Join us over at NowLive.com, or simply press the play button at 9:00 p.m. EST to join us for EDSBS Live: Mystery Edition. It won’t be as cool as the original Mystery intro, but it will be close because of guest Bruce Feldman.

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Talk to you then.

We’re examining the great unsolved mysteries of the upcoming season after spring practice. First, we examined the Nebraska defense; now, we look at SEC, and at the mystery surrounding the most reliably awesome flight of talent in the SEC, LSU. More specifically, we look at their quarterback situation, and Monsieur Ryan Perriloux, their enigmatic starting quarterback. Enigmatic=can’t keep his country ass out of trouble, we say, doing our best Steve Harvey impression.

LSU does not reload, they pop another clip in the AK-47 and keep firing-often wildly, yes, but with Comrade Les at the trigger, you get some of that. Geography and the collusion of the legislature mean LSU picks from a broad swath of talent they may claim all to themselves with little in the way of substantial regional competition. And since 1996 or so, the administration has committed formidable resources to the program, both in terms of building football honeypots like the weight room and in terms of hiring first-rate coaches to keep the talent in the right places.

Yet all programs face a time when the most important offensive player on the field is hopelessly talented and flaky. Enter Ryan Perrilloux, who is all that stands between LSU having another 10-2 type season and the frightening possibility of watching a Harvard transfer Andrew Hatch or redshirt freshman Jarrett Lee toss flanker screens all day. Perrilloux has already had an eventful life. In addition to being named a person of interest in a federal counterfeit investigation before the age of 21, Perrilloux has been suspended at least three times for violating team rules.

I crush your head. Seriously, I will, Perrilloux.

He also stood up in a strip club and allegedly announced himself to be “the next sixty motherfucking million dollar man.” This is important, because Perrilloux may be more talented than Jamarcus Russell: he won the SEC championship game off the bench, and has a dazzling skill set. He also possesses significant potential the other way, since we would be unsurprised to go duck hunting in a Louisiana bayou and discover Perrilloux and friends ferrying crates of bootleg moonshine off a swamp-hutch still.

Either way, it’s going to be fascinating. Who knows where Ryan Perrilloux will take us? To the Rose Bowl, or perhaps the Independence bowl, or maybe even the champagne room at a strip club? (Little mystery there, actually. He may be there right now, actually.) Our poll for the week is: Where will Ryan Perrilloux finish the 2008 football season? And will it involve illegal arms, or calling servers “Osama”? Along with the loss of Glenn Dorsey, this is really the only serious question for LSU, who by custom and tradition are eleven deep in Olympic tracksters at running back and every other position of consequence.

Enter your selections in the right sidebar.

..no matter what them latte-drankin’ yuppies at Forbes say! You just have to like college football. We’re off to get a latte, now. A manly one, served in a skull and topped with the froth of our enemies. And we won’t be paying for that, by Crom’s beard, we won’t.

(Our fave Conan quote: “Conan, why do you pray to Crom?” “Because he always answers my prayers. He always says NO!”)

The fun at Pitt we alluded to yesterday begins to emerge piece-by-piece. In fact, the facts are so sketchy at this point that the fact-ish types at The Pitt News can’t even confirm that Sherod Murdock, a redshirt freshman safety suspended from the football team indefinitely yesterday, was the player involved in the “incident.” Fortunately, we are strictly about “truthiness,” and one of our crack sources reports that the incident went something like this:

Murdock gets into a hellacious fight at the Delta Tau Delta frat house: him, some of the o-line versus frat guys. This goes as well as could be expected. We like to imagine it looked a lot like this, except with Mario wearing shower sandals and carrying a Coors Light in hand. (Pitt? Okay, an Imp ‘n Arn.)

Die, motherfucker, die!

So, primitive strength display concluded and Smash Brothers brawl concluded (frat boys kicked into bottomless pits everywhere yay!,) Murdock returns to dorms with gallons of surplus testosterone surging through his system, and decides that all should hear of his exploits, his intention to kill anyone who crosses his path, and demonstrate it in a clear fashion that everyone here could easily understand. From our source:

Murdock (Yoshi—ed.) was running through the halls wearing only his boxers wielding a three-foot machete screaming “I’ll kill all you motherfuckers”. He had blood all over his face and hands from the earlier fight at the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house. The Wannstache was woken up from his home and brought to the scene to talk the player down before they had to send in SWAT, which they did.

