Because we care: a liveblog will scroll its lazy way down the internets during the Tennessee/LSU game. For the record, we’re taking Tennessee, if only because we can’t imagine the Vols playing as badly as they have three games in a row.

Stranko: 7:34 EST. The games hasn’t kicked off and I’ve already hit my limit on “the game isn’t important its just a welcome diversion” talk. Look, we already know this, but let’s face it, we put too much importance on sports, especially college. That is who we are and we should just be okay with it rather than pretend that “its not that important.” Also, I say LSU wins. We shall see.

Stranko: 7:38 EST. The crowd is in force and ready to rumble… Is Tennessee? We’ll know after the review of the kickoff fumble.

Stranko: 7:42 EST. Well, I can see why Fulmer is so in love with Ainge and has benched Claussen. He secretly hates Tennessee fans. Nice fumble followed by a quick strike by Addai.

Stranko:7:40 EST. Tennesee’s ball, now let’s see if their gameplan is as bad as last week.

Orson: 7:44 EST. Ainge follows in a long tradition of gawky white qbs who turn over the ball at inopportune times at Tennessee. Addai gets that first carry and cuts back with velvety feet wayyyy too smooth for a guy who looks like the Devil’s Bouncer. TD, LSU.

Stranko: 7:48 EST. Orson, it looks like your Costanza powers have affected the Vols. They look rattled.

Stranko: 7:50 EST. Holy Shit… they can’t do anything right. That was a big pass to drop.

Stranko: 7:51 EST. In defense of Tennessee… how tough is it to go from the Swamp to the Bayou. They are probably the toughest two places to play in the country. Even a sophisticated offense like Boise might be affected by that.

Stranko: 7:53. Aren’t blond sideline reporters supposed to be hot?

Orson: 7:54. Speaking of raw deals…how did we get spiky poo Davie with the immortal Ron Franklin?

Orson: 7:57 EST. Lipreading fun: Les Miles mouths “dumbass” on the penalty.

Stranko: 8:03. Nice hit by Kevin Simon. This was a good weekend for big hits.

Orson: 8:04. Large turnover right there. Shame-LSU’s O-Line was whipping Tennessee’s ass, even against the blitz.

Stranko: 8:10. Commercial break. Doug and Carie Heffernen are at their marital bickering again… what a shock.

Stranko: 8:15. Finally a catch by a Tennessee wide out. That turn over by Russell has really slowed the LSU momentum.

Orson 8:18. Randy Sanders has the play-o-matic set on random again.

Orson 8:24. Davie has just informed us that there’s no coaching manual for how to deal with a hurricane. Idiotesque of him.

Stranko: 8:25. I think Davie has just taken over playcalling for both teams.

Stranko: 8:28. If things don’t pick up I might have to watch Jean-Claude Van Damme dance to keep entertained

(more…)

As we reported here and here, Vanderbilt is the most dangerous campus in the state. Well, the hits keep coming as receiver George Smith was shot on Sunday morning in his dorm. He’s okay and expected to make a full recovery.

Hey Vandy. Meet your new ombudsman.

The joys of being a scholarship quarterback in the ACC are illustrated in this horrifying video from last Saturday’s BC/Clemson game. The fact that Ryan stayed in the game is astounding. (HT to Bill at ATLEagle.)

Saturday’s matchup between South Carolina and Troy went about as expected and was mostly uneventful, save for the human interest story that occurred therein. Tim Frisby, a 40-year-old walk-on at the
University of South Carolina, is known by his teammates as Pops both because of his age and the fact that he has six children. Pops spent 20 years in the military before enrolling at USC, only to decide to walk-on to the team. The Disney-movie type story became complete late in the game on Saturday when Pops caught a 9 yard pass on his first play. Way to go Pops.

Gene Wojei…wojeick…wuh…something Polishorwhatever first writes this weird-ass column about USC being exposed in their 45-13 victory over Oregon. Boi From Troy then responds large here (and what gay man doesn’t want to be quoted as “responding large,” right?) As for USC being “exposed,” we’ll take weekly exposure if it nets our teams thirty-point victories every week. We mean that literally, God-if it takes us standing naked outside of Ben Hill Griffin every Saturday to guarantee a win, we’d happily drop our drawers for victory. We’ve done it for much less before.

Gunslingers offers his own expert dissection of the dynamics of the 2005 Gameday season thus far. He doesn’t think anyone calls Herbstreit on anything-we’re inclined to agree.

We, along with most bloggers and young college football fans, are forever lamenting about the fubar system the best sport in America has for crowning a mythical champion. In the past, we believed the only solution was a playoff. The conference commissioners and powerful college presidents apparently disagree and have offered us something way better to fix the broken system. You guessed it, the Harris Poll, which had its premiere this week. We know we feel like it is much more legitimate now. (Although on a positive note, waiting 4 weeks before beginning the poll is the smartest thing they’ve done. They managed to avoid the embarrassing Louisville as number 2 thing)

A gang of six couldn’t catch USF on Saturday.

