THE NEW WORLD, CONTINUED. Mmm, sounds like a cavalry charge, or men in suits with lapel pins riding pimped-out miniature ponies toward a hill made of money.
Dvorak wrote that after a visit to America, but please notice that parts of it still sound a lot like Cossacks burning villages to the ground. This is pretty much what happened in the creation of a playoff, but here we are. Hey, links!
IT'S LANDMARKISH. Andy Staples recognizes the moment as a historic one, which it is. If Michael Jordan can suggest that the Dream Team kicking the shit out of some poor Angolans is the most historic event in the history of ever, then we feel comfortable going on a tiny limb and saying this is a historic one for college football. Bill C. says it's cool, you'll still have plenty to hate.*
*The same people who pre-playoff said "But debate is why college football is great!" will now cite this very possibility as a reason why the playoff sucks. Tawdry whores of self-justification, please pick one. Better still, ignore them because they were fucking idiots before, and are fucking idiots now because football is what's great about football, not arguing with someone who likes to argue badly.
OMG NICK SABAN IS SO SERIOUS. The most common answer to "coach I found intimidating on my recruiting visit" was Nick Saban, but meeting someone in a cold room hung with mysterious flanks of unidentified meat can terrify the uninitiated. Recruits also reported that their relationship with their position coach was way more important than any they might have with a head coach, something that's great for Texas because Mack Brown's doubles do start to seem a bit inauthentic after a few interactions. (Mack Brown is played by proxies for eight to nine months of the year. It's in his contract.)
HEYYYY, BUDDAAAY. David Pollack will replace Craig James, a move that is by definition an upgrade since he is not Craig James. The Broverture Crew just got bro-ier, and that's not a bad thing.
The Tour de France is the world's longest bike race named the Tour de France, and it will be on your television shortly. Your sporting alternatives at eight in the morning are scanty, so it's best to acclimate yourself now to the rigors of the world's most French endurance event now before you have to do something truly desperate for sporting entertainment. (Plus, the bonus of breakfast sports on US time! They're the most important sports of the day.)
The route for the 2012 Tour De France is as follows:
Stage one will be LE BOB. This refers to Bob Roll, who was the best thing about the Tour's coverage in 2007, and is still the best thing about NBC Sports Network's (formerly Versus) coverage of the event. Roll, a former sideman and domestique to Lance Armstrong, knows you don't know anything about cycling, and that's cool because Bob Roll doesn't know anything about broadcasting. It's a good kind of ignorance: Roll is just as likely to make a garbled but salient observation about team strategy as he is to trot out a good emergency poop story mid-broadcast, and you'll be the stunned, but pleased beneficiary.
Stage two will be LE FLOW. Watching the TDF is never about rapt, constant attention. Fold some laundry, read a book, weld something you've been meaning to weld, and it will still be there when you need it.
The broadcasters know this. That's why most Tour coverage is gentle patter interrupted by Phil Liggett blurting out impassioned "AND HERE'S REALLY SOMETHING NOW" to let you know that yes, something is happening and you should pay attention. Otherwise, the TDF is chillwave sporting viewing. Put on some Washed Out for like 60 percent of it, and you'll get the general vibe.
Moving along through the early sprint and road stages, we get to LE GEOGRAPHIE. The people covering the Tour go to great lengths to cover every possible camera angle imaginable. Helicopters hover above, capturing breathtaking French scenery with the peloton streaking along through it like a blob of anorexic neon jellyfish. Cameramen stand on the back of cruising motorcycles to get within feet of the riders, and assault winded podium-winners the instant they get off the bike.
Two thoughts go through your mind watching this. The first: the French really have a more relaxed attitude toward personal injury and liability than we do, since the entire event is a shoving match between bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, cars, and sometimes spectators funneled through tiny European roads.
The second thought is usually, "I had no idea France looked like that." The scenery is part of the allure of watching the TDF, with the nation of France scrolling by like some medieval CGI fantasy. Oh look, a castle just out of f****** nowhere. And another. Here's the most beautiful field of flowers you've ever seen, and now a village straight out of Assassin's Creed. There's some people just chillin' in the Pyrenees drinking wine at one in the afternoon, and now a guy in a devil suit is chasing the riders through an alpine moonscape.
The fourth stage will be LE SPRINT, or the part that's anything but chill. Sprints at the finish are dramatic, but you're really not watching for the sprint stages. They're an appetizer for the mountains, albeit exciting ones that really make you question the effectiveness of your current leg workout. (Sprinters legs are the size of country hams.)
Along the way, there will be the part you may not want to enjoy but will watch for anyway, LE CRASH. You have reasons to be wary: people can totally die in high-speed races like the TDF, or more recently the 2011 Giro d'Italia. They can also crash in more spectacular and less fatal ways: flying off mountains, into trees, or spilling through the peloton like errant bowling balls and flattening twenty riders at a time.
There is no good crash, and we'd like to acknowledge that. However, there is a best crash, and it is this one.
The dog would like to know if you still love it, and sorry he turned your front wheel into a taco, and wag wag wag he'll just be over here if you want to pet him, mad guy in tights.
Winding our way up to the Alps, you will then pass through LES POLITIQUES. The politics of the peloton are complex, but here's an important overview of the offices and positions within the main group of riders.
There is a Minister of Sandwiches. He coordinates the dispersal of all sandwiches, and only gives people he likes the best sandwiches. He is the most powerful man on the tour. The Overfiend of the Pissoir, noted for his yellow jersey, controls the peloton's bathroom breaks. These are taken collectively, and usually on someone's property without even asking them.
