For the second consecutive season under coach Rich Rodriguez, Michigan will not be going to a bowl game.
In two seasons, Rich Rod has racked up a 8-16 overall record, beaten down the Michigan fan base to such a degree that Ohio State scarlet and gray filled up many of the best seats in the Big House this past Saturday, and left my wife, a Michigan alum, refusing to watch their games on television. "I'm already over Rich Rod," she's said on many occasions.
Now as Michigan enters the long, difficult winter of Wolverine discontent, there's a real issue that has to be decided. If you don't think Rich Rod is going to get it done at the school, you need to fire him now, before the next season commences.
Why?
Because you have a legal hook that can significantly lessen the blow of the firing -- you can argue that Rich Rodriguez breached the terms of his contract by violating NCAA rules. Bang. Meet Michigan's own stimulus plan for the athletic department, firing Rich Rod for cause.
A bit of a legal primer: All NCAA contracts contain a contractual provision allowing a school to end their relationship with a coach "for cause." Think of it is as the school's parachute in the event the plane is going down. Unlike a golden parachute where a coach is fired but receives millions to end the contract, firing someone "for cause" effectively wipes away the buyout provisions in a contract.
Rather than face a multi-million dollar obligation for a buyout, something Michigan fans are all too familiar with after the negotiations between Rich Rod and West Virginia, the school can allege a major violation of NCAA rules or intentional misconduct and show him to the door. Given that the NCAA and Michigan are already investigating Rodriguez and the football program over the amount of hours that players have spent playing or practicing football each week, the door would appear to be open to push Rich Rod out.
Some Michigan fans might be thinking, why can't we give Rich Rod one more season to see if he can win and then fire him for cause if he fails again? Here's the reason: If you uncover a breach of your contract and don't act upon it within a reasonable time, then you can't later scream breach at your convenience in order to invalidate a contract. According to the law you have to act within a reasonable time upon learning of the breach.
Michigan probably has a good idea what the results of their internal investigation are going to uncover. Why? Because the school already announced that Rich Rod and crew have failed to keep adequate logs of their players' hours spent on football. Of course, this is a preliminary finding that probably doesn't rise to the level of major violation, but releasing this information suggests that Michigan is far enough along in their internal investigation to have some idea what their final results will be. Will this investigation uncover major violations or intentional misconduct by Rich Rod? Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook In the hands of the right lawyer, virtually any results of an internal investigation could become ammunition to justify a "for cause" firing. And trust me, while Michigan might not have a good football coach, they've got an army of good lawyers.
What's more, we already have a pretty fascinating trail blazed by another collegiate sports titan when it comes to firing a coach after just two years and refusing to fulfill the terms of his contract.
You'll recall that Kentucky fired head coach Billy Gillispie this spring after just two seasons at the school. By virtually every measure, Gillispie had been more successful at Kentucky than Rich Rodriguez has at Michigan. Yet Gillispie never really fit in with the culture of the Kentucky program, some of his players rebelled, and after just two seasons the school felt compelled to act.
Sound familiar?
Kentucky fired Gillispie and swore that they owed him nothing for the remaining years on his contract. According to Kentucky, Gillispie had never officially signed a contract so the university attempted to argue that the memorandum of understanding he'd signed didn't constitute a valid contract. I argued back then that it was a contract, and that both sides were posturing in advance of a settlement.
Which is exactly what happened.
Kentucky paid out a little less than $3 million to Gillispie, and their relationship was sundered forever. But the school got away with paying barely half of what they contractually owed him.
Michigan's options are similar, but I think its legal standing is actually much better. Why? Because at the time of his firing neither Gillispie nor the University of Kentucky were being investigated by the NCAA for any allegations of rules violations. Kentucky had to rely upon a bogus claim that the document Gillispie signed was not a contract.
On Saturday, LSU's Jordan Jefferson made the inexplicable decision to spike the football with only one second remaining in the game. Spiking the football ended the game and negated two miraculous Milacles: first, Les Miles' Tigers recovered an onside kick and then they completed a 46-yard Hail Mary. In his postgame news conference Miles claimed that he didn't know who had instructed Jefferson to spike the football. "I do not know who told him to clock [spike] it," Miles said.
Except, you guessed it, Miles himself was displaying his uncanny acumen by calling for the ball to be spiked with one second remaining on the clock. That's something that you can clearly see on this video after the jump. And yet another reason why LSU fans are still staring morosely at the waters on the bayou, shaking their heads, drinking Jax beers, and cursing the day that Les Miles didn't leave for Michigan.
Earlier this season we put together a list of Les Miles' ten most improbable success stories. We branded these Milacles. In his first three years at LSU, Miles went 34-6, won a national championship, racked up an impressive 19-5 regular season record in the SEC, and won games in such an improbable fashion that you came to believe that the laws of football physics didn't apply to him. After he won a national championship despite two losses to inferior teams, I wrote a column calling him the biggest idiot to ever win a national title in college football.
Some LSU fans took offense to the characterization. I stood by my opinion. I love Les Miles, I hope he coaches at LSU for two more decades. If only so I can get texts like this soon after I sit down at the Tennessee-Vandy game. "Les Miles, you won't believe it!"
Believe what?
There is almost nothing Miles could do on a football field that would surprise me. From coaching without pants -- Miles: "I believed that my knees needed a brisk air to further legitimize our offensive prowess" -- to Miles going for two when an extra point would win the game. The totality of the football universe is truly at play when the Mad Hatter hits the sideline.
Slowly, though, word spread around Neyland Stadium from one fan to another about the end of the Ole Miss-LSU game. Everyone began shaking their head in tandem. "LSU spiked the football with one second left," a portly man behind me told his seatmate.
"That's Les Miles," the other man retorted.
Indeed, Miles has been a wild card on the sideline since he famously attempted to call timeout after LSU intercepted Tennessee in the fourth quarter of his first game as Tiger coach. Sadly, for Miles, the clock stops on the change of possession. Fortunately for him, no one saw him in that game attempting to call a timeout. Unfortunately for him, no one on the LSU sideline saw fit to call timeout with the clock running and fourth down looming against Ole Miss.
Last season the bloom appeared to be off Miles' fleur-de-lis. He and the Tigers lost as many SEC games in 2008 as they'd lost in his first three seasons combined. Cajun hearts collectively skipped a beat. But Miles, with typical self-confidence, brushed off doubters and asserted that 2009 would bring a return to championship-level football.
He was wrong.
What's worse, the harebrained schemes that served Miles so well early in his tenure, such as passing into the end zone with one second left on the clock against Auburn, are beginning to backfire. Cue the Ole Miss game, a new chapter in idiocy.
Last weekend, New England's Bill Belichick came in for an awful lot of criticism for his fourth-down call against the Indianapolis Colts. But at least Belichick realized the significance of his gamble. Miles has never been that self-aware about the perils he's narrowly avoided in his years at LSU. Some coaches steadfastly analyze risk and reward before making a steely-eyed gamble. Miles doesn't even realize the stakes when he takes his risks.
Amazingly, that's worked for him. Primarily, one supposes, because his talent level has been vastly superior to his opponents. No longer. Now LSU fans, staring down the barrel of an 8-4 season that would follow an 8-5 season, are beginning to fear the worst.
As well they should.
Let's break down Miles' errors at the end of the game in numerical format:
1. First, Miles allows seventeen seconds to run off the clock after a loss of yardage on a third down completion.
This has to go down in the annals of coaching as one of the dumbest mistakes any of us have ever witnessed. Can you imagine what being an LSU fan was like as those precious seconds ticked away? How about an Ole Miss fan, suddenly daring to dream that your most hated out-of-state rival might allow the clock to die before he even attempted another play?
Whatever you do, don't buy the fact that someone for LSU called the timeout and the officials didn't notice it.
In these situations the officials are always watching the sideline for the barest signal of a timeout to be made. They're expecting it.
All of us were.
If you're the head coach you have to run halfway to midfield frantically making the T signal at the very moment your player goes down in a heap on the field.
Anything less is pure idiocy.
That's for a coach on any level. But especially for a man making almost $4 million a year.
2. After the 17 seconds tick off, there are only nine seconds remaining and you're facing a 4th and 26.
You've already made one error but now coaching, more than anything else, becomes an exercise in decision-making. You have to answer the following question first:
How many plays can you possibly run in nine seconds if you have to gain at least 26 yards on the play to convert the first down?
Two, at best, right?
And that's potentially pushing it. Because you know that the play is going to take a while to develop if your receivers have to run that far down the field to gain the first down.
But you need to be prepared for that opportunity.
So if you convert that play you have to get your field goal team ready, right?
3. And if you don't want to run your field goal team on, you absolutely, positively, have to call two plays during that timeout, right?
Because maybe you decide that running the field goal team isn't your call.
You know that, at minimum, you have to move the ball to the Ole Miss 22 to convert the first down. So why not go ahead and call a second play that sends every receiver into the end zone assuming that you're going to be in the neighborhood of 20 yards from the goal line?
Sure, it's not ideal to make that play call in advance given that you don't know exactly what yard line you'll be on. But shouldn't you go ahead and set that up?
Again, that's if you've rejected the field goal ploy.
During that timeout you could gather the entire team around and make a play call for fourth down and the ensuing play call. Maybe even pull Jefferson aside and instruct him that he can only ground the ball if there are at least two seconds left on the clock.
Even though that's something that should have been drilled into his head already.
4. Also, at this point, keep in mind that the clock stops on a first down to move the chains.
This is one of the most glaring aspects of this situation. It's not like the clock was ticking down. It was completely stopped!
So, unlike the NFL, where running a team on the field with this amount of time remaining isn't an option, you actually have plenty of time to run a field goal unit onto the field if they're properly lined up should the pass be completed.
Which is what should have happened, ultimately, after the completion. The field goal team running onto the field is the correct decision.
But I would still have given Miles a passing grade if LSU had been prepared to do anything at all after the completion.
5. What I'm getting at is this: you don't even have a lot of decisions to be made here; if you're fortunate enough to complete the pass, then that success can't disorganize you.
Last week I wrote about the controversy over The South Will Rise Again chant at Ole Miss. In that piece I noted that Ole Miss was the only SEC school that couldn't escape the South's past. Now a new controversy is here, the Klu Klux Klan is protesting for this week's game against LSU. Seriously.
Faulkner memorably said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
And when it comes to Ole Miss that's certainly the case.
Proving that killing a wasp with a shotgun is tough business, the KKK has now stepped in to defend student's rights to chant, "The South Will Rise Again." The KKK issued this statement: "We aren't coming there to cause problems or cause trouble, Trouble has already been caused by a handful at Ole Miss, including the black student body president, who wants to shape Ole Miss into yet another liberal sodomite college."
Once the KKK takes your side, you've lost. Justifiably so. But so has anyone else on any side of the issue. Especially, by the way, putting this whole thing in a football context, Ole Miss's recruiting.
You think any other SEC school might mention that Ole Miss is a great place to go to school if you want the KKK to march on the day you play your biggest out-of-state rival of the year?
Anyone else think this would be a great time for Dave Chappelle to come out of retirement and bring back his black klan member character?
Our beaver pelt trader of the week is Bill Belichick for taking the risk on fourth down.
Astute readers of the mailbag will note that I didn't get the mailbag up last Friday because of the UT arrests combined with an early book signing in Oxford. So we missed the tally of the picks from two weeks ago.
I went 3-2-1 and Audrey, my family's French exchange student, went 2-3-1.
That ran our total's for the season to 23-22-3 for me and 18-26-4 for Audrey.
Now, our picks weren't public in the mailbag last week--although I tweeted them -- but here they were.
