My friends and fellow Americans,

We come here today to transcend the awards of old and move to that shining city on the hill we all want to live in: the College Football Blog Awards 2008, where no good blog goes unrecognized, where we all feel the prosperity of hundreds–yes, hundreds!–of dollars of Google AdSense income.

The CFBA would like to thank you for submitting nominations for this years awards. No one person reads them all, and it takes a village to bring this effort along. We would also like to thank Joel, our fearless leader, who brought the whole endeavor together as only he could. He deserves your applause for his fine work, coding, list-keeping, and his amazing ability to help those who have difficulty keeping their pants on straight put on an award process despite the issues with the pants, and the straightness thereof. Kudos and applause.

The Cabal met via chat and, after the hard deliberation and decisions that deciders have to make, a final list of nominees emerged. Cabal members used reader nominations and pared down from there as objectively as they could. Human weakness did emerge: the topic of Stewart Mandel incited some passions, as did Orson’s opinion of one blogger he would, on meeting in person, punch in the uterus. (No, it’s not who you think it is, and no, it’s not a woman, but a feminizing joke.)

Any time nomination posts mentioned or the gizmo spat out one of our own names, we either abstained or argued against ourselves and in favor of someone else. Committee members also attempted to balance bringing the true, echt best of the 2007 to the forefront while also highlighting new but lesser-known blogs.

So in short: while all nominations were considered, not all nominations were included in the end, because there’s no way to include every nominee.

Oh, and while not eliminating anyone, open campaigning for votes by bloggers was considered “in poor taste” by the Cabal, and “aggressively whorish” by Orson. Please refrain from it in gentlemanly fashion, twiddle your handlebar mustache with style, and join us at the bar for a Pimm’s Cup and some strawberries with creme fraiche while we wait for center court to open up for a match, will you? Right-o.

The schedule:

Nominations announced today, beginning at EDSBS at 10:00, then at MGoBlog at 11:00, Dawg Sports at 12:00, Burnt Orange Nation at 1:00, and Rocky Top Talk at 2:00. All times EST. After that, come back to EDSBS for voting instructions.

Reminder! Last year’s winner in any particular category is ineligible to win that category this year, with the exception of awards for individual posts (as opposed to entire blogs), so hold your criticism on that. Send all other complaints to myscrotumismadeoffruitrollupsbiteitandsee@yahoo.com.

Okay, so send in the clowns.

Orson:

Head over to MGoBlog at 11:00-ish EST for the official nominees for Best National Blog, People’s Champ Award, Funniest Blog, and Best YouTube.

I want to hit someone so hard their head comes off. You know, kind of like in that movie Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, where the head comes rolling down the stairs? That scene kind of got into my head.

Ring one more entrant into the bizarro fraternity of eccentric linebackers: Michigan State’s Jon Misch, a 200 pounder at strong side linebacker. That’s 200 pounds, which you might weigh, dear reader, playing at strong side linebacker in the Big Televen and running through tight end blocks if he’s lucky, and defensive ends and worse if he’s not. When you’re weird by weight already, you’re a special variant of strange.

Jon Misch is sorry he killed your brother.

Misch deepens the strange, however, with the bio: he’s got a 137 IQ, is a diagnosed hyperactive, plays classical piano, was originally recruited as a defensive end, eschews sports shows for Mythbusters, and has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Brian from MGo has dubbed him the “Samurai,” which is a bit of a misnomer considering Tae Kwon Do is Korean. Therefore, in honor of a fellow AD/HD type, we’ll dub him “Best of the Best,” after our favorite (and really the only) Tae Kwon Do movie from the golden age of martial-arts-specific action movies.

We reserve the right to use the name “Gymkata” for another player to be named later. (BTW, check out Brian’s outstanding Michigan State preview while you’re at it. Bart Connor would approve.)

The punishment for the players has shriveled like an exposed phallus on the tundra, as well. PREPARE TO BE TEMPORARILY KILLED BY DEATH, UNDERLINGS!!!

Two Penn State football players ordered to stand trial for their roles in an off-campus fight were expelled from school for part of the summer but will be allowed to take part in preseason practice.

Hit me again, Ike, and this time put some stank on it! No school, but you can still come to practice–that’s the punishment from Joe Paterno, who must be fully sailing into the calm waters of the Gulf of Aingivafuck in his 38992th year of life. He’s mellowed quite a bit, as the horsewhipped citizens of Bukhara, Transoxiana would testify, since Paterno was a particularly brutal mayor there in the 6th century.

In response, Urban Meyer described the punishment as “appropriate, but a bit harsh.” We suppose in both places now, the “This is Sparta” rules apply.

This…is…Sparta!!! Note the sign, and don’t worry about punishment.

P.S. We know that’s supposed to be a guy kicking someone there, but it still looks like one guy knocking another guy into a pit with the kind of cartoon penis you’d draw in fifth grade. (HT: Kenny.)

