Perhaps you recall the Oklahoma church deacon and pastor who grabbed the testicles of a Texas fan and nearly ripped them from his body. Or maybe you forgot intentionally, since it involved one man RIPPING OPEN ANOTHER MAN’S FUCKING SCROTUM.

Well, he’s on trial. Fun details follow!

When a pair of bar patrons tried to separate the two men, Thomas said he heard a popping sound, looked down and saw a lot of blood.

Beckett’s attorney said that Thomas was the aggressor and that his client defended himself only after the younger, bigger man went up to the bar to confront him.

And now, for no reason whatsoever, a picture of a heart-healthy pomegranate!

Oh, no reason. Why do you ask?

If we’re playing the Social D, then it’s wrong time…or at least speculative wrong time. A long IM conversation with Russell from Football Outsiders prompted this question: what, if anything, does instituting a forty second play clock do besides put the onus on the officials to spot the ball faster? Even if the take 15 seconds to spot the ball–and watching this laggardly work by an SEC crew in this year’s LSU/Rebels game, that’s fairly brisk–it’s likely a push with the current system. And the more plays bit could come from the variable time that bleeds off the clock while the officials are pushing their walkers around spotting the ball. (Get them some offroad tires on those motherfuckers!)

So the 40 second clock may not be the real problem here, as Russell was quick and correct to point out. We were wrong, potentially, here, if the more logical types we know are correct.

The real-play shaver is still there, though:

“After a player runs out of bounds and the ball is made ready to play, the official will start the game clock. Under the old rules the game clock would not start until the ball was snapped. This new rule will not apply in the final two minutes of the first half and the final two minutes of the game.”

Hrm. it won’t be 3-2-5-e level trimmin’, but there’s some absolute time loss here without the promise of more plays. But that’s not the point here: we jumped the gun here and didn’t do our math correctly. See after the jump for the requisite self-flagellation.

(more…)

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.–Mark Twain.

Extreme language ahead. You are warned. (more…)

AAAHHH! RUN!!!

In the Big Ten, the shit will hit the fan on Saturday night as a classic nexus of Big Ten football, Brent Musburger, and wholesome, sausage-downing fandom meet in Happy Valley as Penn State hosts the undefeated Ohio State Buckeyes.

And if you do plan on attending the game, please note that big games at Penn State tend to have a laxative effect on fans, and that you may be hard up for a place to deposit the angry, glowing bolus of processed sausage and potato salad you’re carrying around in your bowels like five pounds of spare change.

“The number of comfort stations being provided currently is woefully inadequate from a health and safety standpoint,” Brumbaugh’s letter says. “The handful of comfort stations in the parking lots are, quite literally, full and overflowing with human waste creating untold potential health and safety problems for PSU football patrons and, ultimately, the general public.”

(We blame heavy, hearty Midwestern fare for the problem–it’s painful enough when your intestines grab the wheel, but the mandate becomes even more urgent when you’ve got a solid two pounds of brats, potatoes, and casserole blowing through the tollbooth without paying. Barbecue and chips at least stops you up until a bitter, teary fight-crap the following morning.)

The myth of overflowing styrofoam coolers at Ohio State tailgates remains that: a myth. (Albeit, one we heartily support, since it is funny, and should therefore be true. It’s rollin’!) This, however, is a documented public health and sanitation crisis, with 100,000 tailgaters relying on a paltry 339 portable toilets for relief. The recommended number for a crowd of this size is 957, meaning that refugee camps in Chad could, theoretically, have better shit logistics than Penn State on gameday.

And big games really do seem to intensify the problem: while the average gameday sees 7,000 gallons of blue-brownish cloacal goo pumped from the premises, this year’s Notre Dame game saw 18,000 gallons of shit punch taken off site. (We’ll beat you to it. Charlie Weis was not the sole reason for the jump, and don’t even try to suggest it.) We can only imagine that the combination of college football’s two fecal superpowers–one mythic, one documented–could result in a turdocaust of rogue wave proportions.