My picks are in bold:
UT @ Ole Miss -6
Stanford @ USC -10.5
Iowa @ Ohio State -17
Florida -17.5 @ South Carolina
Notre Dame @ Pittsburgh -7
Auburn @ Georgia -4.5
So I went, as usual 3-3. Meanwhile here were Audrey's picks along with her rationales:
Ole Miss Stanford for smart people Iowa South carolina for Jordan Pitt for brad Auburn for my hair color
She went 4-2, picking up a game on me.
Our records as we enter the homestretch:
Clay: 26-25-3
Audrey 22-28-4
Here are my picks for this week:
California @ Stanford -8
Kentucky @ Georgia -9
Ohio State -12 @ Michigan
Oklahoma -6.5 @ Texas Tech
LSU @ Mississippi -4 Vanderbilt @ Tennessee -17
And here are Audrey's along with her rationales:
California hotel
Kentucky kiki
Michigan fleur
Oklahoma voila
LSU tutu
Tennessee pipi
On to All That and a Bag of Mail. Chaz writes:
I have heard, from a source within the school, that Ole Miss is test marketing the "Hotty Toddy Man" as Colonel Reb's potential replacement (not kidding). I thought you might find this interesting/disturbing. Everyone that I encountered in the student section thought he was a joke too. I can't imagine coupling the outrage from disposing of Colonel Reb with the possibly greater outrage of choosing this guy as the new mascot. Colonel Reb would really be crying then.
I cannot imagine a greater travesty on Earth than replacing Colonel Reb with Hotty Toddy Man. It's like when Bo and Luke Duke were replaced by those guys who weren't Bo and Luke Duke during a contract dispute on the Dukes of Hazzard.
Only worse.
Actually, here's a greater travesty, playing your biggest rival on the season with a chance to lock down a likely 9-3 regular season record, and having the KKK show up to protest. Andrew D. writes:
Clay,
There's a lot of chatter about whether Rich Rodriguez should be fired this season, but I haven't heard or read anybody discussing the prospect of firing him "for cause." I haven't looked at his employment contract, but I imagine that if UM can fire him for cause, then it won't be liable for his buyout. If such a clause exists, then the athletic department could potentially fire him for his recent off-the-field incidents, like their time-keeping problem. This seems like a cheap way to get rid of Rich now because if they wait a year to fire him then they may not be able to use the "for cause" justification (unless, of course, he creates even more distractions in the coming year, which is very possible).
In any case, I think that this is an interesting angle to the story that I haven't seen discussed anywhere.
Ding, ding, ding, Andrew D. gives me a premise for a column next week.
That's actually a really fascinating question, one of many reasons why I'm glad that lawyers and lawyers-to-be are such frequent readers and e-mailers.
Now, this would clearly be a contractual dispute if they used this rationale because I don't think it's clear that this is a for cause violation, but much like Billy Gillispie's issue with Kentucky, it's very likely that there would be enough of a dispute that Michigan would get off the hook for, at minimum, half of the buyout.
Now if Michigan was really convinced that something untoward took place, they could play hardball and take this all the way through the courts. But that would open up the program to discovery and who knows what other violations Rich Rod might know about. Or what other violations Michigan might know about that could end up public and lead to violations. (Note: I'm not singling out Michigan here, just pointing out that any program under intense scrutiny with the coach and administration at loggerheads often has a substantial amount of skeletons in the closet.)
But the key point for takeaway here is that Michigan would lose their for cause claim if they kept him on and overlooked this incident. If they fired him after a sub-par third season, a year from now, Rich Rod would get his buyout.
Very good email. J. P. writes:
I think we are about to see a trend, spurred on by the McCoy-Shipley and Tebow-Cooper housing situations. College coaches requiring their starting quarterbacks to live with their favorite receiver. Is it only a white thing? Do Mack Brown and Urban Meyer do this because of an emphasis on saving the endangered species - white receivers? I am not sure, but put me down for crashing on the McCoy-Shipley couch if I had to pick. I'd put up with Shipley playing his guitar over Tebow watching "8 minute surgery" videos.
Are you making light of the amazing fact that Tim Tebow and Riley Cooper live together and that Colt McCoy and Jordan Shipley live together?
Don't you realize how astounding it is that two football players choose to live together?
I'm channeling Verne Lundquist for the first two sentences.
Speaking of which, I think Fox should bring in Verne to call the Texas-Florida game just so he can sprinkle the roommate information for us during the game. Would his head explode with two quarterback/wide receiver roommate combinations in the same game?
It's entirely possible.
Ben F. writes:
Wait, Toby Gerhart is white?
This e-mail is funnier because right now a bunch of people reading this are realizing it for the first time.
Yep, Stanford has a white tailback who is leading BCS schools in rushing.
Uga VII, not surprisingly, the son of Uga VI, succumbed to an unexpected heart illness Thursday. The Bulldog mascot, in just his second year prowling the sideline, was only four years old. Presumably, he is survived by many other dogs given that Georgia uses lineal descendants to anoint the next mascot. The mascot-less Georgia team will play on Saturday against Kentucky without their English bulldog on the sideline. In a show of support, the entire team will lick their balls at halftime.
The conclave will soon convene to nominate the next Pope/Bulldog. Wait for white smoke to enshroud the city of Athens. An early betting line on favorites was scrapped after oddsmakers realized that every dog that might replace Uga already looks exactly like Uga and no one would realize he'd actually changed. Head coach Mark Richt, seriously distraught over the dog's death, channeled every reality show television show when someone is voted off, telling the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "You never think something like that could happen that quickly but it certainly did, " Georgia coach Mark Richt said. "It's sad we won't have him on the sideline anymore."
Back on August 30, 2008, no one could have foreseen this calamity. On that bright late-summer afternoon, Uga VII debuted as mascot, at a robust 56 1/2 pounds. He was the biggest bulldog mascot ... ever. And perhaps, in those halcyon days when everyone rubbed his belly and grinned, was sewn the seed of Uga VII's demise. Like many of the grown men and women who barked furiously in his face, he had difficulty turning away from a full plate of food.
Now comes the funeral.
Uga VII, with a Ray Goffian lifetime record of just 16-7, will be interred in the stadium mausoleum alongside his forebears. In the end, Uga VII is the William Henry Harrison of Bulldogs, catching the equivalent of pneumonia as he delivered his valdictory bark.
But all is not lost, his final game was a 31-24 victory over Auburn in the South's oldest rivalry. And his passing, while untimely, is not without benefits.
UGA VIITo wit, 10 good things about Uga VII's passing.
1. He will not have to be on the sideline for the Georgia Tech game.
2. Defensive coordinator Willie Martinez', "It's not me, it's the mascot," explanation for why his defense stinks will no longer fly.
3. A new dog will get to stare down the plunging necklines of the amply endowed Bulldog women when they pose for photos alongside him -- making men everywhere jealous.
4. Internet site traffic for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution will soar once sicko Georgia fans log on for retrospective photo gallery of Uga VII's reign.
5. A new dog gets to stud while looking at pictures of Herschel Walker.
6. The black collar with silver studs that Uga VII wore around his neck can go to someone who really needs it ... Quincy Carter.
7. Tony Barnhart's new book, "Uga VII: A Dog, a People, a Tradition," will climb the Georgia bestseller lists when a special memorial edition is released replete with Barnhart's own brand of hair dye. Read the rest here.
CBS carries the SEC Game of the Week into living rooms across the nation every weekend. CBS' deal is the only national broadcast of any collegiate conference. (Independent Notre Dame, of course, has an eight-game deal with NBC.) ABC also carries football games on network television. But the ABC games, featuring Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, Pac-10, and Big East teams are carried regionally. That means ABC carries teams split geographically, which would theoretically lead to higher overall ratings. That's been the case every year.
Until now.
For the first time since CBS added the SEC in 1996, the SEC games are outdrawing their regional counterparts on ABC. This season's SEC ratings are up 29 percent over comparable ratings last season. Given that CBS still has Alabama-Auburn and what will probably be the highest rated game of the season prior to the BCS bowls, Florida-Alabama in the SEC championship game, CBS and the SEC are likely to triumph over ABC for the season.
Should the SEC thank Tim Tebow? Maybe so. But even without Tebow, does this represent a fascinating turn in the ratings game? I think so. Read on for seven reasons why this is incredibly significant.
The SEC's ascension in television ratings has slid under the radar this fall. That makes sense with all the attention being directed to the controversies on the field, but in the sporting arena, this year represents a seismic tipping point, the year the SEC went national while the rest of the country kept fighting over their Balkanized football-watching regions.
In fact, I'll even coin a phrase for it, ManifeSECt Destiny.
Most of the implications from the SEC beating regional broadcasts of the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-10 games of the week haven't yet been written or talked about. In fact, go ahead and consider this your first primer on why the SEC's national rankings represent such an important move in collegiate athletics.
1. As I predicted when this contract was signed, the SEC is becoming the de facto No. 2 brand in football behind the NFL.
No matter where you are across the country, you can flip on your television and watch the top SEC game of the week on CBS. Need to watch the lower tier games because you've gotten hooked on the SEC's storylines thanks to the gobs of national coverage? Then you can find them on ESPN's network of stations.
I've written this before, but it bears repeating, it's easier to watch your favorite SEC team on television if you live out-of-market than it is if you live out-of-market in the NFL.
Winning nationwide in football is just the first step. What's coming next? The SEC tide is going to be lifted in every sport, particularly those with a major television presence. For now though, there is only one football brand in America more valuable than the SEC, the NFL.
2. Whither the Tebow Effect?
Skeptics might point to the return of Saint Tebow as the reason for a one-year bump in the ratings. I think that argument is flawed. The trend lines are moving in the SEC's favor no matter who is lined up under center for Florida. That's because each year of the national television contract becomes more of an engine driving viewership. Year after year of increased coverage feeds on itself. There's so much money at stake, ratings have to grow.
Having said that, clearly a big draw for the SEC this year has been Tim Tebow's national prominence as the fourth-year quarterback of a very successful defending national champion. That's why Florida has been the top draw all season long when it comes to television ratings. It also helps that the state of Florida, as the fourth biggest in the nation with over 18 million people, is the biggest in the SEC footprint by a substantial margin. Georgia, the second biggest state by population, is barely half as large.
So, for ratings purposes, if CBS had to pick one team that they wanted to dominate, Florida would be the selection. But how much of this influx in ratings is a function of the Tebow effect? It's hard to be certain on a yearly basis. That's why the conference has a back-up plan.
3. Selling coaches.
No conference in America sells their coaches as celebrities better than the SEC.
Quick, who are the coaches of Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee?
You'd have to be living under a sports rock not to know that, right?
Now, quick, who are the coaches of the Houston Texans, the Seattle Seahawks and the Atlanta Falcons?
I used to think the cult of the coach idea was absurd, now I think it's pretty shrewd. The SEC has positioned their coaches to be celebrities because the players come and go every few years. But the coach stays in the program. Unlike the NFL where coaches vanish beneath the star wattage of a major player, the coaches in the SEC are the constellations. And while coaches may not be there forever, they last much longer than any one particular player.
Which means, even if you're a fan who isn't that well-versed on the players for a particular year, you feel like you understand the vibe of the program because you have an opinion of the man in charge.
That also means that SEC Commissioner Mike Slive's move to cut down on the sniping between coaches might be counterproductive. Ironically enough, coaches taking shots at one another is one of the best ways to strengthen the SEC brand.
And, not coincidentally, the SEC ratings.
Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook 4. ESPN/ABC's awkward position benefits the SEC tremendously.
