The drifter who stole the Auburn laptop thief is caught. Surprisingly, he bears no resemblance to Dave Shula. Sleep safely tonight knowing this man is off the streets…

No resemblance to Dave Shula.

Next up for Florida in the Death Race 2000 portion of this year’s programming…LSU. Who we won’t be able to beat with 13 men on the field, evidently, if you’re weather vane is picking up the general drift of prognostication, since LSU’s beaten the dog out of Tulane! Mississippi State! Arizona! and don’t forget…University of Louisiana-Lafayette!!! Wow!!! Bet the house on the cover! And the wife if they’ll take her! And a kidney!!! WOO!!!

When the inevitable defeat happens, though, there’s one guarantee: hot man-on-man action will commence.

Two LSU fans willing to bend eauxver backwards for each other.

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the November elections, but we’d like to come right out and say that we’re supporting whatever party decides to embrace the American tradition of personal liberty and keeps college football video game stabbing legal. (HT: AUAlum, for the following story.)

James Rodney Wilson, who we bet a plugged nickel uses all three names or calls himself “J-Rod,” and his cousin Lance Eugene Borchert, both over thirty, finished an epic Auburn-Tennessee game late Saturday night where Borchert’s Volunteer team defeated Auburn, most likely with the four-wide “deep attack” play, because either the slot post or the little out to the sideline is always open. Or maybe curl flats, because that’s damn near unstoppable, especially with that post route up the middle…

Ahem. At any rate, J-Rod (yeah, that’s what he calls himself,) decided to even the score after his defeat with a “deep” attack of his own on his cousin. He walked into the bedroom where Borchert was asleep with his wife and put a 12-inch knife into his cousin’s back, puncturing his lung.

The best slice from the Decatur Daily article:

“At first, the victim didn’t know he had been stabbed,” the sheriff said. “He thought he had been hit. I wouldn’t have bet a plugged nickel he would have lived. He went to the hospital with the knife still in his back.”

…Blakely said after the stabbing that Wilson ran from the Borchert home into nearby woods. He said dogs from Limestone Correctional Facility helped track Wilson, and authorities arrested him at 3:15 a.m.

Ahh, sounds just like holidays at the Swindle household.

Release the hounds!

One might call it “parity.” One also might call it “partial crappiness, with a chance of mediocrity.” Thus far, no fifty-story mechabot Leviathan team has emerged from the pack of D-1 teams, and dipping into the ranks of teams below the arbitrary 25th spot is like hand-diving into the backseat of a Manhattan taxi cab to fish out the seat belts: nothing down there that won’t give you some kind of disease, and plenty of it.

The latest laughable attempt to rank the nation’s top 25 football teams follows. Trash away, since we moved a few teams out of sheer boredom.

Notes, Errata, and Analytical Maafa:

1. One move at the top: USC gets shaky and thus loses a spot to Michigan, who with Ohio State are the two death machines cranking their way through the Big Ten right now. Despite vastly different approaches and schemes, both teams seem to run the hell out of the ball and aim to finish every game somewhere around 28-7. Both would be a stern test for a USC team lacking the automatic 6 ypc run advance they cashed in on first down every game for the past three years. Blame it on boredom and the gasper against Wazzou this weekend.

2. Florida moves up a spot for being 5-0 and beating someone who bloodied them last year. They are overrated until they beat LSU-if they do, we’ll just hand over the positioning of our beloved Gators to our readers, since we’ll be so high on the smell of our own brew that rational thinking will be impossible. But as of now, yeah, they’re overvalued across the board, including in our poll.

3. Our affair with the Hawkeyes ends. Seeing them next to the pretty Buckeyes just made them look average. Drew Tate, for all of his gunslinger mojo, also has the natural parallel to that tendency: drilling cannonshot passes directly into the hands of stunned but gleeful DBs. He missed an obvious coverage in the OSU game that had Herbstreit firmly in tutorial mode in seconds Saturday night.

4. Ditto for Virginia Tech. Calvin Johnson is immune to Jenkins’ powers, as well as several major laws of physics. He also works on clean water projects in Bolivia in the offseason. Oh, and your girlfriend was totally willing to play naked pogo with him, but Calvin instead sat her down and talked with her, teaching her a valuable lesson about honesty, fidelity, and how lucky she is to have a good guy like you in her life. He’s that good.

Given that, this is probably as high as you’ll see Tech this year. Don’t blame us; blame science.

5. Have no idea what to do with Texas, since they’re busy beating up kindergarteners for their money and screaming “O’Doyle rules!” in the form of Sam Houston State et al. Tedford has corrected the error in the machine and would like you to know that all systems are functioning at optimal performance.

6. Placing Georgia anywhere near some of these teams becomes more difficult each week. Tennessee will likely finish their plummet from the top 25 this week, since we think most people are just waiting for them to rack up a loss as an excuse to drop them.