The Herald of the Avoidable Obstacle just yells a lot about stuff everyone can see from miles away. No one likes him, and everyone hates him, but traditions are traditions. The Blood Czar ensures that everyone has at least 15 minutes to change their blood completely each day. There is also a Barrister of the Shapely Peloton who ensures an aesthetically pleasing form for the group as they pass through the countryside, and the Minister of Nickels who pays all tolls by carrying hundreds of pounds of dimes. He drives a motorcycle by special exemption, and is not even a cyclist.
None of this is true, but it makes more sense than much of what actually goes on in the peloton.
Reaching the slopes of the Alps means you have now reached LE HARD PART. This makes for the best viewing, because, after racing several hundred miles already, professional cyclists must race up slopes most cars have difficulty negotiating without complaint. The human body puts out as much energy as a toaster oven at this point, and teams go into overdrive attempting to rope in breakaway riders. There is an inverse relationship between the scenery and the degree of pain: the more majestic the backdrop is, the closer the riders are to openly wishing for a swift death by avalanche.
The fun part for you is that this is when the contenders make themselves known or get broken on the wheel of the Alps. Occasionally a rider will just extend two raised middle fingers to the pack, rip away from the group, and pull the race stage of his life out of his spandexed ass. It's as breathtaking in the moment as the following day is sad; unless they're doped to the gills and high on cutting-edge stimulants, they will be a decimated shadow of themselves the following day. (Good news; they're probably doped to the gills and high on cutting-edge stimulants.)
Through the mountains, the influence of LE MOB will become more obvious. The crowds at the Tour de France are the closest in sport, often running alongside riders and waving flags in their grimacing, sweat-drenched faces. The silent agreement between riders and fans is this: get as close as you like, but a) do not knock me over, and b) do not complain when I decide you should be hit in the face. Again: the French have a different understanding of liability than we do.
Coming down from the mountains, we will now begin testing positive for LE DRUGS, all of them, in every variety. This is not because cyclists like drugs. (We're sure some do.) This is because this race destroys people, is inadvisable for anyone's health, and has always sent riders running to the medicine cabinet for something, anything to help them recuperate. People have done cocaine during stages trying to compete in this race. People have taken strychnine, done poppers, had dangerous blood transfusions performed, and blown themselves out of their brains on meth-amphetamines just to finish, much less compete in the Tour.
Someone will be caught. It may be the eventual winner, so don't get attached to too many rankings. Be suspicious of that guy who dragged ass until the 13th stage and then suddenly raced like someone five years younger two stages in a row. He's probably mainlining gorilla adrenaline and jet fuel and will be out of the race the following day after his drug screen explodes in the lab.
Once in the coastal flat lands, you may perform LE SKIP. The riders take a few rest days, and so should you because frankly, as pretty as they may be to watch, many of the flat stages not involving time trials are less than interesting.
Save your energy for a second round through the mountains and L'AGONY in the Pyrenees. If the Tour is not sewn up by now, you will be treated to at least one dramatic torturefest where one rider "breaks" another to build an insurmountable lead their team will then protect as a group. When a TDF rider "breaks," he slows down. The average person going through the same physical stress would explode, and leave a body so ruined the jackals and vultures would skate by it going "LOLnope."
Then, because this is the most French of events, the TDF finishes with a luxury item: a stage that rarely means anything, and is instead just a chance for riders to relax and parade their ravaged selves around Paris. The race could theoretically require some racing here -- it has happened -- but most likely, you won't be watching this stage, and will instead simply watch the footage of the winner sipping champagne on a bicycle*.
*Please notice that after viewing this, the man who drinks forties and rides his bike around your neighborhood will be 10 times funnier, because you will never see him again without thinking he's just won the world's most jankety bike race, and is on some kind of eternal, shirtless victory lap. Which, you know, he might very well be. Congratulate him both on his achievements, and on his attainment of a low-stress, low-maintenance lifestyle.
We never fell in love with anything because it would last forever or make sense. That's why we love college football, things that use vast amounts of fireworks for no reason, and really good television shows. What you call doomed, we call "mortal," and is more lovable for it.
The option is the illusion of permanence, something you would not want. If things were permanent, we would still be passing ten times a game. If they were permanent, we would have no night games, another thing that would be the ruination of college football along with the twelfth game, the BCS, most rules changes, conference realignment, the Bowl Coalition, Penn State joining a conference, Notre Dame having a bad decade and a half, and student-athletes being able to leave school early, and that whole thing about televising games.
None of them destroyed the game. We will watch it anyway because it is a stupid and welcome diversion from real life, a diversion with a perpetually corrupt underbelly reliant on free labor and the notion that you will show up no matter what--which, bitching as you drag your nails across the living room floor toward the television, you likely still will. It is literally the easiest thing in the world to proclaim the end of something. Figuring out the plot in continuation is the hardest. Look around at who's doing what, and you'll see who likes the easy work, and who likes the hard stuff.
What you mourn in the passage of a playoff could be a lot of things. You could mourn the argument, and if you mourn the argument you'll just find something else to argue, since you probably don't actually like football that much and have to make up these accessory playthings around it to keep you occupied. You could mourn the bowls, and if you do that you are literally beyond help, both because they will still be there in one form or another, and also because you are batshit crazy. You could mourn the "death of the innocence of college sports." No one can stop you from being naive and dumb. It's totally within your rights.
