Welcome to our Factor Five Five Factor Preview of Clemson at Wake Forest. No matter how this happens, this game is conveniently prepackaged to reinforce of any your chosen prejudices about the ACC. Close game? Shitty ACC offenses! Blowout? Further proof that [insert losing coach] is an overrated paycheck-stealing stuffed shirt! Shootout? See how inconsistent this conference is!

It’s an Escher drawing no matter how you look at it: inscrutable, meaningless, and will likely give you a headache. It’s also on tonight, meaning you will watch it.

Category one: Nebulous Statistical Comparisons of Dubious Validity. Well, gakked straight from the Clemson Football team’s website comes this extraordinarily interesting tidbit:

Clemson owns 56 wins over Wake Forest in history, its second highest victory total over any opponent. Clemson has 63 wins over South Carolina.

Gamecocks fans, you’re welcome. Over the past five years Clemson has gone 3-2 against Wake, including a 1-2 record against them at BB&T Field, officially the most antiseptic name of any stadium in the known college universe. If they try to bully the Wakesters around tonight at home, they might find themselves overdrawn with no chance for bailout! Topical humor! Get Leno on the phone he’s gonna LOVE this one!

The Nebulous State of Dubious Statistical Validity for Wake Forest: Six, the number of turnovers Wake had two weeks ago against Navy, and an aberration that still left them with the fifth best TO margin in the nation. Grobe sexy, that is, as is a defense that can be devilishly hard to read at times thanks to the Demon Deacons continued use of zone blitzes, fancy binders for their book reports, really nice business cards, and every other possible little edge they care to take in the effort to remain competitive at their size. They have a credit for 42 cents at this casino, and they’d like to use it.

Advantage: Wake Forest, thanks to Clemson being generous with the ball. (79th in the nation in TO margin.)

: Wake Forest: You’ve been factor’d!

Category Two: Mascot:

You can’t tell, right you can’t tell right COOOL that’s good lemme tell you how we’re gonna do this we’re gonna put on some music and call my friends and we’re just gonna rage that’s right we’re gonna RAGE and if we have to we have Steve’s number and we’ll just call him and get some more hey have you seen Underworld it’s unreal vampires are awesome I feel so STRONG on this shit is my nose bleeding OH SHIT MY NOSE IS BLEEDING

Advantage: Clemson.

Clemson, you’ve been factor’d!

Category Three: Aura. Clemson really, really needs this game to maintain some semblance of competitive edge in the ACC. Even factoring in the powerful Tommy Bowden Bitch Mentality, this means they should, according to the script, begin their comeback toward an 8 win season, forcing Clemson to embrace the meh and re-up with Bowden, who will dampen expectations, then succeed beyond them, and thus prolonging Clemson’s turn on the Wheel of Life with Bobby Bowden and keeping them from a hypothetical trip to coaching nirvana.

Advantage: Clemson.

Clemson, You’ve Been Factor’d!

Category Four: Names. Wake Forest has a guy named “Junior Petit-Jean”, which loosely translates to “Little John, Jr.” Aw, look! He has his own pimp cup!

Advantage: Wake Forest

Wake Forest, You’ve Been Factor’d!

Grudges? Scores to settle? Sheer cussedness? Wake Forest are far too tasteful to hold grudges. Rather, they shall pip away and give one for the Black and Yellow, yes they will! Clemson, meanwhile, beat them 41-10 last year, so grudgery doesn’t really apply here, but again: they really, really need this game.

Clemson, you’ve been factor’d!

EDSBS FACTOR FIVE FIVE FACTOR PREVIEW SUM: Clemson, You’ve Been Factor’d! Reminder: THIS MEANS BET ON THE OTHER TEAM.

