Every Day Should Be Saturday - All PostsBecause college football is too important to be left to the professionals.https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/46681/edsbs-fave.png2019-07-31T15:33:44-04:00http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/rss/current/2019-07-31T15:33:44-04:002019-07-31T15:33:44-04:00FREE BIRD
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<figcaption>2005 — 2019 | Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports</figcaption>
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<p>PLAY IT PRETTY </p> <p id="qXZqhJ"><em>Everyone wants to be free. That’s what this country’s all about. </em></p>
<p id="Ps0nW3"><em>—Ronnie Van Zant </em></p>
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<p id="XIhMxQ">It started as a joke, because “Free Bird” was the song rednecks loved to play when doing super redneck things, things you hoped weren’t contagious but wanted to try anyway. It is the song played in the documentary <em>The Dancing Outlaw,</em> while Jessco White and his friends party and drunkenly tear up someone’s front yard in a car doing donuts until the engine smokes and the back axle almost falls off the car. It is the song I associate with the relatives and neighbors who’d inevitably fall out of trees they’d climb as adults on a dare, kill rattlesnakes in their driveways with shotguns while kids rode bikes around the cul-de-sac, and show up to family events with new wives without warning. </p>
<p id="N6MOjG">It started as a joke, all of it. “Free Bird” is not the song anyone alive at any point in the 1980s would have liked in order to be cool. “Free Bird” is the song of the kinds of people a kid growing up in Tennessee desperately hoped to avoid. “Free Bird” people bought Trans Ams and Fieros and drove them until the sound insulation fell out of them and the mufflers started to rust. They thought it was cool because it just made the car louder, and the volume on “Free Bird” on the radio would just have to be twice as loud. They smoked, all of them, all the time.</p>
<p id="kT0CEV">“Free Bird” never had to happen. No one ever had to take the trouble to play it because it just <em>got played</em>, it came on like an assumption, like the weather. It could be cited in Almanacs, like the phases of the moon or the next neap tide. </p>
<p id="bi5mxd"><em>February 18th: 2:40 p.m. at moderate volume from a passing Silverado on I-40 </em></p>
<p id="SGAksF"><em>April 7th: 8:18 p.m. Blasting during preshow for Alabama at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium</em></p>
<p id="5EA0Xu"><em>July 3rd: 10:38 a.m. from your uncle’s Nissan Z as he pulls up late to your seventh birthday party</em></p>
<p id="vOnCbr"><em>September 11th: 10:39 a.m. from tailgate at football game. Blistering volume. </em></p>
<p id="t4EjhE">It was so deeply uncool, and in so many ways. It was uncool enough to become a joke at concerts for bands that would never play “Free Bird,” or play music for those who loved it. It was huge, anthemic, sincere, and beloved by hippie-compatible country types who wore t-shirts with serious-looking totem animals screen-printed on them. </p>
<p id="OIKk1K">In what was a serious error of bad taste for some, it had what could only be called a cartoonish number of guitar solos. Worst of all: It was achingly sincere, the kind of song to play at tailgates after eight tallboys too many, and at the funerals of guys who died helmetless in rural highway motorcycle accidents. </p>
<p id="xd5c2g">***</p>
<p id="OZoSdy">You are reading this because I flunked out of the CIA. When I started EDSBS, I was underemployed in a terrible uninsulated apartment, fresh out of grad school with next to no plan, and not entirely able to think rationally about my situation. </p>
<p id="ma2qka">The computer I typed all this into was a gigantic CPU block Dell with a fan so loud it could be heard on phone calls at a distance. The apartment sat in a stretch of intown Atlanta still wild enough that COPS filmed there. This happened often enough that the camera crew following the lady running out of Green’s Liquor on Ponce, who proved to be shockingly fast sprinting uphill in heels, and the huffing policemen in pursuit didn’t seem out of place at the time. </p>
<p id="AplxlR">I was interviewing for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, because I was a delusional idiot. A good solid dead patch in life drove me there: begging for internships no one else wanted and still getting rejected, running my joints ragged on blistering Georgia blacktop, developing an eating disorder out of boredom and despair. I did things so out of character I don’t even fully recognize them as my own actions today. I went to church once, talked to military recruiters, and thought about law school out loud. </p>
<p id="gT9rq2">I was considering the CIA not out of patriotism, but because a career promising formal obliteration of my existing life was exactly what I wanted anyway. In my desperation, I convinced myself that the only job I could take was one that would erase myself completely by spending the rest of my life trying to sell a multi-level marketing scheme called “deeply underpaid government intelligence asset,” with the added bonus of a regular paycheck and a built-in excuse to barely talk to anyone I knew ever again.</p>
<p id="ru3CJW">I waited tables and waited by the mailbox and got an invite for the second round of interviews, to be held in a dismal brick office park warren in Reston, Virginia. They dole out a battery of written tests, do a few role-play scenarios with potential candidates, and ask applicants to be discreet about the reason for the visit to the not-at-all obvious building with the car bomb barriers and the lady carrying a combat shotgun standing out in front of it. </p>
<p id="1TP6Rl">They pay out per diems in the cleanest cash I have ever held in my hands. </p>
<p id="FhRsWz">The money lasted a day or two after I got back to Atlanta. The letter from “McLatter and Associates” I got two months later let me know that my career as a spy was done before it ever took me any farther from home. I walked around Piedmont Park for a few hours and then I came home, sat down, and fired up NCAA Football to abuse a defense with Kliff Kingsbury and Texas Tech. </p>
<p id="tG9QaJ">I probably threw eight TDs that day. It wasn’t all bad. </p>
<p id="w3HAf1">***</p>
<p id="nA4sB7">The centerpiece of <em>Free Bird </em>is the massive three-pronged guitar solo, four minutes and change long. </p>
<p id="pZvcQl">Al Kooper’s organ intro starts the song in church mode. The piano part — written and played by a roadie who had to become a member of the band later, because shit, that’s the Free Bird piano dude now, isn’t it — walks Nashville sound piano and Floyd Cramer right into the room. The slide guitar line carrying the melody is twin-tracked for an echo effect. It could be a dobro, or a fiddle, or anything rubbery enough to slide around a melody but mournful enough to be confused for a human voice. </p>