You could simply be mourning change. As cynical as we are, this is the one we'll respect the most. This is something changing, and change is hard, sad, and usually for the best only after you rewrite it. We mourn all sorts of stupid, useless things that no longer exist. We miss C.Y. Market barbecue sandwiches after school, Taiwanese breakfast crepes before going to work, and our grandfather. Those might be the only things we miss, ever, but even in the darkest corners of our heart we still miss them because in some small part, at one instant, they were ours in the past.*
*Another aside: this entire debate is a nostalgia test. We assume college football's always been structurally screwed, whereas somewhere in the past there's this point college football idealists have pinned as the ideal. We also never look at old photo albums, and think Plato was totally full of shit. We bet people who long for the days of the AP poll deciding everything love their old yearbooks, and love using the allegory of the cave in applicable and inapplicable discussion of issues.
We can't get too bent about the palace orders. Being a fan involves committing yourself to a degree of hopeless peasantry, and to a willing degree of fatalism, of helplessness. The sport will now have some kind of a way to crown a champion on the field. There will be more money, perhaps an embarrassing enough amount to start some real discussion of revenue sharing. Teams with weak schedules will have a harder time getting into the playoff, and will perhaps start scheduling games out of conference against quality competition.
That's "perhaps" because we don't know. As we said last night, this is slightly less dumb than the way we used to do it, where we settled feuds by pitting boxers against third parties and then guessing whether they would beat each other head-to-head. The identity of college football remains unchanged. USC fans still carry the banner for the oft-neglected West Coast. Alabamians woke up this morning and still genuflected to the scowling picture on the wall. Somewhere, a Boise State fan woke up pissed off, and probably should have been for football reasons. If a poll or lack of destroys any of this, you never liked the game. You liked talking about the game, something that has as much to do with football as masturbation does with sex.*
*Both have their utilities. One is decidedly more important than the other.
The strength of the game has always been its attachment to a place, a community, and a certain random way of doing things. It is about the game, and then the identity built around that. Iowa football, as far as we know, will never get into a moving van and set up shop as the Kentucky Hawkeyes. (If they did, they'd be the best football program in the history of the state, but still.) An NFL franchise chose its logo after intense marketing sessions and focus groups. Georgia Tech's started as a field-crasher, and ended as their symbol. Louisiana Tech's is named after the bravest, possibly apocryphal dog in football mascot history. Like a lot of things, these just sort of happened, like so much of the sport.
So there is a playoff, and it sort of has something to do with college football. It will make new problems, which make new problems, which in turn will make newer, even more exciting problems. When it dies--and it will--just as the BCS did, there will still be weird, corrupt, flawed, and ultimately ephemeral college football. If you liked something normal and permanent, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And if you think there's anything normal or lasting about anything in the sport besides the game and the places it lives, you're more doomed and mortal than most.
P.S. Now for fuck's sake, let's do and have football things.
WE ARE OUTRAGED. Not really, they're cool, though in this photo the player in question--Ryan Nehlen, wide receiver and grandson of WVU coach and Hall of Famer Don Nehlen--appears to be mortified that you caught him wearing only one arm sleeve. If you can inform us exactly what an arm sleeve does to enhance your athletic performance, please do. (Via)
A RADICAL SOLUTION. But given Penn State's situation right now, it makes some sense. (SOME.) After the ball's kicked, though, this will probably fade, since actual sport has a way of completely realigning what people think about an athlete/team/school.
THERE IS NO PREVIEW HERE. Placeholder. Things that don't exist. Someone who accuses Bill C. of not doing enough research on nonexistent school in the comments. Deep laughing over this discussion over nothing.
--and he's back. He was just going to the bathroom, guys. No worries. NO WORRIES. In an effort to revitalize the Sun Devil experience, Graham and the administration will implement some of Graham's ideas, some ideas from administrators, and finally some offered up by the Disney Institute. These ideas do not include some trademark Disney classics
a thousand strollers crushing your Achilles' tendon a thousand times a day
stands just turned into serpentine waiting lines, offering fans college football's most heart-healthy fan experience
all Arizona State players and coaches to be equipped with huge, heartbreaking cartoon eyes.
Visitors will take a convenient bus from their parking lot to a monorail and then to a bus and then another monorail before boarding a bus to get on a people mover to take a bus to a monorail inside a peoplemover which is then lifted onto a cable car before being placed back on a monorail or some other form of transportation only used in inaccurate books about the future.
Ice cream bars shaped like Todd Graham's delicious, blocky head
The actual ideas for improving gameday at ASU aren't bad: reducing the distance between the team and the fans, making tailgating a little more hospitable in the brutal Arizona heat, and making a bit of instant atmosphere with in-game music. Innovative, previously unheard of music.
Music will become a key part of the game. "Wild Thing" will be played for ASU kickoffs. The theme for Jaws will be played when opponents punt. "Hells Bells" is the choice when opponents face third down and "Take it to the House" will blare when ASU lines up for kick-off returns.
Cons: using the same music everyone else uses for everything. Pros: somewhere, somehow, Trick Daddy and Trina will see hundreds, possibly even thousands of cents for this. The Disney Institute's website boasts of teaching you how to "D'Think" creatively. If can punch something in the balls through a computer screen, please do this now. (Via.)
They set that traffic stop up in the school zone just so they could tag people for extra charges. That's entrapment. Like some kind of bullshit bonus round for criminal charges. SORRY, COPS, NO ONE TOLD ME I WAS IN THE DAILY DOUBLE ZONE.