The New England Patriots have won three out of the last four Super Bowls by continually telling themselves that the rest of the football world wants to steal their car and sleep with their girl. And their mom. And take their Rolexes. Victory doesn’t seem to motivate them nearly as much as the desire to refute all the vile things they think opponents think about them.

This psychology bleeds down straight from the wily, slightly paranoid mind of the coach himself. Belichick-the gold standard for whatever a coach is supposed to be now in every facet of the game save fashion, where he looks like your unemployed uncle on disability-keeps his people motivated one way or another, and contrary to the sunny predictions of positive reinforcement, his Patriots seem to thrive on the absurd idea that they’re playing every game as pissed-off underdogs.

This goes a long way towards explaining why the Florida Gators, after winning by 21 points over a Kentucky team that piled up all but 7 of its 28 points in garbage time against Gator backups, are in for a hellacious week of practice leading up to the Alabama game on Saturday. Meyer will piledrive the backups for playing flag football against Wildcats, and probably reserve special ire for the special teams, who allowed a nasty blocked punt on their first series.

But smiles! Don’t forget the smiles, people! Chris Leak actually ran the ball with confidence on Saturday, something which seemed to change everything about how this offense functions. He also went bonkers in the second quarter, finishing at 25-32, 319 and 4 tds. Chad Jackson may be the number one receiver, but a steady number two emerged in grand fashion as Jemalle Cornelius had the game of his career with 8 receptions for 138 yards. They scored 35 points in a single quarter-something reminiscent of the (gasp!) halcyon days of the Spurrier era. The defensive starters forced Andre Woodson into throwing three picks and made Kentucky look like what it is: the sick old man of the conference. (Vandy’ s 4-0, Rich Brooks. Start house-hunting in Boca right now.)

Chris Leak: striking a familar pose?

The backups gagged in the second half, but they were up by 42 points and seeing their first significant action of the season. That’s how you get depth-give ‘em playing time in relatively consequence-free situations. Like, say, being up by 42 points. Most Gator fans, when asked to define victory, would probably agree with former Strategic Air Commander Curtis LeMay’s justification for requesting more nuclear weapons funding from Congress in the 1950s. One Senator remarked that we had enough weapons to reduce the Soviet Union to cinders, so why did we need more nukes? LeMay’s answer: “I want to see the cinders dance.”

Pretty much sums up the Gator Nation’s attitude toward winning. Do it large, and do it at the expense of logic if needs be. Meyer did the right thing by playing the backups-dancing cinders be damned.

Tampa’s a weird place where weirder things happen. Half of all COPS episodes take place there. Tampan fashion seems to have stopped sometime around 1992-progress, we suppose, since our experience there happened in the mid nineties when everyone was stuck in 1987-and people will still, without irony, wear Oakley’s and sleeveless “Big Dog” shirts in public. In fact, people who otherwise would be total shamed shut-ins in other places parade about in public in Tampa, trailing their IV stands behind them while wearing mumus and old Shawn King Buccanneer jerseys. The number one export by weight from the airport is dead bodies of retirees heading back north for the last time.

Bronzer. Loverboy cranking on the radio. Lincoln Towncars going 35 miles an hour in a 55 zone. Tampa.

Tampa, Florida, which has gotta do it their way-or no way at all!

In the midst of all the strip clubs and Sunshine State phantasmagoria, we watched the football equivalent of a rain of frogs happen: Louisville got obliterated at the beginning of their gimme Big East schedule by the lowly USF Bulls. How did it happen? As with all things in Tampa, they did it using their natural advantages:

1. In the first quarter, USF distracted Brian Brohm by blasting the song “Rollin’ ” by Limp Bizkit. Actually, this isn’t special-it’s a city ordnance that the song be played at least three times at any public gathering of over 10,000 people.

2. Upon arrival at Tampa, Petrino’s team found every major bus company’s coaches completely booked for Public Assistance Recipient Day at Busch Gardens. Resorting to rental cars, the team and support staff found itself found itself squeezed into forty-two Fieros and Camaros, whose pleasing handling and bitchin’ spoilers couldn’t compensate for their total lack of legroom. The team cramped up exiting the fleet of mullet-mobiles and never quite recovered.

3. Dehydration worsened by substitution of Gatorade for Fat Tuesday’s Rum Runner Mix (per Raymond James Stadium sponsorship agreement. )

4. Derby Lanes dog-trainers injected entire USF squad with doses of helpful PCP pre-game to ensure optimal game-day performance.

