CURIOUS INDEX, 1/30/09

Monsieur Croom ne regrette rien. Okay, if it were Croom it would have to be about five octaves lower, but it'll do for the moment.

Monsieur Croom regrets nothing about his time at Mississippi State, and will be taking his basso profondo to the NFL as a running backs coach for the St. Louis Rams. As cuddly as we'd all like to be now that he's gone and fired, a bit of Billick syndrome must necessarily be mentioned again here: for an offensive coach to have such an atrocity of an offense year in and year out at Starkville was one of the great mysteries of the Croom era.

(Marion Cotillard doesn't always look like an elderly hunchback. In fact, were one to google her in the right fashion, you'll discover that every role prior to playing Edith Piaf involved her getting extravagantly naked. You're welcome.)

He ran a 5.1 in wooden shoes. Boise gets the Rik Smits of college football in the form of Ricky Tjong-A-Tjoe, a lineman from the Netherlands who played his high school ball at Boise High. Barkevious Mingo respects your strong name, son, and would like to invite you to the Kingdom of Mingovia for dinner and the requisite viewing of the gladitorial combats afterward.

That hurt, didn't it? So you won't do it again? Not necessarily: Steve Sarkisian and his coaching staff may have committed another minor recruiting faux pas by having a media member present during a coffee shop recruiting visit. These seem innocent enough, as Rick Neuheisel is currently wearing a headlamp in a crawlspace and tapping out morse code on drywall to a recruit somewhere in East LA.

Whipple'd! Miami's offense since their move to the ACC has been positively crapulent, though we'd point out that they have had two bad to atrocious matches of coordinator and talent in Rich Olson and Patrick Nix, who just called a bubble screen on aisle 5 of a Wal-Mart somewhere in Southern Alabama.

Behold the Sword of Urlacher! It slashes through red tape and donates $500K to the University of New Mexico for their indoor facility, and shall henceforth be known as Brian Urlacher field. Who's laughing now? Him.