<p id="NGxEpT">Against all that warm 70s guitar, that line will always sound the way sunlight on a lake looks to me. It’s shimmery, sad, gorgeous, a little faded but still bright enough to remind the eye that there’s real fire behind it. It is the reflection of something so intense it can’t be looked straight at without damaging the observer. It sounds like the sun disappearing behind the lip of a stadium on a brutal September day feels: warm, gone from the eye, but still blasting away at something just out of sight. </p>
<p id="Gu85DK">The lyrics are a matter of interpretation. Ronnie Van Zant’s reading was poetical. Birds were the freest thing of all, and freedom was what this country was all about. Those are his words, not mine, from an interview Van Zant conducted while fishing in a trucker hat, because this was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and there was going to be an interview on a boat talking about America at one point. </p>
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<p id="b4lT97">My translation is less sunny. It sounds like a breakup song attempt to “free” the singer, which is already bad, but gets worse when he drops a very literal “it’s not you, it’s me” in the middle of the second verse. Because <em>if</em> he stayed, you see, well, he wouldn’t change. <em>(See: previous assertion of Free Bird-ness and immutable status as same.) </em>You could totally read “Free Bird” as being an asshole’s anthem, if you wanted to, and be completely justified in that read. </p>
<p id="lW1F2Z">There’s a lot there: that Nashville sound piano, the vanishing organ, the trailer park player letdown lyrics, the bombastic drums with the toms echoing to the rafters, the spectral guitar yanked out of a bluegrass funeral tune. It holds together, at one end, because of one guitar line. It soars on the other because of a three-part bar brawl between the band’s guitarists. </p>
<p id="tnuQhS">*** </p>
<p id="zM7332">I didn’t know what I was doing here. I still don’t, really. There was a spot on the screen. Type words into it and they appeared on the internet. It just kept going. No one had to use their real names, even. That worked for me just fine. I didn’t want to be me anyway. </p>
<p id="9n5tq2">Being someone else and talking about this sport all day, put me somewhat at home and closer to all these things: to writing, to a sport I never played, to places that meant everything to me that would never reciprocate the same feeling. I could laugh about it and nothing hurt, because it wasn’t me sending or receiving. </p>
<p id="5hwgjM">It became a hobby, then an obsession, and then a job. Sometimes it could be all three at once. On the worst days, there was a freedom in that, too. It could be pure distraction: A game played in the weird in-between parts of the country, sincere and crooked and sincerely crooked, an earnest scam bought into and perpetuated by the need to keep some piece of home, youth, family, or a friend alive, or to simply <em>belong</em>. To see something loud and spectacular and fleeting that went on too long, and that never really ended, just fading out into a pause until the season returned. </p>
<p id="pjH87l">For the longest time, it was the best way to be free I knew. </p>
<p id="Q6gcwQ">*** </p>
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<p id="pE0yMd"> </p>
<p id="vpN9UO">I. THESIS. The opening little reel that forms the backbone of the whole piece, thrown around hard for a minute or so by Allen Collins. It’s almost a bluegrass fiddle line, if a bluegrass fiddle line stole a car and peeled out in front of the police station. This is the part that starts playing in my head the minute Chris Davis catches the ball in the Kick Six, or if you like the initial stages of Nic Cage’s run from the cops in <em>Raising Arizona. </em></p>
<p id="xbNq1w">II. REBUTTAL. The point where the solos begin to play over and against each other. In concert, Skynyrd’s three guitarists took turns here, but on the album version these are all just Collins. Allen Collins was baaaaaaad. This is the soundtrack to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxW2mL8BbOA">Joe Adams’ punt return against Tennessee</a>, or what <a href="https://www.espn.com/college-football/game?gameId=322730277">the box score of Baylor/West Virginia 2012 would sound like</a>. </p>
<p id="zaK3cg">III. HOEDOWN. There’s really no other word for this: This is a hoedown thrown into a blender, with the snare doubling up and Leon Wilkeson trying to flay the strings off his bass. It’s amazing how much heat Collins gets out of two note toggles here. Think of the moment a ballcarrier gets completely loose from a scrum, or the instant a hole opens in the defense and the quarterback pinpoints a ball thirty yards downfield to a place no one but this one receiver can get at it. It’s<em> </em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFT-pDHmGTk">Eric Crouch versus the entire Mizzou defense</a>, or Cam Newton <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awArqOfxiNA">trampling all of LSU</a>. </p>
<p id="DPBJur">IV. DOWNHILL. The point in any good barfight when it spills out into the street. Off the peak of Hoedown 1, and now gathering momentum and rolling brakeless into the Barry Sanders section. Can’t really decide whether this is someone being chased in open grass by Roquan Smith or Roquan Smith hightailing it through a forest of blockers to get to a running back, but he’s in there somewhere. </p>
<p id="2oeSZj">V. BARRY SANDERS/HOEDOWN 2. </p>
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<p id="X3U0jz">Back to some serious guitar hero shit. If it’s shredding in a country-type milieu, that’s Barry Sanders, the rare college football player who started out dazzling and only got better after he left for the pros. Sanders could juke the wings off a dragonfly. If there is a bottle made of theater glass somewhere within reach when this comes on, smash it over someone’s head immediately. </p>
<p id="VYzowK">VI. #3. Here is Dale Earnhardt <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo4y7MJfeIs">saving his car at the 1987 Winston</a>. Part V almost loses control of the song altogether, and Part VI is Lynyrd Skynyrd making an impossible save and pulling it back onto the track. It begins playing when the ball hits Quincy Adeboyejo’s hands off the tip against Alabama in 2015. </p>
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<p id="qW1NCq">VII. FADE. The best part about “Free Bird” is that it doesn’t end, it just fades out over at least two more sprawling guitar solos. In theory, “Free Bird” might be infinite. Returning to its masters thousands of years from now, turning the knob back up on the mixing board will reveal the band still playing, Allen Collins still soloing into the void. </p>
<p id="qApfx2">It’s a reliable herald for the end of a show. </p>
<p id="kCfOZA">***</p>
