There’s a spectrum of giveafuck. On one end, there’s Oprah. She cares. About everything: your soul, your life, eight dollar coconut macaroons, South African schoolchildren…even your poop. Oprah is blessed with a surfeit of giveafuck-from left to right, put her wayyyyy over on the right of the giveafuck scale.
On the far left, just next to John Daly, Andy Dick, and Kim Jong-Il…there’s the guy on the left in this video of two slammed Oklahoma State fans singing a song about a lonely Okie.
Our fave is the “HRRRRNNNGGGH” that constitutes his only bit of “singing” in the video. He makes that noise right after displaying the signs of having a stroke, after which he recovers and seems to feel much better.
We can only assume T. Boone Pickens is at this moment wangling some way to enter both of these guys in his pioneering Oklahoma State Fundraising Death Pool to raise more cash for the Cowboys. After all, it’s “just another way of capitalizing existing unexploited risk.”
How we’ve managed not to have this man as the Mustache of the Day, we’ll never now. Blame our trademark negligence for missing a true legend of the lip.
The Mustache Wednesday ‘Stache of the Day: Geraldo Rivera. So nice you’ll need it thrice:
Not even the briny sea steals the vim and vigor from his sole companions: justice, and his mustache… (more…)
Who cares about spring football? The usual suspects, according to nifty graph put together by the boys at Big Red Network:
Kind thanks to them for allowing us to use their snazzy image: check out the rest of the article at Big Red Network on pain of having Tommy Frazier run you over like so many Florida defenders, blood clots in his legs and all.
Enlightening to us is the overall pattern mattering most in spring games: hope. We knew it mattered, but if a program feels particularly hopeful, the best way to see it isn’t in the panegyrics local scribes spit out every time a new coach rolls into town. It’s in the attendance leap from the prior year’s spring game. (Fans in East Lansing must really, really be vibing off Mark Dantonio.)
It’s also a rough approximation of the value of a head coach to a program. The spring game costs nothing, means effectively nothing, and reveals little about a team. It’s a fluffy event with little driving it besides the need to see something, anything football-esque in the void of the offseason combined with the desire for a rollicking good sunburn to break in your hide pre-beach season.
The only thing a spring game brings with it is buzz-pure jejune hype about a team’s projected potential hypothetical goodness/badness going into the season. And if you’ve got someone at the helm who can make something out of nothing, or god forbid force the groundskeepers to close the doors at capacity for a scrimmage, you’ve got someone who by sheer talent and shine brought them there to park on the lawns, purchase eighty dollars worth of gas, and roll down to what is essentially a non-event.
That’s a stellar indicator of a coach’s value to a program: the one based solely on his reputation as a program manager capable of making what was good become great. Judging from the bottom of the attendance list, hope in that department does not spring in Champaign-Urbana, “excitment” and “getting better and better” be damned. Illinoise had “several thousand” fans at their spring scrimmage in Chicago, estimated at more like 500 by the Big Red guys.
We checked the calendar to see if we’d been Sid-Finched: nope, it’s April 25th. Checked the byline: that’s the Times, all right, and not terribly prone to making things up under Lee Jenkins’ byline. Evidently the whole story on Walter Thomas, dark horse draft pick for 2007, is real and verified fact.
And barring some spectacular photoshopping, this shot of Shamu doing a backflip is real, too.
And Sea World applauds!
If you’ve ever wondered what all those pesky academic and behavioral regs surrounding college football prevent you, the college football fan, from seeing, Walter Thomas provides an extreme example of just that. Booted from Oklahoma State for a sprained cerebrum after a year (Sooners fans, wait a moment for the guffaws to settle,) Thomas settled at Northwest Mississippi Community College before being arrested on a charge of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. (Kids!) He only played two games in his entire career, but we’ve decided to love him for the following reasons:
-Runs the 40 in 4.9 seconds
-Is a 6′5″ defensive tackle
-Showed up a day late for his interview with Jenkins
-Can bench press 475 lbs and squat 800 lbs.
-Is part of a rap group called “Tre Slide”
-Would be a perfect running mate for Pac-Man in Tennessee:
“Growing up, Thomas was somewhat self-conscious about his size, so he befriended the smallest kids in school. They played a game called “Cut the Cake,” in which they found the biggest building in town and raced each other around it.”
Smallest kid meets biggest kid? BFF? Two thugs make good? Or destroy whole wards of Nashville during one of their 30th birthday parties? Either way, it must happen, Mike Reinfeldt.
Our theory of SEC football scandals involves several stages, outlined below.
First: the spurning! At one point someone pisses someone off about something. This is then aired on a message board, blurted out on talk radio, or vented in a drunken boosters luncheon so virulent it’s spoken of in hushed tones years later.
Second: the infection. The story spreads as people circulate emails from trainers, guys who wash cars for the university spill their innermost secrets (”I saw him calling someone real sneaky-like in the parking lot of his office last night!”) and talk radio begins to hint boldly around the story. That asshole on your message board with an endless well of “insider information” claims to know the real story, which he wishes he could tell you but WHOOO! would that be trouble.
Third: Thermidorian Period. The raging peak of the scandal, where even the coach and administration get too stupid to just shut up and let the lawyers enter the fray for them. We just passed this in the Nutt case last week, where everyone’s issuing fevered press releases (including university car wash guy) and the “inside info” asshole on your board disappears just for effect.
Fourth: Enter the lawyers. The scandal putters out in a succession of frivolous lawsuits, legal proceedings, and increased billable hours for every scheisty lawyer in arms’ reach of the case.
Mr. “I’m not named Richard Dean Anderson and I still have the gall to use three names” then, after filing the lawsuit, presumably went back to his rustic cabin for lunch.*
*Yes, we’re calling you hillbillies. Because this whole thing makes Arkansas look like bone-sucking, muscadine-wine sippin’, knuckle-dragging goatfuckers. And that’s sad because we come from Tennessee and Florida, two places with similar PR issues. Fortunately, the lawyers are in force now, which means the worst thing you can accuse anyone of now is being overly litigious-this is ouuuuuuuuuurrrrrr counnnnntreeeeee…
**Yes, the song is about Tennessee. But dammit, we wanted some Spike Jones this morning.
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Orson Swindle and Stranko Montana are two men pushing thirty who should know better than to run a college football blog, but evidently don't. Both graduated from the University of Florida, and both agree that college football is far too important to be left to the professionals.
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