If it's Monday, it must be time for us to mention that Scoreboard-domo Brian is hung like Reggie F'n Nelson and that it's time for the Fulmer Cupdate for the week. Expansions, digressions, and other elaborate lies follow.
Florida makes a stout appearance with Jamar Hornsby's credit card fraud charges, an eight pointer that's enough to put them on the big board, albeit right down there at the bottom with only the mildly felonious teams. Urban Meyer, who kicked Hornsby off the team, is to be congratulated for nothing because what the crime lacked in actual severity it more than made up for in craven opportunism with despicable timing.
There's something at root here to acknowledge: despite the vaunted decline in character and overall permissive tone in the Meyer era at Florida, there's little to cite in his stay indicating he's particularly lenient or harsh. For all the drill sergeant talk, he let Marcus Thomas smoke through a zillion failed drug tests before he got the boot. And for all the carping (ourselves included) about him being a lax disciplinarian, every kid who committed a major crime (Ronnie Wilson, Jamar Hornsby) was booted from the team...albeit after the requisite wait/see period that makes fans slightly queasyish.
To counter an additional angle of the argument, it doesn't seem like there's much differentiating his tenure from [NAME REDACTED]'s in terms of player discipline. The two biggest incidents in the prior regime involved an accusation of sexual assault (Clint Mitchell,) Taurean Charles' double manfest of punching a smaller man off a porch at a party and then attempting to keggenate the guy's head with a half-full keg, and then the frat fight [NAME REDACTED] broke up/got involved in towards the end of the Times of Trouble.
Toss in capers with Channing "Nope, Not my Car" Crowder and Steven Harris, and then go even further back to look at the long line of youthful, muscled-up stupidity at Florida re: football players and discipline during the Spurrier era, and there's only one crucial difference between any of them: Spurrier was a bit quicker to boot someone immediately, whereas [NAME REDACTED] and Meyer seem willing to do anything to avoid giving shoe leather enemas unless absolutely necessary. All three excused, hemmed, hawed, and kept players on when it was convenient to do so.
It's a warm place--like Tallahassee or Miami--filled with top-notch athletes from impoverished backgrounds. Give them booze and a diet-sized slice of fame cheesecake, and this will happen...especially when coaches enable them by being even slightly tolerant of it, something Meyer undoubtedly and demonstrably has been. He's enabled it where other coaches haven't, and--we tremble with irony as we type this--he could look to the hardline fear Randy Shannon seems to instill in the same kids a few hundred miles south in Coral Gables as an example of how to do it in circumstances extremely conducive to player misconduct.
Oh, and an Alabama player got cited for walking around drunk. If the police actually applied this law even-handedly and not just to young drunk black men across Alabama, the state would be deforested in a matter of days with the frenzied ticket-writing.
Finally: Brian O'Blivion gets his points, corrected dutifully in comment threads for something like two months, awarded to Washington State. Their total now stands corrected at 12 total. Missouri's looking difficult to catch at this point, yet the others refuse to drop out of the competition: WHY ARE YOU HURTING THE RACE BY STAYING IN, WEST VIRGINIA?!?!?!?