This is Stillwater. It’s in the northern part of Oklahoma. Oklahoma State plays there. Amarillo Lubbock**, the home of Texas Tech, is scarcely farther south.

Naturally, the two schools have agreed to start playing their games in… wait for it… Dallas. Because really, why make one fanbase travel hundreds of miles a year when you can make both instead?

Of course, there is the fact that more people live in Dallas than the entire state of Oklahoma* and there’s probably as many fans of each team in Dallas as there are in their home cities, but still, Dallas is not, how you say, close. Stillwater is 266 miles away, and that’s the closer of the two cities; it’s about 100 more miles from Amarillo Lubbock.***

So the question is, dear readers, if the UGA-UF game in Jacksonville is the world’s largest jorts cocktail party, what would OSU-TT in Dallas be called?

*I did zero research to back this up and it may be false, but it sounds like a good point.
**whoops a daisy.
***ditto.

Blogtoberfest: it’s the best of the internet, or at least the part of it we read.

House Rock Built, busy mourning Notre Dame’s season in style, elucidates the difference between Ar-kan-saw and ARRRR–Kansas.

Sylvester Croom isn’t afraid to cry. Especially because he’ll punch you in the windpipe if you start laughing at him.

Andy Staples reports that Florida still has a piddling chance at a BCS bowl, but that hell would have to turn itself inside out to happen, basically.

Les Miles still thinks he is undefeated. And he is, in regulation at least. Thank the pertinent god of your choice that ties no longer exist in college football, or the BCS would be positively quadriplegic.

Oregon’s going to the Blow-A-Goat.com bowl, according to Addicted to Quack. That sponsor still has more clout and dignity than the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl ever had.

Um, sorry. We meant the Sun Bowl. That’s actually where Oregon could end up, facing USF. The other option from the Pac-10 are the Oregon State Beavers. Begin Bulls/Beavers suggestive headline competition now.

Drunken stupidity: Not just for the SEC anymore! A Washington fan ejected from the Apple Cup loss to Washington State beat a Sikh cabbie on Saturday, calling the man “an Iraqi terrorist.” Given his attitudes, we’ll also bet he fully supports Auburn’s sideline police dogs and whatever actions they feel are necessary to protect the public from 180 pound cornerbacks.

Pray tell, cruise for one moment inside the mind of Mike Leach, and you will find a reference saying much if not all you need to know about his cultural references and tastes in cinema:

“One thing I’ve always liked about this place is you’ve got the great college atmosphere, but it’s got a little bit of that NFL flavor with some characters mixed in,” Leach said. “It’s like a college atmosphere mixed with a David Lynch movie, so it’s really pretty cool.”

A naked Isabella Rossellini begging to be hit? Exorbitantly long lesbian sex scenes? Not quite, but there is a Santa with a t-shirt on that (in all seriousness) we would purchase five minutes ago.

Seriously. If you know where that shirt comes from, it’s all we want for Christmas. In the meantime, you’ll just have to make do with your “WWLD?” t-shirt.

Real pirates! Not fun! Like theft! And rape! Yarr!

Yes, it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which like the shifting winds of fall puts one’s mind out to sea, the home of pirates like Mike Leach. Actually, most pirates we suspect are Indonesian or Somali, carry RPGs and pistols, and are missing one or more very yellowed teeth. But don’t blame us, misconstrued reality–blame Michael Lewis and the head swashbuckler himself, Leach.

Bringing us, mateys, to ponder the six year old question: be Captain Leach perched upon a treasure of gold unseen since the mines of Solomon belched forth their wealthy golden vomit o’ fortune? Or be it fool’s gold, as Texas Tech has pulled a textbook example o’ tackin’ ’round the reefs of early schedule contestation, feastin’ on the defenseless wee merchantmen of SMU, UTEP, and Rice to the measty sum of 153-64 in points, friend?

