Part Three, in which we will focus almost exclusively on Florida knocking the corndogs out of the collective hands of the LSU Tigers. We’re going mostly from memory, since our notes read something like this:

“REGGIE FUCKING NELSON!!! WOOOOOO!”

-Establishing basic facts before launching into particulars and possibly seen patterns, events, and tendencies of the game: LSU lost, Florida won, and not because one team got lucky and one didn’t. Florida received substantial breaks, the largest being JaMarcus Russell fumbling a quarterback sneak after a booth review overturned what appeared to be a sure Lester TD.

Smiles, everyone, smiles.

Florida hit harder, more frequently, and with greater effect than LSU did. This is the only thing separating these two teams, since both teams remain stocked to the gills with talent and blessed with savvy coaching staffs. The only thing separating the two teams on Saturday: mass and velocity multiplied.

Don’t reject this as rhetorical bullshit covering a “WOO! FLORIDA!” sentiment, either; consider three tipping-points Saturday:

1. Reggie Nelson’s sternum-snapper on an LSU wideout, sending the ball dovetailing into the air and into the arms of Ryan Smith for an INT.

2. The nastiness of Tebow running, which drew up LSU’s safeties on both of his touchdown passes.

3. The mad-dash train accident hit Riley Cooper put on Dwayne Bowe, who had no idea where he was when he finally picked up his fumbled kickoff for a safety in the endzone.

Concrete manifestations of a football bromide, but true: Florida applied for force at crucial points. For someone raised on finessey Spurrier-ball, watching a team go bareknuckle sends a kind of traitorous thrill up the spine. This team just beats the shit out of people when it wins.

-Defensively, thie bend don’t break thing has held up beautifully. Ryan Smith has 4 picks in his past two games, and in all seriousness could have had four picks in this game, including a dropped pick six for the second game in a row. He just gets so excited! The transfer rule thing may be sketchy, but the dividends have been tremendous for Florida.

-Marcus Thomas was back! And huge with 8 tackles! And probably shouldn’t have played, if you wanted to make a statement about silly things like discipline and all that. All we can say to this accusation is: he learned it from Lou!

-Reggie Nelson blocks a punt and causes a crucial interception. His power waxes; even ESPN has started to pay attention to the man a reader refers to as “The Divorce Lawyer,” since he will separate you from both the ball and your wife. We’ll test-market the name and see how it rolls.

-Tebow is the big obvious story, but give copious credit to LSU, whose defense limited a Florida offense capable of producing 20 yard plus gouts of yardage to 280 or so in the yardage total. The best or worst thing about the Florida offense at this point: Game 7 on the horizon, and there’s still work to be done in all facets of the game. Ambiguity still rules on the scoring side of the ball, though the loss of Deshawn Wynn certainly contributed to the anemic run attack. Leak is taking his Wally Pipp-ing well, though he confounded our 14th straight pick of this game as the “Chris Leak Legacy Game” yet again. Still waiting on that one.

Lundquist’s call is hilarious here.

-The offensive game plan, though, was solid: short routes, screens, little digs and curls designed to slow down the LSU rush. They even did what most teams shudder to do against LSU: go deep, as they did on play-action. Leak missed a man wide open on the left sideline to throw into double coverage for the pick. The only other downfield throw came to Murphy off the one-man play-action move, a play the LSU secondary will wear shamefully around their neck for the remainder of the season.

-Jamarcus Russell looks grizzled, and he’s not even thirty yet as far as we know. He had a terrible game, especially after the fumble on the one, but he’s still ginormous and can throw the ball on a straight line sixty yards. He’ll make a few nice down payments with a pro contract, especially if he does the contract negotiations by himself. All he’ll have to do is grow a beard and stare at the lawyers until they give him what he wants.

-The phantom hands to the head call: fair play for the missed punch in the face to Leak by some jackfuck LSU defender a few minutes prior, an ugly incident otherwise marring a clean game. It happened, we saw it, and lo, it was one of the cheapest shots we’ll see this year. Sideline lobbying earned Florida the foul-hail to the power of lobbying the officials!

-The most important bit of science we may deduce from the game: DO NOT MOCK-CHOMP PREMATURELY! Florida is 3-0 in games where opponents mock-chomp on camera prematurely. If you want to win, do not turn the ball over and whatever you do, WAIT UNTIL THE WHISTLE TO MOCK-CHOMP.

