How much would you pay for a four bedroom house in rural South Carolina? Do we hear $1.35 million? No, we don’t, but that’s because you’re clearly not taking the true cash value of bitch mentality into account here. Tommy Bowden’s house on Lake Hartwell is for sale, and it not only comes with a heaping surplus of bitch mentality to spread around the place, but also four bathrooms, a boat dock, marble flooring, exercise room, guest quarters, pool, and Rod Spence just hanging around the place for the next year or so wondering if you need him to, you know, fix anything up or call a bubble screen or somethin’.

Clemson/Your Potential as Noted in Your Permanent Record. So, your teacher and your mother and your guidance counselor are all seated around the table, and there are these scores: aptitude scores, forty times, profiles, names, James Davis and C.J. Spiller and Cullen Harper and Da’Quan Bowers…and we’re all just wondering, kid: where did we go wrong?

You had so many activities on your resume, Clemson. There were things expected of you.

Ninth preseason. The pick out of the ACC. There were…expectations. You had an appointment with greatness, according to this paperwork in front of us. You had been building for so long for this moment, studying, doing little trial bowls like the Peach Bowl, learning to win…you just looked like, you know, an optimist’s dream, a team that would suddenly take the–pffffiiiip!-liftoff into orbit. You attended that smart camp for smart kids at Duke that one summer. You did a diorama that had the middle school faculty goggling, kid. Just add some study skills and an offensive line, and we were all convinced that it would start working out for you.

But then freshman Jamie Harper got the first carry of the season in the Georgia Dome, and fumbled, and…that kind of embodied the whole season, didn’t it? A preseason promise gone pear-shaped and leading to just another step in a blowout by a team that didn’t spend the entire preseason fantasizing about future glory and the tastycakes that follow hard work?

First you failed the Alabama exam due to underestimating the material and lacking an offensive line. You lay down against Alabama and any team with a decent rushing attack (see Alabama,) and failed to hold onto leads (see Maryland, where you were up 17-6 before coughing the game up to the bizarro Terps.) At no point could we trace any consistency outside of the defense, who unlike the offense seemed to both know what they were doing most of the time and how to do it. Aside from the Alabama game, they showed up every week.

And then you forgot the worst thing of all in the panic induced by deflating expectations: what you were good at in the first place. James Davis and C.J. Spiller were what you were good at, a bruising back and a blazing game-breaker capable of keeping you in games. They got fewer and fewer carries as Clemson morphed from being a run first play-action pass team to dinking the ball all over the place ineffectively like…like Toledo 2003, actually, where offensive coordinator Rod Spence came from in the first place, and where he could be coaching next, for all we know.

He and Tommy Bowden are both gone. Dabo Swinney, the interim coach, has joined Mike Singletary in this year’s audition to be the most outlandish stand-in until the real coach gets hired, calling trick plays, introducing new traditions he has decided will be traditions, and attempting to take complete ownership of an essentially foreclosed house. Going 3-2 may back up your claim of squatters’ rights, or it may not–we have a feeling that after a decade plus of B student performance, Clemson may just bid him farewell and hire someone with no association with the old regime.

But that’s what hurts the most, Clemson. We’ve invested so much time and energy in you. Superb recruiting classes, endlessly positive preseason ink, the late season swings where you looked poised to jump off the plateau and up to the mountaintop of excellence, of an ACC title, and–we dared dream this at one point–a BCS slot. We bought the Baby Einstein, the encyclopedias, the violin lessons, the window dressings we hoped you would build a stately and prestigious house around. We thought you were just taking your time on the way up, was all.

Turns out you were happy with being a B plus student, Clemson. No, please. Let us finish. We’re not even angry. We’re just disappointed, and that…that may be the worst thing of all.

Tell me…have you ever considered technical school?

As the coach of the Miami Northwestern Junior Petit-Canes, the finest collection of nine to eleven year old football players in Dade County, I know what it takes to put a good football team together, to push your players to their maximum and get the most effort you can get out of your kids. I also know how to get the stains out of a white pair of pants, because they are young, and sometimes pee they pants from time to time.

They know how to take the field, though:

I also know how to keep a complainin’ ass daddy’s mouth shut, too. First, you tell him how his boy is doing fine, just fine. Then you take the second complaint quiet–reaaaaal icy, like stone, right? No expression. Then, later that night, you set his grass on fire with some gasoline. That shuts him up right quick.