Yarr! Friend, Texas Tech may yet be hornswagglin’ ye–a likely 6 and unvanquished they’ll be goin’ into the matchup with Texas A&M on October 13th, where they’ll fain avoid the poundin’ offense of the biggest, ugliest mermaid gone terrestrial e’re the crust of this cursed earth cooled: the Black Cap’n Dennis Franchione. Wot with the beastie in Jorvorskie Lane, should be quite a night o’ wenchin’, drankin’, and merriment* to be had there for all concerned!

Still, it be tallish impressive to behold Graham Harrell and the moighty digits he puts forth on this early leg of the voyage: 120 completions, 160 attempts, 75.0 completion percentage, 1,317 yards total, and a 14/2 TD ratio. Great Neptune’s Jockstrap, them’s impressive, even against wee squabbers like they’ve been feastin’.

Get no illusions, however–Admiral Stoops lays in wait just round the horn, and a ferocious galleon he sails this season. Yet for a swabbie’s meager purse, none sailing the sea runs a more colorful ship, matey, than Leach–oh, how the cannonballs should fly when Missouri sees the Red Raiders sail into Missouri! A jolly day it should be, indeed, sirrah, most ’specially with all the heads rolling about the place and the thin hulls of defense on both sides. [TEAM REDACTED] scored 34 on them? Four score and a tankard of scumble for our fair captain that night!

HUZZAH!!!

*And by merriment, we mean rape. Let’s be clear on that. You think pirates be all fun and games, then you ken that next to showtunes, fresh breezes, and cosmopolitans on the stern in a muscle shirt, pirates also loves the rape. Seriously. Men, women, dogs, furniture, luxury European sports cars’ tailpipes, melons with holes cut in them–whatever. Don’t go a-sailin’ with one with virtue on your mind, lest the Barbary Coast find you bent over a barrel watchin’ the sun rise with a fleshpike firm square plied in thy poop deck for a watch’s length. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you’re into that. Pirates love frilly shirts and dancin’, too. Avast ye, love that dare not speak its name!

I’m…sailing awayyyy…
Looking for a fade route
Or my hot read slant…

In four days, we all go sailing with the Dread Pirate Leach.

Again, you are not free. Free men do what they like any time they want and say anything they please. Free men do the weather on their local station with zero prep time if they please. Free men pass deep with 20 seconds left on the clock. Free men do radio interviews while going through restaurant drive-ins. Free men act and live like Mike Leach.

From Big 12 Media days, discussing Lubbock and the game day environment there:

“It’s very savage to play in Lubbock,” Leach said. “I would recommend that everybody try to avoid it. There have been scalpings and there have been some people that quite just haven’t returned.

“There are some people, unfortunately, based on the way the conference goes, that are going to have to come to our place. Sadly, I can’t guarantee their safety or that things will necessarily go the way that they like.”

You think he’s joking. Mike Leach never jokes, my friend: Texas Tech fans have already countered potential bad behavior with a preseason proposal to behave better at games, a manifesto concluding with an all-persuasive argument:

The differences we share both socially and economically are brought together by our love and passion for Texas Tech and our beloved Red Raiders.

We’re not trailer park trash, and it’s time to stop acting like we are.

Settle down, poor people! Love, university graduates of Texas Tech. We never knew of any great problems at Raider games, save several members of the band going hypoxic and passing out due to playing the fight song after scores in a five minute span. We do know that they can be very, very loud, even alone.

HT: Peter. Yes, we know this was up yesterday. But we needed that photoshop, dammit, courtesy of Brian at HRB.

What: EDSBS LIVE online radio.

Why listen? Because the Deadliest Catch doesn’t come on until after the show, and because we’ll be discussing the Big 12, America’s rootin’, tootin’-est conferences. To keep the regional theme constant, we’ll be handing out fried Snickers and toilet bowl meth…very, very politely, mind you.

Where: At NowLive, where you can chat with each other and the show hosts throughout the broadcast in the online forum (which remains damn lively). To phone in to the show, just call (310) 984-7600.

