We are all now one step closer to Florida winning its first Fulmer Cup in the first year without its actual namesake coaching in the SEC. Florida corner Janoris Jenkins loves his chain for the same reason you love your ostentatious and garish gold chain. You know, the dookie roll you’re currently rocking in your desk jobs around the nation, and which no serious professional is without.

An artist’s sketch suggests this was how Janoris Jenkins spent at least part of Saturday night.

Someone–most likely a “hater”, as defined under Florida judicial code 34.2.882.43–decided to appropriate Jenkins’ chain without his permission. Haters do this quite often, both because they are jealous of your immense, uncountable wealth, but also because they often make bad decisions because of sleep deprivation. Losing sleep thinking about your constant success with women, your constantly new and fresh clothing, and your stunning ride and its candy paint will dull a person’s ability to choose wisely, but it’s not your fault. One rule about haters as defined under criminal law is that they are in a constant state of hating, and will “be hatin’” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s nothing you can do but keep shinin’.

Or you could try to chase them down, ignore requests from police orders, and get tased by the tasing’est cops in all of Christendom, the Gainesville police department.

The officer then drew out a Taser and told the group stop. At that point, Jenkins hit another person in the head, police reported…Jenkins was hit with one cycle from the Taser, but afterward he stood up and ran away…Police said Jenkins admitted he was fighting with the others because he thought they were trying to steal his chain, according to the report.

Jenkins, one of Florida’s starting corners, earns three points in the Fulmer Cup for the two misdemeanor charges (affray, resisting arrest) and one bonus point for being a dumbass while on scholarship at our alma mater. We’re this close to appropriating the U gesture for ourselves, and lack only a solid cocaine-based arrest to fully dethroning the U of the 1990s as Thug U. Rick Reilly should be recycling that old line from his piece on Oklahoma any day now.

When a teammate dies tragically in an accident, you mourn. You listen. You hold those around you close and share the unbearable pain of loss. You take one of the dead people’s credit card and use it to buy shit for six months. You get arrested for it when the parents notice their dead daughter has been buying stuff for six months despite being dead.

Jamar Hornsby: creative financing available.

Jamar Hornsby of Florida followed this unique plan for mourning the loss of a teammate and a Florida student closely enough: somehow, after the death of Florida walk-on Michael Guilford and Florida student Ashley Slonina in a motorcycle wreck in October 2007, Slonina’s credit card ended up in the hands of Hornsby, who then revered the memory of the young lady by purchasing goods on the credit card for six months. Slonina’s parents finally noticed recently, and an investigation led to the beyond-classy Hornsby.

OS: Extra icing, please thank you very much life?

Life: Three scoops coming up, sir.

The card abuse started Oct. 13, 2007, the day after the girl’s death, according to court records and involved a BP gas card.

Ah, thanks life. You never force us to make things up, instead just giving us real and improbably terrible things. Hornsby is charged with credit card theft and fraudulent use of a credit card, which we imagine are both felonies. That’s three points times two for each felony charge plus the bonus point for using a dead girl’s credit card the day after she died and with one bonus point for it being a Florida Gator and therefore homer-shameful to us personally, and we take that to eight points for Florida, putting them on the big board in a fashion so tacky no amount of exponents can cover it.

Oh, and you there, we’ll say it for you “WAAAAAAHHHH you’re giving Florida points because you want to win.” Mr. Astoundinglystupidworth, if using a dead girl’s credit card the day after she died only gets two bonus points we should consider ourselves lucky for only getting eight points. Redux: you don’t want to win this thing. It’s not good. Perhaps that’s a point worth repeating from time to time: it’s not good to win the Fulmer Cup. It’s not good to win the Fulmer Cup. By the way, it’s not good to win the Fulmer Cup. For further reference, see: “Fulmer Cup: not good,” or the Wikipedia entry “Fulmer Cup: Bad.”

Extra fun update! How did Hornsby get the card? Simple. He took it when he was helping clean out the apartment with Joe Haden the day after the card owner died. Ashley Slonina. Joe Haden’s girlfriend. The dead one. Oh, Jebus this is sad.