<p id="CjO15U">Freedom backfired, because freedom would mean being alone, but there were you people to contend with. Freedom would have meant doing EDSBS all myself, and that was impossible from the start because a.) people better at this than me just showed up, and b.) I couldn’t tie my shoes on the internet without them. </p>
<p id="Cce8DL">You showed up for some reason and read, and talked back, and kept this alive much longer than I ever imagined I could. A community formed, thrived, and became its own bumptious thing. Some of y’all have kids with each other now. I can’t really process that EDSBS might be responsible for the existence of select actual humans. </p>
<p id="JOo6I3">My family was there too, from the start, and has shared me with the internet in deeply unfair measures. I can give you my gratitude for tolerating it. I can only ask, though, for you to forgive me for all the times I can’t ever give back to you. I have regrets. Most of them are seconds spent looking at the phone when I could have been in the moment with y’all. Nothing is free. </p>
<p id="Xehjke">***</p>
<p id="EljvqH">There are four people I have to thank in particular. </p>
<p id="SQPCuH">The soul of this site is Holly Anderson. Neither of us remember how she took up residence as my left brain; I am left to assume she was a ghost in the machine from the start, who assumed form to yell at Phil Fulmer. The coaching tree starts with her. The site’s voice and sense of humor would never have attained even the medium-fancy level without her. My last shred of sanity resides firmly in her hands at all times. She <a href="https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2016/6/28/12051358/an-altered-state">wrote my favorite things here</a>, and kept me from writing some of the worst. She rewrote half this story, and will never tell you which half. </p>
<p id="6KnNYe">I have never worked with a more talented human, or known someone better at making everyone around her better. I don’t know if I can say that enough, but I know I haven’t ever said it enough before, so let’s fix that. <em>I have never worked with a more talented human, or known someone better at making everyone around her better. </em>Thank you, Porch Cat. </p>
<p id="ptZbgL">Ryan Nanni kept me from quitting. More than once. I can’t decide whether to blame him for that or to thank him. We did keep each other from being lawyers, so thanks are probably the move. There is not a quicker one-line assassin in the world, or anyone else so seamlessly good at everything they try here. I hate him for this. I love him for everything else. Thank you, Ryan. </p>
<p id="xCukdn">Jane Coaston never wrote here, and we would never suggest otherwise. To have germinated her writing career here would be bad for her professional reputation, and her professional reputation is sterling. I would like to keep it that way. I have never heard of her, but would like to thank her regardless. Thank you, Jane, in advance of our eventual meeting. </p>
<p id="j5lakV">Action Cookbook, a.k.a. Scott, has kept y’all company by himself for the better part of three years now. He’s done this while juggling multiple children, a respectable-type job, and one of the worst stretches in Cincinnati football history. Thank you, Scott, for holding this line, for your continued brilliance, and for making sure people know Cincinnati invented gumbo. </p>
<p id="1ehZE9">You. If you are reading this: Thank you. </p>
<p id="o5j4IG">***</p>
<p id="AsywdR">The lesson is that freedom backfires. I wanted to be distracted from not having a job, and ended up carving an accidental living, and a path for what I hope will be the rest of my life. I wanted to be someone else, and ended up writing under my own name, the one I still don’t like hearing out loud, even now at the age of 43.</p>
<p id="Gj43Us">I wanted to write about nothing. That backfired, too. There is no separating the politics from the sport, or you from the politics. There is no way to not eventually meet someone who will disappoint you in the worst way imaginable. I thought Art Briles was one of the best interviews I ever had, and coached what I thought football should look like. He turned out to be Art Briles. There will always be more of him. </p>
<p id="C1MdWj">I interviewed Danny Wuerffel once, for an essay I never wrote about Florida football. Wuerffel had a flawless college career, throwing for 39 TDs in his senior season and leading Florida to its first national title over Florida State. His pro highlights included wearing his helmet sideways over his face in New Orleans and backing up Brett Favre for a minute. </p>
<p id="wDslMP">In 2004, he left pro football for good. In 2005, he lost his house in New Orleans to Katrina. He watched it on tv. Like, he spotted it on the television screen via a news camera, saw the water rushing over it, and realized it was gone. He lost his nonprofit, Desire Street Ministries, too, and had to relocate it to Atlanta. </p>
<p id="dB1Q7J">in 2011, he came down with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Guillain-Barré forces the immune system to attack the nervous system. It causes muscle weakness at first, but can progress to near-total paralysis. Some patients end up on ventilators before recovering completely over the course of what might take weeks, or what might take years. A little over seven percent of all cases never recover at all. </p>
<p id="1vclrr">Wuerffel’s case never reached the paralysis stage. He experienced a constant, powerful fatigue, for the most part, sometimes having to spend whole days sitting in his parents’ backyard. One day he said he just watched a turtle cross the yard, one achingly slow step at a time, until it crossed the whole lawn. </p>
<p id="uS2koZ">I told him I thought that sounded like agony. He made a different choice. He thought of it as a gift. </p>
<p id="VonQLE">*** </p>
<p id="FxNYcf">If you’ve read this far, you’ve reached the end of EDSBS. It’s a change, and to say you can’t change is a lie in multiple directions. One lie assumes that you won’t have incentive to change, that you can’t. That might be true. It also assumes what is definitely a bigger lie: That life will give anyone a choice in the matter. </p>
<p id="4oO3Gb">This has been a gift, all of it. It will stay that way, right here, preserved in internet amber. It will appear locked, but there will probably be places you can crowbar open if you want to trespass around a bit. </p>
<p id="18yGBO">I will be somewhere else. (Not leaving the company! But not here at EDSBS, which is now closed.) I would say come visit us, but that’s not accurate. Come visit me, because “us” stopped the minute I started this site and set my feed on a very long road of becoming an “I”. Whether I wanted it to happen or not, “I” eventually showed up to the party. So come visit <em>me</em>. I won’t be far. </p>
<p id="qcXelJ">“Free Bird” is the anthem of the end. It’s pretty much everything I love about a lot of things, including college football. It is big, bombastic. It has an accent, goes on too long, and might be sorta full of shit when it’s not busy being completely sincere. It gets completely and raucously out of control. It contains stretches of stunning beauty made in places and by people who had no right to make anything this gorgeous. </p>