7. Lousiana State: him big scary zombie supervillain team now. The Solomon Grundy of the SEC.

8. Wake Forest! Another team who’s likely seen its poll peak, but it was a holiday while it lasted.

9. The rest, of course, is a mess as always.

ABC/Disney/ESPN/Cthulu Inc. demands be damned! The Artist Formerly Known as Gameday has loosed itself out of the obligation of flogging the ABC Saturday night game for at least one day as they travel to Gainesville for the Florida/LSU game. In what is becoming an annual post, we review improvements to college football’s much-maligned, much-praised, and much-watched flagship preview show. (Besides, you know, more “Lee Corso Is A Penis” signs.)

Yeah. More of that, please.

1. Play up the Depot. Home Depot, who in case you don’t know are the Home Depot official sponsors of Home Depot Gameday sponsored by Home Depot and would like to thank the official sponsors of this Home Depot pregame prayer, Home Depot.

Home Depot, when you turn 25, becomes a fascinating wonderland of consumer goods. Saws, drills, hammers, exotic bolts, light fixtures of dubious utility, irrigation piping that would make the Sahara bloom…it’s a male spendthrift’s nightmare and dreamworld all at once. Men needing only a tube of caulk and a whisk rake have left there bereft of thousands, wondering how in the world they were convinced of the need for a diamond-edged radial saw, two gallons of fifty-dollar “Jaipur Blue” Ralph Lauren house paint, and three gas-powered Honda generators.

Why Gameday hasn’t worked power tools and building supplies into a kind of pep challenge is beyond us. Give two preselected teams from opposing unis three hours to build something school-oriented with Home Depot supplies, make them take sobriety tests and sign a boatload of waivers, and see what they make. We’re half-joking here, but now that we’ve typed it, half-serious, too: this could be a hilarious reality show within reality show, so long as no one saws their arm off or starts huffing the spray paint midshow.

Whatever they do, it beats those dorky orange hats.

2. More meat! The fluff pieces are overdone and you can feel them coming a mile away in the program. They’ve actually done a better job of this over the past year-at least it feels like they have-but the swings around different regional games, the topical interviews, the odd bits of feature story they pile up…more of that, please, and less soft-focus stories of triumph like Matt Leinart’s struggle with myopia, the official nadir of Gameday as we know it since it came via the same episode as Nick Lachey’s interviews.

3. More local color. If Gameday is about the event, and not the medium, keep opening up the broadcast to the environment. We don’t mean lettinig alums grill brats on the dais with the guys-although that might be cool, actually, if also a fire hazard-but more about campus stuff, since most university towns fit the description usually reserved for Madison, Wisconsin of being “70 square miles surrounded by reality.” College students are poor, stressed, and looking for any excuse to behave oddly on camera. Allow them to within the restraints of FCC code, and they will do so to extremes. It’s what makes the game unique, so use it at every stop.

More Jaworski-ism. Ron Jaworski endeared himself to everyone with half a brain on ESPN by becoming the Richard Attenborough of tape breakdown on Edge NFL Matchup. Watching him delineate the nuance and adjustment of playcalling strategy made your brain audibly pulse with new connections. It’s a cerebral approach that sadly has not migrated across the schedule to other ESPN programs. The closest Gameday gets is taking Desmond Howard, putting him on an Astroturf field set up adjacent to the Gameday platform, and then doing something for three minutes.

We say three minutes, but that’s a guess. When Howard’s on screen, it’s kind of like blacking out or having a stroke. We go somewhere else, but we’re not sure: Aruba, perhaps, or maybe just a particularly serene corner of our brain where Satie plays while we sip chamomile tea on a giant toadstool. We’re really not sure. When Howard stops talking, we snap back into place on our couch, wondering where the time went. It’s a little like waking from a mini-seizure, or being used by Travis of the Cosmos as a talking tentacle puppet.

Not sure what happens when Desmond Howard starts talking…but it’s nice.

Whatever happens, we’re not listening. Put together some other, more compelling way of putting the Xs and Os of the game on display, or just don’t do it at all.

Please do not prolong the withering career of Big and Rich another second.

The specialized lyrics may keep them on the ESPN payroll for another year, but the mayfly’s life that is their career is done. We have lyrics for their final “special edition” song:

Well we’re coming!
And we’re shittaayyyyy!

If you wanna little (SPLASH! AIIGGHHHH!!! ROAAAARgggHHHH fip fip fip fip fip fip..aaiiighhn…)

That noise is a shipping container full of hungry, rabid wolverines being dropped on top of the C-list country duo just after being doused in chicken blood. If the budget doesn’t allow for this, we’ll understand. But after two years, it should be clear that no one wants any more ting in their ting tang, no matter how delightfully suggestive that may sound, since it would involve Big and Rich, whose appearance would serve as a powerful contraceptive to all but the most beer-soaked and undiscriminating brood mare.

We’d swing that wrecking ball toward the nearest firm surface with great velocity.