After last year’s legendary late-night tangle the Florida-LSU rivalry, now hatched, molted, and developing scales, is emerging as one of the few “marquee matchups” in college football truly deserving of the term. Connoisseurs of the game from all conferences will tune in Saturday night for what promises to be an explosive (due in no small part to homemade alcohol) finale to a day of sure barnburners. To assist unallied fans in obtaining temporary loyalties for the game, the EDSBS staff has compiled the following helpful questionnaire:

Do you like air conditioning?
A. Yes.
B. No, it makes skinning giant catfish harder ’cause they skin gets tight an sassy.

Do you like fried food?
A. Yes, preferably from Publix in a cardboard box.
B. Ain’t that redundant?

Your team is down four touchdowns at halftime. How do you react to the GameDay cameras?
A. [sullen stare that could freeze nitrogen while pressing cellphone to ear]
B. “FUUUUCK YEEEEEW WWOOOOOOOOOOOOO TAHGERS GON GITCHA!!!” [shows breasts, regardless of gender]

(more…)

The week leading up to Oklahoma/Texas always yields gems of glory, but give the people MS Paint, and magic starts to happen:

That’s what you’ll find and more at ShaggyBevo.com. Stoops going NOM NOM NOM with a bag of dicks is juvenile, terrible, and of course terribly, terribly entertaining.

P.S.: Your bonus specious rumor of the day: Franchione to K-State following de-RonPrinceification! You can’t keep a good man down, and you can’t keep Dennis Franchione from smelling desperation thousands of miles away. He’s like a shark, but with no conscience, and without forty rows of teeth. (The cold blood? Check.)

You are not shocked that Mike Leach has a deep understanding of every subject known to man. He understands the proper use of cyanide gases in mining, the role the Asian Marmot played in the spread of the bubonic plague, and can lecture you at length on the complex barter systems used by the Maya in building their relatively modest but intricate Central American empire. He also may do this over the phone while defecating or ordering fast food (but hopefully not both.)

Therefore, you cannot and should not be surprised that Leach not only has a deep understanding of elves, but has imparted this knowledge into his playbook and by extension, his continually baffled players.

“He calls me the evil elf because he has all these different things; elves are small; they’re generally pretty mean and they corner well,” Morris said. “They’re good with a dagger; he goes on and on about how elves have different traits, and he thinks that I fit the traits of an elf. He thinks that I do well with the football in my hands and calls the football my dagger.”

We don’t know if this is true, but we’ll say it because it might be true: Mike Leach wrote most of the text and updated rules for Dungeons and Dragons: Demonweb 5 And if he didn’t, you can make damn sure he’s working on the revised edition of the Dungeonmaster’s Handbook due out this spring.

He deserves points for not just referring to it as the “WildRaider” or whatever other use of “Wild-” as a prefix you care to slap in front of your team’s name to denote the Wildcat formation where you take your most talented, slippery players, put them in the shotgun, and then just see what happens. He also deserves a 2D+CHARISMA MODIFIER for actually putting a little picture of an elf in the playbook, which he actually did because he is Mike Leach, this is his quest, and if you don’t like the way he’s running it then you can take your carefully sculpted Mage figurine and head home, okay?

The constant use of fat jokes is really a pitiful crutch in the humor department. Half of all Americans are overweight, and thus make a facile target for the would-be junior varsity satirists of our nation. Really, how funny is it to point out something that shortens lives, lowers the quality of living for millions, and poses a grave threat to the integrity of our national health care systems, both private and public?

Really: how fair is it to mock a coach simply because their metabolism runs at a rate which, in another date and time, was actually an evolutionary advantage? Is it fair to make cheap comedic hash out of people who have become Darwin’s unwitting laughing stocks due to the caprices of fate and commercial farming practices? Is it fair, nay—is it even humane to do so?

LSUFreek has considered the question deeply, and has his thoughtful response and apology for years of fat jokes on this site. It is moving. It is challenging. It is necessary, and it is about time.

Normally scheduled fat-jokes will now resume with regularity and ferocity. Apologies. If you can get the vision of Phil Fulmer pulling beef tongue out of a cow’s head out of your brain, you have a more disciplined air traffic controller in your cerebral cortex than we’ve ever had.