the dead and great Lewis Grizzard. Barnhart mentioned the line Grizzard had on the Clemson-Georgia game:”It’s more than a football game. It’s their way of life against ours.” No one’s ever issued a statement more perfectly encapsulating why, mid-game, you may actually look at the otherwise pleasant and similar people wearing different colors than yours and suddenly feel like you gazed upon the primitive celebrations of a lesser, hairy-knuckled tribe unworthy of having clean water and healthy children–and certainly unworthy of being on the same field as your obviously superior, fully-evolved football team of gridiron samurai.

The irony in all of this is that most people accuse the opposition of being guilty of something they are, by demographic, equally or more guilty of the offense themselves. Nothing’s funnier to the outsider than watching SEC fans accuse other SEC fans of being “redneck” or trash, especially when the rest of the country walks around with this mental cheatsheet of regional prejudice in their head:

However, since we’re soooooo scientific, which individual myths about fanbases are true? (more…)

Signal to Noise points the way toward a grave, grave issue: cheerleaders and the damage they’re doing to this nation through the television.

Ask and you shall receive– SM
(more…)

Todd over at Roll Bama Roll thinks we’re cracking on the state of Alabama a bit unfairly. We concur; the state of Alabama did, as he rightly points out, produce Hank Williams, who made every awesome song ever written before the age of 29, when he died from congestive heart failure induced by being ten men crammed into the body of one. It’s just too much for one system to handle.

We would point out in the latest chapter of “Fightin’ Music” that Florida has not one single musical act to claim in the name of quality. Popularity, yes; Creed sold a zillion fucking records in the late ’90s/early ’00s, a time when we were too busy selling our plasma and giving handjobs for rent money visionquesting and temping to prevent such an atrocity from happening. They did, however, provide the soundtrack for countless teen pregnancies between fundy kids who took virginity pledges, so we have to thank them for the unending dark comedy there.

Florida is a musical Namibia. Sadly, our supplemental football fight music doesn’t change that. If anything, think of “Gator Steve” as a kind of sonic defoliant, killing the happy green thoughts in your mind like Agent Orange sprayed on a Vietnamese hillside. We sometimes forget that there are quarters of this world where men wear tanktops, listen to country music, and watch CSI because they find the murder scenes sexy without apology. You forget there are people who annoy you almost as much as NPR-listening fauxhemians who find Sarah Vowell “droll.”*

And then you hear this:

Bull Gator Steve!

MP3 File

*If you use this word and are not British, you will be punched in the teeth.

An inordinate amount of fight music’s been popping up in the inbox lately. Being the resident pepidemiologist of the blogosphere, we categorize, analyze, and then evaluate them based on the logical system of analysis we’ve created over the past two years of our studies.

Then, of course, we mock them ’till they bleed like Jerry Cooney on blood-thinners.

Kick the stuffin’ out of ‘em–in an amiable country music kinda way. We’re old enough to remember when country could in its own way generate a legitimate air of menace, even when a song sounded cheerful on first listen. “Fightin’ Side Of Me” by Merle Haggard? “Country Boys Can Survive” by Hank Williams, Jr? Or, most notoriously in our mind, “Copperhead Road” by Steve Earle, a song that makes us want to set fire to the nearest flammable object not attached to our body? They all have the glower of a dude in tight jeans skunked on gallons of beer ready to put a knockoff Tony Lama in your canines, or at least thankin’ about doin’ just that.

Totally wants to kick the shit out of you while wearing a silly railroad hat.

Unfortunately, country music is run by total, unremitting pussies, which is why you get Faith Hill instead of Loretta Lynn and Tim McGraw instead of Merle Haggard. (more…)

The Narrative dies a little each week–long live the Narrative! The best part about a system where 10 teams per conference compete for a single spot comes in the knowledge that while you may not win, your most hated opponent’s odds of winning remain steep and will likely explode in their face on national television.

This nearly happened as South Carolina almost beat Auburn 24-17, with only a clanking pair of traitorous hands keeping the Gamecocks from tying it up in the dying last seconds of the game. Brandon Cox was forced to convert 4th and 6 and 3rd and 21 in the third quarter to hold possession. The buzz line is that Auburn held the ball for the entire third quarter–astonishing, especially since Tuberville engineered the cock-free third quarter by going for an onside kick to get the ball back and eke out another Irons rushing touchdown.

Auburn: almost fumbled away the Narrative last night.

The pressure of a road game had Al Borges saying…strange…things: From John Solomon’s blog:

To say Auburn was relieved to prevail is an understatement. Al Borges spoke about “swallowing hard” if Tommy Tuberville hadn’t made two gutsy calls - then Borges acknowledged they were “swallowing hard” anyway at the end.

The general thought among Auburn fans we spoke with was that Auburn’s defense were the ones swallowing hard for most of the night, befuzzled by Spurrier’s going to a spread formation and passing at will despite Auburn dropping eight men into coverage. (This paragraph truncated in order to prevent embarrassing Spurrier man-love spewing across the page. There’s been quite enough of that.)

TCU lost last night, scrapping the TCU “BCS-buster” tag and the nation’s longest win streak simultaneously. If there’s a positive in all of this, it’s the fact that our campaign to get jets installed in TCU mascot’s eyes that spray red fluid may have just found some extra push, since we blame Super Frog’s inability to intimidate opinions for TCU’s loss. Thanks to Austin Murphy, we now know the red fluid is not blood, actually, but something even worse:

We’d spent the previous half hour killing time in the office of associate athletic director Scott Kull, who’d made several important points about the school’s distinctive mascot. “The horned frog — actually a spiny lizard — subsists on a diet of red ants.” It had long been believed that this creature was capable, when angered or frightened, of directing a four-foot stream of blood from its eyes. Kull tells me that’s not blood, but rather, pre-digested red ants.

An animal so filled with rage it vomits through its eyes. That is a mascot.

Kids, come say hi to SuperFrog…AIIIIGGGGHH GOD WHAT IS THIS!!!

The FAMU Band. Where does one begin? Start with the drum majors–even when you’re in the nosebleeds, you know something’s going on, since even from the distance of several miles you can look at the drum majors and guess that a.) they’re not gay, b.) they’re dancing better than you, even in your drunkest fantasies, ever have, and c.) they’re getting straight laid that night.

To properly appreciate FAMU, you have to see the choreography up close, and since most of the videos of the band on YouTube are straight pressbox shots sprinkled with occasional close-up shots, you miss out on plenty of quality pelvic thrusting and leg grabs. The practice videos show their whole routine, though, complete with crowd participation and singalongs. The best comes about a minute in, and yes, you get bonus points for getting people to attempt this in the office.

(more…)

Welcome to the final re-run portion of Pepidemiology… although it has been brought to our attention that we might need to add to the series to cover the inflatable mascots.  We’re not sure they are important enough, but it is under advisement. 

The stuff nightmares are made of.