We skimmed the Cal/BYU game last night while building our evil weather control machine and doing laundry, and it seemed pretty much on point with what we thought: Cal just kind of pulled away early in the third quarter like teams with superior talent do, scoring two quick tds with a long run by Marshawn Lynch and a bomb TD to DeSean Jackson that only cost him a month's worth of sore ribs to catch. BYU would claw back to within a score, but Cal's victory after that carried a sort of glacial certainty to it, especially after watching Lynch carry two of the LDS' finest into the endzone on the td run.
Programming note: on that catch, Mike "Scotchy" Gottfried swore Talmudic oaths that Jackson did not catch the ball and that the replay crew would handily overturn the call and revoke the TD. This Solomonic wisdom came from Scotchy's mouth despite the fact that neither Gottfried nor his broadcast partner Sean McDonough bothered to note that replay calls for compelling visual evidence--which the available camera angles did not show, cutting off the play somewhere about six inches above the view of Jackson's body hitting the turf. To be fair, Jackson may have trapped the ball--on the way down it sure looked like it--but it disappeared from the frame at the crucial instant of catchdom and wasn't visible from another angle. Gottfried could have said any of these things in an attempt to clarify what what was abundantly clear to two-drink tipsy us on the couch: no evidence, no overturn, Cal scores. Instead Scotchy blabbed on about what a sure call this was, acting shocked when the replay officials upheld the call and gave Cal six.
Scotchy scotch scotch.
Making matters worse, both McDonough and Gottfried attempted to cover their asses by insisting that the "replay officials had angles we don't have." Untrue--they've got the broadcast angles, and that's about it. No Matrix cams, no NSA satellite photos, no Fox in-turf cams, no pinhole cameras mounted on the pylons--they've got the same angles, no more, no less.
One positive thing about the game: we got to see the most morbidly obese lineman since "Pork Chop" Womack waddled onto the field at Miss. State, BYU's allegedly 350-pound monster Brian "Lunch Room" Sanders. Sanders can't even really run, instead shuffling around as if his hip sockets were soldered in place--which, for his own protection, they may be. In this article we found the only quote you need to hear about Sanders:
When asked what was something he'd most like to see, he replied: "My ribs."
Aside from watching Scotchy make an ass of himself and grumble his way through another broadcast, testing our corneal tracking speed watching DeSean Jackson, and giggling at "Lunch Room"'s gut, there wasn't much keeping us really loyal to the San Diego County Board of Health Inspectors Federal Consolidated Credit Union and Massage Parlor Poinsettia Bowl. So we went to ESPN2, where Navy faced Colorado State in a game every pundit in the food chain from us to Mandel had pronounced a surefire shootout.
And it was, just not the really satisfying kind where both opponents squat behind oil drums three feet apart and empty their guns at each other for sixty minutes. (Yes, a clumsily phrased Naked Gun allusion.) Navy's one of the the best watches in all of college football because they line up in the bone and actually run the jailbreak option into the teeth of good defenses, a shocking sight in today's game that ranks somewhere in visual shock value between watching a corgi latch onto a charging bull's nose and the scene in Legends of the Fall where Brad Pitt fights a bear (and loses, badly.)
The corgi won this fight easily, though: CSU's rush defense, which ESPN2 graphics helpfully told us was piss-poor all season, lived down to it's billing, with Reggie Campbell evoking Barry Sanders comparisons after 290 all-purpose yards in 51-30 blowout. Yeah, it was a shootout, but not a competitive one. It did, however, give us further flimsy evidence of our "SEAL Envy" theory, which is that all men, in one respect or another, regret the fact that they are not a Navy SEAL. (You're obviously excluded from this if you are a Navy SEAL, by the way. ) Navy had to win this game for a number of reasons--CSU's cheesecloth rush D being a big one--but the Navy SEAL factor had to play a small, crucial psychological factor in the outcome of the game.
Admit it--you've got SEAL envy, cubicle boy.
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