The rest of Football Christmas will come tomorrow. As for tonight, let this put you in the key of football:
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
70. Miller High Life. We really only drink this glorified mare’s urine in the fall, but some alchemy in the season combined with the whiff of nostalgia makes the otherwise substandard brew a choice beverage for any tailgate. Helps in humid sweatbox environments that little, if any alchohol is actually contained within.
The champagne of beers.
69. Breakfast with Gameday. Even Big and Rich couldn’t ruin this one for us.
68. The flea-flicker.
67. The reverse flea-flicker.
66. Fake punts: subtype: awesome
65. The reverse
64. The double reverse.
63. The double reverse pass to the qb (unless called against Michigan in bowl game.)
80. Sloppy games in the rain. A mayhem situation of fumbles, slips, improbable catches, and butch-as-hell effects when people hit each other. Super impressive at night when the lights turn the scene into a cliched football movie finale.
79. Quarterbacks who refuse to slide. Dave Ragone, you may be brain damaged today, but even the FSU defense never made you bow. This year’s bet for this title: Joe Tereshinkski.
78. The shine of lights on newly polished helmets.
Oooh…shiny.
77. God bless you, Central West Multidirectional Vocational Institute of Technology. You just keep taking the checks, and big programs keep on sodomizing you on national television in embarrassing fashion. Thanks to the aforementioned Gameday package, there’s even more “toddler versus rabid Wolverine” matches to see. The only man who compares in the whole history of humanity to the quarterback for these teams is the ball turret gunner in a B-17; as Randall Jarrell wrote, when something goes really wrong for either one, they clean you up with a hose.
76. Wes Durham. The silky baritone that broadcasts Georgia Tech games locally has no shortage of awesomeness about him. He’s a huge Earth, Wind, and Fire fan. He comes armed with a bushel of southernisms so colorful they’d put Jean Miro and Keith Jackson to shame. His sense of timing and refusal not to homerize puts Georgia in the catbird seat of state announcing duos along with the indestructible force that is Larry Munson.
Really, really tan, too.
75. The song “Click Click Boom.” No one said you liked all the presents you got for Football Christmas. The song behind 73 percent of all highlight films on the web is laughable nu-metal that you’ll be conditioned Ludovico-style to love by the time you’ve watched your favorite team’s highlight reels played to it 521 times in a row.
74. TiVo. Because you can’t be everywhere at once. Even on drugs. Unless we’re talking about…
73. ProVigil. When we say never miss a game, we mean it. Provigil gets you there!
72. The 3-3-5 defense. It’s like pornography. You may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it, mister.
71. Complete, utter, earth-shattering upsets. They’re rarer than people think, but when they occur they strike with the unfair violence of sudden death. We mean this: we’re still wondering what the hell happened with UF/Miss. State 2000.
Football Christmas gifts, continued in no particular order:
90. Purchasing paraphernalia only a few hundred thousand people will ever understand. “Punt Bama Punt” bumper stickers. “I Need A Volunteer” t-shirts. Lame single-issue t-shirts for games with slogans like “NEUTER THE WOLFPACK” and “DERIDE THE TIDE” will surely flow from the hands of vendors to fans to Salvation Armies to wholesalers in Africa who then sell them to kids playing soccer in the streets of Luanda. We’ve started our own worthless collection with a “HONK IF YOU SACKED BRODIE” bumper sticker from last year, but hope one day to own something as glorious as the Joe Paterno drink tray Jay once had.
89. De’Cody Fagg, wide receiver, Florida State. “Fagg catches…Fagg scores!” “Fagg gets nailed!” “Fagg dances into the endzone!” The joy will never fade from this name-NEVER.
88. The traitorous guy selling score posters outside the stadium. Your best friend after a victory, selling instant verification of the ass-stomping your team just bestowed on the opposition; your worst enemy following a loss, a Benedict Arnold sitting atop a thousand replications of how much your team just sucked that he will sell and profit from.
87. Johnsonville Brats steaming hot off the grill. Ah, the smell of it…
86. The Vol Navy. Sure, they’re the enemy. But just getting that many people in boats and not killing anyone represents the greatest feat of naval engineering since the evacuation of Dunkirk. And they do it six or seven times a year.
A feat of alcoholic engineering.
85. ATV commercials. For some reason, advertisers think college football fans like them. If we didn’t already own three of the goddamn things, we’d think that, too.
84. Play action. One of the most sublime spaces in college football is the fatal space between a bamboozled defender and a streaking wideout who cannot and will not be caught running wild for a touchdown. Cue satisfying click of planning becoming reality in brain.
Thought we were running, right? That’s so unfortunate.
83. The Gameday Plan. For under three hundred dollars, you can get all the distraction you’ll ever need ever. It’s cheaper than crack and twice as good…not that we know that empirically, mind you…
82. Calling someone at a very inappropriate hour to scream school motto into ear repeatedly. Tactic best employed by Cuddles Swindle, 1:30 a.m. E.S.T, October 15th, 2001, where “WAR EAGLE” was repeated six times in a row to an unconscious Orson Swindle over the phone.
81. Cocktails named after marginal players. See The “Cherryshinski” or “The Bear Bryant.”
On the hour, a list of the gifts-real and potential-for the upcoming season.
100. The sound of Brent Musberger pulling a muscle on a touchdown call early in the first quarter, capped with a guttral “hhhhyyyyYEEEEEESSS!!!” Histrionic, overdone as a hospital cafeteria hamburger, and as essential to the milieu of college football as a good sunburn. If it doesn’t sound like Brent’s just been punched in the stomach by a Hell’s Angel, then it’s an impostor who must be thrown from the press box with all due speed.
Let the Musbergames begin!
