Gator Nation, this is coach Urban Meyer here. First, I’d like to personally thank you for all your support this year. The heart and passion of our fans really helped us through the rigors of our schedule. You’re as much to credit as anyone associated with this program for our success. A salute to you, fans.

Second, I’d like to go ahead and announce that I’m totally slacking off for the year 2007. Yup. With a roster full of blue-chip babies, a national championship under the old belt, and a sweet black leather Members’ Only jacket to boot, Urb’s officially announcing the old phone-in for the year. Waitress, this Ohio boy needs some more boat drinks, please.

Urban: needs more boat drinks.

I’ve said differently, sure.

“I wish I could say we’re going to make another run,” Meyer said. “I have no idea. That’s so farfetched, but rebuilding the defense is obviously the key to us having success. Our coaches on defense are going to have to earn their stripes this year.”

Lick it up, poindexters. You really just a bunch of reverse Ron Burgundys, aren’t you? You’ll write anything I say. Like I could walk out there, make a few remarks that I carefully constructed in between texting recruits, and I could read this in the Tampa Trib the next day:

Meyer said: “The reporter writing this is completely gay. Kissing other men ’til he gets beard burn gay. Dancing nancy, Haddaway What-Is-Love, half-tee-wearing, HGH-takin’ circuit boy twirling glo-stick gay. In case you don’t understand: the person writing this sleeps with dudes.

Sometimes, I really believe you’d print that. Especially you, Bianchi.

Like we’re going to do anything anyone remembers this year anyway. (more…)

File under taking cheese, making sandwich: Urban Meyer caps an eyelid-flipping recruiting season with the announcement of Belle Glade wideout Deonte Thompson’s LOI. Deonte commits in keeping with two Florida traditions:

1. Wideouts with curiously spelled first names. See Jacquez Green, Reidel Anthony, and especially wacky “Travis” McGriff.

2. He’s from Belle Glade, one of the most desperate corners of the Sunshine State and a former Gator stronghold during the Spurrier days. The old wisdom was that in Belle Glade, you had four vocations to choose from: cutting cane, going to jail, catching AIDS, or playing football. (For a while, Belle Glade had the highest HIV prevalence of any town in the U.S.)

We’re glad the 4.28-running Deonte opted for football. So’s Urban, who is frankly beginning to frighten us a little with all the competence and drive busting out all over the place. His ambition seems to be without horizon, and appeasement doesn’t seem to be working with him. Get Ban Ki-Moon on the phone! NOW!

Urban: so good only Microsoft Paint could do him justice. (HT: Reader David.)

Bruce Feldman talks national recruiting on signing day with us, broadcasting from the Orgeron's forbidding Bone Palace.

MP3 File

Florida continues to pour schadenfreude fuel on Notre Dame this morning by poaching New Jersey zillion star recruit Justin Trattou from Weis’ back pocket–a guy that Weis should have had dead to rights, what with Charlie always flaunting his Jersey credentials by driving around the Camaro, eating the canoli, and making the cameo appearances in Kevin Smith movies. (In reality, Charlie only likely does one of these. However, we guess he does it very, very well.)

Trattou had surprisingly lucid reasons for the switch:

“In a 3-4, they’d want me to play rush end or outside linebacker, and while that’s tempting, that’s not really where I see myself,” Trattou said. “I’ve always been a down lineman and that’s what I prefer. At the end of the day, that makes a big difference.”

A 4-3 defense–now that’s something you won’t see in South Bend.

The Trattou-theft brings Don Meyer’s tally of poached verbals to what we believe is a total of seven thus far. If recruits were flowers–and in some grand metaphorical sense, aren’t they, brothers and sisters?–we’d celebrate like this.

SEVEN!!! SEVEN POACHED VERBALS AH AH AH AH!!!!

The dirty business of lobbying 18 year olds has begun, and like most people dealing with 18 year olds, we expect only the worst and most efffective tactics to be employed: fear, cash, and sex, most notably.

You’ll need a steady hand to pass through the recruiting season, and the right tools to guide you through the dank jungle of rubber chicken dinners, strip clubs, illicit late-night drinking sessions, and surreptitious “rental car” usage you’ll find are all common downfalls of the recruiting season.

Our first cheat sheet follows, letting you know what to expect at each school. Enjoy.

(more…)

We’ve got a three day weekend coming up. This means, barring Ryan Perriloux being connected to phony Canadian coins loaded with tiny listening devices and a PLA arms smuggling ring, we’ll be absent from the blog on Monday, indulging in “interaction” with “actual people in the flesh.” We’ll let you know if it’s hazardous to your health.

A few notes that will no doubt develop into full stories over the holiday weekend.