5. Ball slick from fine, omnipresent mist of hair gel coating entire city.

A victory worth a rain of frogs, even if it wasn’t Louisville’s fault after all.

The Lou Holtz/Mark May experiment is hitting a wall here-one we’re happy to see dented by the eventual rhetorical demolition derby that will result. For the first few weeks, May took it easy on his new, cheating hypocrite of a broadcast partner: nodding appropriately whenever Lou made a painfully obvious point (”Arkansas’s really gonna come to play versus USC, blah blah blah blah,”) piggybacking politely off of Lou’s speech defect-laden analysis.

This weekend, for the first time, May tried to peel the sardine can of madness that is Holtz by finally challenging his assertion that Florida showed its ass in allowing Kentucky-the same team that gave up 35 points in the second quarter of Saturday’s game versus Florida-to roll up 21 points against Florida’s backups in the second half of the game. While we’re not exactly poring over the transcripts of the broadcast like a Talmudic scholar, we remember the exchange going something like this:

NOTE!!! Everything you’re about to read is crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. In the comments below, you’ll see that our intelligent and forgiving readers corrected our meth-addled memory of the exchange: it was Holtz defending Florida, NOT May. In the haze of our joy at another Florida victory, we forgot that May is, in the words of reader Bill, “a fucking douchebag,” and was trashing any praise of Florida based on a victory against Kentucky. We were wrong, wrong, wrong. With that clarified, the rest of the article sort of makes sense. But it’s crap nonetheless. To quote Willy Wonka:

We give ourselves the inaugural Trev Alberts Award for the week for crapulent analysis.

You get it wrong, you get…The Trev! Now, on with the train-wreck that is this piece:

Mark May (complete with disturbing vagina-stache): “The Gators finally found their rhythm against the Kentucky Wildcats. Chris Leak threw and ran the ball with authority, the defense stepped up, and they’re firing on all cylinders going into their matchup with Alabama next week.”

Leprechaun McProbationman: “Oh, Mark, but Florida really let Kentucky back into this game, those backups-whew!-they’ve got some depth issues there.”

May: “Lou, it was Kentucky and they were up by 42 points.”

McProbationman: “Hey, that Kentucky squad really moved the ball once they…”

May: “IT WAS…KENTUCKY!!!”

McProbationman: (pounding his fist on the desk like a dessicated Mussolini) “THEY’VE GOT TO FINISH GAMES! THEY PUT THEIR FIRST TEAM OFFENSE BACK IN IN THE FOURTH! THEY’VE…” (remarks between May and Holtz made incomprehensible in the din of Holtz pounding the table.)

Lou Holtz: creeping madness.

A couple of wonderful things happened in the thirty seconds or so of that exchange. First, May finally got sick of Lou Holtz pulling the football Yoda act and got bitch-snippy with him. Bravo-Holtz has been sketchy on the show, speaking so softly and indistinctly that we hit the volume button every time he starts talking, usually only to find him tossing out pablum about “don’t understimate this team” and “they’ve really got to come to play.” And unlike the ersatz hostility ESPN seems to encourage between their pundits in every other sport, this seemed real-the only other real displays of hostility being whenever Stephen A. Smith interacts with anyone else on the network.

Second: Lou finally let his “red dog” loose on national television. There’s a passage in A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe where a normally meek accountant ditches his married guy, 2 kids and a mortgage life by engaging in crazed embezzlement from his floundering company all while bedding a hot Finnish mistress. It all ends badly, of course, but the phrase Wolfe uses to describe the moment a normally sane person lets their inner dog off the chain is “letting the red dog loose,” referencing a particularly malevolent shade of pit bull.

May and Holtz: muzzles off!

Lou Holtz the commentator and pricey public speaker bears little resemblance to Lou Holtz the coach-often caught swearing a blue streak into the hair of a player who fumbles or misses an assignment by network cameras, but disappearing behind the “aw-shucks” poor-mouther facade at the presser or the ESPN interview. Lou was pissed that May would challenge him, and he let his red dog loose by pounding the table like a maniac as May attempted to talk over him. He looked a little like Nikita Kruschchev pounding his shoe on the table at the U.N. , revealing the red dog coach behind so many instant fixes of dysfunctional programs and the scruples-deficient competitor who never met a corner he wouldn’t cut in the name of a prize recruit.

Three: we swear that Mark May almost dropped a “fucking” on national tv. This close, we swear, just as he was saying “BUT IT WAS FFFFF….er….KENTUCKY!!!” The end of his career? Oh, sure. Would have totally been worth it in our book, as he would have become one of EDSBS’ commentators-for-life, joining with a drunken Brent Musberger on play-by-play and Rick Flair on color commentary in our hypothetical booth. (The sideline reporter? Sarah Samantha Bee from The Daily Show)