#11 Ohio St. at #24 Northwestern

HOLLY, QUASI-RATIONAL: Relax your bedtime grip on your Glocks, America. Ohio State has two losses, and the universe can breathe easy, safe from the specter of a third-straight Buckeyes champblahblahblahBig10bashing. Statistically, these teams are surprisingly well-matched, but….look, we’d all love to pick Northwestern, adorably ranked after a victory over Minnesota, but if pluck guaranteed wins, we’d be celebrating the single-digit ranking of Texas Christian (HOW DARE YOU PUSH US TO ACCEPT UTAH AS A LEGIT TEAM, HORNED FROGS).

ORSON, IRRATIONAL. The force is strong in the young one…

…but this is episode five, and he loses his hand to the Dark Lord.

Baylor at #4 Texas

ORSON, QUASI-RATIONAL. If Baylor had the chops on defense to hold Colt McCoy in check, we’d happily tiptoe over to the pond of tribute bets and salute Art Briles and Robert Griffin for revivifying Baylor football. (more…)

By the EDSBS staff.

We care, just like a tiger does: with their claws and teeth first.

Tennessee has a minor, eeny-tiny-bit of a discipline problem, and not the sort that professional paste-eater and push-door puller Mike Freeman suggests should end up in the firing of Phil Fulmer. (Mike: Tyler Durden IS the narrator!) Fire him for being only good to excellent, sure; we’ve seen that in the SEC before. Fire him for blackmailing Trace Adkins with incriminating gay sex photos into performing at his daughter’s birthday party. (Unsee that, dear reader, and you have achieved enlightenment. We just typed it, and will not eat for several days.) Fire him for picking up field mice and bopping them on the head, and then dipping them in panko crumbs, deep frying them, and eating them during film sessions.

Fire him for any of these, but not the juvenile aborted Liverventures�* most Vol players get arrested for these days. The Vols just need a special blend of caring, discipline, and caring discipline outlined below. Because we care. We really do. In that kind of foster kid kind of care, the one where you don’t buy them fresh produce, turn on the heat for them in the winter, or buy them clothes that fit.

Actin’ Straight with EDSBS: Vol-arity Edition.

1: Pat Summitt. This doesn’t even have to take longer than 15 minutes. Simply invite Pat over, have the winningest coach at Tennessee ever come to a Vol team meeting and then allow her to rip each of the Vols’ gridiron types a new, perfectly torn second asshole. Summitt is the kind of thin-lipped, wiry, kerosene-eyed women who drove schoolbuses in my childhood: very, very quiet schoolbuses. There were rumors one kid, once, had spoken, and that only a red mark the birds liked to pick at on the school driveway stood as testament to her wrath. The team would be a lot like that schoolbus for the next year, at least.

2. Hedge mazes outside dorm entrances. Bull your way through fifteen rows of thorny hedge without bleeding to death? Do I smell starting defense?

3. The ChastiT belt. Fierce, made of stainless steel. Adorned with picture of John Chavis on codpiece for extra contraceptive power. (more…)

The latest disturbing chapter in…

Houston Nutt should resign–just resign, leave, and go coach at some place where people don’t care as much about football. Care may be a weak word here; try “obsess,” “mull over 24/7,” or “pray to their secret arachnid overlord in the dark of night” instead. None still really cover how odd affairs at Arkansas truly are right now.

How about “football-haunted?” If that’s close, then Houston Nutt’s got a poltergeist on his hands. We dropped this in another entry, but someone used the Freedom of Information Act to get their grubby hands on Houston Nutt’s cell phone records, all game thanks to Nutt using an Arkansas-funded cell phone as part of his coaching perks.

Weirder–or more dedicated, depending on your relative sanity here–someone’s put together the equivalent of a legal brief detailing Nutt’s behavior and public statements as they correspond to his phone activity.

We mean this with gravity: don’t click on it unless you want to rearrange the cells in your brain to form new, frightening connections you may find disturbing. (more…)

Beer, the hospitality of tailgaters, and impending obsolescence do add up: we missed prime a.m. blogging due to a doctor’s visit to have a trained professional look at the official right knee of EDSBS. Prior to today’s diagnosis, we’d been relying on Dr. Stoical McDumbass, who’d been telling us that singing pain in the right knee was a good thing, and that we weren’t reading our Marcus Aurelius with enough diligence:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Did we mention that Marcus Aurelius was an emperor? Anyway, the diagnosis didn’t even give the comfort of man points in the form of “It’s a torn ACL. I’ve been walking on it like it was nothing.” Runner’s knee at thirty: now officially and indubitably a yuppie blogger type.

We’ll be along in a bit with Jim Delany being a dick about the SEC. BTW, Jarvis Moss just sacked Troy Smith again in the shoe section of a Dillard’s in Columbus, causing him to fumble a pair of Tims he was buying, which were recovered by Derrick Harvey who promptly returned them for in-store credit.

We’re calling it blogger’s knee. Oh, the glamour!

Turkey beckons, so we’re off to Birmingham to visit family. To quell any potential rumors, we would like to announce right here and now that we are staying put at EDSBS, and will not be considering any offers to coach the University of Alabama football team.

Posting will be very, very light. We’ll hold off on the rest of the Michael Lewis interview, since transcribing the thing is like ten bitches in a bitch boat, so expect that on Monday. We may post some FSU-inspired invective, but after watching them lose to Wake by 30 points and getting shutout at home, the wattage for this game is going to be very, very dim indeed. Even we’re almost tired of watching Drew Weatherford get collar-tackled in the back of the pocket every other down (almost.)

Coaching deaths may rain down upon us quickly in the next week or so. Expect updates in that case. Paper maelstroms are already likely flying between lawyers, and should turn into blizzards following the final gun on Saturday. A few predictions:

–Larry Coker may just walk into the stands and leave via the visitor parking lot on Saturday. He could, since he’s going to be fired most mercilessly by Donna Shalalalalalala on Sunday.

–Amato: say goodbye to those sweet, sweet gazongas.

–Dirk Koetter: Norm Chow is taking your job, and leaving behind the flaming garbage scow that is the Titans franchise. Why not send your resume to Tallahassee?

–Shula: for all we know, Papa Smurf may well be a legitimate candidate. Like many Alabama fans he too eschews the wearing of shirt and shoes, a bonus in his compatibility rating for the job.

Enjoy the weekend. Remember, a frozen turkey placed into a deep-fryer will kill anything in a fifteen-foot radius. Whether this is preferable to spending another second with your family is your decision, but try not to take any innocents with you.

On that note, we are thankful for our readers, who remind us that you when you are sick, you are never alone. Oh, and for Reggie Fuckin’ Nelson, who worked his ass off through the boondocks of the college football world to get to Florida and play with unparalleled passion and joy. Here’s hoping he becomes the first man to intercept two passes at the same time Saturday. The way Weatherford and Lee are bleeding picks, it may happen.

Leave your own thanks below if you wish.

–O.

No, no, don’t thaw it, it’ll “seal the juices in.” Yeah, stand right over it. You’ll be fine. I need to go get a drink–be right back!