CBS's best SEC game competes against ESPN/ABC's regional coverage of games. Yet ESPN/ABC has its own major television deal with the SEC to promote the conference. Talk about hamstrung. ESPN/ABC finds itself in the unique position of building up interest in the SEC to help draw viewers for their coverage of the SEC. Meanwhile, in providing that coverage, they're simultaneously stripping away viewers from their own featured content on ABC.
That 29 percent yearly increase is also a nice bump for CBS that's indicative, I believe, of the increased attention that ESPN/ABC has been paying to the SEC's big stories. For instance, the ESPN-fueled drama between Lane Kiffin and Urban Meyer led to a, wait for it, 60 percent increase in viewers for Tennessee-Florida in 2009 over 2008's rating.
Getting ABC/ESPN on board for the majority of the games was an incredibly shrewd move by the SEC. Their biggest foe in primetime telecasts is also, paradoxically, their greatest ally.
5. The networks want to build SEC stars.
With CBS Sports College Television and ESPN's focus on recruiting and high school games across their network platforms, football recruits are increasingly becoming celebrities before they ever reach a campus.
Why?
Because in college football these networks can book at least three years worth of attention from these players. The earlier these networks can make football recruits stars, therefore, the more interest the sporting public has for them, and the greater the resulting ratings.
See, with basketball, recruits become stars but they vanish off the collegiate stage in a hurry. For ESPN that's no big deal, they can carry someone like Carmelo Anthony from high school, to college for one-year at Syracuse and then on to the NBA and make money off of him for the entire career path. Because they carry games at all three levels.
So one-and-done players in college really don't hurt them.
But with college football players, thanks to the collective bargaining agreement you get three years of play guaranteed. So if you're one of these networks you're incentivized to make these guys stars as quickly as you possibly can.
Guess which players are going to be given star-billing the most?
The ones whose games are featured most frequently on the network.
In 1985 Bo Jackson won the Heisman Trophy by rushing for 1,657 yards and 15 touchdowns. Twenty-four years later, no SEC running back has won the award again. Not Emmitt Smith, not Darren McFadden, not Knowshon Moreno, not Jamal Lewis, not Fred Taylor, not Garrison Hearst not Terrell Davis -- okay, he wasn't that good in college. None of them. And it's not like there hasn't been an awful lot of talented player, by my review of first-round draft picks, the SEC has had 15 running backs taken in the first round since Bo Jackson won the Heisman.
For over a generation, Jackson has stood alone. But now, in the absence of any overwhelming favorite, Alabama running back Mark Ingram seems to be atop many Heisman lists. Is it justified? How do his numbers stack up compared to past winners? And what do those past winners at running back -- there have only been seven since Bo Jackson in 1985 -- tell us about the current state of college football. Proceed, fearless reader.
Barry Sanders' 1988 season is the gold standard for college football rushers. In fact, it may be the gold standard for college football players period. In that year Sanders rushed for 2,628 yards in just 11 games. He had 37 regular season touchdowns. (All stats are pre-bowls, since the Heisman is handed out in advance of bowl season.) But you don't need to hear it from me. Go look at his game stats from that season. In four of the 11 regular season games he went over 300 yards. Four times. He averaged 238.9 yards per game.
I think we can safely call this the greatest season for a running back in the history of college football. Not surprisingly, Sanders won the Heisman Trophy.
Next came Rashaan Salaam at Colorado in 1994. Salaam broke the elusive 2,000-yard plane and scored 21 touchdowns. The next season, 1995, Eddie Georgia notched 1,927 yards rushing, 24 touchdowns, and an average of 152.2 yards per game. In 1998 Ricky Williams broke 2,000 yards and finished the regular season with 2,124 yards and 27 touchdowns. In 1999 Ron Dayne went for 1,834 yards and 19 touchdowns en route to the award. Finally, for the only time for a running back this decade, Reggie Bush won the Heisman in 2005 with 1,658 rushing yards and 18 touchdowns. Bush also had 383 receiving yards.
What does all of this tell us? In the past two decades, you have to put up huge numbers to be considered for the Heisman Trophy as a running back. That's because the Heisman has become a quarterback's trophy. Indeed, every winner this decade has played quarterback except for Bush. Four of the past seven winners have soared over 2,000 yards rushing, Eddie George and Ron Dayne came tantalizingly close. And Reggie Bush ascended the Heisman plateau on the strength of his running, receiving, and punt returning prowess. Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook
Now the question remains, does Mark Ingram have what it takes to chalk up the first Heisman Trophy for Alabama? I've already cast my lot with Boise State's Kellen Moore, but Ingram's candidacy is an intriguing one. Let's go pro and con.
1. Pro: Ingram is averaging 6.7 yards per carry which is tops among major college backs. It's also better than the per carry averages that Bo Jackson, Darren McFadden, Cadillac Williams, Jamal Lewis, and other SEC tailback luminaries have put together in their best campaigns.
For whatever reason, Ingram doesn't have a reputation as a breakaway back. but his per carry average is better than just about everyone in major college football. In fact, the only two BCS backs that have a higher per carry average among the nation's top 100 rushers are Oregon's LaMichael James and Florida's Jeff Demps.
2. Con: Presently Mark Ingram has 1, 297 yards rushing, 225 yards receiving, and he has 13 total touchdowns. That's good for fifth in the nation in rushing.
While those stats are impressive, it's important to note that Jackson, Sanders, Salaam, George, and Dayne will all finish with more yards than Ingram even though Ingram will gain two extra games on those men--the additional 12th game added to the schedule as well as the SEC championship game. Statistically, if he wins, Ingram is likely to have the lowest rushing average per game than every Heisman Trophy winning running back since Archie Griffin ran for 1,357 yards in 1975.
3. Pro: Ingram has played against rugged SEC defenses, five of which are presently ranked in the top 25 of the nation's defenses. Three of the backs that are ranked above him in total yardage, play outside the BCS at Fresno State, UTEP, and Temple.
4. Con: Stanford running back Toby Gerhart is the only BCS back with more yards than Ingram, and he's also scored 19 rushing touchdowns to Ingram's 10.
Given that Gerhart has recently led Stanford to back-to-back top 10 wins, why isn't Gerhart considered the Heisman favorite if a running back is to be selected?
5. Pro: The only quarterback that can justifiably be selected over Ingram or Gerhart is Boise State's Kellen Moore.
Given the relatively mediocre seasons, at least relative to their past standards, of Colt McCoy and Tim Tebow, both of these men should be eliminated from Heisman contention. Meaning that effectively, this should be a three-horse race, Moore, Gerhart, or Ingram down the stretch.
6. Con: If Mark Ingram played for a team that wasn't ranked in the top five in the country, he would not be a major candidate.
Consider, last season Georgia's Moreno rushed for 1,400 yards, 16 touchdowns, and caught 33 passes for 392 yards.
No one even mentioned him as a Heisman candidate. Isn't Ingram being hyped solely because Alabama is having a good season and there is such a weak field of contenders?
7. Pro: Alabama plays Chattanooga this weekend and Ingram could roll up 200 yards pretty easily if Nick Saban elects to keep him in the game.
Following this game, Alabama has the national stage to themselves for a Friday game at Auburn. As if that weren't enough, the SEC Championship game has a shot at becoming the most highly watched college football game, in terms of viewers, in CBS history.
So Ingram has a better opportunity for a strong close than any other Heisman contender not named Tim Tebow.
8. Con: Mark Ingram is in the same voting region as Tim Tebow.
How much will he be hurt by those who reflexively vote for Tebow and cut into his support base? Does someone like Gerhart have a geographic advantage when it comes to support?
9. Pro: Ingram has performed the best against SEC opponents and has not, thus far, padded his stats against weaker competition.
In fact, in the two easiest games on Alabama's schedule, FIU and North Texas, Ingram carried the ball just 25 times for 142 yards. His best running has come in conference.
10. Con: Ingram, a sophomore back, has come out of nowhere this season and his numbers aren't overwhelming.
There's nothing eye-catching about what Ingram has done. He won't come near breaking 2,000 yards, there's no singular play that anyone can point to, yet, that defines his candidacy. He's a hard-working, grueling, runner. Typically those types of runners aren't rewarded.
Plus, he hasn't built up a profile with the Heisman voters, he's come out of nowhere. That relative anonymity works against him when it comes to garnering a national award. I'd wager that one month ago, prior to the South Carolina performance, most voters didn't even have Ingram on their radar screens.
Midway through the Ole Miss-Tennessee game on Saturday, a highlight package of Archie Manning's playing days at Ole Miss came on the jumbotron. Ole Miss fans, up to that point cheering their biggest win of the season, went quiet. The man behind me muttered softy to himself, "Them were the days."
As Archie ran around on the field making play after play, it occurred to me, not for the first time, how amazing it is that he sired not one, but two, Super Bowl winning quarterbacks. By the time the cameras found his youngest son, Eli, in a suite, I was still attempting to contemplate how amazing the fact was. By Sunday, after Peyton Manning led his Colts to 21 points in the final 12 minutes of a victory over the Patriots, there could be no doubt: Archie Manning's sperm is one of the greatest national treasures in our country.
Right up there with Abraham Lincoln, the flag outside Fort McHenry that inspired Francis Scott Key to jot down "The Star Spangled Banner" and Dorothy's ruby red slippers. That's why I'm making a humble suggestion to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Archie's sperm should be an exhibit. (Lets see you do that, exhibit on late 19th century wheat threshers.) Otherwise, the museum is worth nothing.
On to the Starting 11.
1. Is TCU's Gary Patterson the next Urban Meyer?
Granted, the comparison doesn't fit squarely since Patterson has been at TCU for eight years and Meyer was only at Bowling Green for two years and then Utah for two years before he arrived at Florida. But if you look at their last four seasons as a head coach, Patterson is presently 40-9 while Meyer went 39-8.
My point, someone is stealing Patterson away at the end of the season, the only question is who?
And here's where it gets interesting, I played coaching dominoes on the phone driving back from Oxford. I had each of the people I talked with assume that Charlie Weis is gone. Then I assumed that either Brian Kelly or Urban Meyer would take over at Notre Dame.
Kelly leaving Cincinnati really doesn't cause the entire coaching universe to scramble since it isn't an amazingly desirable job, but what would Florida do if Meyer left?
I formulated a couple of working hypotheses, A.) Given the Ron Zook failure, there is no way Florida takes someone who isn't already a head coach and B.) What head coaches are the most attractive out there regardless of conference affiliation?
Isn't the answer Gary Patterson? And if Meyer left, wouldn't there be a really good shot that Jeremy Foley would head back to the Mountain West conference and poach another rising coaching star?
I think so.
Anyway, coaching dominoes is great fun. I highly recommend it when you're on long drives by yourself.
2. Do you also feel cheated as a college football fan that teams like Stanford, Cincinnati -- even though I dogged them above -- Boise State and Georgia Tech don't get to throw their hats in the ring and compete for a championship at the end of the season.
First, how hot is Stanford on offense?
Jim Harbaugh going for two against Pete Carroll when he already had 48 points was one of the best things I've seen this season.
Can you imagine how sweet that was for Stanford fans? To kick the dirt in USC's face for a change.
So I miss seeing Stanford in a playoff, assuming they find a way to win the Pac-10, but I really miss Georgia Tech.
Can you imagine a team trying to gameplan against Tech in an eight or 16-team tournament. When you don't even know you are going to play them until less than a week before? How do you get ready for them without any previous preparation?
Also, how many points would it take to win, say, if Cincinnati and Georgia Tech played? Seriously, is there a more exciting game out there? Maybe Boise State against Stanford.
