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CURIOUS INDEX, 3/18/08

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Boom, motherfucker! Will Muschamp on Texas' spring practice, profanity-free but obviously amped.

Reporter: "Are you aware you're a star on Youtube?"

Muschamp: "My wife told me that. I don't know if that's a good thing."

Gary Patterson, wordsmith. Have you ever spoken with someone who has a three-year old? Or even worse, someone with a pair of toddlers? They're borderline retarded and have this kind of thousand-yard stare, that if you look very carefully, you can see Dora the Explorer standing at the end of. With a gun.

That must explain the recently noted discrepancy in the superior PR skills and loquacity of basketball coaches, who we've noticed seem a bit less stressed and more eloquent than their gridiron counterparts. (None of them are Lionel Trilling discoursing on post-colonial British literature, mind you. But they're definitely a bit smoother.)

See TCU's Gary Patterson, for example:

"You're only as good as your weakest link," TCU coach Gary Patterson said. "Our spring ball is probably tougher than most. That's where we get our physicalness."

Physicalness, like aggressiveness, is a made-up bit of verbiage: physicality and aggression should be the preferred diction in each case, though we can't really knock Patterson for it, since he's not paid to use words correctly, unlike someone like Merrill Hoge. (Hoge's word choice and speech are to commentary what the Dustin Diamond sex tape is to fucking: a clumsy, awkward, and ultimately shitty exercise you regret even beginning.) You can find physicalness on dictionary.com, but probably not in your dusty analog version, and there's a reason: it's a lesser variant of the more potent physicality.

The point is: football coaches have so much more to worry about than basketball coaches, and consequently are human beings worn down to nubs, which might explain why you hear them saying the same things over and over again. They do it because on their huge rosters, there's one skull so thick that even the thousandth repetition of a rule doesn't sink in. And by this, we mean the Marcus Thomases of the world. (Spark it up, big guy! You're in the league now.)

Duke players received IVs following a brutal spring practice. Another six collapsed with air embolisms after it was discovered that putting Pellegrino into your veins is a very, very bad idea.

Mark Mangino ate two scholarships at Kansas, and the administration has concocted an elaborate cover-up involving something about Kansas not meeting scholarship requirements.

Boise State's tinkering again. This time, it's with the Nevada pistol formation, but Chris Petersen's no plagiarist. Seriously. He's never had an original idea in his life.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had an original idea,” Petersen said. “Everything we do has been taken from somebody. We make no bones about it. … That’s how we do things. We take things that we like and we try to marry them into our offense.”