Clarke County's just Grand Theft Auto for college students, except your only mission is to get drunk, and then you always get arrested and lose. Mudcat Elmore's car is the big unlockable vehicle. Get that, and you win the game and become Sheriff. Then you get to ride around poppin' kids for DUI and riding a scooter while being a football player.
God, this is the worst video game ever. Nevermind.
He had it under the seat, too. That's legally considered the glove compartment in Florida. Urban Meyer got that passed in the Florida Senature, or whatever. I don't even think they have a government. There's just an old Albertson's filled with guns and cocaine and key lime pies. Governor Pitbull just writes his orders on bitches' asses and lets the people read 'em. Then he goes to an underpass and eats someone's face off.
GATOR HATER 4 LYFE HOW YA LIKE THAT, URBAN CRIER?
[pause]
It hurts to admit this, but...well, it's not like Crowell would have been able to run away from them, anyway.
[pause]
Well, maybe he could have gotten away. If the chase happened during the fourth quarter, that is. Because he'd just disappear into thin air.
[takes long drink out of red solo cup]
Good thing we've got Keith Marshall. He's...I'm pretty sure he's the next Herschel. Seriously.
[takes reaaaaaaalllly long drink from cup, throws cup onto quad grass]
[nods decisively]
Dammit, Mark Richt's lost control of this team, hasn't he?
If you watch this episode for nothing else, watch it for two things.
1. Skip Bayless is shot, strangled, and given the dim mak death-touch by a man in a ghillie suit.
2. Les Miles, Dabo Swinney, and Dave Wannstedt play poker, and discover the brutal penalties for both the "No Hoagies" rule and for "pulling a Dooley" at the final table of a tournament.
Enjoy. Chan Gailey has already been eliminated, and that's not a surprise.
THEY DID SAY FIGHT, FARMERS, FIGHT. Is Texas A&M ready for the SEC? Does a T-Sip sip tea like a fancy frilly boy while schemin', plottin', and prolly a-polishin' a panky rang on a fancy porch while the farmers do all the dang work? YOU BET HE DOES, AND YOU BET THEY ARE.
The shirtless mugshot for one of the Aggies' real contenders for starting quarterback might as well have been their entire resume for SEC membership, but now that it's here it might as well confirm Mike Slive's sound judgment in bringing them aboard. Points to be awarded later, shirt to be removed immediately in his honor. (They also got a Hyman, which is the only way you can break this news online on a sports blog, ever.)
MORE CROWELL. Suspended indefinitely for now, Isaiah Crowell's absence from the lineup for any period of time leaves Georgia with the usual array of kind of okay experienced guy plus three dudes who could probably be starters anywhere else if they could just stop doing UGA running back things.
So many important lessons here, but two stand above them all: a man should wear a mustache at least once in his life , and regardless of gender, one should always go for two at the end. Enjoy your weekend, one of nine before the 2012 season starts. (And it will, before you know it, and before you are ever completely ready for it.)
LIKE A SON. A TIGER-SON. "Hey, we need to make an ad for NCAA's new version." "Oh, cool, how about we just use Les Miles and a mascot." [prints money]
Just assume Les is mad at Mike for running an offense with a quarterback Miles wanted as an "Athlete." Yes, LSU fans, he was recruited as an "athlete" everywhere else, but that athlete played quarterback at Baylor while Jordan Jefferson was your starter, and that's never not worth pointing out at every opportunity. Excuse us, we have a John Brantley to put back together in our garage.
GET MONEY, YOUNG LADY. Erin Andrews will be hosting an evening college football show as part of her new deal with Fox Sports. The idea of a CFB evening show sounds weird unless you consider that soft spot between the afternoon games and evening games, a logical point to stop and have a loose, fun recap/preview show. If only someone would do this show, but without men in ties and commercials...hmm...but WHO...
DEFINITELY RELATED. You really don't want to start this, Alabama fans. First the campus vandalism, then the outright vandalism of homes, and soon your children are born with "GEAUX TIGERS" spraypainted on them, and if you doubt that LSU fans could tag a fetus you clearly don't understand how far they're willing to go.
I FEEL SO CLOSE TO YOU RIGHT NOW, TAMU. The Aggie SEC welcome video uses Calvin Harris' "Feel So Close," and now you're picturing it set to this, and you're welcome. Oh, at midnight on Saturday TAMU and Mizzou both became official SEC members. That's why they woke up to a light rain of Golden Flake potato chips and untraceable gift cards raining from the sky. Expect this weather forever, y'all.
THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL. But the nod to Mizzou's slavin' past will remind everyone that at least one horrible part of you belongs in the SEC's worst, darkest corners.
ILLINOIS NEWS! Hey, an Illinois preview! Hey, an Illinois arrest! Never a little rain without some hail and barn-destroying winds, Illini fans, and then just more rain for eternity.
It's Sandusky-topical, so feel free to wait for the Fulmer Cupdate if you're good and sick of it.
We don't know where this point is, but on the continuum of reaction to an event there's a point where the anger over an event becomes its own momentum, and feeds some rabid dog let loose in the brain-yard. The dog eats the chickens. Then it eats your pant leg. Then, as you sit in the kitchen watching it through carefully parted blinds, it just barks to make itself run off the buzz of sweet, sweet anger.
You should be mad Penn State officials willingly covered up Jerry Sandusky's pedophilia. Then again, I don't feel like I have to tell you that. I shouldn't have to tell you that. I shouldn't have to tell you that someone who does this "is a bad person." If you can't tell that from the story presented in reporting, you shouldn't be reading me, or words, or anything other than the road flare you have in your hands, and are about to use as a toothbrush.