I'm drooling now. Follow Us on Twitter Friend Us on Facebook
3. Would Cincinnati's defense hold up against Florida, Texas or Alabama?
They gave up 202 yards rushing to West Virginia. Granted that was on 46 carries, but still, the defense has shown some ominous cracks that don't befit a national title contender. At least not when you compare their defense with Texas, Alabama, Florida, or TCU.
Put it this way, does anyone think that Cincinnati would be less than a double-digit underdog on any neutral site game against Texas, Alabama or Florida?
Would Cincinnati even be favored in a neutral game against LSU or Ole Miss? (The oddsmakers love Ole Miss. Perhaps they've been bribed with excess BenJarvus Green-Ellis jerseys).
I don't think so.
And if we don't think that, and the market wouldn't think that in Las Vegas, isn't it ridiculous when we don't even allow the market to dictate the best match-up between the two best teams? Instead we rely on polls and a computer.
In other words, we're not even using the best market to determine the match-up, we're allowing a flawed and limited perception of teams to govern our selection.
4. Did anyone else see the kid celebrating Mississippi State's apparent kick return touchdown that came back?
I'm not sure why this clip is so addictive to me, but I watched it four times on DVR replay, and then voluntarily leapt up from my seat when my editor found it again on Youtube.
There's something about the curious arm pumping with the pom pom, the slightly askew cap, the chubby cheeks, and the head movement that all lends itself to greatness.
Of course, now I feel like there's a 90 percent chance that kid is going to grow up and start a blog called claytravissucks.com.
5. Michigan is still awful in year two.
Assuming he survives, which is a big assumption, is Rich Rodriguez going to fire defensive coordinator Greg Robinson? You'll recall that last offseason Robinson replaced Scott Shafer, who was hired by Syracuse. Last year Shafer's Michigan defense finished ranked 67th in the country.
Now Robinson has, wait for it, the 89th-ranked defense in the country.
Last year, Shafer's Michigan defense allowed 347 points, the most in school history. This year the Michigan defense has given up 309 points through 11 games. With Ohio State coming to town and Michigan's defensive woes against Big Ten schools, don't be surprised to see that record fall for the second year in a row.
Meanwhile in the ultimate irony, Shafer's Syracuse defense has been better than Michigan's.
Leaving us with this question, can we just acknowledge that nothing is going right at Michigan?
6. Kellen Moore rewarded my faith in his Heisman campaign.
Kellen WinslowMoore passed for five touchdowns and 299 yards. Through 10 games he leads the nation in passing efficiency, has the second lowest interception percentage of the nation's top 100 most efficient quarterbacks, and now has 32 touchdowns against just three interceptions.
When are people going to take notice of this performance in a year when the other top candidates keep dropping like flies.
You know what doesn't help?
The fact that Boise State's Heisman campaign is not ready for primetime. I e-mailed the powers-that-be at Boise State and asked him to send along whatever facts and figures they'd put together to buttress Moore's Heisman case and make sure I had those facts lined up in my endorsement.
Boise State didn't respond to me.
Seriously, what are they doing out there?
7. Let's talk some more about Archie's sperm.
How many men have successfully become fathers in America between the years 1969 and 1988 -- the age range of current starting quarterbacks in the NFL. Conservatively, 40 million. (Currently 4.3 million children are born every year).
How many quarterbacks have started a game in the NFL during this generation?
Maybe 500?
How many quarterbacks born during this generation have won a Super Bowl?
11!
And Archie Manning has fathered two of them!
Seriously, just think about the odds on this.
I'm going to do a full column on this at some point, but it's unfathomable that the same man has sired two of the greatest quarterbacks in football history.
We're talking about the toughest position in all of sports.
I want to actually run the odds on this happening. Put it this way, each of these kids, including me, had a .00000003 chance of winning a Super Bowl.
And Archie pulled it off twice.
What football fan out there woudln't want their smiling son or daughter posing alongside Archie's sperm?
OXFORD, Miss -- Saturday, I had the misfortune of watching Dexter McCluster run for 4 billion yards against Tennessee. At least that's what it felt like. In all actuality, McCluster merely slashed, dashed, and cavorted his way for 282 yards on 25 carries. In the process Dexter McCluster struck a blow for men named Dexter, made himself millions of dollars in the NFL, and left Tennessee's defense looking as if they weren't familiar with many advanced defensive techniques.
Such as tackling.
All of this took place on a glorious Saturday morning in Oxford, Miss., when, aside from the brutal 11 a.m. kickoff that left Ole Miss students in bed until halftime, it was hard to imagine wanting to be anywhere else. By shortly after 2 p.m., I wished I'd been anywhere else.
At least, that is, when I wasn't marveling over McCluster's utter domination of the Vols.
I've watched football games my entire life, and I've never seen a rushing performance in person that dominant.
Ever.
Let's be honest, it's not like Tennessee's defense is awful. They'd gone almost two years without giving up 30 points to anyone. Tennessee only allowed one touchdown against Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, two to Florida, two to Auburn. Then came Dexter McCluster.
That squirrelly little back Dexter got four.
By himself.
Anyway, come along for the journey through 18 observations from the game. That's a nice tip of the beaver pelt cap to Ole Miss' Archie Manning.
1. Let's get this out of the way early. At the NFL Combine come February, McCluster is going to run in the 4.3s. And someone on the NFL Network is going to say, "Wow, I didn't know he was that fast."
That analyst should be slapped in the face with a wet rag that has recently been dipped in carbolic acid.
McCluster is that fast. He made Tennessee defenders look like they were forced to play on roller skates all afternoon.
2. In fact, for one game at least. McCluster looked an awful lot like Tennessee Titan Chris Johnson.
That's what I kept thinking as this game progressed, if McCluster was just a couple of inches taller he'd be Johnson's clone. And you'll recall that Chris Johnson ran a 4.24, the fastest time in NFL Combine history.
You'll know Johnson's 40 time if you've seen any Tennessee Titans game for the past two years. That fact is, via sheer ubiquity and repetition, the "Tim Tebow and Riley Cooper are roommates" of NFL football telecasts.
Am I the only person who kept picturing guys named Dexter pumping their fists everywhere as this game was going on?
I mean, really, if you think about it, if I'd told you that the two most explosive football players in the SEC were going to be named Percy and Dexter in back-to-back years, would you have ever believed me?
Thomas the Tank Engine's friends, maybe, but guys who made you involuntarily hold your breath every time they touched the ball?
I don't think so.
It's uncanny.
3. How was Tennessee surprised by McCluster running the ball out of the wildcat formation?
I don't believe he ever handed off. And if he did, shouldn't you encourage that since whoever he handed it off to wouldn't be moving at the speed of light?
Yet, all afternoon, Tennessee's defense looked like McCluster had brought alchemy to football: presto, he can make gold out of thin air and score touchdowns simply by taking a direct snap.
Basically, i don't get the defensive panic that comes from the Wildcat. Effectively, that's just the single wing that Jim Thorpe used to run.
Somebody explain to me why this is so earth-shattering. Granted, a talented player has the ball in his hands, but how is it tougher to defend than a quarterback being under center with the tailback lined up behind him? Because then the defense has to take account of a bevy of options, right? Put simply, the quarterback could pass or hand off to a speedy back.
McCluster never passed all afternoon.
He just ran.
After a direct snap.
Meanwhile Jevan Snead, the man Steve Spurrier's sports information director thought was the best quarterback in the league, is standing off to the side of the formation doing nothing.
Clearly, this works at times, but how does it work all afternoon? At some point wouldn't you just have to say, okay, if McCluster attempts a pass, they're going to score. And commit every single player to the line of scrimmage at the snap?
4. Ole Miss is still trying to get rid of their No. 6 BenJarvus Green-Ellis jerseys.
My friend, Memphis radio show host Chris Vernon, came to Oxford with me and bought a jersey for $20.
This is funny on so many levels. Among them:
A.) How many Ole Miss fans end up with this jersey for Christmas because someone's Mom hasn't recently checked a roster?
B.) Do you think someone got fired at the Ole Miss athletic department for ordering 20,000 extra Green-Ellis jerseys? I'm picturing the Ole Miss head of merchandise looking at the inventory list and thinking, "What in God's name are we doing with all of these things?"
In a few years, all these Green-Ellis Ole Miss jerseys are going to be showing up on fundraising commercials for impoverished African orphans.
C. Did they offer the overflow to Green-Ellis for a dollar each? For some reason I'm picturing Brent Schaeffer driving a 1989 Chevy Silverado with the back seat pulled out to fit extra boxes of his Ole Miss jerseys.
5. Why did Houston Nutt take the ball out of McCluster's hands at the end of the first half?
He went to Snead for three straight passes. One pass hit a UT defender in the helmet, one was dropped in the end zone, and the third was short-hopped to McCluster.
I was praying that Houston Nutt would go away from McCluster. Like, you know, he's done for an awful lot of big games this season.
For instance, how did Dexter only get the ball six times against Alabama?
6. How can Ole Miss ban the chanting of "The South Will Rise Again," but allow that Hotty Toddy guy on the JumboTron?
If you haven't ever been to Ole Miss, they have a man in a garish red and blue outfit that has Hotty Toddy written on the lapels. I'd say it's uncomfortable to watch this video, but that does a disservice to the word uncomfortable. It actually makes you feel like you have a tic in your hair and you can't find it. Or like when a person with an eyepatch lifts the eyepatch.
You can't un-see what you just saw.
Even now, just writing about this, makes me uncomfortable. Like every time they show Georgia's Joe Cox on the sideline with his helmet off.
I ask again, Ole Miss fans, how do you stand for this?
7. Why did Eli and all his friends, including his brother, dress the same for the game?
Fan at book signingJust because you're an NFL quarterback doesn't mean you can show up at the tailgate in matching outfits with other men. Somebody has to change clothes, right?
Definitely.
Now, credit where credit is due, Eli shopped in Square Books just before my book signing. (Which is also where I spotted the shirt, pictured right, not on Eli.) Of course, he didn't come to the signing, but he was shopping in one of the best bookstores in the South. That shows he has good judgment.
Even still, change clothes.
Unless, that is, you all wear BenJarvus Green-Ellis jerseys.
8. Things I found myself thinking in between McCluster first downs: Do you think Nu'Keese Richardson is watching from jail?
(FYI, after the game, I learned that Nu'Keese had been released from jail by gametime. Nonetheless, these are still questions worth pondering.)
And if he had been, would he have gotten to choose the television station? Or does the fact that he's a football player have no status in jail and did he have to sit and watch Judge Judy?
Also, does he get back the air pistol from the robbery?
No, because it's evidence, right?
But what happens if the charges got dropped, would he get it back?
Further, what are the odds that someone in the Knoxville police force who isn't a UT fan has mocked a UT fan, by using the air pistol as a prop?
100 percent.
9. Midway through the fourth quarter, Verno and I started debating whether the two of us could touch, not tackle, just touch, Dexter McCluster if he got the ball at the 10-yard line and we were both lined up to try and keep him from scoring.
I'm offering this challenge up as gold to the Ole Miss athletic department.
The man who made the Colonel Reb Is Crying song and me, trying to get a hand on McCluster with him starting at the 10-yard-line and the two of us between him and the goal line.
Just one hand.
This video could be golden.
10. The boots and dresses combination is everywhere now.
Thank God.
I feel about the boots and dresses combo at tailgates like old men feel about thongs. Basically, like I wish I'd been single when this was popular.
Seriously, old men's love affair with thongs is really underdiscussed. Probably because I'm the only person who will write about it. But I've had five conversations where men older than 50 have told me that when they were growing up women didn't wear thongs.
In the past three months.
That's a lot of conversations with old men about women's underwear.
You're cringing right now, but bring it up with an older man. I guarantee you he comes clean about how pissed he is that he missed the thong era.