Who: Tonight’s special guests are Chip Brown from the Dallas Morning News and Seth J from Double T Nation (Texas Tech). Guaranteed bonus Mike Leach pirate discussion should be enough, but we’ll throw in a real journalist just for the hell of it.

Four Questions: As always, our four questions for the night.

1. Who emerges atop the Big 12 scrum this year? Oklahoma State. The offense has Bobby Reid pulling strings, Larry Fedora calling plays sans shoestrings (even with them he did a fine job at Florida), and a nice upward trend from 4-7 to 7-6 last year. A young coach, improved defense, and no one looking out for them all strike the eye as fetching, like a comely lass in a parasol we’d like to buy a sarsparilla for at the park.

(Anyone with any brains will pick Oklahoma or Texas. But that’s not us, and you know it.)

2. Now take it a step further. Does the winner of the Big 12 play for the BCS Title game this year? Sure, if there’s not an undefeated Big East team, who would face a one-loss LSU or Pac-10 team. Oklahoma may have a slight edge, since Texas would have the shameful pygmy heads of Arkansas State, UCF, and Rice as trophies in an undefeated scenario, weak nancies, all of ‘em. At least the Sooners could claim Miami (FL), even in year one under Randy Shannon, which would give them a slight SOS advantage.

Then again, Texas could claim Oklahoma if they won…which is why the strongest candidate would be an undefeated Oklahoma State team, since they could have Georgia’s scalp on their resume, too, provided UGA sleepwalks through their opener as they’re wont to do from time to time, along with Oklahoma and Texas, too. They’d be the strongest candidate, but again, since we’ve picked them it ain’t happening.

One albatross, however: human beings still being a factor here, Oklahoma will suffer for crapping out against USC and LSU in recent BCS championships, no matter the circumstances. People have short memories, but they have ‘em, fair or not.

3. If I paid you $500,000 would you permanently move to Nebraska? If not, what’s the threshhold? $1,000,000? $10m? For how long would you move to Nebraska for $500,000? For $500K, we would sleep in an open pasture in Nebraska for a year. That’s 500 large, there. As long as the pasture had wireless, we would be fine. Which in all likelihood means we wouldn’t do it.

4. Because our show is so dependent on juvenile humor, the obligatory sex question: What’s the sexiest mascot in the Big 12?

We go pirate, of course, but only because the words “Pirate Fetish Machine” beg to be used in a band name, tattoo, or novel title.

You’ll never look at Baylor the same way.

Talk to you tonight.

We knew vacation was over when the vodka ran out–which, sadly, it did. We’re back, up, and hoping to take the Serena Williams approach to blogging fitness. Meaning we’ll play our fat asses into shape over the course of the tournament. Edit: our fat beautiful asses.

Getting in shape? That’s what the first two rounds are for, suckers.

The morning roll call of extremely important events we missed while gone:

Auburn recruits allegedly changed the grades of two players had grades changed at the last minute to make them eligible, according to the Mobile Press-Register. We normally don’t even post allegations of malfeasance sent to us by either Alabama/Auburn fans re: Auburn/Alabama football players, but this one comes from an actual newspaper, not Roscoe’s House O’ Cheatin’ Bastards.blogspot.com.

The NCAA is investigating… (more…)

The New Radicals of blog features: one permanent member, many revolving pieces.

Texas Gal’s knows how the Shorn Emu sings. Shocking, sad, and underreported news from Notre Dame’s spring scrimmage: Jimmy Clausen shaved his trademark Emu-do. Without the distractions, bourbon warrior Texas Gal focused on the important things: Tom Zbikowski’s Van Damme-esque buttocks.

In case you need a brain enema after that phrase……this will not help at all.

The matchup of cocaine and Jean Claude Van Damme in the prolapse of his career has been as inspired a pairing as Peter O’Toole/scotch, Joe Piscapo/nandralone, and David Lee Roth/rockclimbing. Um…football? Yes, football…

Smrt pepl lke futbaw. Particularly smart Republican ones. Meanwhile, baseball continues its slow death, while NASCAR reigns supreme among people who didn’t graduate high school. Stereotypes: full of vitamin fact!

