CURIOUS INDEX, 8/22/07

If you have any balls, you will force them to air you singing "Send In the Clowns." In their ongoing campaign to kill Rece Davis or force a spectacular on-air suicide, ESPN is making Rece Davis and company pull a 25-hour lead-in to the LSU/Mississippi State game on Thursday next week. First, prolonged May/Holtz exposure, now this, and then he wakes up in a bathroom chained to a radiator with Sean Salisbury with a saw on the floor between them.

Who is trying to kill this nice man?

(Judging from Salisbury's jowls this year, we'd bet on Davis losing by a devouring there.)

3.22 more yards will destroy this sport. Or not. The hysteria over changing the kickoff to the thirty yard line--ballyhooed in Mandel's blog and in other places--may be just that. CFB Stats looked at the data, always a cunning thing to do, and deduced that the actual difference last year on kicks from the 30 (as opposed to the 35) amounted to a measly 3.22 yards.

Pete Carroll does his best James Jesus Angleton impression. We only think we're winning this Cold War gentlemen...and we are sadly mistaken. If you've been watching The Company, you're undoubtedly fascinated by the paranoid head of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, who was real and was convinced that a Soviet "supermole" lay in their midst at all times.

Pete Carroll's channeling him when he suggests that the recent departure of Emmanuel Moody and Jamere Holland comes as a result of double agents.

``Those guys got their information from somewhere,'' Carroll said. ``Somebody's talking to them. I have some ideas.''

Contact our people in London. Use no open channels. Contact me, and then only announce yourself as "Ravenwood." I'll see you in Oslo in 72 hours.

The SEC is a marginal conference in one sense of the word. Life, according to SMQ, is lived at the margins in the SEC, which should have everyone from the pummeled Kentucky fan to the already-hyped Alabama fan brimming with the most toxic drug of all: hope.

And for seventy-five dollars, Tommy Bowden will wash your dishes. Florida's on a mad cash run following the national title, including dinner with Urban Meyer for just one million dollars. Highlights will include Jarvis Moss blocking bites of food as they enter your mouth, Reggie Nelson smashing open the clay pot chicken with a devastating tackle, and Chris Leak delicately floating profiteroles into your open mouth as you turn around on a four yard curl route.

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