GATOR RECRUITS, MEET THE POPE OF PAIN. This is the time of year when recruits meet their strength and conditioning coach for the first time, and allow him to kill them multiple times a day. For Florida this means meeting Mickey Marotti, who makes his players lift obscene amounts of weight, flip tires, push trucks, run endless sprints in 90 plus degree heat, and the requisite reptile squats.
One of those things listed above is not actually part of the Florida strength and conditioning program. It might be the Gator squats, but we can't be totally sure of that with Marotti. Just know that for two or three hours on hot summer days, your young warrior-poets are out there getting destroyed in conditioning drills, and that their peak heart rate in all of this is consistently higher than yours will be at any point not involving sex or a car accident.
MMMM BEEFY. It's not just Cody: Alabama had the largest d-line in football last year, proving that beef is what's for dinner, lunch, and breakfast when you face the heftier d-lines in college football. Even without Cody this year Bama tops the list, with UNC sitting right up there in the top ten and reminding you that one of this year's impending minor tragedies will be the class-superior UNC defense playing on the flip side of an unbalanced coin with the UNC offense, who at their best put forth an effort soccer announcers would describe as "cynical." Iowa places quite high on the list, too, something Georgia Tech would attest to from a prone position on the field of LandsharkProPlayerJoeRobbieohgofuckyourself Stadium.
THE ADVANTAGES OF BROKEN EXTREMITIES. In Ryan Mallett's case, having a broken foot may have shortened his throwing motion, which at his height really is about the length of a medieval English longbowman's arrow-pull. Are we suggesting this will begin the practice of routinely breaking prospect's extremities in cases where it would perform improvement? Not by coaches, no, but ambitious fathers will do it in a heartbeat.
THE MIDLIFE CRISIS COMPLETE. Myerberg's excellent as usual with both analogy and analysis on the Pre-Snap Read's Tennessee preview, and includes a reminder that Cormac McCarthy is Tennessean by birth. If anyone could have written the story of Tennessean football over the past two years, the man who wrote Blood Meridian could have done it without punctuation or ceasing as the blood of men has coarsed through restless angry veins for years unto the sun the bloody sun which stabs the sky and earth in twenty four hour cycles. <-----killy prose McCarthy-style.
I'M SO PRECOMMITTED TO YOU. Well, thank you three-star commit. That's very sweet of you. [blocks number] [blocks IM] [looks out window]
THE CURSED TIE. There are elegant arguments for why the tie in college football should exist, and none of them change the still very live distaste for leaving a game without a winner. The tie is the organ extraction procedure of games, with a hollow corpse left at the end that sends its dividends to others. Pat Dye pulled the most mad dickish one ever, though, something we'd all but totally forgotten about until reading Maisel's list of notable ties:
5. No. 4 Syracuse 16, No. 6 Auburn 16, 1988 Sugar Bowl: The Orange went into the game 11-0 with little chance of winning the national championship. Dye's decision to kick the field goal led enraged Syracuse fans to send thousands of old neckties to the Auburn athletic department.
What better way to say FUCK YOU than with the gift of a tie ruining a clean sheet of wins on the season. it's good that they eliminated the tie, though, since Chan Gailey and Al Groh would have become the first two coaches to simultaneously coach teams to 0-0-12 seasons.
EXCEPT THAT WE ACTUALLY HAVE REPLAY. Posnanski's otherwise choice piece on Lionel Messi briefly mentions that FIFA's abhorrent policy on in-stadium replay is similar to the NCAA's. True, except for actually having replay officials dedicated to using technology to right completely erroneous calls, which we do.
HEY, ANY LADIES NEED RICK MUSCLES' HELP IN THE TUSCALOOSA AREA? Just asking, girls.
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