<p id="H16BkD">It has its own troubled history, and attendant disasters. Falling in love with it means passing through layer after layer of apprehension: irony, then insecurity, then cynicism, and finally into a molten core of genuine, unabashed love. Everything else is the noise playing over that. It is deafening, and will always be worth the silence that follows. </p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/31/20729397/free-birdSpencer Hall2019-07-30T09:20:30-04:002019-07-30T09:20:30-04:00SEPTEMBER 21st, 2002
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<p>ON CLARITY</p> <blockquote>
<p id="ULXC1C"><em>You know when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s, that’s part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game — life or football — the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half step too late or too early you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second. </em></p>
<p id="8EhiWR"><em>— Al Pacino (as Tony D’Amato), Any Given Sunday</em></p>
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<p id="lxRPhQ">To me, the most wonderful thing about college football — the thing that elevates it above all the other lesser sports — is its merciless clarity. There are no second acts in college football (unless you’re 2011 Alabama). Maybe the sport’s never been great about setting clear ground rules, but it’s incredibly good at letting you know exactly where things went wrong. The vastness of the field of opposition and the brevity of the schedule, even in the playoff era, mean that more than most sports, one game — one play — can cost you everything.</p>
<p id="7fBkMS">The 2002 Ohio State Buckeyes know this. </p>
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<p id="eMRfX7">Dispute the overtime pass-interference call against Miami all you want (it was a good call), but never forget that the Buckeyes that year were simply one of the luckiest teams to ever win a national title. This is not to claim they weren’t good enough to win one; they were exceptional, loaded with NFL talent, bolstered by a shooting star in the backfield and a stifling defense. Rather, this was a team that put themselves in position to lose many times — in a season where one loss assuredly would’ve kept them out — and yet they held on to become the first team in history to win 14 games in a season. A Chris Gamble interception against Penn State. A fourth down prayer against Kyle Orton’s Purdue. Overtime against Illinois. And a fourth-quarter comeback against the specter of an unthinkable indignity: losing a road game in the state of Ohio.</p>
<p id="hsAI57">On September 21st, 2002, the Cincinnati Bearcats came within two dropped passes of beating the Ohio State Buckeyes for the first time in their modern history. </p>
<p id="3Gf8Zr">The night before, I probably should have died. We’ll come back to that.</p>
<p id="n3CPBf">You have to understand what it’s like to root for a ‘little brother’ school. I don’t have anything against the Ohio State University. I attended high school in suburban Columbus. My older brother and many of my closest friends attended the school; I spent so much time hanging out on that campus during college that one friend actually thought I was a student there until years later. I halfheartedly root for their success most of the time, and full-throatedly root for them when they’re playing Michigan. There are just some things we do when we’re born in a state — things that come preset out of the box and persist because we’re too lazy to dig out the manual to figure out how to turn them off. It’s like motion-smoothing on a TV: it doesn’t look good, but I don’t know how to fix it. O-H. </p>
<p id="5fJ2G6">I <em>didn’t </em>attend the Ohio State University, though. I attended the University of Cincinnati, and that’s where I truly grew up. It’s where I forged some of my longest-lasting friendships, where I learned to live on my own, it’s where I learned to shotgun a beer and design a building. (Not in that order.) (Sometimes in that order. Have you seen our architecture school building?) It’s a place that will be forever dear in my heart, even as the campus and surrounding neighborhoods become almost unrecognizable with change and the people walking across it look more and more like children every time I return. </p>
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<p id="u4QHp2">When started attending school there in 2000, the University of Cincinnati was still firmly a basketball school in the public consciousness. The Bearcats’ men’s team had looked poised to threaten for a national title the previous season, had Kenyon Martin’s leg not snapped. The football team, meanwhile, was three years removed from their first bowl appearance in nearly a half-century and were still finding their way in Conference USA after decades of fruitless independent play. They’d make, and lose, two Motor City Bowls in my first two years on campus. </p>
<p id="CK4J7U">In the fall of 2002, a rare opportunity arose. <em>They were coming to us! </em>For the first time since 1900, when the Buckeyes were hardly a glimmer of an idea of the program they would grow to be, Ohio State would play <em>at</em> Cincinnati. Sure, it wouldn’t be at Nippert Stadium; the historic on-campus jewel of a stadium would be far too small to accommodate the crowd for that kind of game. It would be played at Paul Brown Stadium downtown, home of the NFL’s Bengals. And sure, at least half the crowd would be Buckeyes fans making the 90-minute trek south on I-71. Still, <em>we</em> got to be the home team. They were playing on <em>our </em>(borrowed) turf.</p>
<p id="YTz2an">The University of Cincinnati football team that year wasn’t yet the fiesty mid-major power it would become in the next decade under coaches like Mark Dantonio and Brian Kelly, but there was cause for a renewed spike in attention to the program, and much of that centered on sophomore quarterback Gino Guidugli. Guidugli, a top prospect coming out of Fort Thomas, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, had originally committed to play for the University of Kentucky. He would be the next dominant arm in Hal Mumme’s high-flying Air Raid offense, the same offense that had turned Tim Couch into a #1 overall draft pick several years prior. Just before National Signing Day, though, Mumme was fired under a cloud of NCAA recruiting violations, and Guidugli reconsidered his future with the Wildcats. He ended up staying even closer to home, and immediately began lighting up scoreboards for the Bearcats. He threw for 2,500 yards in his freshman campaign in 2001 and looked poised to do even bigger things in 2002. </p>
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</figure>