-Another bit of science: Brandi was right again. Never doubt the power of a Great Dane’s intellect. (Insert Tycho Brahe joke here.)

-Finally, a huzzah to Justin in Baghdad, who IM’d us on Saturday with kind words. Watch your ass and take care from the States.

While Tampa police officers are still busy beating the hell out of USF fans for standing up in the stands and attempting to behave like football fans, we continue the hectic rundown of the weekend’s activities.

“Doing the wave, huh? Is that what the hippies are calling it these days? ON THE GROUND, HIPPIE!”

-Oklahoma/Texas! 2002’s hottest matchup played out pretty much according to punditry scripts. (Again we’d like to remind everyone that this was not the case in the LSU/Florida game, which everyone on the planet except Brandi the Wonder Dog and Lee Corso got wrong. Include us in this statement.) Texas proved too deep, Bob Stoops took one more step down the slippery slope of coaching middle age, and Paul Thompson proved once again that when you go to the stat sheet to pick games between two good teams, one side’s impressive stats will melt beneath the other’s.

Thompson was among the nation’s leaders in passing efficiency coming into the game. This may have sounded odd to you, and should have: Thompson hadn’t faced pressure and occluded passing lanes like he faced against Texas on Saturday. Oklahoma had been confounding defensive gameplans by not running Adrian Peterson 45 times a game, a stubborn insistence on balance despite Thompson’s limitations as a passer. So they let Peterson eat within reason-109 yards on the ground-and let Thompson dig the Sooner’s grave, pressuring without bringing a ton of blitzes and hitting the flesh off anyone who dared touch the ball.

Gene Chizik, call an estate planner. Your income will triple in the next year. Stoops must, somewhere in his soul, be rooting for Mike to get a pink slip at Arizona and return to his staff. Oklahoma’s defense hasn’t been the the same since hermano left the Sooners, leaving Stoops coughing up big games Oklahoma used to gut out with defense.

-CBS Gamenote: Tim Brando used the speech pattern “The Fighting ____s” four times in a single five minute segment on the Saturday. This merits some kind of sanction or rehab, we argue.

Call the WTO. We want a sanction.

-Spencer Tillman, however, no longer wears eyeliner. This is positive, since a light blush and soft eyes works a lot better on his complexion.

-Clemson wore the purple pants on Saturday, a color choice straight from the palette of Maxfield Parrish, and still managed to overcome Ugly Uniform Curse and allowing Wake Forest to get up 17-7 on them. Special teams plays don’t just damage teams; they straight kill them, especially when they come as auspiciously timed as Gaines Adams’ forced fumble and return on a flubbed field goal by Wake Forest. Gaines completed the single greatest one-man nutpunching of a team in a single play by doing the following on a single snap:

1. Rushing to the holder and nimbly recognizing the botched play, hesitating for a nanosecond. Gaines, for the record, weighs 260 pounds; what he did compares to running a traffic cone slalom with a loaded garbage truck.

2. Turning his full 260 pounds on the poor holder and separating his undoubtedly stunned body from the ball.

3. Picking up the wandering pigskin and running the length of the field for the TD that began the comeback.

The snapper looks pretty terrified. He should have been.

Adams every step reeked of another ten thousand on his signing bonus. Wake played over their head for the first half and simply ran out of belief juice despite baiting Will Proctor into three picks. Them making a bowl this year is all but assured, though, provided [NAME ALSO REDACTED] doesn’t touch down in Winston-Salem on a connecting flight to East Lansing. That man is contagious.

-Linda Cohn prounonuces Pur-due as “Poor-due.” Freudian slip, or Lahhngaiiiland accent? And what did she do to deserve the Saturday throwback bitch duty on ESPN? Badmouth ESPN Mobile publicly?

-We caught two things about USC’s near-death experience with Washington. First, Washington almost beat them, something only our magic bloggerpundit glasses allow us to see as really, really bad for USC. Second, they also scored on a fake field goal, which is what offenses do when they’re stalled and in need of a little pick-me-up to score. We know this since Urban Meyer went fake-happy last year when the spread option stalled. In fact, the fake punt was our finest play for a three week span culminating in the LSU debacle.