11. If you doubt McCluster's speed, watch the 71-yard run. In particular the part of the play where he ran diagonally across the field and no one could catch him.
Let me repeat, he ran at a diagonal and everyone else was running straight ahead and they couldn't catch him.
"That's Tecmo Bo," Verno said, sitting next to me.
And he was right.
I halfway expected for McCluster to let people catch up to him and then start running in circles backwards to regain his speed before he passed them again.
12. You know how you can tell that your team got whipped? You find yourself searching for flags in the backfield after plays more than 10 times in a game.
On each of McCluster's four touchdown runs, I spent the final couple of seconds of the run, once I was sure he was going to score, looking for a penalty flag.
Is there anything more self-defeating than looking for a flag on the field after your team got gouged? The only other equivalent I can think of is when you have a really bad dream and you wake up, and then realize that you dreamed everything.
That's exactly what seeing the penalty flag lying on the field is like.
And I never got that feeling on Saturday.
Nope, it was real life and it was a nightmare.
13. If I was Ole Miss's chancellor, I'd solve, "the South will rise again" controversy, by saying, "Okay, we're not all that different no matter what color our skin is." Then I'd pivot to a new, common, enemy: "What if we burn Hotty Toddy man at midfield. We'll give every race a lit torch, and once we roast him, we'll all be purified."
I think this might work.
14. If you're Tennessee's Ed Orgeron, do you take a perverse bit of pleasure in this game?
After all, you brought in the recruits who dominated your new team. And even if you'd won, no one was going to give you any credit for the victory. It's kind of like getting dumped but then having your girlfriend end up marrying the President.
Yeah, you lost, but you used to sleep with the First Lady.
Anyway, it's a good thing that Coach O. didn't talk to the media this week. That would have been a huge distraction.
15. Did you know that Ole Miss is now barring Colonel Reb from entering the stadium?
Yep, last week for the first time ever, they refused him entrance to the student section.
This thing is going to turn into yet another battle.
A reader wrote me and asked whether there's any correlation between these battles and the upcoming release of the movie, The Blind Side. I'm not ready to go that far yet, but fighting this battle in conjunction with the movie release is kind of odd.
Almost like Ole Miss's chancellor is angling for the fawning New Yorker piece.
Also, I'm heading down to Oxford today for a book signing at Square Books. I'll be there at 5. Then I'll be in Oxford for the UT-Ole Miss game on Saturday. Hopefully I'll see many of y'all.
When Ole Miss hosts Tennessee Saturday, the school's band will not play "From Dixie WIth Love," a song that features an incongruous pairing of "Dixie" with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Why? Because some students and alumni chant, "The South will rise again," at the end of the song.
For Ole Miss' first-year chancellor, Dan Jones (pictured, right), this chant is unacceptable behavior.
"Here at the University of Mississippi, there must be no doubt that this is a warm and welcoming place for all," Dan Jones wrote Tuesday in a letter to the university community. "We cannot even appear to support those outside our community who advocate a revival of racial segregation. We cannot fail to respond."
So Jones has responded.
And so, "From Dixie With Love" has gone the way of Colonel Reb, the original song Dixie, and the Confederate battle flag, excised from Vaught-Hemingway stadium as offensive relics of a bygone era.
But in his response, Jones has opened another series of debates. What are the obligations of a generation born two or three decades after James Meredith integrated Ole Miss' campus with regard to racial sensitivity? And, in taking this stand to combat an offensive phrase, are Jones and members of his generation fighting the ghosts of their youth more than they're fighting a present-day ill? Are Jones and his ilk the true heirs to the Lost Cause mythology for fighting against an evil that doesn't actually exist?
Unlike Dixie, or Colonel Reb, or the Confederate battle flag, the "South will rise again" addition to the song is a recent incarnation, originated, by most guesses, in the past five years or so.
Let's add a few years of leeway there and say that the chant began in the neighborhood of the year 2000, the dawn of the 21st Century.
So the chant itself, though the phrase has long since existed, is not connected to a time before the university's integration and is not an embodiment of past values. If it were a vestige of years past that had existed for decades, this would be a much simpler argument. Traditions of racial intolerance should be left in the past. But if, as it would appear, the chant is of a more recent vintage at football games, how do we assess the relative offensiveness of the language when standing alone the language is not inflammatory?
The Watergate investigations became framed by the single question, "What did the President know and when did he know it?" The question that emerges from the "The South will rise again" imbroglio is: Who is chanting it and why?
After all, isn't it the intent behind the phrase more than the words that matter? While men and women of generations past might hear this language and think of a monolithic and ethnically divided South rising again, "a revival of segregation" in the chancellor's words, why can't the young Ole Miss students be advocating a particular form of regional pride? "The South will rise again," is hardly a universal phrase of racism like an ethnic slur, something students are chanting, knowingly espousing an idea of a racially divided South.
After all, think about this: Today's Ole Miss freshmen were born in 1991.
1991!
The vast majority of these students, then, have grown up in an era where they can't even remember the O.J. Simpson trial, much less Meredith and the race riots that preceded his enrollment at Ole Miss. Systematic segregation is as remote to them as a world without air conditioning. And if it is, in fact, a chant that evokes regional pride for students, as I believe is likely, what, I would ask, in the student's mind, distinguishes a chant like this from one that is universally beloved, "SEC, SEC, SEC?"
Does any thinking person really believe that modern day college students watching and rooting their hearts out for a team that is majority African-American are actually, simultaneously, rooting for a return to the era of plantations and slavery? It's laughable beyond belief.
If, in fact, some fans are doing this, aren't they likely to be such a clueless and antiquated minority that engaging them in a battle of ideas is self-defeating, relying on the false assumption that all ideas are worthy of debate?
In waging this battle, is Ole Miss allowing the defenders of the Old South to win by engaging a ludicrous idea and considering it worthy of debate? For instance, if a few Ole Miss students decided to form a club that argued against man landing on the moon, would the university really feel compelled to debate them? Ultimately, there is probably nothing anyone at Ole Miss could have done to draw more attention to the chant, than attempt to ban it.
In fact, in a bit of counterintuitive spin, the chancellor would probably have been more successful in eradicating the chant if he'd actually requested that the entire student body do it. And then attempted to lead them in it himself. Because there is nothing less cool on a college campus than doing what an old white man suggests.
All of that, of course, doesn't even consider how stupid the chant itself is. And that's probably my primary issue with the chant, not that it's offensive, just that it's stupid.
Breaking down the language of the chant, as I wager most students have not, what magical and halcyon "again" do you want to return to? The "again" of a pre-Civil War South? When a few rich plantation owners lived lives of luxury while poor whites and enslaved blacks lifted them to their exalted stature? All while breaking their backs in menial and difficult labors beneath a harsh and unrelenting sun?
Why would anyone in their right mind ever yearn for a return to those days?
Or is it an "again" that exalts the South's rise from the ashes after the Civil War? And if it is, in fact, that, hasn't the South already risen? And, more accurately, not "again" as the chant would suggest, but for the very first time. Put it this way, has there ever been another day or era when the South was more ascendant than the present? And if that's the intent of the chant, to represent Southern pride, wouldn't, "The South has risen," be more accurate?
Of course, there's a bigger issue at play too. To what extent are modern generations of Southerners, people like me who only attended integrated schools, held hostage by the conditions that predated our birth? Is it our responsibility to be schooled in the specific racial insults of years past so that we don't inadvertently make that mistake again? Do young whites and blacks need to hear old stereotypes, maybe for the first time in their lives, solely to be aware that the terms are offensive, should they ever happen upon them in their modern lives, a sort of social inoculation? Are we, as the chancellor would suggest, beholden to link arms with those of older generations and fight the ills that existed in their lives even if they don't exist in our own?
I think that's an awfully difficult question.
Meanwhile isn't it every bit as troubling that the head of a university would cancel the playing of a song because he doesn't like the way some members of his student body, those chanting "The South will rise again," react to that song? Doesn't this sound like something that would have happened oh, I don't know, in a Mississippi of 1957? In a 21st century of open discourse, does stifling that conversation when you disagree with the statements of others really defeat the same American values that you're seeking to protect?
Less than a day after Lane Kiffin bragged that no football players had been arrested in 11 months at Tennessee, that record came tumbling down. In a big way.
According to police at 1:43 Thursday morning, three freshmen on Tennessee's football team, safety Janzen Jackson, wide receiver Nu'Keese Richardson, and defensive back Mike Edwards, were arrested and charged with attempted arm robbery. The trio allegedly attempted to rob three men parked in a 1998 Hyundai Elantra at a Pilot gas station on Knoxville's Cumberland Avenue.
One of the football players reportedly brandished an air pistol while wearing a black hoodie and demanded money. Another football player wearing a black hoodie opened the other door. The three men said they had no money, at which point the football players fled in a 2010 Toyota Prius driven by a woman, 22-year-old Marie Montmarquet.
Police later pulled over the Prius near the Gibbs Hall dormitory, uncovered two black hoodies, an air pistol, and led the men back to the Pilot gas station where they were identified by their would-be victims. Immediately the Internets exploded. Here was a story that offered the improbable combination of crime vehicle -- 2010 Toyota Prius, location -- the Vols' attempted robbery was in the parking lot of the gas station, Pilot, that is owned by UT's most prominent booster, an air pistol and two of the most famous recruits from the 2009 football season.
Let's dive in.
I've decided to itemize some observations, a Starting 11 for the arrest, from me, Twitter and others via e-mail about this incident. Why? Because in the modern era, when no one is injured by the stupidity of others, public shaming is the weapon of choice. It's amazing how rapidly the reactions poured in from the moment I woke up this morning and turned on the iPhone.
First came the reports of the arrest and well, then came the jokes.
1. Janzen Jackson is starting at safety for the Vols as a true freshman. He's been dominant. A few weeks ago I wrote that he might kill someone on the field before his career is done. If we remove three words from the previous sentence, that still might be true.
How much money did Jackson cost himself? He's going to be a first-round draft pick if he just keeps from getting arrested for a felony for the next two years. Leading to this imagined conversation.
Kiffin: "Janzen, in two years you'll get $18 million guaranteed."
Janzen: "But I really needed $18 now, Coach."
2. How to attempt a robbery and get caught. This should be a seminar taught by Pahokee grads at Tennessee:
a. Wear UT football gear
b. Commit robbery just off campus for which you are wearing gear
c. Rob the most highly trafficked gas station parking lot in Knoxville
d. In one of the only 2010 Toyota Priuses on campus
e. Select as victim, someone driving a 1998 Elantra
f. Use an air-pellet gun
g. Stay in car after failed robbery
h. Keep all objects used in robbery in car
I. Plead not guilty and have your lawyer condemn judgment, "Before all the facts are out."
3. Best email of the morning, from a South Carolina fan, "We pump the gas and then you rob us?!"
4. I've been calling Nu'Keese Richardson, who Kiffin memorably stole from Urban Meyer and Florida, Helen of Troy. As in, he's the apostrophe that loosed a thousand ships. But now that analogy is strained.
This is like Helen of Troy going up to Hector and stealing his loincloth just as he prepared to fight Achilles.
I know, someone else read The Iliad, right?
Right?
Moving right along.
5. Tweet via my buddy Spencer Hall over at EDSBS.com, "Got my team gear on/So you know this be us/ get the cash game right/ take off in the prius"
Yep, that's a new Lil' Wayne lyric.
6. Kiffin's penalty checklist:
Positive: no excess carbon emissions
Negative: attempted armed robbery
7. Will M. tweeted: "This kinda gives new meaning to 'Nu'Keese on the Block.' huh?"
To which I responded, "Yes, Joey McIntyre has more street cred than Nuke does."