<p id="t6IfZy">The Buckeyes, meanwhile, never struggled for recruits, but were in a transitional era of their own in the 2002 season. Though it might be hard to remember now, given the success the program has had the last two decades, the ‘90s were a period of intense frustration and missed opportunities for Ohio State. In the John Cooper era, massively talented teams managed to fall short every year — usually at the hands of Michigan. Cooper’s 2-10-1 record against the Wolverines would be the ultimate albatross on his otherwise decorated career, and it would chase him out of Columbus in favor of a relatively-unknown coach who’d been quietly winning FCS titles at Youngstown State. </p>
<p id="E0FY9s">It might not be evident from the record books — in Cooper’s last season, the Buckeyes went 8-4 with an Outback Bowl loss to South Carolina, and in Tressel’s first season, they went 7-5 with an Outback Bowl loss to South Carolina — but to anyone who witnessed it firsthand, the energy around the program had completely changed. Much of this could be attributed to an arrogant boast that was delivered on. </p>
<p id="9lq1ah">In one of his first acts as Ohio State’s head coach, Tressel, addressing a home basketball crowd, had told fans “I assure you that you will be proud of our young people, in the classroom, in the community, and most-especially,” — he paused for maximum effect — “in 310 days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the football field.” Fans realized he understood the importance of the rivalry, and when he delivered on that promise with a 26-20 win in Ann Arbor that fall — only the third Buckeye win in 16 years in the rivalry, and their first in 14 years at The Big House — he was already on his way to becoming a legend. The 2001 season was only the beginning for his team, though.</p>
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<p id="ij77U6">Coming into the Ohio State-Cincinnati game, there was little to suggest that it was going to be a close contest. The Buckeyes had rolled to three easy wins already, blowing out Texas Tech and Kent State, and easily dispatching #10 Washington State in a <em>College GameDay</em> matchup. The Buckeyes’ early success was driven in no small part by the incredible running of true freshman tailback Maurice Clarett, who had 517 total yards and seven touchdowns in his first three collegiate games. </p>
<p id="f46etf">Their fourth game of the season would be a virtual home game against a team that had barely eked by pre-BCS-quality TCU and lost to West Virginia. In their last meeting, a 1999 game in Ohio Stadium, the Bearcats had staked a first-half lead only to watch the Buckeyes cruise in the second half to a 34-20 victory whose momentary closeness seemed indicative more of boredom on Ohio State’s part than anything. I attended that 1999 game, a lone idiot cheering for the Bearcats’ early scores from C Deck, and I wasn’t going to miss this one.</p>
<p id="iON6QY">With Clarett on the sidelines recovering from minor knee surgery, the Buckeyes were down a major weapon in their run-heavy attack. Lydell Ross stepped into the role and hardly missed a beat, though, racking up 130 yards on 23 carries. The Bearcats struck first, with DeMarco McCleskey taking an option pitch from Guidugli for a first-quarter touchdown. School-record-setting and Lou Groza Award-winning kicker Jonathan Ruffin missed the extra point (something that would prove important later), but a field goal later would give UC a 9-0 lead at the end of the first quarter. He added a career-best 49-yarder to keep the lead at 12-7 by halftime. The Buckeyes were sleepy, perhaps, but surely any reasonable person among the Cincinnati-record 66,319 fans in attendance expected them to pull away in the second half, just as they had three years earlier.</p>
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<p id="LVMuZa">I wasn’t one of them.</p>
<p id="6nBlkj">As a UC student, I’d had access to tickets, so I requested them for myself and one of my best friends from high school, an Ohio State student. He was driving down from Columbus, and I planned to drive up the night before from Nashville, where I’d just moved into temporary housing in anticipation of starting an internship that Monday. The forecast called for sporadic heavy thunderstorms, but if there’s anything that’s ever registered with a 19-year-old man, it’s not changing your plans on account of some conceptual risk.</p>
<p id="bs2HXn">Somewhere just south of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, there’s a broad, flat stretch of I-65 with a wide grassy median. I think there’s cable barriers now, but at the time, there wasn’t anything but grass between the northbound and southbound lanes of the interstate. Around 9 or 10pm that Friday night, I was cruising north in the steady rain, making good time on my way back to Cincinnati, on my way to see the ‘Cats upset the Buckeyes. </p>
<p id="uMVXUc">People always talk about your life flashing before your eyes in a near-death experience, and maybe that’s true for some people, but I didn’t have time for that. I saw something, and all I had time to think (or say?) was “Oh, SHI-” as a big black Ford F-150 heading southbound lost control, fishtailed across that grassy median, and found itself facing west and heading east in my northbound lane. My little two-door Pontiac Grand Am hit the driver’s side door head-on at 70 mph. There was no drama, no time to lament my lost loves or that novel I never wrote, just a half-second of “oh, that CAN’T be good”, an incredibly loud noise, and then nothing.</p>
<p id="mBEiI5">If you’re old enough to remember when air-bags were a new feature and not standard equipment on every car, you might remember car commercials with super-slow-motion video of them fluttering out as they deploy, pillowy and white as a cloud, looking for all the world like a nice place to take a quick nap while your car crumples. The reality is more like a ten-pound bag of potatoes being launched at your face from a cannon, but I suppose it’s better than the windshield or the steering column. For a few interminable seconds after, I had a fleeting but wholly serious internal debate of “am I dead?” I’ve never been confident the afterlife or what it might entail, but for a brief moment in a crumbled, smoking wreckage of a low-end sports coupe on the side of a Kentucky highway, I wondered if that might be all it is.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/VLt9KA8jr63ufi7QWbtfWEdYR1o=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/18365763/1996_pontiac_grand_am_se_americanlisted_28330701.jpg">
<figcaption>THIS IS NOT MY CAR, BUT IT LOOKED LIKE THIS, UNTIL IT DIDN’T</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="UjgIYF">In the second half that I never saw, the Bearcats tried to keep the inevitable at bay. Guidugli threw 52 passes, completing 26 for 324 yards and a touchdown. Ohio State took the lead shortly after the half; Cincinnati took it back. It was only with just under four minutes remaining, when quarterback Craig Krenzel scored on a keeper, that the Buckeyes led by more than a field goal. 23-19. </p>
