The FAMU Band. Where does one begin? Start with the drum majors-even when you’re in the nosebleeds, you know something’s going on, since even from the distance of several miles you can look at the drum majors and guess that a.) they’re not gay, b.) they’re dancing better than you, even in your drunkest fantasies, ever have, and c.) they’re getting straight laid that night.

To properly appreciate FAMU, you have to see the choreography up close, and since most of the videos of the band on YouTube are straight pressbox shots sprinkled with occasional close-up shots, you miss out on plenty of quality pelvic thrusting and leg grabs. The practice videos show their whole routine, though, complete with crowd participation and singalongs. The best comes about a minute in, and yes, you get bonus points for getting people to attempt this in the office.

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Senior Joe Tereshinski has been named the Dawgs’ starter to begin the season.  Good for him.  We like to see an opportunity for a third generation player who waits around for 4 years get a chance.  It is one of the beautiful things about college football.  We hope he does well enough to remain the starter and get beaten by the Gators in Jax.

Real life intrudes today, as we’re in New York on business and therefore posting this from various jankety wireless hookups across Manhattan. We’ll try to have a primary piece up for tomorrow, too, since Football Advent is a-wastin’…

We never thought we’d type anything putting John Mackovic and Dirk Koetter in the same sentence, but the last time we remember anything close to a player revolt against a sitting coach came when the robot known as John Mackovic lost complete control of his Arizona squad in 2003.

The thorny individualism of the American West must be to blame, since Arizona State allegedly had a player revolt of its own this past weekend. Sam Keller, who had originally been named the starter at qb by coach Dirk Koetter, has now been excused from practice for two days as he “explores his options.” According to two sources close to the uni, that means leaving the program altogether. Rudy Carpenter will start at qb.

The situation came to a crux in a player meeting between Koetter and his players after he named Keller as starter. “I screwed up,” was the quote Koetter gave reporters after Keller’s announcement.

Read more about it here courtesy of the East Valley Tribune, which beat the big boys to the story in lightning fashion.

Cacti… apparently bad for team chemistry. 

The House Rock Built has the season’s first official blogpoll roundtable, and it’s potato-heavy, carbolicious midwestern goodness through and through. We answer below.

1. What’s the biggest ripoff in this preseason poll? Either pick a team that’s offensively over or underrated, or you can rag on a particular voter’s bad pick (hey, we’re all adults here, we can handle it).

Since we’ve decided that everyone’s poll is the equivalent of the Togolese space program-low-budget affairs doomed to explode in spectacular fashion on the launchpad-we’ll bypass slamming anyone else’s poll, even if people actually did put Pittsburgh in their ballot at any spot whatsoever. (We just insured a winning season for Dave Wannstedt with that remark. Look what you made us do! On the upside, Mark May’s misery will continue as long as the Wannstache is coach, which may ameliorate some of the anguish you’ll feel watching him commentate this year.)

Virginia Tech gets straight jacked this year, and only because they’ve lost Marcus “Toddlers gotta get whacked, too” Vick at quarterback. This is a team that lives on a steady diet of whirling dervish defensive talent, a sterling staff all seemingly locked down for life in Blacksburg, and an offense committed to running the shit of the ball while occasionally letting the qb throw five yard passes on bootlegs.

It’s not baroque design and grand strategy in action-it’s lunchpail ball designed to win by stranglehold and rapid opportunism, which may be the optimal strategy in a conference that in its current iteration has been a race to the bottom as far as competition goes. (Look at the roster of BCS teams since the Miami/Virginia Tech merger-it’s scanty at best, and mostly because the conference now occupies the same ground the Big Ten used to claim in the 1990s, a warre of alle againste alle where the conference champ would likely have at least two losses by season’s end.)

The Hokies play hyper-conservative football that leans on the margins. It’s elegant demolition on the defensive side of the ball; it’s tooth-pulling boredom on the offensive side of things. Yet in a conference where games are decided by pro-style margins, it makes gobs of sense to play Beamer-Ball. Plus they’ve got Jenkins, and there’s something to be said for that.

The most overrated? Notre Dame, but mostly because they’ve attracted the cyclops that is ESPN/ABC/OMGUSC!, who’s now sending it nude poloroids of itself, texting every ten minutes, and probably has the Robot Genius thinking restraining order at this point. Really, to throw yourself at a team that soon after dumping USC…it’s just trashy, really, just classless. We call relationship foul.

ESPN is starting to remind us of Stacey, the epitome of the creepy girlfriend (The picture of her as Stacey crashed, so this will have to suffice.).

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