This means USC is good, but misfiring left and right and drawing on past credit. Where to put them in a poll? If you’re a futures-trader type who votes without consideration of past performance, keeping them in the top three is inexcusable at this point, especially since their prime performance came against a Nebraska team operating, it seems, without a functional pair of testicles at this point. (Callahan’s Trojan game plan was simply despicable coaching.) If you allow USC to coast on what you think they may be capable of, then you’re drawing on last year. Judging from the results of this weekend, this is a dangerous assumption.

-Isiah Stanbach, according to someone on the broadcast, runs a 10.4 in the 100 yard dash.

-Gus Malzahn has the second most stylish pair of eyeglasses in D-1 football, a pair of wireless specs from the Mike Martz Collection. (Unlike Martz, he seems to believe in the run, calling 15 out of 16 plays on an Arkansas scoring drive on the ground against Auburn. It was like watching someone get beat to death with a shoe.)

Mark Trestman, NC State OC, still holds the crown with his fashionable art dealer specs: black frame without Buddy Holly, stylish but not femme. David Cutcliffe gets third for his grampa reading glasses, since they give him that owlish perfesser vibe we’ve always associated with him anyway.

-Another fake name alert: Sam Swank, Wake Forest punter.

Alternate reality job with a name like that: lead singer for mediocre college town ska band.

-Science is about shifting paradigms, and we may be on the verge of shift as the principle of Chan Gailey Equilibrium is in danger of being disproved. Georgia Tech, three quarters into the scheduled collapse to a mediocre Maryland team at home following a big loss, unshackled themselves and clawed their way back into a win thanks to defensive hustle, solid running by Tashard Choice, and competent, level-headed play by Reggie Ball, winning 27-24 in regulation. They didn’t even need overtime! Or divine intervention!

Reggie Ball’s fumble total may be the most serious threat to Chan Gailey Equilibrium: zero. None. The man who used to be a human Juggs machine under center hasn’t unleashed a single fumble this season (or at least not on the books, at least-we just checked.) We’ll watch the data to see if the theory holds true, if not this season, then at least for Gailey’s career; it stands to reason that if Tech goes 10-2 this year, a 4-8 season would follow, at least according to script.

They do not, however, deserve to be ranked behind Georgia at this point, as the fucktarded USAToday poll has them. The paper written at a fifth grade level for a reason…

Anarchy! Anarchy! The SEC sees a coup d’etat in the East and West, Cal cheats by using sensory warfare and a Nobel Prize winner in defeating Oregon, Tennessee gets Spurrieresque in Athens, and last but not least on this blog at least, Florida beats LSU with blind luck, guile, a few well-timed turnovers, and a Create-A-Player quarterback straight off the hard drive of your X-Box.

-First, and most importantly: the made-up, fugitive-eluding-authorities-by-working-as-a-coach name of the week: Wake Forest Offensive Coordinator Steed Lobotzke. This is not this man’s name. A future coaching gig under the alleged Bronco Mendenhall is inevitable.

-The new hottness in football chants has arrived, courtesy of the Oregon/Cal game:

Cosmologist George F. Smoot, who won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday, was introduced before the game to the cheering student section, which chanted ”Nobel Prize! Nobel Prize!”

Nobel Prize! Nobel Prize! Also helps Tedford with pass route construction and blocking schemes.

There’s a cheap Auburn joke in here somewhere. Though we could see a faculty member winning something like the S. Truett Cathy “Small Restaurant Entrepreneur of the Year Award,” though, so you’ve got that going for you. Which is nice. Smoot, by the way, won his Nobel for his work analyzing faint background radiation whose patterns provide strong evidence supporting the “Big Bang” Theory. Of interest to the football fan: among these ancient wavelengths, Smoot’s team also managed to parse out a faint broadcast of a young Joe Paterno singing “Maisie, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet Has Let Our Love Flower Once Yet Again,” his hit phonograph record of the 1930s.

Nobel Prize! This should be Cal’s battle cry for the rest of the season, since it worked large. Cal dipped into its magic bag of indefeatigable running backs after Marshawn Lynch left with an injury, plugged in Justin Forsett, and plowed Oregon 45-24. Again, the run game-or lack thereof-determined the ebb and flow of the game, with Jonathan Stewart struggling under piles of Cal defenders for the pitiable total of 25 yards on 18 carries.

Jeff Tedford has resurrected Cal in the short span of 6 games. Nobel Prize! Nobel Prize!

