Part Two of our Thanksgiving weekend recap. Naturally out of order, hastily written, and one hundred percent unrefundable.
Friday, cont'd
--One final note on the TAMU/UT game: if Bill Cowher is still around at Pittsburgh next year, he's drafting handy doorstopper to the gods Jorvorskie Lane. If he's at NC State, he'll inquire about a transfer. Fatty running backs and Cowher r made n heaVen luv mates.
--WOOO!!! LSU/Arkansas. Who doesn't love watching the SEC West? Watching their games is like watching old caveman movies where dinosaurs fighting people get distracted by a flying pterodactyl; when they kill each other in stop-motion animated death blows, the cavemen eat them.
Perfect metaphor for this game, since the spectacular beasts on both teams were brought low by the cavemen playing around them and coaching them. Muddled best describes the play of both teams for the majority of the game with the exception of manmutant Jamarcus Russell and his brother in species advancement Darren McFadden, who spent the majority of the game attempting to elevate the lowly, unadvanced cavemen around them.
Jamarcus Russell did his usual bit: standing with a tackler draped around his knees while firing passes fifty yards downfield without stepping into the ball. Dwayne Bowe answered the evolutionary bugle,
playing havoc in secondary and allowing LSU to revert from the run-heavy game of the Matt Mauck era to the long ball artillery attack of the Rohan Davey game. He's been phenomenal in the second half of the season. Even when he gracelessly rockets two or three picks a game he's still a danger to come back thanks to an essential component of qb success: zero short-term memory when it comes to error.
McFadden made THE awe-inspiring play of the year, splitting two future NFL safeties on a play they clearly misjudged. Considering that around the forty yard line McFadden hit the nitrous, we can't blame them. Watch and drool; your "GODDAMN"s will distract your coworkers, so shut the door or staple your mouth shut prior to watching.
And yet Humanity Advanced (as we will refer to McFadden from now on) was brought low by his coach, Houston Nutt, whose wackymantics hadn't killed the Razorbacks this year...until this moment. The sequence:
--First, kickoff coverage explodes and Arkansas immediately blows a momentum changing play by their best player as LSU scores on the following kickoff. LSU adds insult to injury by using a midget on the return, which while amusing is clearly bad form.
--Second: with limited time and in need of a score, Houston Nutt rediscovers his inner Boss Hogg genius by not letting McFadden wreak havoc on the defense directly from the splashy "Wildcat formation," but by letting Casey Dick--at this point doing his best Reggie Ball imitation despite being a foot taller--attempt to get the ball to McFadden and Monk. This would have been a sound idea had Dick done dick earlier in the game, or even done dick in previous games. Yet Nutt went geniusfied, came up with nothing on four feeble plays, and lost the game on the way into the SEC matchup with Florida.
The point for Nutt and the Razorbacks: next time leave the battle to the mutant.
--The Spurrier/Willingham DiGiorno commercial gets the failfinger from us for many reasons. First, no smartassy lines for Spurrier, a man who radiated snark before the word existed. Second, no fun for Willingham, the coach of the "Cats," who merely smiles, eats pizza, and makes a lame bet everyone gets excited about, a series of actions that pretty much sums up his entire career at Notre Dame. Third, the commercial does not take advantage of the humor potential of having a team called the "Cats" whose actual mascot was...a house cat. If you find this funny, it's the funniest thing imaginable. If not, you don't.
There are some positives, though. Spurrier does coach "the Otters," which fits with Spurrier's lifelong affinity for coaching oddly named teams (Cocks, Blue Devils, Bandits, Gators...a grab bag of team name sausage parts.) That much deserves credit.But the probability of Spurrier coaching a team in drag because of a bit is ridiculous, since that only happened once: the 1996 Fiesta Bowl. Most people were too busy watching Danny Wuerffel get used as dental floss to notice the elegant evening gowns they wore that night.
One other thing the commercial gets right: Spurrier's quarterback getting sacked hellaciously from the weak side. At least some accurate research got done on this shoot....
Hey, if it's not delivery, I'll let you sack the shit out of my quarterback.