We slammed a fifth of Powerthirst after waking up this morning, and the Curious Index is now the FURIOUS INDEX! Thus, it’s only fair we start things off with something satisfyingly harsh, like Pantera in front of tens of thousands of angry Russians. Mind the language, of course, but it’s likely your boss might care a bit more about the fact that it’s Pantera than if an F bomb gets dropped. Plus you can’t even understand any of the lyrics anyway.

Who the hell is “Terrelle Pryor”?: Recruiting minutia for those of you who care about this stuff… some Pryor kid, who seems more interested in basketball than football, has committed to the “University of Ohio State.” aren’t they in the MAC or something? Regardless, we expect this to have absolutely no effect on the college football world for the next four-five years. None whatsoever. We’re certain that Michigan faithful would rise up with pitchforks and torches and throw Rich Rodriguez into Lake Huron in 2010 anyway. Anyway, worst kept secret turns into not secret at all, and the other members of the BXI now have their excuse why they plan to lose to Ohio State 90-0 for the next four years.

June Jones cares about defense, pants: An alert reader sends us this tip:

But here was the big surprise — June Jones was coaching the defense. Seriously. I expected him to be right behind the quarterbacks talking to them about everything, but instead he had a notebook in his hand and after each play he’d flip it open and show something to the defense — I’m guessing a formation he wanted them to line up in. He even lined up as the right end a few times and at the snap would take a couple of steps into the backfield, like a rusher.

Picture evidence, which is too large for the constraints of this site, is here. There is no denying, now, that SMU is controlling Jones like Scientology. First, the clothes: Jones, who used to dress like a bad mix of a Jimmy Buffett fan and Bernie Focker, is posing in suits with the SMU brass. Now the former Hawaii coach thinks he’s a defensive guru. Don’t be surprised when, by July, Tom Cruise hears June’s name, thinks he’s a girl, and instinctively gets him pregnant.

Did we say “aggravated murder by arson?” We mean “misdemeanor.”: Charges against a Penn State player have been dropped. No, this is not a repeat. This time it’s Tyrell Sales, cited last Saturday for hollerating, and charges have now poof disappeared. This follows a long line of exorbitant Penn State charges that haven’t even come close to sticking, which just goes to show what happens when you hire Fericito as your attorney general. The Big Board will reflect the adjustment, assuming it was ever changed in the first place.

Did you have a good day with your bracket?: Yes, so did everybody else. It’s not like you had Georgia in the Elite 8 or any… oh God, you did, didn’t you. It’s okay, you didn’t need that money. Your wife can live off canned food for a while.

The Fulmer Cup 2008…now with theme song! God bless Garage Band loops.

MP3 File

The Fulmer Cup enters its third year of existence as college football’s premiere offseason time-waster and the only established measure of which teams really do have the least well-behaved student-athletes in the sport of football. In case you aren’t familiar with the system, we’ll recap the rules and even show you an example of the scoring, since the University of Tennessee–appropriately enough–gave us an example this weekend to open the scoring for this year.

Points are awarded for player arrests. These have to be current football players and verified charges, so if Uncle Jimboridicus calls and tells you that he swears he saw someone being stuffed into the back of a squad car…no dice unless we’ve got a wire report or an arrest record. Also, if it’s a graduated player, or someone who’s already declared for the draft…no go there, either. Coaches can count, but relatives of players do not.

The rules for scoring are as follows, but are not limited to:

* Murder: 5 points.

* Rape: 4 points. Downgraded to one if either participant is wearing a clown mask.

* Bestiality: 4 points. It’s a form of rape, really, no matter how much the goat has had to drink. High point value justified further by the fact that it involves having sex with an animal. You could say this was unthinkable, but in the past year alone two stories involving college athletes and at least the association with barnyard bonhomie of a most intimate degree have been reported, including the EDSBS Official GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD: the arrest of Oregon State player Ben Siegert for stealing a sheep used in a study on homosexuality in sheep.

* Grand Larceny: 4 points. We use this as a catchall for players being involved in crime so outrageous and well-planned it can only be described as ‘nefarious,’ ‘professional,’ or ‘legislation.’ Applies to large drug rings, chop shop operations, and the Haitian human trafficking ring that’s been run out of the Miami locker room since ‘93. (We kid! They didn’t get that thing humming ’til ‘95 at the earliest.)