Making Nick Saban look steadfast: Tim Graham. The Rice coach, who took scraps to scrappy with a 7-5 record this season and a bid in the New Orleans Bowl, leaves for rival Tulsa just three days after signing a contract extension. Let’s review the shitbag factors in total:

1. Leaving for conference rival–si!

2. Leaving after contract extension–ja, ja.

3. Leaving three days after contract extension, forcing us to break out the italics, dammit: hai!

Hmm…we’re feeling an equivalent shitbag score of…

Ricky Bobby’s dad in Talladega Nights.

Don’t worry. I’m a volunteer firefighter.

2. Ryan Perrilloux. The rumor now is that he’s a pigeon (Hey! Who else got the DVD set of Mannix for Christmas from their 60 year old uncle? Anyone?) in a counterfeiting scheme involving Perrilloux exchanging LSU memorabilia for a bag of fake bills. Further rumor has him cooperating fully with federal investigators, LSU handling this with a hazmat suit and mile-long tongs, and the Louisiana media sitting on the story until the uni gets its shot at the spin.

Word of a forfeit in the Sugar Bowl is also flying around, but then again, some people think the blood-type diet is based on actual science and that John Mayer is music to fuck to. (It’s actually music to fuck up people to, since the rage at hearing him rasp and wheeze through another milquetoasty song would make us want to put knuckles to eyesocket any day.) It’s the internet! There’s a trough of crazy in your flavor somewhere out there.

–Major Applewhite to Bama to coach the offense. Again, Saban don’t hire no dumb boys.

–Finally, we leave you with this: we promise that gloat week will end as of midnight tonight. But right now, it’s 6:20 p.m. EST, and it’s fair game. For a rapid-fire collection of a bareknuckle season, watch below. (WARNING: Contains scenes of Tim Tebow running, which may be unsuitable for small children.)

Enjoy your weekend.

This is going to be all over the place. Beginning in no particular order…

–Did Tressel watch a single minute of game film on Florida’s offense? Florida withers under blitz; him big ape, me call blitzes. Instead OSU opens each series with three down lineman, including some sets with a linebacker at the nose tackle position. They begged for the short-passing, highly accurate Leak to undo the sutures of their defense and let it bleed.

Coach Heacock, this space-age device could change your life.

This might not have been a disastrous strategy had Leak not been tossing the ball down hallways. The dbs seemed horrified of giving up anything over seven yards, playing miles off the ball on the snap and allowing Florida receivers to catch the ball in space. If this phrase sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s in your pablum detector for announcers, who use this verbiage to describe any short passing attack. Like, say, Florida’s. Who’d been called that all year.

A failure of imagination, gameplanning, and execution for Ohio State doomed them on defense. When they held soft zone, it was over. Next time, watch some tape. Or call someone. Or hell, pick up a controller and give NCAA 2007 a whirl. You’d think a team familiar with shattering Michigan’s soft zones would be the last to allow a team to do this, or create a gameplan begging for such treatment. Bear, meet trap.

–On defense Florida needed no coaching accomplices. (Negative superlative coming! Cliche warning issued.) Troy Smith played the worst game of his life and any other Heisman Winner in a big game, dipping below the Toretta line with the damning evidence listed in agate type for all to see:

4-14 completions 35 yards 0 TDs/ 1 INT

We imagined his agent creaming cellphone batteries, bluetooth light in his ear accentuating the panic, wearing out blackberries and reaching for holstered backups in an attempt to counter the ugly reality unfolding in front of him with carefully leaked leads to sympathetic sportswriters.

Cancer. Can we fake cancer? Sure, Lance Armstrong did it, right? That’s plan A, man. Then we go to dead relative–does he have a dead one? A really recently dead one? Or injury. He’s got to have a few. It’s gotta be something severe, like fractured ass, or cerebral ebola. Hell, cerebral ebola might actually up his signing bonus–what linebacker’s gonna want to touch someone with something called cerebral ebola? Phyllis! Get me the number of the CDC…

Earl Everett needs no helmet, and does not fear your cerebral ebola.

Smith should have more attempts on the books, and in reality did–five became sacks, and one became a fumble to set up Tim Tebow’s gotcha TD pass at the goal line. Ohio State’s tackles redefined late on Monday night, with Derrick Harvey and Jarvis Moss blowing tight curves around the edges to pressure Smith every time he had the ball.

Jarvis Moss: walking and talking on Facebook. He likes Heisemens.

If Marcus Thomas had laid off the GHB and stayed with the team, the numbers–horror of horrors–could have been worse. (more…)

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.

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.

Urban Meyer: ironist. As other have pointed out, that odd expression where he pulls his lips back to reveal his teeth may be what most would call “a smile.”