(Dear person who has to be told this: that is a road flare. It does not go in your mouth. It will burn you badly.)
I shouldn't have to tell you that a thousand words of invective thrown at a monster currently in jail for the rest of his life, and at those who aided and abetted him, is doing something else. It is a tomato thrown at a prisoner on the gallows. It is a Sunday stroll at Bedlam. It is demagoguery on the cheap, the snorting a line of an execution notice to get a buzz.
There are ways to write about the long trail of the Sandusky case, but somewhere in this, you cross the Nancy Gracepoint. In the face of atrocity, you look for some rationale, some protocol, a straight, unbroken line in an exploded space. Take a statue down, or put one up, or suggest the insanity of foresight. Throw everything down the memory hole. Demand the NCAA, an organization with no legal or moral purview whatsoever, do insane, unjustifiable things to a team that received no on-field benefit whatsoever from this.
If you mean it, you're just anger-binging, and are well past the Gracepoint. Nothing will ever be enough, and you're half-right: nothing ever makes this better, not jail, not torture, not anything, and certainly not fury-mobbing about the mediocre, spineless evil of something so obviously spineless and evil that was still allowed to flourish thanks to the community's leaders. Good reporting literally helps put these people in jail. Horrendous editorializing does not.
If you don't believe it and write it anyway, you're just trolling for hits from the people lining up for the five minute hate. If it's the latter, good on you for finding a profitable angle in a small crashing heap of humanity's worst failures: subservience to authority above all else, cowardice, and a failure to think past your arm's laziest reach. It's an omelet of atrocities, but at least someone's finding a way to make those eggs work.
As for the statue, leave it up. It'd cost money to move it, and Penn State will need every dime they have. It's not the statue's fault, anyway. It didn't get there by itself. Going back to an earlier theme: if you're the kind of person whose emotions are ruled by erecting and then destroying graven idols, I'm not writing for the 12th century reader, and never will.
A remembrance of games that really should be removed and forgotten completely.
We remember watching this game. It came on late thanks to a weather delay, some horrendous hail-spitting crapnado blowing down off the plains and through Lawrence. The cameras panned up to the rim of the stadium, and all you saw were empty seats, flags blowing sideways like they were propped up with wires, and miserable, deranged, and utterly brave Kansas faithful in the expanse of bare rain-soaked concrete.
It looked like the nuclear winter league. Terry Allen was coaching at Kansas, and Tom Osborne's eventual split-champion '97 Huskers stood on the opposite sideline, so it was in fact the nuclear winter league. Nebraska was the team of bone-devouring mutants. Kansas played the part of the Sad Boy, and circus peanut similes (way NSFW audio) were just as relevant to them then as they were last year under Turner Gill.
There's a lot here, but the "48 yards total offense on 48 offensive plays" is the eye-popper, particularly in contrast to the 415 yards on SIXTY-FIVE ATTEMPTS next to it in the Nebraska rushing column alone.
We mention this game because we were thinking about "games where one team clearly wanted to be doing anything else other than playing football, up to and including contracting intestine-warping food poisoning in the third quarter." The first team that came to mind was this '97 Kansas team against Nebraska, playing in a bombed-out stadium against a Nebraska team determined to run the clock out and get the hell out of whatever was preparing to destroy Lawrence from the skies.
(To be fair and accurate, Kansas also wanted to get out of there--or die, or at least for the clock to run out so they could lay down in their room and have the kind of cry that makes you snort and make embarrassing choking noises.)
No one watching this wretched facehammering of a game would have blamed them. If you are a Kansas fan who sat through this--all of this--you deserve some kind of combination award/faceslap for even making it to the third quarter. And if you're the sick bastard who actually posted this to Youtube, may Bob Devaney have mercy on your soul.
CRATE. CRAAAAAAAAATE. Just, you know...get back in there for a minute, TAMU.
Nice words first: that's a great Gator chomp. Picture perfect, in fact. You also got the lady to say "cocks," and the Peter Griffin Appreciation Club will certainly love that. Now that we've said that, you need to destroy this immediately. Place the ashes in a tube. Take this tube and drive to Nevada. Deposit it in one of the receptacles the government uses to stash nuclear waste ten miles deep in the earth. Then drive away and begin a new life. It will be easier than you can possible imagine. (Via)
AND ALL THIS CHANGE WILL RESULT IN NO CHANGE. One reason you have to like Brian Murphy's coverage of Boise State: he'll happily list every single piece of equipment Boise State takes on the road with them, including 50 pounds of "miscellaneous." (And now you know exactly how much Chris Petersen's enormous balls weigh.) It's cheaper to fly to Hattiesburg, Mississippi than to Hawai'i, yes, but oh god it's so worth the price once you realize what you've done by flying to Hattiesburg.
CAUSE HE'S ON THE MOTHERHUMPIN' HOT S-E-A-T. Joker Phillips is leaning on 50 Cent for inspiration these days, and Kentucky football is now owned by VitaminWater. WAY TO GO JOKER, NOW YOUR FOOTBALL TEAM IS WATERY GATORADE WITH NO HEALTH BENEFITS WHATSOEVER.*
What AF2 -- the developmental arm of the Arena Football League -- lacked in talent, it more than made up for with its team logos. Here is a selection of the finest the now-defunct league had to offer.
