Stewart’s Mailbag is up. We like his dark horse picks, especially Texas A&M in the third season of Franchione’s tenure. Why? Coach Fran’s teams don’t really flesh out until their third year, they’ve got some solid experience on the roster, and Reggie McNeal is hell to plan against for opposing DCs. As usual, we’ll also be shamelessly expanding on the stuff Mandel brings up in his asides as material for the next week of posts. Thanks, Stew!
We’ll pass on his pick of Rachel Bilson as a new object of worship, though. The official objects of worship for the staff of EDSBS.com are our wives. (Marvel at our black-belt husbandry, audience. Marvel!) We know that Stranko has an enduring fondness for Katarina Witt and Salma Hayek(quality, sir) but hey, if we’re talking about pinups, Orson will state for the record that his tastes run more to the Vargas Girl side of things than to the Twiggy school: Sophia Loren in the day, Jennifer Tilly, at least half of the Australian women’s football team, and that woman from every Outkast video, Ki Toy Jackson (pictured in all her splendor below.) Ah, and Angela Bassett, but only in the limo driver’s outfit in Strange Days. You know, with the boots. Oh, and Cate Blanchett in The Life Aquatic , and only when she’s pregnant. Sure, it’s weird, but is it any weirder than lusting after a ninety-pound 19-year-old who’s half your weight? We think not.
Women on trampolines. We’re not totally immune.
West Virginia and Marshall have agreed to play each other in a series extending through the 2012 season. The official redneck quotient of the rivalry could rival the great ones, but will likely not surpass Alabama-Auburn for sheer, quantifiable, and stratospheric Cletusness. If Jessco White, a.k.a. The Dancing Outlaw, makes regular appearances at the games, however, we’ll recalibrate our scores immediately.
We imagine he’ll be rooting for the Mountaineers, not them sissy nancy private school boys up the road.
Heismanpundit looks at the Heisman race…next year’s Heisman race. Three and a half months from now, this will all be a memory, and we’ll actually have things to talk about.
Not likely says Michael Dirocco of Jacksonville.com in a nice article about the Gators search to fill that 12th game. Expect them to play a home and away ocassionally or possibly at a neutral site in Orlando or Tampa but not until at least 2008 as the open dates for the two teams do not match up well. While many around the sunshine state would love to see this as an annual rivalry, it might not make sense for the state of Florida’s football to have all three teams beat up on each other every year while we still have a fairly ridiculous means of deciding who plays for the mythical national championship.
Matt Hayes needs to blog. He already writes in two sentence paragraphs. If he could just get over that “fact-checking” shit, he’d be in business.
A few minutes after posting the link to the AP’s article on Bowden, DeBerry and Team Jesus, let’s just get this forecast for the reaction to Bowden’s comments in for posterity, okay: a mild shitstorm, complete with its own tabbed segment on PTI, an outraged mention on Hannity et al, a column from Mike Lupica talking out of his ass, and a general shrug of the shoulders from FSU folks who wouldn’t care if Bowden worshipped the chupacabra and made live virgin sacrifices on the fifty at Doak Campbell stadium as long as he brought home nine wins a year. Bowden will get tons of air time this week, and he’ll talk about “his boys” a lot while playing Pappy Bowden. DeBerry, on the other hand, won’t make a peep.
A Vandy lineman is suspended indefinitely for brawling at the Spin-a-Pin bowling alley in Springfield, TN. We just wanted to mention Spin-a-Pin can reserve lanes for you ahead of time, both for regular parties and for special events.
Bobby Bowden has many endorsement deals, most notably with Nike, who makes his funny-looking “blotchy-cracker-on-big-game-hunt” hats. Bowden makes another endorsement deal of a different sort by boldly coming out of the closet as a Christian in support of another Christian coach, Fisher DeBerry at Air Force. DeBerry was forced to take down a banner reading “I am a member of Team Jesus Christ” from the locker room last season, a story usually mentioned in conjunction with an ongoing Pentagon investigation of religious intolerance at the academy.
We must agree with the move for a simple reason: the phrase “Team Jesus” inevitably makes us think about what Team Jesus’s uniforms would look like. Imagine: if you put one team on the field in white jerseys with gold trim reading “Team Jesus”, and then put a team out there in jerseys reading “Team Satan,” “Team Kali the Destroyer,” etc, their players decked out in red with flaming trim and black helmets with visors…well, on sight we’re putting our money on the evil guys. (Never mind the fact that we’re gambling in this hypothetical, which according to a smattering of people puts us on the express elevator to hell, anyway.) This is the opposite of what someone is supposed to think when confronted with a “Team Jesus” t-shirt, right? And don’t bring up the idea of a mascot, since a lamb on the sidelines doesn’t exactly instill fear in the hearts of men like a red devil holding a pitchfork and shooting flames from his nose. You might as well pick something ridiculous like a turkey, a rodent, or a possessed lay member of the clergy…
Warner Robins High School, GA: Actually are Demons, as well as 4-time state champs. (And yes, their uniforms are coooool.)
