CURIOUS INDEX, 9/24/2008

Well, really, who does? NOLA.com tells us what you might have suspected all along: that Les Miles, a risk-taker at heart, doesn't mind assuming the position Dennis Miller once described as "feeling like Dick Crippen at the helm of the Space Shuttle."

He'll go for two and call trick plays, too, which means whatever your sick little minds want it to.

Future Academic All-Americans, stand up. Washingon linebacker Mason Foster got the semester off to a roaring start:

“Oh, man, yeah, I forgot about that. I like school. It’s cool. UW is a beautiful campus, but it just kind of changes up your schedule, so you have to focus and get your work done or you’re going to be in trouble. It’s cool though.”

We'd make fun of him if we hadn't done the same thing as an undergrad thanks to a crippling Beastmaster marathon and a 12 pack of Honey Brown in 1995. Damn your endlessly fascinating movies, Turner Broadcasting. Damn them to hell.

Duke ist ein oberdog. Duke will be favored over Virginia this weekend, the first time Duke has been the favorite by the odds since their 2002 game versus North Carolina. (They lost.)
Al Groh's now quantifiably terrible according to college football futures traders SELL SELL SELL.

That'll sound great in a wrongful death suit, sure. George O'Leary has a long and pained history of pushing players past their limits, an oral history presented in cringe-inducing fashion in the Orlando Sentinel. Detail:

So McNealy, then an 18-year-old redshirt freshman, sat down on the machine, his back angled toward the ground. He recalls O'Leary above him, yelling, "Push the weight! Push the weight!"

McNealy tried -- and then blacked out. The weight crashed down and pushed McNealy's knees into his chest. "I heard guys saying that they saw me turn blue," McNealy said. "They said they heard the air just go out of me."

This comes, shockingly enough, in the midst of a public and extended spat between O'Leary and the Sentinel over the paper's coverage of the death of UCF player Ereck Plancher in drills this offseason. We're sure this piece would have been exactly the same had O'Leary played ball with the paper in the months following the incident.

Shocking tales of objectively evaluated realities. Syracuse AD Dr. Daryl Gross says the obvious in public, meaning he must be a highly paid public official:

"It isn't working out," Gross said of Robinson. "It's very disappointing ... He has some work to do out in front of him."

Like cleaning out his office, because he is terrible: 2-22 in the Big East in his three seasons at Syracuse overall, and most of them in embarrassing, head-up-ass fashion. (The 2006 Iowa/Syracuse game ended with the most pathetic display of goal-line offense ever, so putrid that every male watching it suffered erectile dysfunction for days afterward.)