<p id="L6JM3l">The Bearcats had one more drive to try to take down the big one, to dominate the state if only for a day. That first-quarter missed XP loomed large, as they’d need a touchdown now. Guidugli drove them the length of the field, getting to the Ohio State 15 with a minute remaining. First down, Guidugli finds senior wideout John Olinger open in the corner of the end zone — and he drops it. Second down, an incomplete pass. Third down, George Murray, a sophomore backup QB in at receiver, stretches on a fade route in the opposite corner, appears to pull it in, snatching the victory, and… he doesn’t pull it in.</p>
<p id="45EIIO">Guidugli’s final, last-chance heave is tipped and picked, and the Buckeyes escape back north with their perfect season intact. They’d have their other scares in that dream season, but they’d escape them all unscathed, the first 14-0 team in major college football history. Jim Tressel becomes a Columbus legend, the kind a middling compliance scandal over tattoos could never take away. The Bearcats go 7-7, and head coach Rick Minter gets one more season before the administration decides to spruce the place up on their way into the Big East, hiring away Ohio State’s defensive coordinator, Mark Dantonio. By the end of the decade the Bearcats would be playing in BCS bowls and challenging for titles themselves.</p>
<p id="Vj4DB5">A few inches here, a few inches there.</p>
<p id="H2CxWM">Upon examining my car a few days later, the insurance adjuster called my dad to confirm the details of the police report, because “it says no one died, and that doesn’t match the car I’m looking at”. I hit a three-ton truck head-on at highway speeds and walked away with nothing but nine stitches in my forehead and a prescription for Vicodin that I threw out because it made me sick. The other driver, who’d apparently been sleepy after a long shift at the nearby UPS sort facility, was taken by helicopter to Louisville. A few days later all the hospital would tell me, a stranger on the phone, was that “that person is currently a patient here”, the first four words of which were a tremendous relief and a mild surprise.</p>
<p id="pNBxyH">An inch or two to the left or right, and the Buckeyes are never champions. An inch or two to the left or right, I don’t get to find out about that or anything else. I don’t get to know how that story ends. I don’t call my friend the following morning, apologizing that we were going to miss the game, only to have him interrupt, completely unconcerned about the game, and ask if I needed a ride from where I was, five hours away. I don’t get reminded what true friendship was really about. </p>
<p id="r2wTR7">It’s hard to explain to people who don’t appreciate sports why you do. For me, among other things, it’s that it gives us moments of clarity without having to face life and death moments like this. We don’t always see where things go right or wrong in our live. Missed opportunities can go unseen for years or forever. Mistakes can take years to play out. We might never know what might have been because the possibilities are too complex, too interdependent, too subjective to know. A ball dropping through the outstretched hands of a receiver is unambiguous. He catches it, we win. He drops it, they win. This isn’t about those players, and this isn’t about blame. It’s just a simple fact. Things could’ve played out very differently. </p>
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<p id="gQOfpx">I’ve got plenty of ambiguities in my own life. I know I’ve missed opportunities. I know I’ve made mistakes, personal and professional. We all do, but knowing that doesn’t keep me from staring at the ceiling thinking about them some nights. Did I say something wrong? Could I have seized on a chance that I didn’t? What would life be like if I’d taken that job, or handled that relationship differently, or eaten that gas station sushi? How could it all have happened differently? </p>
<p id="LIeW0P">I’ve got a nice life. I’m blessed with a wonderful partner, two beautiful children and a perfectly acceptable dog. I’ve been lucky. A couple inches are all that kept that from not happening.</p>
<p id="6MXJX6">Sometimes you just need a moment of clarity to remind you. </p>
<div id="Io5CJk"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 75%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/28z5aTiN4UI?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="7ttRBA"></p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/30/20746155/september-21st-2002ActionCookbook2019-07-25T10:22:52-04:002019-07-25T10:22:52-04:004TH & SHORT COMES OUT OF RETIREMENT
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<p>THIS IS YOUR FAULT FOR DONATING MONEY TO CHARITY YOU MONSTERS</p> <p id="GqHcF8">ME: Wow, I’m really proud of the <em>Every Day Should Be Saturday </em>community. I put out a request last week, and everyone really stepped up. Five straight days of donations, and ultimately, they raised over nine thousand dollars to support mental health services in Southern Indiana, and-</p>
<p id="yJdNd8">[clattering of claws on wood floor as someone shimmies out from under bed]</p>
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<p id="bqbRru">HOLLY: I’m sorry to support WHAT</p>
<p id="DTSXKU">ME: oh hey Holly, I didn’t know you were under there. To support mental health services, they fundraised for Personal Couns-</p>
<p id="0D8pxS">HOLLY: I THOUGHT THIS WAS A FUNDRAISER TO FIRE YOU</p>
<p id="WS5EAv">ME: No, it was for charity.</p>
<p id="Qzx4wD">HOLLY: YOU STILL WORKING HERE IS A CHARITY. I THOUGHT WE WERE JUST GATHERING FUNDS TO ASK THE BEARD GUY TO FIRE YOU. IT WORKED WITH NANNI.</p>
<p id="pHxB5V">ME: [sighing] Holly, did you steal my credit card and make some of those donations</p>
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<p id="hGDLRT">HOLLY: You can’t charge a dog with bank fraud. It’s the law. You should watch some of the later Air Bud movies. He got away with a LOT.</p>
<p id="13W1cj">ME: Why do we even still live together</p>
<p id="KTjfUf">HOLLY: Because someone’s got to keep you in check. Hey, by the way, are you excited about the upcoming football season?</p>
<p id="jm0gYj">ME: Oh, well... yes, I am! Thank you for finally taking an interest in the things I like, Holly, yes, I am actually quite excited about the upcoming season, the Bearcats looked really great last season, going a surprising 11-2 and they’ve got a lot of returning talent and-</p>
<p id="3LiMjp">HOLLY: [spelling out “4-8” in dry food on the floor]</p>
<p id="VxXEVJ">ME: The commenters got to you, huh.</p>
<p id="DUBzNU">HOLLY: I’m at least five of them.</p>
<p id="BAUCbJ">ME: [sighing]</p>
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<p id="mFRGq8">HOLLY: You look like your face came free with two pairs of slacks.</p>
<p id="fwLN1O">ME: That’s unnecessarily hurtful.</p>
<p id="nTP3rN">HOLLY: More like Joseph A. Blank, amiright?</p>
<p id="qWvr8S">ME: I give you cheese. Why do you do this to me.</p>