I would first like to thank you for the warm welcome I have received since signing with your university. It’s not often an 18 year old gets the chance to have sex eleven times in a 24-hour span with anyone but himself, much less with a gang of disease-free ladies with such a dizzying array of techniques, preferences, skills, and battery operated devices illegal in six states. I would personally like to thank the three generous Latina ladies who helped me pull off the “Lotus Spinning While Riding Nandi to Brahmaputra” manuever, or whatever the hell that thing was. That shit was loco!. I am now forever a convert to culo caliente, and plan to spend my leisure time rutting my way through the Hispanic Students Association con aficion, bitches. (See? That AP Spanish credit was for real, Myles Brand. Holla at ya nino.)

Huevos Rancheros for me for the next three years, y’all.

(If you have any questions for my prostate, it is on vacation, having just run its own version of the NFL combine. It should be back on Friday to address your inquiries. )

As warm as the welcome wagon has been, I would like to talk for a few minutes about a few things I intend to do while attending your university.

First, I promise to astonish you with my muscular development. My calves will jump out of my legs like electrified cornish game hens when I make the slightest movement. My biceps will flutter under my shirt as I stretch outside of study hall. Even my eyebrows will flex with a might your puny, mortal soul will flinch in envy and fear at. The little caveman in your brain is saying that back in the day, your children would be mine, I’d steal your cave, and your girl would be jocking mine on a sabretooth tigerskin rug fireside while you froze outside and waited for the jackals to finish you off. And you would be right.

Second, I promise to give nothing but the most lackadaisical of efforts to my classes. I will sip protein shakes in the back of “Growing Fruit for Fun And Profit;” I will stuff burritos in uninterrupted chains down my gullet in “Hispanic Studies” (3 credits!) at Mamacita Flores Mexican Restaurant across the street; and lastly, I will play Madden on my PSP in the back of Fundamentals of Mathematics, and you will stand in awe as I thrash fellow recruit Cro Beardsley of Glendale, California with the lowly Arizona Cardinals. (You want math? Me plus the Buzzsaw= infinite losses for you and yourz in the Maddendome. And that’s real.)

If you’re looking for me in any of these classes, I’ll be the one with a protein shake in one hand and a hefty 12-inch Idongivafuck sandwich in the other.

Third, I plan on repping to the fullest in whatever temporary, open-for-this-season-only club my football teammates frequent, despite the fact that I am 19, underage, and likely not supposed to drink alcohol under my training regimen. I will get into at least one fight of dubious cause and yet avoid having the incident enter the public record. Moreover, I will astonish you with my dance moves, including my fantastic Matrix (strictly clownin’), my heartstopping two-step, and most impressive of all, my bewitching Shoulda Lean. Again, should you want to find me, I’ll be the one dumpin’ and punkin’ monkeys at (Single, flammable word like “FUEL” or “Blaze”), Club (your area code here), or someplace named something like “Shankey’s Hideaway.”

My girl got a girlfriend.

Fourth, I plan to stay frosty. Just warning y’all. The car is my mother’s, and she likes her screens to drop and just kill all the haters, too; where do you think I inherited my fine appreciation of haterevader technology? She just lets me use it. Every. Day. The bling is not fake, and I am willing to risk suspension during the two meaningless opening games of the season if I am accused of wearing ersatz ear candy by your punk ass.

Lastly, my apartment shall look like I held Ty Pennington at gunpoint and convinced him that it was not me, but instead a needy 26 member immigrant family living in it, and that the refit best include two flat screens or someone’s ass is gonna get an Extreme Makeover they won’t forget.

Say aloha to my new friend.

In conclusion, I thank you for the welcome, and invite you to say hello when you see me on campus, and that unless you are purple ribbon fine, you may not ride in the White Light, a.k.a. my my mother’s amazing Tahoe. (You see the white light, you die, right? That’s what happens when you see my–um, mom’s car.) If you are fine, you may ride both the car and the Octagon. That’s right. I just dropped an Anchorman reference without sweating.

That’s just how complex I am.

Yours,

(Insert recruit’s name here.)

Young man, you’re so…pretty. Come dance for my university, please.

Rhetorical offramp: why, indeed, is recruiting so creepy? Begin with the drastic power differentials working here. Rex Grossman, for example, may have had the best recruiting process of any player we’d ever heard. Wealthy, relatively unnoticed by marquee programs, Grossman hurt for neither money nor personal opportunity. He just happened to enjoy playing football, and threw a wicked deep ball, a nice combo. He also had Bobby Knight pimping him to anyone who would listen, and when Steve Spurrier got a highlight tape, an offer came in a quiet, deliberate fashion.

Rex Grossman, too, had the ultimate setup for success once he arrived in Gainesville. Low-pressure reigned; not a blue-chipper, he could simply play and lie in the weeds waiting for Jesse Palmer to self-destruct at Mississippi State, racking up significant garbage time play in Spurrier-era blowouts. Rolling in it by any student standard, Grossman had the financial freedom to focus on whatever he chose to in his spare time, which by most accounts fell to the responsibility of mastering the EA NCAA games on several different game systems. Completely unpressured, Grossman thrived and grew into the role of a Heisman hopeful and eventual NFL draft pick.

