The soundtrack obeys the universal rule of all highlight reels-nu metal rulz!-but if you turn the reprehensible soundtrack off, it’s as fine a ’90s retrospective as you’ll find on YouTube for Florida. It’s got everything: Curl ‘n Go, Doering’s Got a Touchdown, Ike Hilliard’s Brake and Fake, and of course, Lawrence Wright turning Joey Kent into applesauce in 1995.

But we got a little misty when we saw Ben Hanks hooting on top of the pile pregame. We miss the skull and crossbones bandana more than we knew.

Click here to watch the video, since the formatting does something odd to our formatting in Firefox.
*** Stranko’s 2 Cents: That may be the best thing I’ve seen in my life! The tradition of Wake Forest my ass. We may not have been the best team of the 90s, but damn it we were probably the most fun to watch.

Damn right we’re living in the past. With 18 days to go, it’s all we can do.

USC almost scored a few point today as Dwayne Jarrett and Thomas Herring were detained by police before practice this morning. Apparently they decided, against their mothers advice some 15 years before no doubt, to take a ride to practice with a stranger… in a car that may or may not have been used in a crime. But, as it seems they were innocent of any wrongdoing (despite what Bruins Nation would like you to believe), we award them no points and remind them not to get in a car with a woman they don’t know.

By week five the first serious guesses at conference pecking orders and long-term prospects for the season roll in just in time to get crushed, reformulated, and then proven wrong again in week six. A few teams will already have received the death ray treatment by fate at this point, having been reduced to cinders by a sudden, tragicomic loss that should have never happened; a few charlatans will ride 4-0s into matchups buffeted by easy schedules and irrational exuberance. After a lackluster week four, week five marks the point at which Darwinian law kicks in and starts bumping the less evolved creatures in college football into the dustbin. This is when you begin to discover if your team is a hardy street pigeon or doomed dodo of a squad.

You’ll begin to know by week five.

Friday, Sept. 29th:

The Jersey Versus the Jersey Diaspora Game: Rutgers vs. USF

Fuck yeah! USF’s in a weird spot, program-wise: it went from being the wiz kid n00b on the block in the Sunshine State to entering what is undoubtedly its adolescent phase as a program, ceding the new kid spot to the FIU and Florida Atlantic. Like most adolescents, USF can be alternately brilliant (last year’s freak implosion of Louisville) or horrendously inconsistent (a 15-10 loss to UConn, for example.) RB Andre Hall is gone, so the offense will hinge on the continued development of Pat Julmiste, the jack of all trades who’s just versatile enough to turn USF’s offense into a run-based but still unpredictable melange of formations and schemes.

Rutgers ebbs closer and closer to respectability, so much so that one day in the forseeable future, you may see a preview of one of their games with nary a Sopranos reference to be seen. For the moment we’ll simply state that their offense is a veteran group with Mike Teel, a VHT of the yet-unfulfilled-potential type, taking over at qb after the most successful offensive year in the school’s history. The defense lost much to graduation, so Rutgers may have to rely more on scoring than they ever have before. Beating USF-who stifled good offenses all year last year and held Miami to 27-will be a game of steady hammering rather than long bombs.

Saturday, Sept 30th:

The Please Oh God Sweet Bloody Vengeance FLAMES! Game of the Week: Alabama at Florida. Losses come in different sizes. Some don’t fit at all-the 2002 loss to LSU in the Swamp, for example. It seemed so disproportionate to what was happening on the field, a size too large for the nibbles, fake punts, and dribbling fumbles unfolding in front of us. Some seem too small, like Florida’s loss to Nebraska in 1996, where the score, bad as it was, still didn’t reflect the unholy demon asswhipping we’d just been handed.

It looked exactly as bad as it was.

And some losses just fit. 31-3 in Tuscaloosa? Just about right, even mathematically. Alabama looked exactly ten times better than Florida in every phase of the game. Only the “Leg Heard Round the World” injury to Prothro darkened what was otherwise a crystalline moment of perfection for Alabama. Unless under the influence of the most dire fan delirium or prescription medication, not a single Florida fan left the stadium thinking we were the better team.

Now Alabama’s devoid of speed at wideout, banged to scrap on the o-line, and replacing seven starters on the defense. They’re also breaking in a new starter at qb. In the Swamp.

We’re struggling to describe how bad a beating would avenge the proper beatdown ‘Bama gave us just last year. Yet it gets worse when you figure the streak of three losses to the Crimson Tide, dating all the way back to the Shaun Alexander “Superman” game in the Swamp. We present a list of things that would come close to avenging the three in a single game-not actual events, but a combination of images, phrases, and themes we’d combine into a single horrible maelstrom of football carnage:

1. Chuck Norris.
2. When Animals Attack.
3. Concussion Island
4. “I’ll kill you last”
5. The music of Slayer
6. Beating John Parker Wilson like he was Peyton Manning.
7. Chong Li in Bloodsport
8. Mongols burning a city to the ground.
9. Alabama fans openly weeping not from embarrassment, but from pain.
10. Flames.

Flames. Sorrow. Yes, that would be nice.

That said, this seems like a born 27-17 game if one ever existed. Hopefully we’ll be the 27.

Subversive Pac 10 Curveball Game: Oregon at Arizona State.

Will Oregon still be rotating quarterbacks at this point? (more…)

Damned Internet! Spurrier closes practice. Just what the Gator’s need, starting O-Lineman breaks ankle. Feel good story of the day: Willie Williams finds a home. What’s the matter with Kansas? Sure, V Tech found a new starter, but can you ever really replace Marcus Mexico? Fulmer to Vols fans: “You complete me“. Finally, as a public service announcement, if you are reading this with a laptop close to your groin, move the laptop away and read this now!

Laptops, like Appalachian State, can be Hot, Hot, Hot!

GatorSports has a nice profile on a Florida Gator we’ll be rooting insanely for simply because of his backstory: Wondy Pierre-Louis, who in addition to his charming name has a great backstory as an immigrant from Haiti who leapt through the flaming hoops of U.S. Immigration to clear his scholarship at Florida.

And then there’s this:

Pierre-Louis credited some of his agility from days when he chased goats in his native country.

“It was something we did for fun,” he said.

Tennessee…tradition of fast defenders…hmm…

Bets you won’t even call her afterward.

Fire Mark May has the Bill Simmons simulation module uploaded and cranking.

(On a side note, has there ever been a greater moment in sports than when the Steiner Brothers beat the Rockers? I don’t even care if it was fake, that was wicked. That rivals when Gene Hackman’s speech in “Hoosiers” for ‘Most Inspiration Non-Real Sports Moment 2006.)

Is not interested in college football. Therefore we use a simulator.

Troy University marches into the Fulmer Cup with a late but impressive charge set of charges. Three players were arrested in connection with a burglary late Friday night, each garnering a second-degree burglary charge along the way. (HT: Todd.)

No bonus points awarded for anything here, just a flat sum of 2 points for second degree burglary times 3 totalling 6 points. We’re keeping the charges light since if we lived in Troy, Alabama, we’d be breaking into every house in the whole damn town looking for something to do, too.

We’d be cutting the heads of parking meters, too, if we lived in Troy.