The Republic of Kyrgyzstan, College Football division-a.k.a. Georgia Tech-loses Joe Gaston to injury for the year. The AJC line on this looks something like this:

GT secondary-senior DB/graduation losses= Not good.

Notre Dame could feel free to equate “not good” with “400 yard day for Brady Quinn” here, and we couldn’t blame them on the face of it: Weis vs. Gailey’s like pitting Murray Gell-Mann versus Tony Siragusa in a chess match. (Only time these two will ever appear in the same sentence-ever-unless you discuss their other commonality, which is having sex with a drunken Madeleine Albright. She still calls Tony, from what we hear.)

They shouldn’t assume this though, since Weis will in fact be squaring off against Jon Tenuta in this case, a maddening defensive architect who likes to bring pressure from every imaginable nook and cranny of the field and the only thing keeping Chan Gailey gainfully employed by the Georgia Institute of Technology. We’ll do a whole segment on trap games, but Notre Dame would be doing their due diligence by making sure to get up on Tech early and often to avoid turning the game into a dreaded Chan Gailey special: strangling d combined with three play drives and much head-scratching among both coaches and fans.

In the Gailey era, these kind of trap games have been their specialty: ask Auburn, Miami, and very nearly USC about that. Gailey’s teams win the games they’re not supposed to win and get waxed by the Dukes of the world the week after, a fact we know Weis isn’t overlooking in his preparations. But don’t be shocked if this turns out to be a much uglier game than anyone imagines.

Actually, we bet Charlie just heard us type that…damn his robot genius ears…

Kyrgyzstan…beautiful…and deadly!

He had the best center of gravity of any back we’ve seen in our lifetime; knocking him off his feet was like trying to upend a taxi. If Brian can post videos on Friday, so can we in honor of Cuddles Swindle, who no doubt appreciates the badass factor of a whole reel of Ronnie Brown’s greatest hits set to an a capella gospel song that makes us want to move to rural Alabama and start a Christian fundy cult based on football, singing about prison, floods, and women, and life without air-conditioning.

In the interest of fair play-and in accordance with some obscure FCC regulations-we also present a clip of Alabama legends, lest we be hit by a wave of rabid Tider Insider emails about our obvious pro-Auburn stance. (more…)

Technology’s always amusing. The Gutenberg printing press may have made a few copies of the bible first, but as with the internet, the world’s first mass-producing text replicator moved quickly into rapid porn production, which really paid the bills, including such explicit popular titles as “Ein Leichtes Mädchen” and “Die Besserung in die Männerhose.” (We swear those are funny, even though they’re in a notoriously humor-impaired language.)

Photoshop has enabled fans to take trash-talk to a new, lofty height. For example, we now bust our mad lit-crit skillz on this image sent to us by reader David:

Professor Derrida?

Here the reader inverts the seme/meme of standard Texan iconography by loosening the metaphorical moorings of the Texan longhorn symbol in a direct comparison with the female reproductive system, fusing the savage, Dionysian bravura of animal-enslaving cowboy Wild West imagery with the Apollonian, cold detachment of the anatomical, at once illustrating the anerotic notion of a woman’s most private parts cut and illustrated with the same cold calculation as the cattle on a ranch. In one sweeping collision of imagery, womb and cow meet under the scalpel, one enslaved by the lasso and barbed wire, the other by science, culture, and the anatomists’ hand. The cowboy is the invisible figure here, framing both with his desire to map, trap, and subdue all that is wild, rhythmic, and natural-in reality, the picture is his.

We’ll take our Master’s in Bullshit Studies English now, thank you.

Bob Stoops has punted punter Cody Freeby from the team for just kind of generally sucking at life as an Oklahoma Sooner. Freeby, already suspended from the team, refused to “cooperate with his suspension,” which we interpret as funneling beer, skipping class, and behaving like most non-scholarship, non-athlete cretins on college campuses do: like a second-degree ass with a PlayStation addiction and five dollars to his name. Freeby’s name will no longer describe the cost of his education, however, as the scholarship ends with his dismissal.

This begs the question: how does one fuck up a punting scholarship? That’s like getting in trouble on the lacrosse team, and you know how mild-mannered those guys are…especially at prestigious private schools. Bobby Bowden, however, understands the plight of renegade kickers, and will likely roll out the red carpet for the “misunderstood” Freeby at Florida State, paving the way for his eventual pick as the number one draft pick of the Oakland Raiders in 2008 draft.

Al Davis: suddenly madly in love with a punter.

Herschel Dennis has torn ligaments in his knee and will miss the 2006 season. Dennis happens to be the only running back with experience on the USC roster, leaving the Trojans with two backs both recovering from offseason surgeries. Thank God Leinart came back for one last fling…

Ekom Udofia, a VHT for Stanford in 2005, has blossomed under the tutelage of his trainers, who’ve evidently been shoveling food down his gullet like relief workers filling sandbags at a flood. Udofia has gone from his recruiting weight of 290 in late 2004, briefly pausing at 320 before topping out (so far) at a bouncing 335. What the blue hell has Udofia been eating? Besides strangers and sacks of bacon-wrapped macadamia nuts?

We suspect the following:

-hamdogs

The horror: the hamdog.

-high-fructose corn syrup IV

-N-Large 2 shakes made with clotted cream instead of water

-Braised slices of Kirstie Alley’s ass in Bearnaise sauce

-Foie gras milkshakes

-Available at top-tier schools like Stanford only: piles of dork chops