Grossman, on the right: obviously not under a lot of pressure.

The one constant in this: money. Grossman succeeded because of the support he received from his parents, the relative lack of hype, and the dearth of expectations the environment placed on him once he arrived in Gainesville. The power differential between Grossman and his environment wasn’t that vast; had he not worked out as the deep bomber of Spurrier’s dreams, Grossman’s worst case scenario was dropping out and living comfortably on his parents’ sectional sofas. He didn’t owe it all to the university, and his future showed a diversity of opportunities, not one blood-filled egg of NFL hope that when cracked spilled his soul and any hope of a future onto the cold ground.

(For those of you who just missed the reference, it’s to the story “The Heartless Giant,” which may be the most depressing story ever written. Do not ingest near bottle of pills, razor blades, or running tree shredders.)

That’s obviously the case for many university recruits. Check the interview with Michael Lewis a few months back. Lewis–no expert on college football, but certainly an accomplished economic mind–said that the NCAA exists in large part to prevent young, underprivileged black men from contacting the very people to seek to help them in an exchange of skills: wealthy white businessmen. Lewis’ argument sounds typically economist-like here, a bit trenchant, rhetorically inverted, and blunt, but bearing a skein of fact. For the most part, universities deny any contact between those who fund big football programs and the recruits whose talent turns game into irresistible spectacle, a division enforced via the NCAA but whose existence continues with the tacit agreement of the NCAA’s partners…the universities themselves.

Adam Smith would object. Then again, Scottish people object a lot, so take that with a grain of fairly traded salt, laddie.

Universities protect their incomplete free market through the NCAA. The NCAA makes itself a great target through poorly defined mission, sure. (Listen to Myles Brand circumscribing the topic when addressed makes one think he’d be a perfect White House Press Secretary, North Korean Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, or superb divorce lawyer.) Yet it’s really only the gatekeeper, propped up through an arcane series of codes and regulations arbitrarily enforced through a process we can only define as random draws of paper slips from THE BAD IDEA HAT.

(If you’re not familiar with THE BAD IDEA HAT, we’ll lay out the concept quickly. It’s the device all bad governments and body politics use to determine harebrained policy. A friend of ours came up with the idea in Laos when the government decide to rip up an old street, repave the whole thing during only daylight hours when traffic swelled to stroke-level intensity, and then neglected to install the gas and water lines underneath the road. The whole thing was ripped up and repaved at extravagant cost to a nation whose per capita yearly income is equal to a weekend’s tailgating bill for you. Thus: THE BAD IDEA HAT.)

Current guardian of THE BAD IDEA HAT.

If players were treated like hotshot teen programmers fending off Microsoft’s advances, or even given the courtesy term of professional football interns, this would be a different story. In fact, that may be the most honest term for college football players: football interns. They do work for the university, raking in returns at major universities far above the money laid out for them by their sponsor.

Crucial differences emerge, though. Interns aren’t typically under contract, and aren’t obligated to sit out for one year professionally should they decide to work for someone else. Interns at other companies also aren’t signed to four-year contracts, and stand a much, much better chance of getting on professionally than their brethren in football. So football players are denied the courtesies extended to interns while simultaneously denied the opportunity to network effectively with wealthy alums by the NCAA.

That’s a perfectly engineered power differential there: the labor gets a pittance in return for the eventual payoff. This power differential is not as drastic at universities with low athletic profiles; in fact, at a place like Vanderbilt, the athletes can claim a pretty legitimate exchange of goods. At places like our beloved University of Florida, however, the divergence between effort and eventual payoff swells to the wildly disproportionate.

Its shadow becomes all too evident during recruiting, when agents of the corporation called college football go out to pitch the logically impossible: an exclusive contract of a good (a university education) unwanted by many of the purchasers in exchange for a fleeting shot at an NFL career attained by a slim percentage of the applicants. In repayment, their truly unique talents get short shrift in the form of denied benefits proportional to their input. In plain terms: athletes on the whole don’t get back what they put into their time at a university. Not even close.

That’s reason one why recruiting is creepy. It’s the beginning of an unequal and exploitative arrangement between athlete (not “student-athlete,” for the most part) and university. And the sell from big programs begins with the most illusory claim of all: a shot at the NFL. If you’re Rex Grossman, not making it is no big deal; you’ve got options. Rex Grossmans in college football, though, are rare. A sizeable chunk of college football players come from places where going back to sit on the couch represents a much different and more dire prospect for them.

They can’t all be Rex Grossman, who didn’t owe the university everything in exchange for the nothing they received in return: a university degree (not guaranteed, of course) and precisely zero share of the profits they generated for the school or, worse yet, the corporate third-party entity running the athletic program. Until they get a share while playing, the power differential will remain grossly unequal between athlete and university. And recruiting will remain the first step in what is an inherently duplicitous arrangement.

(Part Two, which will explain why this is all necessary and still creepy, will follow later today.)