HT: Senator Blutarsky.

If you missed last night’s horrible intersection of angle, momentum, and potential energy made kinetic in dramatic fashion during the LSU/MSU game, you haven’t now. Watch as Brandon Lafell extirpates Zach Smith in the third quarter. Feel free to stand at your desk, jump up and down while shaking your arms back and forth, and scream “DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYUUUUUUUM!!!!”

Your boss will totally understand. Or will fire you. Either way you win: it’s still college football season. (HT: Those brave, brave men at Mississippi State Sports Blog.)

And when we say first stabs, we mean jagged slashing with a sling blade type jabs at what might approximate a best top ten teams of 2007. (Mmm. French fried potatoes.) In fact, just think of us as the retarded, murderous redneck coming to butcher the art of prognostication, one lonely denim strap unbuckled as a proper top 25 sits drunk on the couch and helpless. Not that you don’t think of us that way already, of course.

Yup. Thankin’ ’bout makin’ a top 25.

The upside is that when it comes to prognostication, we’re all Hills Have Eyes mutants looking for a fresh meal for daddy, since we all uniformly suck at predicting the future. It’s a great trick of the human brain: we’re terrible psychics, but we’re superb editors, giving ourselves credit for things largely acheived by outrageous fortune, a little hard work, and the endless combinatorials of fate. This explains why you can tell yourself you did not, in fact, want that promotion, you are, in fact, quite happy with the way your body looks, and that you think that despite having no offensive line, a quarterback you’ve personally seen vomiting up a 12 pack in a Quik Trip parking lot, and a coach with the IQ of a salamander, that you think [INSERT TEAM HERE] has a great chance to [ACHIEVE SOMETHING THEY MOST DEFINITELY CANNOT, PUNY HUMAN.]

And yet despite the innate futility of predicting the future value of college football teams in the upcoming season, it’s a great time-killer, and not an entirely inaccurate one thanks to inequities within college football. (more…)

Meat on the hoof on the move! For all the big boys out there, your five seconds of glory: the tackle eligible, executed to perfection here by Colorado’s Sam “Lightnin’” Wilder.

Even Musburger couldnt’ work up the nerve to say “If he breaks that tackle…”, a sentence only appropriately completed with “he goes another two yards and collapses due to a pulmonary embolism.”

Scratch one offensive lineman in Gainesville: Ronnie Wilson, offensive lineman, attempts to bring a third championship to the University of Florida by earning plentiful points in the Fulmer Cup. From the Gainesville Sun:

University of Florida offensive lineman Ronnie Matthew Wilson was arrested early Thursday on charges of aggravated assault, simple battery and use or display of a concealed weapon during the commission of a felony, a Gainesville Police arrest report stated.

Wilson later told police he took the rifle out of his trunk and fired one shot into the air because he wanted the other man “to know how it felt to be scared,” the report stated.

Mission accomplished, sir! Wilson probably eats pancakes with jam, honey, and syrup just to get the job done, since being a screaming, Stonehenge-sized football player in a traffic altercation evidently wasn’t enough for him in the fear evocation department.

Smile, dumbass.

For his display of proper Baghdad crowd control technique, Wilson earns (shakes head, sighs) NINE GODDAMN POINTS for our own Florida Gators. The breakdown:

Aggravated assault: 3 points.

Simple battery: 1 points. Akin to FnDC.

Use or display of a concealed weapon during the commission of a felony. Another 3 pointer here.

Gator bonus: 1 point. Not because we want to win, but because the last team we want in this thing is our own. Points for shame.

Mongoloid Bonus: 1 point. Honestly, the stupidest Gator crime we can remember. Ever. Period. Dumber than Taurean Charles trying to mash a guy’s head in with a beer keg. That was homicidal rage, which we can understand. This? Overkill in the hands of bonified paste-eating moron.

Perhaps Miami’s not the only team that needs a firearms policy?