The Boise Burn sum up a lot about AF2, the developmental league for the Arena Football League that played from 2000 to its implosion in 2009. Located in a mid-sized American city underserved by the American sporting-industrial complex, the Burn started out with good intentions. The name itself was a gesture to honor firefighters in the form of an Arena team name, but also throw in some lyrical branding simultaneously.
So what did they do? They put a man on fire with a football in his mouth on the logo, combining failed firefighting with terrible football fundamentals. We may agree or disagree with a lot of things about the AF2. Its business strategy may have been doomed from the start. Its football may have been spotty and inconsistently entertaining. These are all points for substantive debate.
What we must agree on: firefighting done well does not involve a man whose head is on fire, and proper football carriage does not start with a firm bite. That's not even three points of contact. You're terrible at this, floating head.
Much of what the Corpus Christi Sharks were has vanished into the dustbin of history. We know they were indeed in Corpus Christi, Texas. We know their logo is a rabid shark ripped directly off a bankrupt surf shop's memorabilia, some place like "Ted Shockey's Surf House," or "Gnarly Bud's Beachside Scut Hut." One has to assume this, since the other alternative is the shark being engaged in a physically impossible and impossibly lewd sex act with the letter K.
Please also notice that the letter A has a mustache.
This is all the world need ever know about the Corpus Christi Sharks.
HMMRPHH.
HMGRRPHHHGrrrrbllEBBGMMMLLPGGHHHPPHHHHHH
Ifff harrrrd to GRRRPPHHH talkkwiff A LOGOOMRRPH IN YOURRMPHH MOUFFF
(This is the logo of the Amarillo Venom, a team that unlike many AF2 teams is still in existence playing in the IFL. The team's vagabond existence has now spanned three leagues: the INTENSE FOOTBALL LEAGUE, a real league that's championship game was logically entitled THE INTENSE BOWL, the AF2, and now the Indoor Football League, where they have a $7 special for those who want to attend their upcoming game against the West Texas Roughnecks on July 7. Their old logo from their days as the Amarillo Dusters is a swirling, vengeful fart.)
The South Georgia Wildcats might not even be real. This may just be a logo taken straight from an early release Nintendo game that created fake teams rather than pay licensing fees. Look at the map, Hiro. Find me a place where there is absolutely no one to sue us. South Georgia? Yes, this appears desolate indeed. NES America Play-Action Football is already a glorious success. Let us fly to Paris for dinner. Then Hiro and his boss would burn money to stay warm and then fly to Paris, because it was 1985 in Japan.
Even their website appears to be a plant, too cruel and staged for reality. No one would just leave this unattended for five years, floating out in cyberspace forever with its promises of a band (it wiggles when you click it!) and a dance team (appears to be in the middle of pooping when you wiggle your mouse over it!) and the Wildcats mascot, set to appear on July 19, 2007, from 2-3:30 p.m. at Phoebe Putney Hospital. We hope the Wildcat left that day, walked past his car, and just kept walking until he found peace and something like home.
(Real talk: he was arrested for vagrancy in Waycross a week later, and currently works as a carnival ride inspector for the state of Florida. He can and has been bribed.)
The Peoria Pirates did not even have money for color, or for making a logo using anything but ClipArt and a font known only as "Crayola Ransom." They did win the 2003 ArenaCup over the Florida FireCats, another team with an ill-conceived tribute to firefighting built into their name. The makers of AF2 had no idea what firefighting was, and may have understood it to be setting things on fire, including Floridian feral cats.*
*I cannot wait for a professional sporting franchise to name itself the Feral Cats.
"What do you think of when you think of New Hampshire?"
"Uninsured drivers dying in collisions with moose."
"Okay. What else do you think of when you think of New Hampshire?"
"A football with a wolf's head growing out of it like a tumor."
"Can you make the football jagged?" "So done." "And be sure to reverse the logos so it sounds like a British boxer from the 1950s. Some giant Cockney bleeder who'd take a dive for five quid and a pack of smokes?"
"I dunno. 'Wolves Manchester' sounds more like a dobro player some music critic bring up when you say you like 'This Friday Night' by Katy Perry, like 'Oh, that's such BS you should really listen to more Wolves Manchester you cretin.'"
"Whatever. Make it happen in 20 minutes, and if you use anything other than MS Paint you're fired."
"Right! Wolves Manchester!"
"Wolves Manchester!"
I don't know how it does it, but the Albany Firebirds logo is clearly saying "Ohhhhh girl, don't even try." That's a sassy raptor. A SULTRY raptor, even. It also has people feet, a common choice when drawing anthropomorphic birds due to the inherent scaly creepiness of bird feet. You're prepared to buy a lot when dealing with mascots, but it all falls apart when the feet pop out in their tripartite horror. The opposite end of the dynamic: going too far and giving birds creepy human teeth.
We believe this is an Aztec playing baseball with a football, a very silly way to play our nation's pastime or football. The RGV Dorados, despite their unorthodox tactics, were pretty good at football prior to their dissolution in 2009. Their great rivalry with the Corpus Christi Sharks had them at a 9-1 all-time lead in the series, actually, meaning the AF2 was terrible at a.) firefighting, and b.) the definition of the term "rivalry." Their hopes for more glory died in losses in Bossier-Shreveport. They join the entire population of Bossier-Shreveport in this achievement.
Homar Saenz - TE/HOSS - Works at H&H tires during the off season. Contributes his success on the football field to moving tires on a daily basis
Workout secrets of AF2 will be available as an e-book as soon as we figure out what every player in AF2 did as a day job, and then just write out that day job as a workout.