8. Andy D. did tweet one shining light: "Remember when boosters just gave players money?"
No kidding.
And, of course, there's a booster connection, Jim Haslam, UT's most prominent athletics booster, owns the Pilot gas station where the attempted robbery occurred.
9. My friend Junaid, a UT grad who managed not to attempt a robbery through four years of undergrad, emailed the following:
"I think we should buy that Pilot gas station and the Rocky Top Market and tear them down. All our guys get arrested there."
It's true. That area on Cumblerand Avenue is like the Bermuda Triangle for UT athletes, go there frequently enough and you vanish from Knoxville without a trace.
High definition television has revolutionized the sports viewing experience. What it hasn't revolutionized is the SEC's ability to use high definition to help with instant replay review. That's because the televisions in the instant replay booth at SEC stadiums aren't in HD.
Yep, every time I think an SEC officiating error is going to surprise me, I get reminded that satirizing SEC officiating is really a hard business. Why? Because the satire writes itself. You, me, and millions of other people who watch games at home have a better view of controversial plays than the guys in the instant replay booth.
And the only thing worse than that is that the director of SEC officiating, Rogers Redding, doesn't think it would make much of a difference to have HD television. In fact, he wouldn't oppose making the change, but he won't fight for it either.
"The way I view [officiating] is, if this isn't broke, let's not fix it," he told the Birmingham News. "I don't see any sort of emergency, oh my God, we've got to fix something here."
Sigh.
Yep, when it comes to HD, the SEC is just like your parents.
At least if your parents are anything like mine. My dad and mom come over to help with my son on a regular basis. Sometimes, when my son takes an afternoon nap or when my wife and I head out for a movie, I return to find my dad and mom watching my HD television on the non-HD stations. Often, with my dad, he'll be watching a sporting event that is playing in glorious HD. Only he's watching it on the standard station.
I'll walk in, take the remote and say, "Dad, remember, that if the entire flat screen television isn't full of image, you aren't in HD." I guarantee I've said this to him 500 times. He'll wave his hand in a dismissive fashion. "I can't tell the difference anyway," he'll say. Inevitably, I will flip to the actual sporting event in HD, it explodes on the screen, a million times better, the picture crisper, as vivid as real life. More vivid, even.
"You can't see the difference between these?" I'll ask.
"No," he'll say, sheepishly.
I've basically given up with him.
Now when we come home and turn on the television after they've been over, my wife will say, "Why is it on this channel?"
Like she's come home and turned on Cinemax's excellent "Sexo Urbano: Lima." (Note: this rarely happens because usually I change the channel back to the Sprout network.)
Now, the SEC feels the same way. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, their sterling officiating couldn't possibly be helped by HD feeds of the game. That's despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. In fact, when you watch the replays in HD, and then think what they might look like in standard definition, you can actually see why a call might not be made. Because, quite frankly, the official can't even see the play.
Currently, and this is no joke, you and I are better equipped to decide controversial plays from our living rooms than the SEC officials are from the replay booths in from the stadium. This would be funny if your team wasn't getting screwed by the failure of the most competitive football conference in America to jump on the high definition "trend." And, of course, by "trend" I mean something that every SEC sports fan under 40 with a scintilla of disposable income -- and many without that -- already have had themselves for over half a decade.
In the meantime, SEC officiating has been slammed for the errors associated with having antediluvian equipment in their stadiums. Nick Saban, a man who has benefited from the errors made in favor of Alabama this season, even thinks we've been too harsh on the officials.
"If I was an official, and I was making what I made officiating because I love the game and I love doing it," Saban said, "and I was getting criticized by the media -- including our announcers on TV -- like these guys are getting criticized, I'd step back and say, 'I think I'll go to the lake this weekend. You can have this.' That's what I'd do."
It's nice of Nick Saban to come to the aid of all the men who have been messing up in his favor. That makes sense. Hell, I'd probably defend people who made errors in my favor too. For instance if banks kept doubling my paycheck every week I might say: "If I was a banker, and I was making what I made banking because I love the bank, and I love banking, and I was criticized by the banking media, I'd step back and say, 'I think I'll go to the lake this weekend. You can have this bank.' That's what I'd do."'
As the fourth quarter of CBS's coverage of Alabama-LSU went to commercial break, the cameras caught something extraordinary, an Alabama fan giving the cliched and overused four finger slogan. Okay, nothing extraordinary about that, but, this is when a bit of the Southern Gothic came into your living room, the man only had four fingers, he was missing a pinkie! So he gave the four finger sign utilizing his thumb.
My jaw literally dropped. Judging by everyone's reaction on Twitter, I wasn't the only one. The most shocking thing, of course, is that the fan gave up the pinkie to Nick Saban, wielding a machete, as part of the pregame speech. Good to see they got the bleeding stopped.
But, of course, this moment of four-finger jubilation wasn't the only thing that caught my attention. We've got Alabama, LSU, Notre Dame, Oregon, Cincinnati, and a groom who made it rain at this wedding reception and caused a 40-person brawl. Plus, we learn that 5 yards in Alabama math actually means 5.5 yards.
Dive in and enjoy.
1. What the heck is up with the Pac-10 results?
I'm not quibbling with the talent of Pac-10 teams. In fact, and I'll take grief for this, I actually like Pac-10 fans the most in college football, behind only the SEC. Partly that's because the West Coast is my second favorite region, so I like being out there, but it's also because the games are entertaining, the fans are pretty fun, have the second-best senses of humor in football, and there are plenty of lovely women around
Yet, does any conference in America have more shocking results? Particularly in light of the scores of the shocking games?
I'm not astounded that Stanford beat Oregon. Coming off a bye week with a good coach and a home game, the ingredients for an upset were all there, but still, Stanford hangs 51 on Oregon?
Stanford had only scored 40 once this season, against San Jose State back in September. Meanwhile, Oregon has only given up 58 points total in their last five games.
So what happens when the two teams meet? Stanford scores 51 en route to the upset.
Of course it does. That's Pac-10 football.
Again, the upset doesn't surprise me, but in most conferences in America the upset score would have been something like 20-17.
In the Pac-10, all bets are off. 2. NBC's coverage of Notre Dame football is atrocious.
My favorite part of Saturday's loss to Navy -- and there were several parts -- was when NBC labeled Jimmy Clausen "the toughest player in America."
Really? You don't think that might be a slight exaggeration? Perhaps connected to NBC's television contract with Notre Dame? Bigger question, can a quarterback ever be the toughest player on a team? I don't think so.
But every time I watch an NBC broadcast of Notre Dame football, I'm reminded why Tom Hammond and Pat Haden are the worst announcing team in college football. It's not just the Notre Dame homerism, they're genuinely awful at explaining the game, discussing strategy, all of it. At some point, I should just do an article chronicling their ineptitude.
Anyway, I've never heard a team praised so much while only putting up seven points against a service academy. Listening to the Notre Dame-Navy game was like attending a kindergarten graduation ceremony with the woman whose son got held back for a year. And she's heaping praise on her son for the accomplishment: "I can't believe my baby did it!"
Really? Did you think he was going to be in kindergarten for the rest of his life? At some point they have to promote you. (Aside: Is kindergarten not one of the trickiest words to spell? Doesn't it seem like the first three letters should be K-I-D? I misspell this word every time I type it. I'm always ticked that I have to look it up, and then I always think, why am I using the word kindergarten again? Kind of like when I didn't write the word misspell for three years because I was terrified of the irony of misspelling the word misspell).
As for Charlie Weis, I think his era was summed up by this stat, white fullback Vince Murray carried the ball 14 times for 158 yards against his team. That's an average of over 11 yards a carry.
Think about that.
A fullback, who started the year in a battle for the second string spot at a position whose primary job is to bang into things. Who, in two previous seasons had only seen action against titans Duke and Ball State. Whose online biography has no stats but lauds him for playing with "great toughness."
He rushed for 158 yards.
All the talent that Weis has brought to Notre Dame and they can't stop Navy's white fullback, who by the way played a hell of a game, on the dive play? Putting those stats into context, that average per carry was almost twice what the next worst team has allowed him -- Rice gave up 6.5 yards a carry.
If I was a student at Notre Dame, I might make my own anti-Weis shirt. "Notre Dame: White Fullbacks Own Us."
3. Officiating errors when made via replay review are unforgivable.
I've already volunteered myself for the position of instant replay reviewer. I think I'm every bit as qualified as the people the SEC employs now. But what I really want to happen, is someone to pay the price when they blow a call on instant replay review. Because that, my friends, is inexcusable.
The Patrick Peterson interception happened really fast in the LSU-Alabama game. The fact that two officials who were standing in the position to make the call both blew it is, while sad, somewhat excusable. That's why we have video replay, right? But when a guy sitting in a booth in front of the television blows the call too, there's no point to having replay at all.
Zero.
So here's a suggestion: If a blown call happens in a game and instant replay review doesn't change it, then the booth official is suspended for life and has to spend an entire afternoon in the stocks on the campus where he made the error.
I want to be the lawyer who drafts this contract. 4. Speaking of unforgivable, how about CBS trotting out the film of all eight of Jarrett Lee's interceptions returned for touchdowns?
Why is that unforgivable?
Because Lee wasn't even the starting quarterback. That means CBS had that clip on file just in case Jordan Jefferson, LSU's starter, was injured.
Think about that for a minute.
They'd already decided to throw Jarrett Lee under the bus on the off chance that he played against Alabama.
Having said that, how unbelievable is it that Lee had eight interceptions returned for touchdowns. Especially when you look at his picks all together. It's not like he's throwing passes that get tipped away at the line of scrimmage and returned for touchdowns. All of his passes are traveling down the field. And almost all of them are 40 or more yard returns.
It really is one of the most amazing statistical abnormalities out there.
Now, does that mean that Jarrett Lee should be subjected to this every time he plays a game?
I don't think so.
Even more importantly, should LSU fans be subjected to this?
Definitely not. 5. Someone explain to me how LSU was penalized 5.5 yards for running into the kicker in the fourth quarter.
Dan Wetzel at Yahoo Sports tweeted it in real time, and now here's the actual evidence.
After the error on spotting, Alabama then converted this fourth-down play. Which was, you guessed it, shortly followed by the interception that wasn't. Then Bama kicked a field goal to go up nine points.
I'd include this photo when Les Miles inevitably tees off on the officials.
Personally, I'm hoping Miles brings in an overhead projector and puts this picture on the screen behind him. I would pay a thousand dollars of the fine myself to see Miles do this. Especially if he pulled out an old school marker and noted the ball placement.
Seriously though, isn't it incomprehensible that this could happen? 6. Jonathan Crompton is Lazarus.
Since I called for his benching, Jonathan Crompton has turned into Jesus Montana. This is why Memphis should contact me about their new opening at head coach, I know football. (If you need further evidence of this fact, I am dominating my family's former French exchange student in our weekly picks challenge in the mailbag.)
Saturday, Crompton passed for 331 yards with five touchdowns through the air and one on the ground. That's all in less than 33 minutes of football -- Kiffin pulled him after the first drive of the second half. Crompton would have gone for over 500 yards and eight or nine touchdowns if he'd played the whole game.
And while he threw the ball with precision, the most impressive part of Saturday, I thought, was Crompton's quarterback sneak for a touchdown at the end of the first half. With a running clock and one timeout left, Crompton came to the line, faked like he was going to spike the football, and then got under center and dove into the end zone for the score.
It was an incredibly smart play.
Why?