* Hitting Girls: 3 points. We’ll downgrade this to 2 if the girl can hold her weight and requires daily medication to prevent her from gouging her own eyes out (since those were the ones we always ended up dating, and we understand); or we’ll upgrade to 4 points if the damage includes intensive care. Dad always said never hit girls, so we take this one seriously. Dad also said always double down with split aces, too, but we’ll be damned if we didn’t end up selling bone marrow in Macau the last time we followed that bit of advice.

* Car theft/Assault/Driving through houses drunk/Drug possession of the Tyrone Biggums variety: 3 points. “Drug possession” never sounds all that bad until you add in ‘crack cocaine,’ which is society’s signifier that your life has gone from that of high functioning simian in a complex society to that of a rat with electrodes in your brain’s pleasure centers hitting a pedal in a glass box in a lab. Weed? Par for the course, especially if you’re NFL-bound. Crack? Break out the Sports Century ‘Weepy Sonata’ music, because the story of your descent from boundless potential has just begun, and they haven’t even begun to show the grainy shots of 130-lb you huddled in a shelter on Skid Row.

* Fightin’ in ‘da Club/Weed Possession/Standard DUI: 2 points. Any scenario involving group fighting of a thugged-out, ‘we run this place’ variety, and marijuana possession of the nickel bag level. Possession of 100 pounds of marijuana is a totally different thing, and takes you right back up to the 4 point ‘nefarious’ level.

* Drankin’/Suspended License/Assorted petty misdemeanors: 1 point.

Crave it: The Fulmer Cup.

There is a fair amount of wiggle room here, especially given the degree of the crime and the zest with which is was committed. For example: there’s DUI, and what we’ll call Estonian DUI. Some poor kid who had one too many beers gets pulled over with a .09 BAC? That’s standard DUI. Some coach gets pulled over, say on a desert lane somewhere in Arizona, for instance, with a .45 BAC and a can of ether? This calls for bonus points, an award determined both by reader input and by Queen of Hearts Rules. (Orson is the Queen of Hearts here, and if he says off with its head, then it’s off with the head.)

The updated scoreboard will be maintained again by Brian “Hung Like Reggie F’n Nelson”, who will get an even cooler nickname this season if he keeps it up. Scoring is maintained in detail in the archives here, but somewhat more conveniently talled by our close personal friends at SAS Wiki at their indispensable Fulmer Cup page.

The Ellis T. Jones III award, neglected last season, will make a return to the scene this year. The ETJ3 is given to the player who makes such an astounding individual achievement he cannot fairly be considered to be part of the team. This is designed to offset not only the impact of one bad egg on a whole team, but also to recognize outstanding effort on the part of the individual. Think of it as the Davey O’Brien Award, but for stealing car stereos instead of passing.

Now, for an example: Tennessee wide receivers Gerald Jones and Ahmad Paige were showing some recruits around this weekend. Light stuff, really: a nice cruise in the ride, a few joints firing away in the ashtray, and the one excuse a cop needs: a busted tag light. Paige granted police permission to search the car, they did, and now we know what explains Tennessee’s blunted deep passing game this year: two possession charges, one for Paige and one for Jones, and the first points of the new season go to the Cup’s namesake, the University of Tennessee.

The tally:

2 points each for possession, meaning a total of 4 for Tennessee. You count them each, and considering the piddly amounts involved, you’re not talking Tyrone Biggums/Nate Newton levels here.

Let the race begin! When the fat man says it’s time to dance, it’s time…to dance!

Also check out Miami Hawk Talk’s preseason rankings. They’re bullish on Arizona State, and why not?

Ronnie Wilson, best remembered as the hopefully former Gator lineman who pulled an AK-47 from his trunk to “scare” a man who followed him out of a Gainesville nightclub a few months back, has finally been formally charged for the offense. The tally:

State Attorney Bill Cervone said Thursday that Wilson has been charged with one count of battery and one count of discharging a firearm in public. Gainesville police had recommended Wilson be charged with a felony count of aggravated assault and a count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony.