How can gigantic people in singlets, lifting large amounts of weight over their heads, be one of the most moving events at the Summer Olympics? Spencer Hall explains, with the technique and story of Matthias Steiner.
Olympic lifting is just one kind of weightlifting among many different schools of weightlifting. There is powerlifting, a burly discipline focusing on the back squat, deadlift, and bench press. There is bodybuilding, an aesthetic sport where the barbell serves as the chisel and hammer for the human form. Strongman competitions blend powerlifting, Olympic lifting, and a long series of ill-advised junkyard dares into a single, spine-snapping marvel of an event.
I will not judge any of them save one: the random gymbro's discipline, something we'll call the Cybex Swolenado. The basic guidelines for the Cybex Swolenado involve a studied series of three-to-six month programs based on extensive reading of Men's Fitness, Outside, FLEX, GRRUNT, and that thing your bro sent you about the Bane workout. None of these mention steroids, and they really should because all of them involve large amounts of steroids and eating nothing but endangered fish and green apples for months at a stretch.
These workouts usually run like this:
Bench press i dunno do like twenty sets at 300 pounds (scale as needed).
Go over to the cables machine and grab the cables. Yank on them or something. This simulates all the cables you grab all day long in your job hauling things in an office specializing in data entry and lobster fishing.
Keg press. Bring down three inches, then lift for the calves because you can build them if you don't have them I promise you can work it harder why are you such a failure?
Some bulls@#$ like bicep curls or just grab a kettlebell and wave it around until something hurts.
Cool down by sitting in the power cage and checking twitter on your iPhone.
This discipline is probably close to what you do. Repeat for two to three week cycles until you forget to go to the gym. When people ask what you're doing, insist you're "focusing on your cardio," and then resume watching whatever you were watching on Netflix. Repeat cycle by taking another dumb, unnecessarily complex workout out of a magazine several months later.
Unlike the Cybex Swolenado, Olympic lifting is deceptively simple, with just two movements used in competition: the snatch, and the clean and jerk. That's it: Olympic lifters practice just two basic moves, albeit moves so complex they take years to master, and separately involve no fewer than three other separate lifts in each one.
They both accomplish the same thing in variation: taking a gigantic amount of weight and putting it over your head. The "merely explosive" clean and jerk consists of two movements: the "clean," where the weight is brought off the ground, and the "jerk,' where the weight goes over the lifter's head. In the snatch's case (STOP LAUGHING) it differs by having a wide grip and the weight going overhead in one "insanely explosive" maneuver.
Both happen with a practiced swing, a smoothness all too happy to lie to the untrained eye. On some snatch attempts, the lifter looks less like they're pulling an entire 19th century kitchen cabinet over their head, and more like they're just using a loaded barbell to stretch their shoulders. It looks fine. It usually is, unless someone's elbow joint dislocates, and then there is screaming and a rush of panicking people in jumpsuits to the stage, and now you've got the one bit of lifting everyone sees in GIF form around every four years or so.
Risk is an element, but Olympic lifts involve so much more: an immense amount of effort, brute strength, balance, coordination, timing, rhythm, and most importantly, the willingness take at least your body weight and then haul it above your head in one long jump, pull, and hold. Here's a brief primer on how to do my favorite, the clean and jerk. (Try it at home, preferably when no one is home. It'll feel more intense that way.)
The first part is basically a deadlift. Mentally this goes from grabbing the bar, a move I call "feelin' pretty strong, y'all!" This feeling then rips off its fleshmask when I start lifting, and immediately becomes a tentacled-faced goblin I call "oh god this weighs a metric ton and is going to shatter my spine."
This happens at astonishingly low weights for the average person. For Matthias Steiner, pictured above, it occurs at a mere 400 pounds or so. For the record, that is 568 pounds you're seeing on the bar in these pictures. You are not an Austro-German neanderthal cyborg Olympian. Please remember this.
The second part is a jump and a pull, in that exact order. Attempt to pull a weight of this magnitude without opening your hips, and your shoulders will spit out your arms, the weight will drop, and you will be the human equivalent of the nylon sock men car dealerships strap to fans by roadsides, just wavin' your worthless gooey arms all over the place. Jump without pulling, and the weight levitates to around chest height and whispers "dumbass" in your ear seductively.
Please do all of this without shaving your kneecaps off with the bar. That trajectory up is straight for both efficiency and because no one likes picking their patellas off the floor. Iranian coaches recruit lifters from childhood, and the first thing they look for is not size, brawn, or strength, but rather a jaw-dropping vertical leap. This is why: in a move this explosive, it's basically one long jump to start, albeit one with up to twice your bodyweight in your hands.*
*Many Olympic lifters at staggering weights claim they can dunk a basketball. If you meet one, demand video proof.
While the weight is floating upward--you got that to happen, right, even though it's as much as a really fat grown man, right?--the lifter sits down and catches the bar in a front squat. The front squat by itself is a hard lift, but the clean means catching a bar with the collarbones and shoulder muscles. At high weights this is like jumping throat-first into a noose: the weight lands right across the middle of the body, the blood pressure and heart rate skyrocket, the face flushes, and the legitimate sensation of being crushed sets in like a stroke.
The bottom of the front squat is not unlike being teleported without protection to the bottom of a very deep submarine trench. You also feel like you might crap out your soul, along with all vital organs, and turn inside out like a lamprey pulled from the depths by a fisherman. If you have ever eaten at Taco Bell, you are beyond familiar with the feeling. Since you're wondering: this is the point in competition where someone is most likely to soil themselves.*
*Really, Bob Costas has done the nation a great disservice by not pointing out this exact point in all Olympic events.
