Yesterday the mothership’s Big Televen Borg covered the possibility of conference expansion from a multitude of angles, many of them cautiously negative, however resigned: “We don’t want traditional conference rivalries diminished.” “The extra week at the end of the season helps keep the student in our student-athletes.” “We don’t want to be nice to Notre Dame for extended periods of time.” What hasn’t been addressed in many outlets just yet is the obvious and inescapable money angle. Being gooey liberal-arts types, we certainly don’t intend to start tripping down that analytical path ourselves, but let’s put some hazy dollar figures to this. Turns out the Big Ten Network, for a start, might not exactly be a disincentive except on a purely aesthetic level:

The revenue from the unprecedented conference media initiative will be distributed between the general campus (30 percent) and the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics (70 percent) with the breakdown as follows:
Guaranteed revenue: $6.125 million;
Less campus programming costs: $250,000;
Percentage of net revenue to campus (30 percent): $1.762 million. Of that amount, 75 percent distributed to Student Financial Services (75 percent): $1.321 million; and 25 percent distributed to General Library System: $440,625;
Percentage of net revenue to Athletics (70 percent): $4.112 million.

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Your mustache of the day: Tim Brewster, Minnesota coach and early eighties ’stache aficianado.

Notes:

a.) That hair is a butt cut straight from the head of the primordial Sumerian god of butt cuts. It is cleaved like the fissure from which all life comes, the kind of haircut that would happen if you went to a barber and said “make it look like I have a deep axe wound along the crown of my head, but made of hair. That is the hair that send a thousand skinny dweebs flying inside of a locker. That is the hair seen crowning through the t-top of a Trans-Am’s roof. That is the hair seen wiggling between the legs of a thousand girls named Linda or Josie in a backseat parked outside an REO Speedwagon concert.

That hair will keep on loving you.

That hair, we would wager, is seen on at least one out of every three heads in archival footage of the 1986 Green Bay Packers. It is the Midwestern Pussy Hunter’s Pith Helmet, and can be neatly replicated with a Flowbee, a hair dryer, and flat, non-curly coiffures.

Today, every man besides Brewster who has this haircut has a goatee and wears baseball caps everywhere. This is a natural law and cannot be debated.

b.) That ’stache sold car stereos in a shop in Kenosha for a while back in ‘83 before doing a bid for check kiting.

(HT: Lost Lettermen.)

The deadline for Florida fans to buy tickets to the Sugar Bowl has been extended to 5 p.m. today, and if you call and order more than four now you’ll get this BEEFY GATOR ARM MAGNET:

Not really, of course. (HT: Alligator Army.) Purchase more than four Sugar Bowl tickets and you will likely win the price of armroom in the form of an empty seat next to you, because an extended deadline always means one thing: that Florida fans are not exactly snapping up their allotment of reserved tickets, and that between a Cincy team coaching with an interim coach (who will not be there thanks to the hiring of Butch Jones) and a Florida team taking the game as a consolation prize….well, you’re looking at a flop of Orange Bowl-scale proportions. (At least the Orange Bowl is going to have a spectacular score.)

Those bodies flying off the bridge in NOLA just after New Year’s will be scalpers. The certainty of this is certainly a pleasant change from the usual mystery of the flying bodies’ identities in New Orleans. (Could be anyone! The governor! A drifter with a colorful past! A drifter with a colorful past who became governor!)

The entire thing is an interview with Howard Schnellenberger, which is of course worth the listen all by itself. However, if you want the best quote in the entire thing, go to 8:50 and you’ll hear the fumblerooski referred to as “illegal immoral, and unsportsmanlike play.”