Don’t blame the nefarious tentacles of Florida boosters for the reduction in charges–blame Florida’s TOTALLY AWESOME and tourist-friendly “Shoot First” law, specifying that a person may “use force, including deadly force, against an intruder or an attacker in a dwelling, residence or vehicle under specified circumstances; creating a presumption that a reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm exists under certain circumstances…”

Wilson, for the record, is 6′3″, 316 pounds. His lawyer better hope the “threat” in the case is big–like, Nikolai Valuev-sized kind of big.

Didn’t you play the part of a Persian in 300, dude?

Wilson is not currently enrolled in classes, but “would like to remain at UF.” Urban Meyer will conclusively kick him off before the judicial hearing in August, and thus assert himself as a disciplinarian! It’s opposite day yay!

Ahem. He’ll totally be back and in the starting rotation by November when he gets his conditioning back. We’re already resigning ourselves to this inevitable and sad fact of having a Lou Holtzian coach. Stop looking at us like that–we suddenly feel…threatened…(reaching in trunk…)

The big board is in need of some updates. Follow along below.

First, old business. A weekend of Vegas debauchery delayed this score, but Bobby Maurice Purify polished up an already impressive resume of offseason naughty (two counts of assault, failure to comply, resisting arrest and trespassing five weeks earlier) with an arrest on suspicion of drunk driving at 12:25 am last Friday. Purify, already Nebraska’s leading scorer for 2007 without putting on a single pad, racks up another two points pending further details on the incident. Coach Bill Callahan has indefinitely suspended him and offered no further comment other than that he remains smarter than you can ever hope to be, you fucking redneck.

UGA’s Fulmer Cup points never come from a dark, malevolent quarter of human nature. (more…)

Reader Atomic Dog sends us this excellent satellite photo of what’s truly causing all those fires in South Georgia and Florida, composed by some MSU-lovin’ genius named Brent. If you had a mustache, sir, you would be our Mustache of the Day. That’s how awesome this picture is:

Marcus Thomas’ training techniques: set to light the NFL world on fire! For a larger version, click here.

Auburn scores points for drunk in pub-LICK, as Octavius Balkcom (nice Bond villain name, there) is arrested at 4:40 a.m. this past Saturday in Opelika for public drunkenness. As you may know, if you are drunk and in public at 4:40 a.m. in Opelika, Alabama, then your blood may be used for rocket fuel, because you are likely drunk as haaaaaaiiiiiiiiil.

Powered by booze!

That out of the way…we have Florida points to report, though not so many as previously thought. Last night the student newspaper of the University of Florida, The Alligator, reported that five players were arrested attempting to steal a beer keg from a student in the Cabana Beach Apartments.

(Cabana Beach Apartments should not fool you with its name: it no more resembles tropical paradise than Camelot Apartments resembles the mythical home of King Arthur. Most apartment complexes in Gainesville have hyperbolic bullshit names like this. We’ll respect the one that just comes out and calls itself “Drywall Claptrap Where Your Sex Life Is Your Neighbors’, Too.”)

The details, from Carl Hiaasen’s student newspaper:

On Saturday, a UF student was taking kegs out of his truck when the men approached him. One 6-foot-4, 280-pound man attempted to steal his keg, cutting his neck in the process, according to the report. The cut was 5 to 6 inches long, the report states, and it appeared to be the result of a fingernail or ring.

The other four players on the scene restrained the attacker, who then broke away and assaulted the student again, slamming him into his truck, according to the report.

The Alligator changed its headline overnight, since the incident came out as one player demonstrating assholishness beyond reason restrained by four players who clearly failed in their goal of not ending up in the paper. This is, by the way, the only paper reporting the story.

Nevertheless…

One count of robbery= 3 points.
Two definite accounts of assault=4 points
One bonus point for fucking up at our university=1 point

That’s eight points right there, a substantial sum placing Florida well within striking distance of Illinois’ once impregnable lead. The charges, though, may not even stand. For shame’s sake, though, we award them in hope that our climb up the rankings will push Urban Meyer to do something, anything positive in the way of disciplining a football player for anything.

On the upside…at least he didn’t throw it after he stole it.