ProFootballTalk has produced some of the most specious, unfounded gossip you’ll ever hear anywhere. They also have a clip of Nick Saban saying the following on tape, but have bleeped the profanity for reasons we can’t possibly explain. Who doesn’t want to hear Nick “Window Treatments” Saban rolling in the profanity pit as we know he really does? You don’t make grown men who play offensive line weep with goshdarnits, after all.

They have the audio here, but the dialogue reads as well as it sounds:

“My friends are okay with it. The rest of those guys? One of my, one of my guy on the board — you guys won’t be able to put this on the thing — was walking down the street, one of the Board of Trustees guys like these people around here and sitting up on the stage today at LSU, is walking down the street yesterday before the Sugar Bowl. He calls me. There’s a guy working in a ditch. One of those coon-ass guys that talk funny. I can’t talk like him but he can. Most people in Louisiana can. And he says, ‘Hey, you see where Coach Saban signed up with Alabama?’ You know however they talk. And the Board of Trustees guy says, ‘Yeah, I saw that.’ And he says, ‘That son of a bitch. I feel like he’s f–king my wife.’”

Coonass seems to be acceptable usage here as long as you’ve actually logged some time in Louisiana, but expect no serious flak from this. Expect some masterful signs from Auburn fans referencing this one. In fact, please accept our humble submission done with the magic of Microsoft Paint. Should Auburn win the Iron Bowl again in 2007, we beg Tiger fans to use it.

Kind of makes ‘fear the thumb’ take on lascivious meanings you hadn’t considered before.

Some OSU fan feels pretty stupid for making this right about now.

HT: KD Godfrey.

Although not as stupid as Ginn’s teammates for crippling him.

Overwhelmed with emotion–simply overwhelmed. 41 out of 50 AP sportswriters can go choke themselves with a Twizzler right now. After five minutes, this game was out of reach. It’s not that Florida was merely good–they were flawless and magnificent like anyone who’s ever appeared on The Actor’s Studio with James Lipton. Chris Leak played a magnificent game-no Evil Chris, lurking in the shadows in the third quarter. No blocked punt, a la Auburn. No improbable decisions.

(Chris…we’re so sorry. We’re so, so sorry.)

And it’s not that Ohio State was bad–they were pathetic. Odious. Null. Reeking. Inert. They had no answer, no adjustments, no nothing. Alex Boone and Kirk Barton spent all night reaching backwards into the void where Derrick Harvey and Jarvis Moss should have been, and instead turning over to look at Troy Smith, eyes wide as dinner plates, turning away from one 270 lb. man attempting to kill him to find another 270 lb. beast running at him with 4.7 speed. His line becomes a paragraph unto itself:

Troy Smith: 4-14, 35 yards. 0 TDs, 1 INT. Sacks: 5

Heisman! UF outplayed them in every single facet of the game. No Ted Ginn excuses, no blown calls, nothing. Florida kicked ass until their toes fell off. It was like watching a small animal get crushed between two glaciers. It was like watching Roy Jones in his prime boxing an Olsen twin. It was like watching Clarence Darrow squaring off against Starr Jones in the courtroom. It was defeat, served rare, with a side of raw loss.

And for us: scoreboard, bitches. Scoreboard. We. Win.

This is where random comments go–have at it.

Today was a relatively light day of posting in anticipation of a rigorous weekend of blog preparation for the BCS Championship Game on Monday between the University of Florida and the Ohio State University. We’ll be posting on Sunday for the bathrobe and CBS Sunday Morning crowd slowly filing through the paper–hey! dibs on Parade! We just love that rascally Howard Huge–and will have a full cavalcade of preview material for Monday: podcasts, words strung together in some order, and other “surprises.”

Our weekend schedule will include the following tasks:

1. Purchase live chicken. Sacrifice to Danny Wuerffel shrine while deboning and dropping immediately into Fry Daddy for lunch.

2. Sell all stocks in Columbus real estate in anticipation of Buckeye festivities.

Nothing, officer. Just on a stroll, that’s all. Yes, I would like some pepper spray. It tickles.

