Urban Meyer has garnered much of the recruiting season hubbub-mostly by walking into homes, pointing his hand with index finger and pinkie extended a la Crocodile Dundee and mesmerizing recruits with his animal charisma. (It’s enough to make you wonder if he and Dan Mullen urinate on the door to mark their territory as they leave.) The storyline now is an eventual UF rush to a number one ranking in Rivals’ recruiting watch, which classically has been both an indicator of future success and inevitable harping from fans instantly expecting national championships, conference titles, and free puppies for everyone.

Urban in person: yeah, just like that.

One ongoing storyline not to forget, though, is the continuing dry-humping of Northeast Ohio by one Jim Tressel, a.k.a. Cheatypants Sweatervest, in the handshake wars. Tressel has the area, tradionally a battleground for Michigan and Ohio State’s coaches, is firmly in the Sweatervest’s lollipop-filled hands.

Why the complete turnover? A few scenarios we imagine playing out may explain why Michigan has lost almost all of their ground in this important recruiting theater.

Greetings

Tressel: “I’m Jim Tressel. That’s an Escalade in your aunt’s name. Can I come in? ”

Carr: “Hi, Carr here. Don’t look so happy. You’re a second closer to death, you know. Jesus, same shit, different day…”
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Oh yeah, it’s the offseason: Bill from ATL Eagle offers his own theories on Boston College quarterbacks, greatness, and hair.

Hair matters. Ask Flutie

Thanks to Jameson Davis and Antonio Freeman, who were suspended from the team after their arrests for possession of marijuana following a traffic stop, Wisconsin is now making itself a factor in the Fulmer Cup. Don’t rest on those laurels Badgers, you still have work to do to catch Purdue and the inevitable onslaught of some SEC team this summer.

Former UCLA coach Bob Toledo was hired as assistant head coach and offensive coordinator at New Mexico. Oh, how the mighty have fallen… though it still isn’t as bad as Mike Dubose.

Tom Nugent, former coach of the Virginia Military Institute and Florida State, died of congestive heart failure Thursday at the age of 92. The interesting thing to us in this story is that Nugent created the I formation. Look for that question in the coming weeks at your local sports bar trivia game.

Nugent, after inventing the I formation, went on to become a survivialist rocker.

The offseason sucks for many reasons. First, we have to explain our five month absence to our wife, who just apparitioned into existence next to us on the couch seconds after Vince Young crossed the goal line for the win in the Rose Bowl. (Honestly, we have no idea where she went for those five months—we were here the whole time. We either just didn’t see her, or she’s been garroting Al-Qaeda operatives in back alleys in a miniskirt for a secret government agency. We’re really hoping for the second option, because that would simultaneously absolve us of husbandly negligence and also would be really, really hott.)

We hope the Conscience of a Nation does her killing during football season.

(We just heard Scott Van Pelt do a Carl from ATHF impression on Sportscenter-are we going to have to abandon this line of reference now? They’ve touched it, which means it’s been hit by the whore’s stankfinger of ESPN, bringing a significant level of taint to the situation. And though we all have some level of taint, the Worldwide Leader brings a huge taint to the table here.)

Another thing that sucks about the offseason: pesky numbers like graduation rates bubble to the surface thanks to the news vacuum. This presents good news for schools like Vandy, Florida, and Duke, who may tout high graduation rates for all athletics as further evidence that their athletic programs are not in fact minor league sports teams haphazardly grafted onto their schools. The numbers present nothing but badness for schools like Arkansas, Georgia, and NC State, whose lackluster grad numbers certainly don’t bode well for their reputation as fully integrated units of the schools.

The worst news for a program out of this set of stats comes directly to the door of Georgia Tech, however, a school with a formidable academic reputation whose athletics program, currently headless following the resignation of longtime AD Dave Braine, has apparently been staggering along without a brain for quite a while. (Horrid pun. Apologies.) Georgia Tech, playing in a conference where Duke is second in the league for graduating its players, has little excuse in the way of high academic standards preventing players from gettting degrees. There’s no shelter under the “left for the pros” defense, either, since Tech hasn’t exactly been a spawning ground for pro prospects lately.

Stop smiling.

Georgia, in contrast, can lean on this defense a bit, since UGA under Mark Richt regularly cranks out pro prospects who leave early. Their rates still aren’t great-just 50 percent for all male athletes-but hey, at least they’re not inexcusable Arkansas, holding steady at last in the SEC with a 48 percent grad rate for their male athletes. Still, Richt’sGeorgia’s numbers for graduating players belie our desire to like him; if you’re not going pro, you’re there to at least get a degree and exchange your knees and a few concussed brain cells for it. Georgia’s doing this to a degree just above Arkansas, which in plain terms ain’t real good. (There’s our own UF education working for us, there.)

They’re still relatively outperforming what one should expect of their in-state rival, though. Did Tech’s outgoing AD Braine retire out of genuine medical concern-he does have Krohn’s Disease, an unpleasant intestinal disorder-or was he to be fired anyway for turning the athletics department into separate, poorly managed fiefdom disconnected from the rest of the North Avenue Trade School? And are we just following our innate dislike for the doddering Chan Gailey in thinking that this and a fourth (!?!?) 7-5 season are just more nails in the coffin for Gailey’s eventual firing next year under a new AD? Or are we just looking for another excuse to throw tacks at Grampa here?

One-Peat.com got their ten grand. Taunting won’t cover what this will look like sitting on a billboard in L.A…(image below the jump)
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Florida Gulf Coast University, who held its first classes in 1997, has opted to pursue a D-I affiliation as soon as possible. In addition to further crowding the burgeoning Florida football scene with yet another team, FGCU’s team will compete in the Atlantic Sun Conference, also known to most programs as “Who We’re Playing in the 12th Game.” No word on whether Mike Leach was in the audience applauding the announcement. (HT: Mark at Sports Biz Blog.)

Separated at birth: the eagle from the FGCU logo:

And Dr. Weird from ATHF?

Gentlemen! Behold…a new cupcake on the schedule!

Marshall scores a point in the Fulmer Cup standings: Ahmad Bradshaw is free on bail following his arrest for “petit larceny and nighttime burglary.”

Does it say something about West Virginia that they differentiate between nighttime and daytime burglary? As in, “Well, your honor, as if crankin’ up a winder and ducking into someone’s house ain’t bad enough, they did it when Walker, Texas Ranger was on. Now that just ain’t fair-I couldn’t even hear him comin’ in, I was so riveted to the tv. I only opened fire when I noticed the tv was gone.” Makes a man want to set something on fire…like, say…a couch…remember, though, the important lessons from this incident. Burglary, if you’re a man, is strictly a nighttime activity.

Don’t break into a man’s house in WV at night-we’re watching Walker, dammit.