<p id="uBi20T">HOLLY: Listen, it’s not my fault you look like an actor playing a sitcom husband in a Lifetime movie about a troubled sitcom. </p>
<p id="ls4JDo">ME:</p>
<p id="00RnTg">HOLLY: <em>According To Us: The True Story Behind According To Jim, </em>starring you as a broke-ass Jim Belushi</p>
<p id="pwPILT">ME:</p>
<p id="9XwRyo">HOLLY: Look like a guy who wants to tell people about his podcast.</p>
<p id="XL8teq">ME: I did actually just start <a href="https://circlesevenpod.com/">a podcast.</a></p>
<p id="q6fevE">HOLLY: Oh dang wow is that true? Too much math in craft brewing for you? I know you had to keep your washed-up 30something white guy CEUs, but couldn’t you have just taken up axe-throwing or something? Wait, no, I’ve seen you throw a tennis ball. You throw an axe you’ll probably lose a toe.</p>
<p id="woZIhy">ME: Hey c’mon</p>
<p id="jJ6VJh">HOLLY: I’ve got a better arm than you and it’s a leg</p>
<p id="6elY8A">ME: See if I get your ball out from behind the bookcase.</p>
<p id="ne9vJc">HOLLY: Great, I’ll just sit here staring at that copy of <em>Infinite Jest</em>, maybe I’ll get as far as you did in it, and I can’t read.</p>
<p id="t2qZEc">ME: Yeah we’re even then</p>
<p id="k5H5oK">HOLLY: So, seriously, you think your Bearcats are going to be good again this year? Usually after a Cincinnatian finishes a bowl, they regret it the next day.</p>
<p id="GcaEkn">ME: Is that a Skyline Chili joke?</p>
<p id="ouJuK9">HOLLY: Yeah, by the way, I sent a few people boxes of that stuff last week using your name on the return address. I realized there were a few people left here who didn’t already hate you.</p>
<p id="5nKyxR">ME: Why are you here? Do you even like football?</p>
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<figcaption>I’M NOT EVEN FIXING THE ROTATION ON THIS ONE</figcaption>
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<p id="z9nEzo">HOLLY: I’m a hateful short creature who annoys the neighbors and likes to tear the cover off balls. I’m a Bama fan.</p>
<p id="r94rlI">ME: This explains so much.</p>
<p id="m23H2N">HOLLY: I lack object permanence.</p>
<p id="qPxWBT">ME: Ah, so the fake field goal-</p>
<p id="2ISQR4">HOLLY: Roll tide.</p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/25/8929562/4th-short-comes-out-of-retirementActionCookbook2019-07-19T08:23:48-04:002019-07-19T08:23:48-04:00CHARITY DRIVE FINAL DAY: CROOKED NUMBERS
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<p id="v0vVx3">Happy Friday!</p>
<p id="3BOHQJ">We’ve reached the end of our week-long drive to support mental health services in Southern Indiana, and you’ve put up some huge numbers. I’ll say it again: I’m deeply appreciative of this community, your generosity, and your commitment to weird numbers.</p>
<p id="usSkAJ"><a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">The link is still live, please donate</a> or share if you haven’t already, and thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’ve put up some big numbers on the scoreboard, and I love that.</p>
<p id="fZuUii">Because, fundamentally, when it comes to football, I’m a dumb guy who likes big numbers. I appreciate a well-played defensive game as much as anyone, but when it truly comes down to it, one of the things I love most about <em>college </em>football vs. the pros is high scores. Touchdowns are fun. (Thank you to Pat Mahomes for taking this gospel to the pros.)</p>
<p id="uhy3dj">If pressed to come up with a game I enjoyed in the last decade — and we’re going to have to set aside both the Kick Six and Cincinnati 45-Pitt 44 here — there’s hardly a better candidate than 2014 TCU-Baylor. 119 combined points on 1,267 yards of total offense, a 21-point fourth-quarter comeback, two teams screwing themselves out of the playoff race — it’s the perfect college football game. </p>
<div id="DiS8cv"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DoOvDwQhLBQ?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="iESVUW">I just realized my son was born 9 months after this game. It was a GOOD game. </p>
<p id="1Mk5gm">Enjoy your weekend, <a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">donate</a>, and thank you for supporting <em>Every Day Should Be Saturday.</em></p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/19/20700539/charity-drive-final-day-crooked-numbersActionCookbook2019-07-18T12:12:26-04:002019-07-18T12:12:26-04:00CHARITY DRIVE DAY 4 AFTERNOON
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<p>THE MICHIGAN MONEY CANNON TAKES RETURN FIRE</p> <p id="Ad3YU6">When we get charitable around here, we expect certain things. </p>
<p id="mIyV2B">You’re going to step up in a big way.</p>
<p id="iB8Mv1">You’re going to use some clever numerology in how you make donations.</p>
<p id="KRgc1j">Somehow, Michigan is going to end up on top.</p>
<p id="WLdEjn">Through the first day, that bore out — our largest Monday donation was made in honor of Michigan’s 40-34 win over Ohio State in Brady Hoke’s first year.</p>
<p id="7l6MLX">Now, there’s been some volleys overnight — big shots from Texas A&M, Louisiana Tech and Georgia Tech.</p>
<p id="5ca6C8">And now an Ohio State fan has tweaked the overall total in an odd way.</p>
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<p id="KXh8yq">Huh. Wonder if that means anything. </p>
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<p id="PuwBlJ">7-3-83? In July 1983 Urban would’ve been a minor league baseball player in the Braves’ farm system. That can’t be it.</p>
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<p id="I8HVvQ">Oh, it refers to Urban’s 7 wins against Michigan, 3 Big Ten titles, and 83 overall wins at Ohio State. (Okay, he told me this, I didn’t guess it.)</p>
<p id="721sA3">You gonna let that stand, Michigan? Or you gonna come take your crown back?</p>
<p id="fyhpyR"><a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">DONATE!</a></p>
<p id="P6IXLv"></p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/18/20699464/charity-drive-day-4-afternoonActionCookbook2019-07-18T08:13:10-04:002019-07-18T08:13:10-04:00CHARITY DRIVE DAY 4: THE BALL WAS RUN
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<p id="aAD5z5">I’ll make this brief: y’all are great.</p>
<p id="cHmDQT">Yesterday, in the third day of our charity drive to support Personal Counseling Services of Southern Indiana, the numbers understandably slowed for much of the day, after a blazing start on Monday and Tuesday.</p>
<p id="RXrkmW">And then came the bombs.</p>
<p id="lLohTZ">A couple BIG evening donations, capped late by a $666 donation with only the comment <em>“Run up the score three times as much as Heisman on Cumberland”. </em></p>
<p id="pCdtbf">I can only infer that our new champion — current leader for the <a href="https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/15/20694869/charity-drive-update-the-race-for-the-garlic-butter-cup">Garlic Butter Cup</a> and champion for this <a href="https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/17/20697600/charity-drive-day-3-clock-management">glorious hat</a> — is a Georgia Tech fan (identify yourself, please, unless you wish to remain anonymous), based on this reference to Georgia Tech’s 222-0 win over Cumberland in 1916.</p>