3. Get defibrillator charged and ready for the inevitable Chris Leak Gaffe of Astonishing Terror, which we predict will happen in the third quarter. Prep TCOAN and bar staff on proper voltage, placement of paddles, and conductive gel use.

4. Meet business contact Lucifer Beelzebub to complete signover of alleged “soul” in exchange for a Florida victory. Play a quick 18 at East Lake Country Club afterwards to celebrate deal.

5. Buy new in-game crash helmet.

6. Scout local curbsides for toss-away couches for West Virginia-style potential celebration.

7. Reflect that leading up to this game, it’s oh so quiet. Maybe too quiet.

Enjoy the weekend. We begin bleeding from the eyes with anticipation on Sunday. See you then.

A bowl sponsored by a flat-screen television just begs for one team to come out in similar fashion: flat, overpriced, and showing it all in crystalline clarity. Oregon did just that last night in the Pioneer Purevision Las Vegas Bowl, losing 38-8 to a clearly furious BYU team. Mormons, despite what you might hear, are not nice: they vented a missionary’s rage on the Ducks, who looked like they rolled off the bus after a single fifteen minute pregame meeting for preparation, whipping the Ducks into a smooth, even confit by halftime and snacking on the remainders for the whole of the second half.

Mmm. Confit.

That fifteen minute meeting must have gone something like this:

1. Hey, guys. Ugly-ass helmets. Play like you don’t ever wanna wear ‘em again.

2. We’re gonna jerk around quarterbacks, too, because Crowton totally left his playbook at the hotel. Plays will be relayed in via text message, so keep your phone on you at all times.

3. We just found out you can’t carry a cellphone on the field. Um…check with me, aight?

4. Ryan Leaf’s in the building, and he’s watching. Make him proud, Brady.

5. Again: ugly-ass helmets, over there. Play the way they make you feel, boys.

Bellotti needs to rekindle his late 90s magic by regrowing the mustache. Like Sampson and his locks, Bellotti’s coaching strength has waned with each year since parting ways with his donut duster. (And Jeff Tedford, former Oregon OC. But enough with that–it’s obviously the mustache that caused his and the Ducks’ minidecline.) Oregon never defended a single crossing pattern, never strung together a single meaningful drive on offense, and looked all night like a team praying for death. Their only touchdown came on a heave and hope late in the game, which BYU–living to win–answered with a touchdown.

Credit ESPN, though: they provisioned for a blowout well. In fact, if Musberger serves any purpose in life besides hyperbole factory, it’s as blowout facilitator. The second half, rendered meaningless by Oregon’s vacation of will to live and the hitting of the ugly button, featured Musberger reeling through a bizarre grab bag of Vegas celebrities, outmoded highlights, and freewheeling bullshit sessions with Craig James. The Tarkanian interview was great enough, as was a surreal interview with Ryan Leaf.

The crowning killtime moment came when the second-tier blowout filler arrived: Craig James SMU highlights. Banter about tearoff jerseys rapidly devolved into this:

James: You know, those guys in the SEC would run through fifteen jerseys a game.

Davie: Well, back then, with the budgets teams had, you could do that.

Musberger: Of course, the budget down at SMU was bigger than most, right Craig?

James: (giggles) Uh, well, um…

Musberger: I mean, you guys had everything you wanted down there. Cash wasn’t a problem.

James: (full-on laughing) Um…yeah, but but but….

Musberger: I mean, you were snuffling like a hungry sow at the trough of one of the most corrupt football programs ever, right? SNUF SNUF PIGGY PIGGY OINK! Right, Craig?

Sherriff Brent will get you through this blowout, sweetcakes.

Actually, Musberger did not say that last line. The rest is fairly approximate, though. Bob Davie could only sit in his camel hair jacket and watch as Musberger dared someone to put the Brent express back on the rails. Fortunately no one did; had someone actually intervened, we’d have had to pay more attention to Oregon getting Rochambeaued by a BYU team playing like blood-doped convicts on parole. And after a half and a quarter of that, we’d seen enough.