Tom Dienhart, goin’ robo at work if this is any indication. Cough syrup is a hell of a drug. At least it better be to make someone construct a ranking of coaches where one can construct these inelegant statements:

Jim Grobe>Steve Spurrier
Kirk Ferentz>Urban Meyer
Tom O’Brien>Greg Schiano
Chan Gailey>Phil Fulmer

We hate Phil, but God’s Wounds! Chan? By the Hammer of Thor, we’ve got to break out some seriously exaggerated oaths to encompass how truly silly that list is. Richt at 23, in a job that’s tougher than most people know? Great Rama’s Lingam! Bobby Bowden over Joe Paterno? By the Silvery Feathers of Quetzalcoatl!

Yet another Michigan blog. It’s like you all can read AND use the computer, Wolverines. Literacy, bitches, literacy.

Mike Leach, healer of souls. The best college football blogger in the known universe has the pirate captain on for a bit of soul-healing advice to a reader in the latest installment of “Ask Mike Leach,” re: why his friends who did not attend his awesome, championship tramp of a school aren’t speaking to him.

It could also be they’re avoiding you because you’re an asshole. I was listening to public radio recently while I was mapping the inefficiencies of my local sewer system for my upcoming presentation to the Lubbock City Council, “Optimization of Collection System Maintenance Frequencies and System Performance,” and I heard a story about a guy who suddenly realized all his friends thought he was an asshole.

MIKE LEACH LISTENS TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE!!! Shocking. Too bad they’re ending the series, their long, arduous mission finally accomplished.

Mike Leach: Ira Glass fan, yes, ladykiller, no.

Science verifies reason. It makes marginally more sense to go on defense first in overtime, according to people who work with numbers and stuff. We’re thrilled that the Sabermetrics crew has drifted slowly over to football, a significantly more difficult subject of analysis than baseball. We just can’t wait to see who emerges as the despised Joe Morgan of the antiempirical mob. We’re guessing Mark May, though Bob Davie’s a good guess, too.

Again: Mike Leach lives every week like it’s Shark Week. Those moments in the day when you hem and haw, wondering if what you’re about to do will make someone awkward, violate an invisible social boundary, or possibly get fired…those simply don’t exist for the man.

The latest example of why you live life like a mincing ninny comes courtesy of the Fanhouse:

I’m a Bill O’Reilly fan. I listen to a lot of talk radio. G. Gordon Liddy. Rush Limbaugh. Sean Hannity. I like G. Gordon Liddy. I got Leach that Stacked and Packed Calendar. G. Gordon Liddy puts out this calendar. It’s women in bathing suits holding guns. He talked about it; I figured he’d want it. Maybe that’s why he put me on scholarship.”

Ladies with guns=hott. Ladies with guns and burqa=hotttttter.

Ladies with guns=scholarship? There’s nothing there to really support it other than the supposition of an 18 year old who “listen(s) to a lot of talk radio.” This does not present the best case. However, we want it to be true, because it would be so much funnier if it were.

Therefore we proclaim that Mike Leach traded gun ‘n babe cheesecake calendarage for a scholarship. Just try and take down the pirate, NCAA!!! You don’t have the balls to take Captain Mike down, Myles Brand. Just try it and see–after all, he’s now got a recruit with “an undisclosed number of firearms” in his custody.

Wait a second…how did he get away from us? Sending Urban email immediately–we have to maintain our status as college football’s most ardent defender of the 2nd amendment. We’ll fight for that prize, and you’ll have to take it from our cold, dead hands, pirate. From our cold, dead hands.

Courtesy of Univision: Vanessa convinces you that Mazda=glamorous. Or at least Mazda=woman with visible tan cheekmeat who, if not willing to rub herself on you, will certainly do so on your car while you watch.