That little blue squiggle is the bar path. His is about as perfect and unwavering as one can be under the weight of 568 pounds. If you make it out of the depths of the squat, you can rack, adjust, and just chill with a baby elephant on your clavicles for a second. Matthias Steiner could do it. You really should not ever try to find out if you can, because you would most likely die or explode or both.
The jerk is the process of getting it over head. The very technical way of explaining this is to say that the lifter dips at the hips while remaining a positive upright posture, and then uses that momentum to start the bar upward. The lifter then extends the arms in an explosive press while dropping downward again in a split posture, and then locks out the weight over head.
This is the technical explanation. The realtalk explanation:
oh god am gonna pass out good god this is crushing me i'm down and dip and THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS WHOOOOO IT'S OVER HEAD wait do i have a hernia AWWWWW YEAHHHH MY BALLS FEEL GREAT! LET'S DROP THIS BEFORE I DIE
The lifter then stands with the weight overhead and waits for the judges to signal the completion of the lift as indicated by control. Then, the lifter drops the weight, and often begins crying instantly from the stress caused by the lift while rolling around on the ground like a scalded child.
The lifter in this case is you, average person. You don't cry if you do it in the Olympics. You cry because you are normal, and because olympic lifting is hard, and indeed so much harder than you know. Matthias Steiner, the lifter those screencaps are taken from, cried for different reasons in 2008. He was competing a year after his wife died in a car wreck. He had decided to go to the games on a very abbreviated training schedule, and was up against Evegny Chigashev. (You don't need to know anything about Chigashev other than this: he is huge, he is Russian, and if you painted him silver he would be throwing Wolverine in an X-Men comic.)
Matthias Steiner had never lifted 568 pounds before his final, desperate attempt in Beijing. This is what happened when he did.
He would take the podium with gold around his neck and a portrait of his dead wife in his hand. You should probably watch some lifting if you get the chance. It has its own rhythm, like a poker tournament with increasing wagers of weight, ATP, and boundless amounts of unquantifiable will. It will teach you to convert kilos to pounds quickly if only so you can gawk at how much gravity-leased weight a 130 lb Chinese woman just threw over her head. It is, at its best moments, more moving than anything involving gigantic people in singlets should be.*
*Wrestling fans, you are exempted from this statement, especially if you weep at WWE Hall of Fame induction speeches or old Rulon Gardner clips like I do.
This being one of the homestretch Fridays, we turn toward one of EDSBS' national pasttimes: time-killing. After reading a very long thread about impossible college athletics stories, we have as a council decided the best thing to do is air our own immortal secrets of time spent around the glorious world of athletics.
The rules and examples are as follows.
NO PLAGIARISM. For instance, sure you went to school with Orangejello and Lemonjello, and oh sure you were a bouncer at a bar in NC when you threw Tim Duncan out for being nasty to a lady. You also can use the copy and paste button, and GTFO for that. Stories must be original like this: we did whippits with Gator basketballer Dan Williams at a party at Florida, and it was AWESOME.
PERSONALLY VOUCHED FOR. I did in fact have a friend who worked at the Florida bookstore, and I trust her when she says Florida quarterback Doug Johnson tried not only to skeeve free class notes off of her, but also dropped the "Do you know who I am?" on her. She had no idea who he was, and he left in a huff. Be scientific, because the fate of the world depends on this.
INTERESTING. "Hey dude, did you know Jason Williams smoked weed at Florida?" is not a fascinating story. What is fascinating is former Gator Channing Crowder befriending one of our associates at a casino, drinking a thousand beers with him over the course of a day, and then when my friend suggested night-bowfishing in the Glades, Crowder saying "LET'S DO THIS" and going harder than a Russian in an overnight fish slaughter. Channing Crowder is one of our greatest Gators, and do not ever, ever forget this.
We start with the following story, naturally about Charles Barkley.While at The Sporting News, we did a story on Inside The NBA on TNT. Charles Barkley required not one, but two PR people present at all times. The PR people, both attractive ladies, informed me that Charles could be "colorful," and asked me not to quote "everything he said, and especially not certain things you'll know are those things."
Then Charles walked up, smiled, shook my hand, and leaned his planetoid head of his into our conversation. He gestured at the two ladies and bellowed "Man, you gotta help me out, I've been trying to make this threesome happen for YEARS, man." And then everyone laughed nervously except for Charles, whose fucks have never been given even in the quantity of one fuck given.
The opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics in London began with a televised ode to measurement. Per NBC, the British are known for coming up with the concept of time, speed, punctuality, distance and every other metric you fail at in life. Thanks for making the bricks and mortar of the world's terrible self-esteem, England. You're a peach.
Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt narrated shots of impossibly beautiful athletes moving in slow motion. The Tower of London was mentioned without mentioning how the place was basically one big jewelry storage/torture box for the monarchy, and then something something Michael Phelps flexing in a pool. Then XBox Bob Costas appeared. Bob Costas in HD resembles the fake newscaster in Tom Clancy-themed video games, but instead of telling you how Armenia has been taken over by terrorists and needs Biff Thunderhorse and his special SEAL team to kill everyone there, he introduced Tom Brokaw, who then got everyone good and terrified about terrorism. He then embraced a wild meme let loose from the internet.
And that is how NBC welcomed you to the games: chalk cliffs, terrorism scares and just way, way too many singing children. Then everyone started playing a live-action game of Civilization. It is, for lack of a better word, neat.