If he'd actually grounded the ball, there would have only been around six seconds left in the half. It would be second and goal and UT would have one timeout left. Time for one definite play, maybe two if you were very lucky with the clock. Instead Crompton took his shot at getting into the end zone with a running clock. If he's stopped, no big deal, call the timeout and you still get another play where run or pass is the option. The point is, the quarterback sneak there doesn't take much longer than spiking the football and it gives you a chance to score.
It was a really, really smart play.
Crompton now has 21 touchdown passes against 10 interceptions, and in the past five games he's got 14 touchdowns and only two picks. Time for a bold pronouncement that can never be justified, proven or disproven: If Crompton was coming back next season the Vols would win the SEC East. 7. What are the rules for wearing a coaches' polo if you aren't actually in the town where the game is played?
I'll tell you: You can't go coaches' polo unless you're at the game.
Period.
For the unaware, the coaches' polo has taken the SEC fashion world by storm. You know the shirts the coaches wear on the sideline? That's the coaches' polo, these things are insanely popular down South. I've never seen that many other fans wear them out, but in the SEC they're gold bullion. Basically, if you're over 35 and graduated from college, the coaches polo is your fashion security blanket, the male equivalent of women's heels at an SEC game. You can't go wrong with the CP.
Except when you can.
You look like an idiot when you wear your coach's polo out to the bar and you didn't actually go to the game. The CP is strictly gameday wear in the town of the game. Otherwise, keep them in the closet. 8. Why is no one taking shots at Cincinnati for giving up 45 points to UConn?
I'll tell you, because for much of the media, Cincinnati is like a hot chick on a beach in Venezuela, you know she exists but she's so remote you don't pay any attention to her actual physical characteristics. A large part of me is convinced that the only Bearcat game anyone has actually seen was the game against South Florida.
For instance, I couldn't watch the Cincinnati game in Nashville.
Why?
Because we got the Nebraska-Oklahoma game on regional coverage. That's despite being about 280 miles from Cincinnati. I have no idea who made this programming decision, and I'm not even sure what the rationale could possibly be. I guarantee you that more people in my city were interested in watching Cincinnati. It's a closer school, that game has more relevance for SEC fans, and ... yep, we got Oklahoma-Nebraska.
Which means we missed 711 yards of offense from Cincinnati and a 555-yard offensive performance from Zach Collaros, the Bearcats former backup quarterback.
Want another wacky stat? Prior to giving up 45 to the Huskies the most points the Bearcats had allowed all season was 20 to Fresno State.
But, you guessed it, no one really paid attention. 9. Michigan lost at home to Purdue 38-36.
My wife's family was in this weekend so we watched this game on the Big Ten Network. How disappointing is this loss if you're Michigan? The worst part is that the nation isn't even paying attention to you anymore because you've become an afterthought. At least when Notre Dame lost to Navy, a much better team than Purdue, people reacted.
Michigan losing to Purdue?
No one even reacts anymore.
George Bernard Shaw once said that the worst sin towards a fellow man is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. Presumably he had just flipped through a Michigan football game for a Home Shopping Network special at the time.
That's how far off the radar Michigan has fallen.
In his second season at Ohio State, Jim Tressel won a national championship. In his second season at Michigan, Rich Rodriguez is not going to a bowl game. Again.
My wife, a Michigan alum, came downstairs after getting our son down for his nap, looked at the television, saw the Boilermakers celebrating, and said, "Purdue! We're still Michigan."
Isn't it time for all Michigan fans to have this collective reaction and kick Rich Rod to the curb? I understand that installing the spread offense takes time, but what about the defense? You've given up 30 to every Big Ten team except Michigan State, a game you lost anyway.
Nothing is working. And Rich Rod ain't the right fit.
I know this has been a rough month for you. What with everyone suggesting that the SEC officials want to see Florida and Alabama in the SEC championship game no matter what the actual game results might be. Furthermore, I know that generally speaking the SEC's issue has been with judgment calls, celebration penalties on A.J. Green, personal fouls on some Arkansas defensive players -- it's okay, no one knows anyone's name that plays for Arkansas other than Ryan Mallet, it will be our secret -- missed calls in favor of Florida against Mississippi State, allowing Terrence Cody, the largest man on earth who still resembles a girl, to play without his helmet on. But this latest move, ignoring a clear interception by LSU's Patrick Peterson, has me steaming mad. What's the point of instant replay if you're going to use it and still get the play wrong?
That's why I'm making you an offer, I will work as instant replay reviewer for any televised SEC game.
For free.
Do you understand what a deal you're getting here, Commissioner Slive? I will work for the SEC for absolutely free. And I won't miss any calls.
Zero.
You know why? Two reasons, first, I don't care who wins the games and, second, because I can watch television replays and tell whether or not people intercept passes. For instance, unlike your replay officials, I watched today's Alabama-LSU game. And when Patrick Peterson intercepted Greg McElroy with just under 6 minutes to play in the game, I said, "Wow, that's a hell of an interception."
You know how I knew?
Because like the rest of America, I saw Peterson catch the football and get not one, but two feet in bounds. That's one more foot in bounds than you actually need, Mr. Slive. Yet, somehow the man you pay to sit in a booth and watch the replay didn't see this. He must have been blind ... or drunk. Perhaps he was both, so drunk he'd become blind. That's okay, I've been to Galette's before in Tuscaloosa and gotten that drunk. Although, to be fair, that's always been after a game.
And here's my promise to you Commissioner Slive, I won't even drink during the games when I'm working as your replay official. I'll be stone cold sober. I won't even pause the television and look closely at the cheerleaders on the sideline. Do you know how hard it is not to do that?
And I won't pause my DVR and spend ten minutes thinking about how awesome it was the CBS camera caught a 'Bama fan with four fingers doing the fourth quarter sign as they went to commercial break.
Nope, I'm completely committed to the game.
I won't even spend any time thinking about the press conference I would stage if I were Les Miles. I'd load stacks of hundred dollar bills until I had 300 stacks, or $30,000 in all, into a black garbage bag and carry it into my press conference. Then, before I even said anything, I'd turn up the garbage bag and dump all the cash out onto the table in front of the reporters.
I'd let it all spill around on the ground and then I'd walk to the microphone and say this:
"Mike Slive can come pick up this money when he gets a chance. Because that official who blew that call in the replay booth doesn't deserve to ever work another game. We're not talking about a blown judgment call, or a decision made in the heat of the game when everyone is moving a million miles an hour. We're talking about a fat man sitting in front of a television and making a dispassionate decision based on what he sees.
"And he blew it.
"Big time.
"I'd sooner have Clay Travis making the decisions from his house in Nashville."
Our beaver pelt trader of the week is, be still my beating heart, my coaching crush Mike Leach. As if it weren't enough that he went on "Friday Night Lights" -- spoiler alert, I have to wait until January to watch the show because I don't have DirecTV -- after the loss to Texas A&M, Leach blamed the loss, partly, on the players' "fat little girlfriends." Given the status of bingo wings in Florida, Urban Meyer should file this excuse away. It's much better than blaming the flu for poor performances.
Not to be outdone, as reader Chris V. e-mails, "There is now a website up selling apparel at fatlittlegirlfriend.com.
Outstanding.
As many of you know, my college football picking war with my family's former French exchange student Audrey, continues. Last week, sigh, we picked the exact same teams in our six-game slate. So we both went 2-3-1. This means for the season I am now, wait for it, 20-20-2. The perfection of the number notwithstanding, it is impossible to be more average. I am, in effect, the reasonable college football fan. Meanwhile, Audrey is 16-23-3. My lead is slim as we lead into this week's slate of games.
Here are my picks below in bold:
Boise State -21.5 @ Louisiana Tech
Northwestern @ Iowa -16
Ohio State @ Penn State -4
LSU @ Alabama -9
Oklahoma -6 @ Nebraska
UConn @ Cincinnati -17
And here are Audrey's picks along with her rationales when given. Often, I have no idea what her rationales actually mean.
Boise
Northwestern for Chicago
Penn State for Paula
Alabama
Nebraska style
Cincy where is that?
On to All That and a Bag of Mail.
Matt R. writes:
Just finished reading On Rocky Top. Excellent read. Congrats. With your description of Phil Fulmer, I saw true class. That got me wondering. What is the "classiness" in the SEC as far as coaching goes?
I'm a huge fan of the other UT (Hook em Horns!), and think Mack Brown is a classy individual. While he may grandstand occasionally for the press, the man has a good heart and has a real team philosophy.
In the SEC, I see little left; the programs with class acts usually suck. The Spikes-eye-gouge incident highlights Meyer as a particularly win-centric coach. What are your thoughts?
My friends and I have actually had a bar debate about this, who do we think is genuinely the best guy among SEC coaches? In the debate we eliminate our favorite teams from contention and ask a basic question: If you had a son, who would you want him to play for because you know that even if they ended up sucking as a football player, they'd still be a better person for being around that coach?
And we thought about this for a long time. Immediately we tossed out Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino, Urban Meyer, Lane Kiffin and Houston Nutt as people we thought would be really great role models.
We didn't feel like we knew enough about Gene Chizik or Dan Mullen to make a determination.
We eliminated Les Miles because he's crazy. (Even though I'd give anything to have a relative play for Miles just for the stories.)
So that left us with Mark Richt, Bobby Johnson, Steve Spurrier and Rich Brooks to pick among.
And I think I'd have to go with Bobby Johnson among that group.
Now, I think there are certainly assistant coaches and coordinators who could make the list -- Monte Kiffin, Charley Strong -- for instance, but among head coaches, you're right, the pickings are getting slim.
Nate R. writes:
Once again, no mention of Oregon in your mailbag ... just the way we like it. If you think that USC will march into Autzen on Halloween night and beat the Ducks, you are sorely mistaken. This will be USC's worse loss points-wise in the Pete Carroll era.
I enjoy your work and have for a few years. Just a little pet peeve as a reader: please eliminate "look" and "listen" from your arsenal. We are already looking. We are not listening; we are reading. Thanks.
This is one of the best e-mail predictions I've ever gotten. Not just that USC would lose, but that it would be the worst loss of the Pete Carroll era?
Wow.
I did pick Oregon over USC in the picks, so I'm not sure I expected the Trojans to march in to Autzen and dominate.
As for the the looks and listens in the column, I write the column like I'm talking with you. Plus, let's be honest, many people who e-mail in their hate, are reading the column out loud while moving their lips. We know them as the Florida fans who go shirtless to games.
I want them to feel welcome.
Jesse H. writes:
On cell phones and toilets, I work in the cell phone industry and was a former tech for a carrier. Unfortunately, I saw many a wet phone courtesy of the toilet. The interesting thing, in my experience, was it happened to females more than males. I haven't spent a lot of company time thinking about it and how that was the case, but it has been discussed with co-workers trying to figure out how it happens way more to females. Just thought I would share that nugget of knowledge with you. Keep up the great writing!
Come for the sports, stay for the sociological reports on cell phone in toilet losses.
My guess here: women have to sit, exposing their pockets to disaster. This bests my prior theory, which is that women go to the bathroom together, become overcome with sexual desire for one another, passionately make out and lose their phones while deep in the throes of passion.
A Few Halloween Costume Suggestions:
Joey F. writes:
You could go as Archie Griffin, the ONLY two-time Heisman winner. Obviously that will still be true after this season.
Wrong, Tebow is going to win the Heisman. I don't necessarily think he deserves it this year -- conversely, I did think he deserved it last year -- but I do think he's going to get it.
Anthony H. writes:
Neither of these two costumes have anything to do with the game this weekend......but you could always go as Steve Tannyhill......whose powerful mullet lead to the downfall of Coach Majors.......
And of course a fat suit and a UK Jersey and you have none other than the hefty lefty.