BTW: there’s an unfulfilled market need here, people: naughty car washes. Feel free to make it your own. Imagine how clean your car would be if every scene were like the car wash scene from Cool Hand Luke. It’s posted after the jump for both filthy men to ogle Lucille, and for dirty women with prison fantasies to ogle Paul Newman dirty and shirtless. We know who’s reading this.

(more…)

Yarr.

Some people really do live every week like it’s shark week. Mike Leach, pirate and Texas Tech football coach, sees the winds change, tacks against it, and broadsides the opposition with this news: his crew be needin’ a mighty punter, and they’re willing to use your fancy newspapers to find him. As found in the Daily Toreador, the swashbucklingly named student paper of Texas Tech: (HT:Dave)

Anyone wanting to tryout for the team can start today by calling the Texas Tech Athletic Department and ask for Tech graduate assistant Clay McGuire.

If you’re in the area and would like to try out, that’s (806) 742-4260 and ask for Clay. Sure he’s having a really, really fulfilling day. We weren’t aware Mike Leach actually had a punter, or even used one. However, if he wants to appease critics by carrying one, we’re glad to egg the charade on with him. (We love elaborate charades–see the BCS, or the current subprime lending market for some of our faves.)

Qualifications include:

–Scurvy-free.
–Does bellringing in private.
–Prefers to kick into practice nets as opposed to real-time, in-game situations.
–Extensive wenching experience preferred; basic random sodomy and pillaging, however, is a must.
–Must be a big fan of “brown rain.”

Again, just ring up ol’ Clay there if you think you’re game, swabby. Yarr.

This Friday’s Latin-themed Cheesecake of the day comes via Kanu, who answered our call for an OMG Shirtless! cheesecake recruit from Brazil with speed, skill, and precision.

Bianca Rinaldi, a paulista from Sao Paulo . Foi um prazer te conhecer, bonito.

Bianca Rinaldi. Proof that living in Brazil might be worth the exaggerated risk of being shot.

Tonight, EDSBS Radio reappears…

…only this time with such innovations as sound quality, a moderator for callers, and interstitial music and commercials that won’t deafen you. We’ve moved the show to the Now! Network–check the preview page here–and will have someone manning the boards for us, controlling sound quality, and exterminating all of the bugs that bedeviled the initial installment of the show.

The details:

What: EDSBS Radio

When: 8:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m. EST

Where: On the EDSBS channel at Now Live.

How: To call in? (310) 984-7600. You may also register at Now Live and participate in the live chat, where we’ll be taking comments and working them into the broadcast.

Why: Because you, like us, need to confess to the fact that you’re going to tailgate your spring practice game like the desperate, depraved person you truly are.

Who: Peter Bean of Burnt Orange Nation and Orson from this website, along with special guest Warren St. John of the New York Times and the best book ever written about college football fandom, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer.

The five questions from last time have been whittled down to four questions. To prepare ahead of time, your study list appears below:

1. What do you know about your team going into spring practice?

2. Better still…what don’t you know about your team going into spring?

3. What’s your offseason coping mechanism?

4. What’s a badass death?

The final question has to do something with a long running debate between EDSBS attorney to the stars Weo Lee and ourselves as to what constitutes a badass death. His prime examples:

–Brad Pitt’s death in Legends of the Fall where he fights a bear.

–This eagle:

About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power Jan. 28 after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.

The eagle “got a hold of a little bit more than he could handle,” Wood said.

–A hypothetical he’s been refining for years where he plays a guitar solo on top of a jet that’s just dropped a tactical nuclear weapon into a hurricane off the coast of Florida. Did we mention he’s wearing a speedo and a hockey mask, too?

These will be on the exam tonight. Prepare accordingly. And hey, they’re taking us on the network despite us bringing down the overall hotness of the operation considerably. After all, Adrianne Curry is one of the hosts on the network, and she married Peter Brady. That’s uber-hott.

We’re bringing the ass factor in the neighborhood down considerably.