That is a pissed off shirtless turtle/dinosaur there. Maybe Pitt stands a chance in the Big East this year after all, if Murdoch’s this fired up after a simple frat fight. (And really, how much more opposition will Syracuse offer than Delta Tau Delta?) And even if the three-foot machete turns out to be a merely normal knife as it did in the case of Penn State’s Chris Bell, the question remains: just how distorted a picture of their own security do athletes have? You’re already one and a half times the size of most people around you and easily twice as strong in most cases. You live on heavily patrolled campuses, and usually travel in groups.

Do you somehow still feel threatened, campus athlete? If so, we have a bazooka with a bayonet and taser attachment we’d be happy to help you. It’s the balls.

Points to be awarded as soon charges of any sort are pressed. We would like you to know that we’re typing this covered in blood and wearing boxers, but only because we’re in the mood for love, not because we want to kill all you motherfuckers.

In anticipation of Bruce Feldman coming on EDSBS Live tonight and helping us figure out the grand mysteries of life and spring practice, we will be covering them today, Unsolved Mysteries-style. If you need a soundtrack, please add ascending and descending synthesizer notes, at any point. It worked for Robert Stack, at least.

Unsolved Mysteries, Volume 1: The Nebraska Defense: Gone, in a week: the Nebraska defense was last seen playing on the field against the Nevada Wolfpack on September 1st, 2007. Then they disappeared completely, replaced instead by eleven palsied men who appeared to be either a.) in the process of being consumed by invisible flame, or b.) test subjects for the Air Force’s new “pain cannon.”

Nebraska’s point per game average for 2007: 37.9 a game, a total that if read again by an elderly gentlemen scanning this piece in Lincoln, Nebraska, would cause a fatal defibrillation of his heart rate in seconds. Fortunately, old people fear computers just as they fear robots and goats. (They have the devil’s eyes!) Particularly troubling about Nebraska’s defensive collapse-and by this we mean something more troubling than allowing 40 points to Ball State-was the seniority of their defense. Three seniors across the middle at linebacker and half the defensive backfield were seniors.

Experience and senior leadership, both nostrums of “what a good team is” per coachspeak, did not help the Huskers, who were uniformly bad at pass defense (84th in the nation) and rush defense (116th. We’ll type that again: 116th in the nation. The Blackshirts.) Apocalyptic doesn’t approximate the sadness and completeness of their badness. Crap in a baking pan and place in your oven for three hours at 350 degrees, then open the oven while simultaneously shooting yourself in the face with pepper spray. You have just experienced one-eighth of how bad this defense was last year.

Mysteries: with many of the same players coming back on the defensive line and a new crew shuffling at linebacker, can they improve? Or is it a matter of physical law that they improve, because they simply could not be any worse? Or will they simply present a different, more blitz-y philosophy of disaster with Bo Pelini at the wheel, sucking this time on pass defense instead of rush defense, and thus doing Nebraska fans the favor of presenting a new flavor of misery?

Insert scary recreations of the Kansas game! Add smoky filter and us narrating this in a trenchcoat? And that’s a wrap!

Been to Kentucky? We have. The barbecue is underrated, the weather eats our ass, and combine Tennessee provincialism with Ohio squalor and your math for the place is complete. In other words, it’s so bad you’d rob a cop just to get a thrill.

This is actually from the Redneck Games in Georgia, and has no relation to this story. Carry on.

This is a worse idea than you might realize:

Murray State quarterback Jeff Ehrhardt was charged with pushing a campus police officer and taking his ticket book. The athletic director called this “a prank gone bad.”

Ehrhardt, a 20-year-old sophomore, was arrested Wednesday and charged with second-degree robbery. He surrendered to the campus public safety office and returned the ticket book after a witness identified him.

Your moment in insane judicial overkill is sponsored by: Kentucky, the Bluegrass State. Second-degree robbery for robbing a cop? What is this, Soviet Russia! We now instantly award ourselves points for doubling up on a conservative blogger’s version of Godwin’s Law (first to mention Soviet Russia in comparision wins!) and for opening up the logical “In Kentucky, you rob cop. IN SOVIET RUSSIA, COP ROBS YOU!”)

No Fulmer Cup points awarded due to Murray State not being a division one team. But it’s cute and sad nonetheless.