Hoping to usher in a new era of football, the University of Illinois Trustees are contemplating renovations to Memorial Stadium. Better act quickly Illini, before the Zooker gives your fans hopes of greatness only to rip your hearts out repeatedly with second half collapses at home. The luxury boxes may not sell quite as well after the luster of great recruiting classes, big potential and “we’re getting better and better” speaches wears thin.

Just in case you were wondering, there is a new American Air Guitar Champion. The championships were held in Los Angeles yesterday, July 14, 2005. I’m not sure I could have made it through life without knowing this.

The Bemusement Park coins a new word for the sort of agony Steve Spurrier will likely encounter at SC this year as the wolves of the SEC East and the vultures of the NCAA feed off the stinking carcasses Lou Holtz left behind for him:

I don?t think the outcome of this game is much in doubt. I see visors flying through the air before halftime and, at the end, something operatic: Spurrierdammerung, if you will.

Ah, and the schadenfreude won’t come fast and hard enough for the Cocks once Spurrier lays out a clunker or two, either from the media or from the cackles of rival message boards. The sanctions and ongoing investigations, though, may have quite the opposite effect on Carolina as a team on the field, however. In fact, South Carolina, already the wild card in the conference, just went from intriguing to “sewer-dwelling underworld mutant” frightening in terms of expectations for the season.

Flashback to Auburn, 1994. Jackshit to play for since Pat Dye leaves them in hock to the Rules and Violations committee. No bowls, no fun, no season in the sun-nada for goodies. A noticeably slimmer Terry Bowden takes a talented Auburn team to an undefeated season that year, basking in the glory of being the ultimate squad of haters: a team bent only on inflicting harm for harm’s sake. (At this point we would launch into a misty, painfully nostalgic diatribe here about the pass from Patrick Nix floating into the arms of Frank Sanders in the far corner of the endzone with 1:42 on the clock in the 4th, but every time we do that a red mist clouds our vision and we wake three days later up naked and shivering in the county pen.)

Spurrier’s just the guy to pull off a suicide mission like SC.

Who better to pull off a similar suicide mission of a season than nose-picking, face-twitching Sideline Lucifer himself? With an ego-mad coach bent on winning again and a decent styrofoam cooler full of talent (we would say cupboard, but we are talking about SC here-it’s a styrofoam cooler or nothing,) the Cocks already make treacherous pickings for the powers of the SEC East. Toss in a season or two hobbled by sanctions and a lack of any positive incentive whatsoever, and you’ve turned a renegade program into an outcast renegade program.
Spurrier could play the Lee Marvin role in this Dirty Dozen remake quite nicely, we think.

We broke down for a post-birthday splurge and cleaned out the Best Buy on Moreland Ave, running screaming from its tasteful brick edifice holding a sexy green box and the key to our eventual undoing, NCAA 2006. We’ll be posting a full joint review with Stranko, but in the meantime, a few observations:
1. Right with MGoBlog here: bad, crappy, no-pass nasty 2005 is replaced with sleeker, friendlier 2006 edition. The option works, but not all the time; the pass works, but often only in streaks and not without balance. The game is now more about flow and rhythm than ever, and that may be it’s greatest programming triumph.
2. We started a Heisman campaign with scrambling qb Orson Swindle, a freshman enrolled at Florida struggling to learn the complex Meyer playbook. We, by the way, look a little different on tv: 6′2″, black as night with a blonde flat top and quads that would make Serena Williams look like a runway model, covered in all sorts of mismatched tape and accessories with a full cage facemask, mouthguard, eyeblack, and an orange visor. Standing still, we look rather silly; in motion, we’re sex in spikes. We plan on winning the Heisman next year, if only to break one of the Heismandments in a virtual environment.

Reefer ain’t got nothin’ on NCAA 2006
3. The blocking animations are getting downright scary, from the little push blocks the wideouts toss on dbs to the flat-out pancake animations that require the runner to actually use the jump button to step over the decimated lineman. Back to the flow thing; though it started to emerge last year, the emphasis on movement and flow has come into its own in the ‘06 edition. When we got the linebackers stuttering in the wrong direction with the spread option, we paused and took a deep breath of exultation at all the majesty of the game.
4. There’s a bigger emphasis on momentum in the game this year. Landslides, if not countered early, can get ugly. On the other hand, inferior teams can hang in a lot longer than they used to, so now you too can play UCF or Georgia Southern in Athens and scare the crap out of Mark Richt for three quarters before eventually getting salted away like so much cheap beef.
5. Hits. Bigger. Better. More important to momentum, since making them with your impact player-Brandon Siler, in UF’s case-usually does something nice like jarring the ball loose or rupturing the spleen of the opposing qb. Your IP on the offensive side does the little things that kill, like leaning over the 1st down line on crucial third and gottas and making circus catches over the middle after you’ve missed a few passes in a row.
A long former to come, provided we tear ourselves away long enough from the many-corded demon long enough to type it…

On the last day of the work week, we offer some giggly distraction in the form of our first preseason conference all-name team. We begin with the ACC:
Offense:
QBs: Kevin Cronin, Tribble Reese. One’s named after the lead singer of REO Speedwagon. The other’s named Tribble. ‘Nuff said.
C: Izzy and Lavdrim Bauta. Brothers!
OTs: D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Gary Burley, LaMarte McGee. A lineman named Burley is always funny, but damn-D’Brickashaw never fails to take our breath away. Manlier than being a football player in D-1? Being a D-1 starter whose nickname is “Brick.”
OGs: Yomi Ojo, Arby Jones. An athlete, a roast beef sandwich, all in one!
WR: Chansi Stuckey, De’Cody Fagg, Jo Jo Walker, Max Opamuratawongse, Damarius Bilbo. As usual, the WR category had an outstanding selection of talent, with De’Cody Fagg continuing his inexorable rise to the top of the all-time all-name team list. What we wouldn’t give to hear Larry Munson cussing under his breath when the spotter hands him “reception by Max Opamurata…ahwhatthefuckinghell…”

K: Gary Cismesia, Obi Egekeze. One sounds like a disease, the other a disgraced Ghanaian finance minister.

Defense:
DEs: Mathias Kiwanuka, Omarr Savage. For christ’s sake, with a name like Omarr Savage he’s got to be a football player. The extra “r” is what makes it extra tuff.
DTs: Kamerion Wimbley, Goryal Scales, Kyndraus Guy. Special mention to Goryal Scales, whose name fits into the “Vigo the Destroyer” category of intimidating monikers. Plus, it sounds like “gore y’all.”
LBs: D’Qwell Jackson, KaMichael Hall, Devonta Brown.
CB: Jazzmen Williams, DeJuan Tribble. A noteworthy pair from Boston College. Jazzmen deserves special attention for having a plural noun for a type of people as his singular first name-imagine someone named “Plumbers,” or “Damongolhorde,” or even “Helpdesk.” By the way, we just named FSU’s starting linebackers in 2018.
FS: Jamaal Fudge, Greg Threat. A safety should take a new name when they earn a starting position, like a codename or the new label you take when converting to a new religion. Greg Threat wouldn’t have to change a thing, though we recommend changing his first name to “Major” just for the hell of it.
SS: Matt Rising. A man who’s name is a sentence, which earns him a starting spot. The sentence being a suggestive one only adds to the appeal.