-SEC internecine warfare begain in earnest; noble heads rolled all day, most notably the silver-pated head of Tommy Tuberville and the Auburn Tigers. Arkansas’ came in with a shocking game plan, deciding on doing something called “running” whenever and wherever they wanted to against Auburn. The Toeminator-Darren McFadden, the red-shifting dervish who busted toe ligaments in a club parking lot shortly before the season-did something that doesn’t happen often, running mad and free through the Auburn defense without getting so much as a slap from a Tiger defender. Felix Jones backed up McFadden, with the two running for 104 and 145 yards, respectively.

The Houston Nutt Game: Not even an offerin’ a them french-fried potaters will prevent it.

This again proves that there’s little defense against the Houston Nutt Game, where an otherwise mild-mannered team with exactly three players of note comes to your house, turns into a werewolf, and eats you. You know you’re suffering from a Houston Nutt game when a freshman quarterback heaves up a prayer on a blitz for what looks like a sure pick, gets a heroic effort from a power forward playing wideout (6′6″ Marcus Monk,) and watches him sprint to the endzone for an early lead. Another clue is that Houston Nutt is bojangling around the sidelines ecstatic at the prospect of keeping his job another year.

-Karma’s on Arkansas’ side, too: Jacob Skinner, yogi punter, makes it so with his gloriously executed Sun Salutations prior to each punt. Namaste.

-The yogi punter isn’t the only Pacific Rim influence on the Hogs’ sideline. The costumed Arkansas mascot doesn’t really resemble an intimidating Razorback Hog so much as “Matsuku, the Most Lucky Lunar Pumpkin Festival of Hokkaido Pig.”

Most lucky pig.

-Tennessee spotted UGA a 17-point lead just for funsies, perhaps because they could not believe the sight of Joe Tereshinski throwing the ball effectively in the first half. How cute that was! Until Tennessee, down 24-7 at one point, constructed a hellacious comeback that morphed rapidly into a nearly record-setting assburn of the Dawgs. Willie Martinez’s Georgia defense, hilariously inflated in the rankings prior to the game as the number one D in the nation, has that problem no more, as they sat comfortably in a cover 2 waiting for Tennessee receivers to catch the ball before courteously allowing their guests to gain yards after the catch before gently stopping the play.

The Jim Herrmann “Assistant Coach of Adhesive Shame” award goes to Martinez this year, who by all accounts is taking a shellacking on talk radio and on message boards for the priestly defense of the Bulldogs. (Read: very forgiving, not “drunk on sherry at 2 in the afternoon,” or worse, you sick, sick person, you.)

-For a league perpetually concerned about its perceived reputation as being corrupt…is it a good idea for the SEC to have a referee named “Penn Wagers,” who called the Arkansas/Auburn game Saturday? Or his partner, “Bookie McBribe?”

-On the announcing beat, is anyone else horrified and fascinated by the in-booth shots of Trevor Matich on ESPN? Has anyone ever seen him in the same place as Russian hormone freak Nikolay Valuev, the hirsute 7-foot tall boxer? And can he be legally hunted in the state of Maine?

Buckshot will only make him mad. Use slugs. Lots of ‘em.

-Watching the ticker creep Indiana’s score up over the course of the afternoon against Illinois, a nasty, sickening deja vu washed over us. As Illinois got “better and better” over the course of their game, slowly losing the lead it built by passing the ball by running the ball aimlessly into the middle of the defense three times and punting, we suddenly became an Illinois fan by proxy. You know, kind of like people who bond over getting hepatitis or both recovering from severe head trauma.

The Chicago Sun-Times Greg Couch regurgitates four-year old Mike Bianchi columns below:

Question: You’re up by one with 3½ minutes left, and you get the ball at midfield. Your opponent has all its timeouts left. Why do you plunge up the middle, plunge up the middle, plunge up the middle, then punt?

That makes no sense.

Ahh, vintage stuff. You’re getting better and better!

People put the strangest things on Gameday signs. For example:

This sign appears to imply that Lee Corso likes something resembling a twin-knobbed back massager. Well, who doesn’t like twin-knobbed back massagers? With six settings on most models, they’re the perfect accompaniment to a nice glass of Franzia and some Taylor Dayne to finish a long, stressful day. We bet Lee uses his all the time.

(Massive HT: Fancy Gator.)