<p id="oOSoQY">Sadly, we don’t have video of that game. But, our crack digital team has worked up a computer simulation of what the Jackets winning by 666 might look like:</p>
<div id="jiWRzP"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zqx0e0A9uS0?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="RStTgz">We currently stand at a tidy $6,666, already at 11% of the <em>total </em>season’s fundraising campaign just due to the efforts of the EDSBS community, which is incredible. You all are amazing, we appreciate you, and I can’t thank you enough.</p>
<p id="1SpddY">(Oh, and now that we’ve broken the $5,000 threshold, I’ll have a Hollydog-roasts-me post soon.)</p>
<p id="JO7Qmp">We’re almost to the end of the week, and the donation link’s still live, let’s keep it going if we can.</p>
<p id="TzTBYX"><a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">DONATE</a></p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/18/20699082/charity-drive-day-4-the-ball-was-runActionCookbook2019-07-17T08:39:33-04:002019-07-17T08:39:33-04:00CHARITY DRIVE DAY 3: CLOCK MANAGEMENT
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<p>WE’RE RUNNIN’ THE DANG BALL AND PROTECTING THIS LEAD</p> <p id="Qq9Pn8">Good morning! We’re entering Day 3 of our <a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">charity drive to support Personal Counseling Services of Southern Indiana. </a></p>
<p id="isKXF5">A brief recap of what we’re here for, in case you’re landing on this for the first time (quoting myself):</p>
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<p id="BjhuIx">I want to speak to you about a non-profit that’s personally dear to me. For the last three years or so, I’ve been working with Personal Counseling Services, a small mental health organization located in Southern Indiana / greater Louisville. For the last 60 years, PCS has been providing counseling, therapy and mental health services to under-served communities in this area. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of our clients are children and youth and 57 percent (57%) are at or below the federal poverty line.</p>
<p id="iMOeJc">Our clients include abused women and children, veterans, families, couples, individuals that have been diagnosed with: depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, autism, developmental disorders and behavioral issues.</p>
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<p id="RzpPiC">You’ve responded wonderfully, raising $4,565 in the first two days of action. Some business!</p>
<ul>
<li id="49Yqcc">If you were one of the people who donated over $100 yesterday and would like me to mail Skyline Chili to you or your enemies, please contact me via Twitter (DMs open) or flag it in the comments so I know.</li>
<li id="0E37aT">We are only $435 away from me bringing Holly The Insult Corgi out of retirement to roast me and/or Ohio State, etc.</li>
<li id="P49vDB">Our current leader for the <a href="https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/15/20694869/charity-drive-update-the-race-for-the-garlic-butter-cup">Garlic Butter Cup</a>, awarded to the largest single donor of the course of this week: </li>
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<p id="r36wMv">(please let me know which one of you this is, I can’t always connect usernames to real names, says the guy who only recently doxxed himself after 5 years of pseudonymy)</p>
<p id="IF3iPE">Anyways, you’ve got a big lead, and there’s time left, what do you do in that scenario?</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">my god <a href="https://t.co/IE4DsRaxyy">pic.twitter.com/IE4DsRaxyy</a></p>— actioncookbook (@actioncookbook) <a href="https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/1096814824586203141?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2019</a>
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<p id="zftCMm">Last year, as you may recall, <a href="https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2018/9/13/17854300/lets-talk-charity">I incentivized this fundraiser by auctioning off a hat</a> — a wonderful hat — won by our own very generous ChocoTaco.</p>
<p id="YmRnN1">I figure, why not do something similar this year?</p>
<p id="YkHV0Y">The hat pictured above, the glorious Run The Damn Ball hat, a limited-edition in-store-only purchase from a store in Athens, Georgia that is not available online, can be yours. (The tags have been removed, but it is new and has not been worn.)</p>
<p id="s7KvI3">I will send this beautiful hat to the person who makes the single largest donation between the time of this posting and midnight tonight. </p>
<p id="R0FotS">Do what you do best, folks, and thank you again for supporting mental health, and for supporting Every Day Should Be Saturday.</p>
<p id="Kcd1Nu"><a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">DONATE!</a> (And share!)</p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/17/20697600/charity-drive-day-3-clock-managementActionCookbook2019-07-16T14:53:18-04:002019-07-16T14:53:18-04:00CHARITY DRIVE DAY 2 AFTERNOON: A NEW LEADER EMERGES
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<p id="akTNCK">Welcome back!</p>
<p id="ayPlmW">I’ll make this brief: you’re all doing great, with — at the time of posting this, $4,320 raised to support the efforts of Personal Counseling Services to provide mental health services to underserved communities in Southern Indiana.</p>
<p id="M9Qd2p">And we have a new leader! </p>
<p id="anpcEJ">Some intrepid Person of Michigan has donated $403 to the campaign. The fundraising website doesn’t display cents, unfortunately, but “Brady Hoke’s Revenge! Go Blue” makes me suspect it’s a donation of $403.40, in remembrance of that time it seemed like everything was changing:</p>
<div id="Astedj"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5pEaL9xF0NA?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="T8R5pz">Let’s appreciate just how special this was for Michigan. Not only did they break a 7-game losing streak to the Buckeyes here, they sent OSU to 6-6 and a trip to the Gator Bowl against Will Muschamp’s Florida. The Buckeyes lost, sealing their first losing season in decades.</p>
<p id="4bSmKY">If they’d just taken a bowl ban at the beginning of the season, they could’ve avoided the losing season, avoided the ugly trip to Jacksonville, and OH, RIGHT, they likely wouldn’t have been bowl-banned in 2012, when they went undefeated and would’ve pushed Alabama aside for a slot in the title game against Notre Dame.</p>
<p id="xBwCCm">And since Michigan’s being nice to us right now, we’ll say nothing more about Brady Hoke.</p>
<p id="i43Aic"><a href="https://pcs-give.networkforgood.com/projects/77666-60-for-60">DONATE. SHARE. THANK YOU.</a></p>
https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2019/7/16/20696690/charity-drive-day-2-afternoon-a-new-leader-emergesActionCookbook