We don’t even know this guy and we hate him. Today we eviscerate UConn’s horrid promo, brought to us by the discerning eye of reader Kevin from New Brunswick. Warning: this note contains language.

School: University of Connecticut

Ad title: “Great Pick”

EDSBS title: “Your asshole dormmate with the guitar pitches a university.”

Setup: A guy sits on a stool and picks out a Dave Johnson Mayer-ey white blues tune. As he plays, factoids about UConn flash beneath it, like “Number One Public University in New England,” and “Record high applications.” As each one flashes into the screen, the guitar guy looks suitably impressed, wrinkling his eyebrows and flashing his obviously whitened teeth with approval accordingly. Immediately prior to the end of the commercial a flash of images rushes at the viewer, and as the guitarist finishes up with a flourish he announces “UConn…(blows on pick)…great pick.”

Subtext: We’re UConn, and golly, we’re improving. We’re also making you listen to this shitbag pound out John Mayer/Matchbox 20/other music of diarrheal blandness in his endless quest for pussy while you hurl up Jagermeister in the bushes. Oh, and you can go to school, too.

Wanna hear me play guitar mmphhh AAAGGGH…(sounds of unimaginable violence follow…)

Production values:

Low. A/V club low. The nicest thing we can say is that the lighting and cake makeup makes Guitar Gabe and his wondrous flannel shirt look slightly better than Betamax. The graphics and Ludovico treatment-fast montage of images at the end of the ad, though, are reprehensible work.

Hits: Informed us that UConn has “RECORD-HIGH VALEDICTORIANS.” This may be UConn’s way of cornering the market in drug-abusing overachievers; if so, we’re definitely making a campus visit.

Misses: Everything. Everything, Everything, Everything. Everything. It’s hard to overstate how much we hated this ad. (more…)

In case you missed some the major offseason moves, get caught up here.

Round and round she goes…. where are they coaching, heaven only knows.

Tovarech…welcome to Moscow!!! Dennis Erickson, very good college coach, professional disaster, and alleged fan of booze returns to the ranks of college coaching by coming full circle and becoming the biggest Vandal of all in accepting a post as the head coach at Idaho. It also gives USA Today the excuse to write the following headline on their college football home page:

ERICKSON IN IDAHO’S SACK

My, that relationship moved quickly. But what with all the gay cowboy fever spreading all over the nation, it’s little wonder things moved that fast out there in the wide open spaces of the Potato state.

The return to Idaho in Erickson’s eyes presents a logical progression:

“I just thought it was an opportunity for me to come back, give back and get back to coaching college football … my first love,” Erickson said at a news conference.

…or the only gig that really wanted to take a flyer on a coach whose job-hopping resume is a paean to Ritalin. Either way, Erickson fans can welcome him back with a bubbling round of applause as he’s sure to give a brimming shot or eight of enthusiasm with a chaser of excitement to the Idaho program. Erickson’s teams over the years have , in two and three year stints, scored tub-sized margaritas full of points, which Idaho’s sure to do on the matador defenses of the WAC.

Over the years old Scotchy’s done great work, a fact that shouldn’t be clouded by the beer goggles of the current visage of a man who spent two years running San Francisco into the ground in the pros. He piloted some of the most thugged out teams in the history of the Miami program, which is kind of like saying you’ve been to prison…in hell. (This is the title of a real movie, but we’ll be damned if we can find the IMDB entry. The poster depicts a flaming skeleton reaching through the bars of a blockhouse situated in what appears to the backdrop from an old Dio video. If we ever found the poster, we’d sell it to Glenn Danzig for a million dollars and start typing this from an undisclosed location off the coast of Thailand.) Erickson also gave the world the monstrous Oregon State team baddddd enough to dupe Sports Illustrated into placing the Beavers on the cover of SI the following year, a team whose annihilation of a positively retarded ND squad solidified the notion that Bob Davie could not coach a squad of trained Russian wolfhounds to victory over a hutch of cuddly baby rabbits.
Erickson’s spread sets from the ’80s are credited by many-including Urban Meyer-for inspiring the spread movement in college offensive coaching.

Erickson: back to Moscow.

So we’re kind of looking at a piece of history here-a shock-haired, khakis-wearing, hard-drinking damn-the-NCAA-I’m-recruiting-straight-from-the-reform-school type we’re not likely to see again for a while. A relic worth watching? Oh, yes. We say welcome back Coach Erickson, and the first round’s on us. After that, though, you’re on your own, since we don’t carry that kind of cash on us, and binge drinking in Idaho could lead to freezing to death in a ditch if you’re not careful.