99. Gravitation beyond reason: reader Pool Hall Bill, who at this moment is suspended above the Pacific Ocean on a jet on the way to see his wife, son, and the Georgia Bulldogs against Western Kentucky on his leave from duty in Korea, who has been thinking about this game despite sitting just a stone’s throw away from half a million North Koreans armed to the gills.
Welcome home, Bill.
98. Flicking off complete strangers on the interstate based solely on the window flags flying from their windows.
97. Outlandish wastes of capital on items used for 12 weekends of recreation a year. Sure, guys like Peter just put a little bit of the spicy mustard on an already typical American level of overconsumption. (In most of the world, ownership of an SUV, a generator, and a satellite dish makes you “Minister of Sketchily Defined Department of Something” by default. Here it makes you, well, normal.) And some people get their truck tricked just for football season. In case you were wondering, the Tail Gator? Not ours…yet.
96. Mascot violence.
95. Cursing Lee Corso’s mere visage with every atom of our soul. It’s become a hobby, really, with Corso transcending the merely loathed into a Cossell-ish place of hated necessity. This year’s bonus: wondering out loud during games if the shield-faced, unbelievably tanned announcer has in fact had an eyelift.
94. Drunk people. Sometimes they give you hot dogs and beer; sometimes they throw cinderblocks at your car. Either way, they’re rarely boring and come in ample supply at a college football game. Being unpredictable and belligerent is sometimes entertainment enough for a visiting fan provided the tar and feathers don’t come out. We’re looking at you, Morgantown.
93. The roseate sunlight of dusk on the pine trees ringing the fringe of Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, California.
92. A hit so hard an audible “SHIT” can be heard from a sideline bystander on the mike. God bless the lack of delay on sports broadcasts, because that only echoes what every viewer on the couch is saying out loud to themselves and their impressionable, innocent children.
Now that the season is upon us, we want to remind you all once again of our continued celebration of tailgaters who help make college football the greatest sport in the land. So, if you have any good shots of tailgating send them to us at edsbsfans -a- gmail dot com. We’ll sort through them and post our favorites. We also want to hear any great tailgating stories, especially if they go along with the pictures. As always, bonus points for kissing up to us (after all, we blog because we’re egoists)
Wearing one of these bad boys can’t hurt.
For an example of a good one we received last month, follow the jump. (more…)
As of midnight, the clock wound down and the scoring closed on the Fulmer Cup 2006 competition with the advent of today, Football Christmas.
And for Football Christmas, Swindle Claus has a magnificent gift for the Marshall Thundering Herd: The Fulmer Cup, given to the university whose football team goes furthest in felonious behavior, maxes out their misdemeanors, and generally makes The Program look like an airbrushed, idyllic vision of college footballdom with their behavior. Way to BRING DOWN THE WHAMMY on the award, boys. The final scoring:
Final notes and honorable mentions:
-No one in the whole state of West Virginia can decide whether or not to charge Geramy Rodamer with anything in an incident outside a bar in Huntington; he was charged, then he wasn’t, then he was…at last account he was, so Marshall’s total remains steady at a conservative estimate of 15 points. Even if he wasn’t charged, however, Marshall’s total easily surpasses that of fellow 1-A rival Purdue, who rode a formidable 12 point lead deep into the competition after racking up points early in the comp.
-Delaware gets the special award for distinction by a 1-AA program and the award for single incident damage with its Scarface-esque home invasion incident. Four players reinvented the concept of team unity by breaking into a fellow Blue Hen’s house and robbing him of steroids, cash, other drugs, and pretty much anything else he had. Though we’d like to stress that the Fulmer Cup competition includes only D-1 teams, Delaware made a ferocious case for small-time programs doing big-time business of their own in the race.
-Florida got six points for Kenneth Tookes discharging an AR-15 in an apartment complex and for Avery Atkins beating up the mother of his child. So that’s our beloved school saddled with an abuse charge and a reckless endangerment charge involving a barely legal assault rifle. That is all.
-The finest individual crime on the comedy scale? An easy question with an easier answer: TurdGate.
-Finally, the real champion here: Ellis T. Jones, the former San Jose State player who allegedly enticed bargain hunters on Craigslist to an apartment complex where he would taser them, rob them, and in one incident, put them in a trunk without their permission. The final tally in the incidents came to 31 points that couldn’t possibly be saddled on a single program alone. Therefore Ellis T. Jones will receive the first annual Ellis T. Jones Award for individual accomplishment in felony and mayhem. Congratulations, Ellis.
-A final note of thanks to board administrator Big Mike, whose enormous penis once inspired John Holmes to put on a sundress and invite all his lady friends to the cutest tea party your little heart’s ever seen. (As part of our contractual obligations to Mike, we’re forced to write complimentary things about him.) Mike’s been the principal interpreter of our hairbrained scoring codes and judgements, and for that alone we owe him an IV of daquiris. (“So cold going in the vein…so warm in my heart!”) Fine job, Mike. We’ll unchain you from the radiator as soon as you show us the respect we deserve, but still, good job and all.
Again, congratulations Marshall. For the next five months, you’re tasting victory no matter what happens on the gridiron. Say it with us:
Who’s on notice in our corner of the universe? Thanks to the wonders of the internets, now everyone can know in convenient Stephen Colbert form. Here’s our list, which you can certainly do a much better job on by clicking here and making your own.
Two are hangover-related. But who doesn’t fear the unending threat of grizzly bears?
ORSON SWINDLE FAQs Got leisure time? Care to waste it? Learn more about Orson Swindle here.
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Orson Swindle and Stranko Montana are two men pushing thirty who should know better than to run a college football blog, but evidently don't. Both graduated from the University of Florida, and both agree that college football is far too important to be left to the professionals.
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