Anyway, also consider myself an expert on a medical condition I have myself termed and named: The Bitch Mentality. The Bitch Mentality strikes without warning. Scientists have not identified where it comes from, because it ain’t Miami, where we tolerate no bitchness or bitcheraciousness. I do know where a severe case of it lives, and would like to point it out to you:

BITCH MENTALITY may infect the knee, since some knees clearly get bitchy. Frank Gore had bitch knee for years, and had to slap it down with surgery. Kirby Freeman had bitch arm, and he still ain’t got treatment for that that worked worth a damn. Steve McNair even had bitch toe for years, and don’t laugh: bitch toe will mess you up something nasty.

BITCH MENTALITY is at its most infectious, though, can spoll a whole team. And that is the topic today: the unstoppable bitch mentality of Tommy Bowden, who most definitely has a severe and untreated case of BITCH MENTALITY.

Let me explain: James Davis, your running back, is most definitely no bitch. He reminds me of Miami Northwestern great and current 13 year old Marvin Ellis, who runs a 4.3, hang cleans 350 pounds, and is already committed to Miami. It was clear from day one that Marvin was a Balla Unlimited with Gold Frontz and skills to match. Unlike his cousin Trevard, of course, who was obviously infected with the bitch mentality from the womb, since his mother cut the tires on my Yukon and left threatening messages on my voicemail when I sat her bitch-infected son at the end of my bench for refusing to block.

I hope your grass never grows back. EVER.

To get back to my discussion: James Davis clearly is no bitch. Neither is C.J. Spiller, who is so fast he might very well be able to play high school football here in the 305, and perhaps beyond. And yet, when you are ahead against Maryland, you see the destructive effects of the Bitch Mentality at its most infectious:

After gaining 195 first-half rushing yards, Clemson totaled 26 in the second half, when Maryland switched from a three-man to a four-man front to add another defender for run support.

On ten carries. All because fat old tub a grease Ralph Friedgen goes to a 4-3? AW YOU SCARED OF SOME LINEMAN NOW? In this situation, it would he easy to just blame Tommy Bowden for being the person he is, but that isn’t scientifically accurate: you see, the only excuse for flipping your wig in this situation is an obvious case a BITCH MENTALITY, diagnosed by only giving the two most fearsome, playa tight ballaz on your team a grand total of ten carries when you’ve got a lead.

Head down, slumped posture, air of bitchedness: all symptoms of the Bitch Mentality.

Unfortunately, I’ve got bad news: there’s no one cure for BITCH MENTALITY. See, it infects the corpus–you didn’t think I was gonna use the word corpus? RACIST–in totality. From the bitch toes, to the bitch feet, and all the way up to the bitch ass cheeks, back, and bitch-ass face. It is a complete and total effect on the non-bitch parts of the body, and science has not defined what can stop it.

The good news? There are success stories. For example, Mack Brown beat his bitch mentality out of himself with the help of Vince Young, though he may be in remission now. Chris Leak suffered from bouts of bitch mentality, but overcame it to win a national title. Ohio State had a case, but Terrelle Pryor has all kinds of antibiotic, anti-bitchedness properties. See? There’s hope. For Clemson, it would be letting the bitchosity-killing powers of James Davis and C.J. Spiller do the work.

For Trevard, though, they may be no solution, though pregame dancing has an antiseptic effect against infection from a team infested with BITCH MENTALITY. I hate to say this about a boy when he’s just 13 years old, but BITCH MENTALITY got its claws deep there. That’s a genetic case if I ever seen it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to buy some gasoline.

Luther Campbell, who performs professionally under the name Unkle Luke, is a rap impressario and reality television start in addition to being a successful Little League football coach. He holds no medical degree.

Wait, make that two cries for help: As you may have noticed, our liveblog software, though lovely and featureful, is a bitch and a half to run.  And tonight, we’re soliciting some help so we can actually watch the game.  Looking for two or three brave souls willing to pretty much do nothing but approve comments all night.  If you’re interested in playing deputy for us and are gonna be around for the whole game, shoot me an email (wolfbearclownshark, gmail) kindly identifying yourself by commenter name, and we’ll get you set up with a login.

For us.  For your blog brethren.  For Tommy Bowden’s bitch mentality. For humanity. See you there, lawyas.