Next year I'm throwing a Halloween party and every guy invited -- which will be like 10 people -- has to come as a former SEC quarterback.
And you have to come dressed as a fan other than the one you root for.
In a similar vein, all women will be required to dress as topless cheerleaders.
Adam D. writes:
Clay,
I think you should go as Man-kini from The SOUP. He has a beard, he wears a bikini top (great for 89 degree weather) and he has a cult following like yourself. Who knows maybe Joel McHale invites you on the show? Have a great weekend.
Warning: This Tennessee-Alabama Story Will Make You Cry
Which is why I included big boobs, because they also might make you cry, but at least they'll be tears of joy. So you can lie if someone sees you shedding a tear. Read the full column here.
On Oct. 24, Justin Paschall, a 13-year-old eighth grader at Southside Elementary in Lebanon, Tennessee, went to his first Alabama-Tennessee football game. He traveled to Tuscaloosa with his grandfather, Ray Todd, as huge of an Alabama fan as there is in the Southland and two cousins, also Alabama fans. Justin says his first question upon being told that his grandfather had tickets for the game, his first ever Tennessee game, was, "Can I wear my orange jacket?"
Grandpa Ray Todd, Alabama born and bred and now residing in Tennessee, said that he could wear his orange, and on Friday the foursome traveled to Tuscaloosa for the game. Come Saturday, Justin woke up and took wearing orange to a whole new level.
Yep, he wore an orange jacket, but he also painted his face white, and spiked his hair with orange highlights. Grandpa Ray Todd, a 68-year-old Bama fan, shook his head and smiled. It was the trip of a lifetime, a ballgame at Bryant-Denny with his three grandsons. Even if, you know, one of them had the bad sense to be a Tennessee fan. Ray Todd smiled throughout the cloudy morning chill, grinned as the clouds broke in the early afternoon and poured forth brilliant sunlight into the stadium. He tried to do everything he could to soak up every moment. That's what happens when your grandsons are pushing you in a wheelchair, you have pancreatic cancer, and doctors have given you one football season left to live.
So it came to pass that the 91st rivalry game between Tennessee and Alabama was an awful lot like many of the 90 that had preceded it, close, bitterly close.
"I cheered loud all game," says Justin, "I wanted Tennessee to win so bad. It was my first game and all, and I didn't want to go all that way and see them lose." Sitting beside his grandfather and his two cousins watching his first Tennessee game in person, Justin pronounced it, "The best day of my life."
As the game progressed, Justin had a lot to cheer for; Tennessee, a 16-point underdog, kept the game close against Alabama all afternoon. By late in the fourth quarter, the Vols had the ball near Alabama's goal line, down 12-3. "I cheered so loud then," says Justin, "everyone around me, all the Alabama people, were looking at me like I was crazy."
Tennessee scored a touchdown to cut the lead to 12-10 and Justin went crazy in the stands. "I thought we were going to win, I really did," he says. As Tennessee lined up to attempt the onside kick, Justin stood and prayed that Tennessee would recover. When the Vols came up with the ball and the official signaled Tennessee's possession, pointing straight toward the opposing goal line, Justin came undone.
"I was screaming for Tennessee as loud as I could." Justin kept on screaming as loud as he could, reaching a crescendo of joy when Jonathan Crompton, Justin's favorite player, hit Luke Stocker for a 23-yard gain to the Alabama 27. Tennessee ran the ball on the next play and called timeout to set up the field goal, a kick that would win the game for the Vols, their first road victory over a No. 1 team in the history of the program.
Then Justin looked down at the man he calls Pops, his grandfather Ray Todd. "Pops was all slumped over and his lips were quivering." Just like that, Justin says, "I couldn't keep rooting for my team anymore." Right then and there Justin said a prayer. "I said, Good Lord, could you please let Alabama win?"
As Tennessee lined up for a field goal aimed at the opposite end zone distant from them, white uprights rising into a blue sky across a distant green field, Justin continued to pray. And when Terrence Cody came through the line and blocked the kick, when the entire Alabama stadium including his grandfather, Ray Todd, exploded in joy, Justin says he couldn't help but feel he'd made the right decision.
Kind of. But there was still one person he had to clear it with, his daddy.
Last week Mike Slive, the Montgomery Burns of the SEC, threatened Lane Kiffin with a suspension and rewrote the SEC policy when it comes to commenting on officiating. All season Slive has been besieged by officiating errors, coaches sniping at one another, and the continuing onslaught of media coverage that having a brand new television contract and two top ranked teams all season has brought.
Now, Slive (pictured right) is backed into a corner, just a few days after he announced his new policy on officiating, Urban Meyer teed off on officiating once more, taking a shot at the non-call on a late hit that Georgia delivered to Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.
"That should have been a penalty, in my opinion," Meyer said, "Obviously, it should have been. You've got to protect quarterbacks. That's the whole purpose. It's right in front of the referee."
And then, not to be outdone, Lane Kiffin took a swipe at Meyer's comments on officiating. "Urban Meyer? Criticized the officials, wow, that will be interesting," Kiffin said, "We'll see." Not content with a sarcastic aside, Kiffin also commented on the Brandon Spikes situation: "Yeah, I saw it on replay, it was pretty bad ... Obviously he'll discipline his team. Or not."
In 2009, the SEC has been the new king of controversy and virtually every action Commissioner Slive has undertaken has, instead of quelling the uproar, actually increased the attention. Of course the ultimate irony of all of the attention being foisted upon the SEC is this, much of it is self-inflicted attention brought on by the increased prominence of SEC football on both ESPN and CBS.
Once those companies ponied up billions to televise the athletic events, minor conflicts suddenly turned into nuclear war, the Bay of Pigs meets SEC football.
Don't believe me? I've been writing for over a year about how the increase in television fees was going to lead to stories that would have otherwise been regional in nature, becoming national. And we've already seen that happen this year, it's the primary reason Kiffin became such a lightning rod, because ESPN needed him to sell their product. And it's worked, SEC football ratings are up across the board, highlighted by a 60 percent spike in UT-Florida ratings after the Kiffin-Meyer tiff.
Controversy increases interest. Conflict sells, even manufactured conflict, sells, baby. In fact, I'd even argue that controversies over bad officiating probably, paradoxically, lead to more viewers for games. Why? People want to see for themselves just how bad the officiating really is. And once the impression that the officiating is bad exists, it becomes the default assumption the next time a questionable judgment is made.
But this increased media attention has also caught the league and Slive flatfooted. I think the SEC, where regional writers still spend the majority of the time covering individual teams, has been surprised by how quickly statements by coaches have become national news. Same with the officiating controversies. In fact, anyone who has been a fan of SEC football for a decade or more, knows that this season's comments and controversies are no more extraordinary than any in the past 20 or 30 years.
Maybe even less so.
There have always been bad calls that have cost teams games, there have always been coaches looking to gig opponents -- it's what made Steve Spurrier a media darling -- and there have always have been extremely competitive games that magnify the importance of officiating calls. What there hasn't been is a national onslaught of attention surrounding these controversies. It used to be that if Spurrier said something bad about Tennessee, it led the local paper, maybe the local news, in the offended jurisdiction and after a day it blew over.
News could only trickle down from the top back then, and if it did trickle down it came to an end quickly on a regional basis. Now? Now, news comes from both directions. It can boil up via fan outrage on blogs, message boards and YouTube, where eventually the national media pick up on the controversies and turn them into stories. Meanwhile, the national media can now take a single sentence and turn it into a blizzard of publicity. Those words have always been there, but in the past the money didn't justifiy the attention.
In the latter days of the 19th century, the term yellow journalism took flight. Ultimately, it led to William Randolph Hearst helping to start the Spanish-American War, "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war," he's said to have remarked.
Now SportsCenter furnishes the sports war.
That's a seismic change in the attention being paid to the league. And one the SEC still hasn't caught up to.
I knew we'd reached the tipping point in breathless SEC coverage when ESPN led a telecast with a story about Kiffin firing the strength coach at Tennessee. Really, the strength coach? A man many hardcore Vol fans couldn't even name is being covered by national news?
And the SEC hasn't helped themselves in surfing the onslaught, Slive's every move has added fuel to the fire rather than quelling the blaze.
Don't believe me, let's take a look at some of the hamhanded decisions made by the league just this year.
First,Slive made a big show of reading coaches the riot act after offseason controversies. The idea was that this public haranguing would kill all negative commentary. You can all see how well that worked. Instead of actually changing anything, the story of the fiery talk led newscasts and reinforced the previous statements made by coaches.
Next, the league attempted to restrict media coverage of athletic events with a new media policy that provoked outrage. The idea behind controlling rights was financial, seizing control of images would, the league reasoned, make those images more valuable while also allowing them to control more of the stories that ensued. That's why the league also sought to restrict blogger access, as if any of the bloggers driving news coverage actually needed to be present at events to influence public perception. Nevertheless, the league buckled and rescinded many of the restrictions after complaints from long-time partners.
Finally, once the season commenced, Slive and crew overreacted to bad officiating judgment by throwing part-time officiating crews under the bus and suspending them. This decision opened the floodgates for coaches to comment on officiating mistakes, something that had previously been swept under the league rug. In rapid succession, Bobby Petrino, Lane Kiffin, and Dan Mullen were reprimanded for publicly ripping officiating. Then, not to be outdone, Slive revised the existing rules for coaches to comment on officiating mid-season and threatened coaches with suspensions should they fail to follow the newly prescribed rules.
What do all of these issues show? The SEC is behind the curve on responding to and preventing stories from spinning out of their control. Why? Because they've got a product with national appeal that is still run like a mom and pop store. After all the time they spent courting television partners, they failed to realize how those partners would cover the product they paid so dearly for. A league where everyone loves one another isn't great television. A league where everyone hates one another?
That's compelling television.
Slive, to his credit, is smart, and has done a great deal to clean up the league's image, but what he hasn't done is anticipate new and old media's ability to create national stories out of sentences that would have been, at best, regional dust-ups just 10 years ago. Partly, that's the result of the explosion of the Internet as a news cycle driver, but, mostly, it's a reflection of a hard and fast rule in today's media, if you pay a lot of money to cover a product, all of a sudden that product becomes more news worthy than it ever has before.
Enter ESPN.
Enter the controversies.
Ener the belated responses.
And now, after a season of futile and belated responses, Slive doesn't have any options left. Will he become the first commissioner in league history to suspend a coach for commenting on, wait for the outrage, a football game? Can he? Does he have the political power to make that move and be backed by everyone? Especially if the coaches are making comments that most SEC fans agree with?
15 of you emailed this to me in the past two days. My only criticism is that I would have gone with Media instead of Press on the sign.
Or maybe gone specific, created a long gray, Benjamin Franklin-esque mullet and simply labeled the person, "Verne."
Okay, in the past when we've tossed photos like this out there, inevitably one of y'all has been able to track down this guy. I'm confident someone knows him. Have him contact me at the button on the right side of the website using the contact button. The story of this costume deserves to be told.
One of the most frustrating cliches trotted out by college football's BCS defenders is this banal line: Every game counts. I hate this three-word cliche with the fury of a thousand blazing suns. I hate the smugness with which it's delivered, I hate the fact that no one points out the obvious -- name a sport where the games don't actually count-- but I hate the fact that it isn't even true the most.
In fact, this phrase is positively Orwellian because it leaves off the final part of the sentence. Every game counts ... except some games count more than others. How else to explain the fact that everyone can brush off Boise State's win over Oregon because it happened the first game of the season?
I understand we're dealing with a broken system, but right now Boise State is continuing to plummet as they win. I wrote about the glass ceiling that Boise had reached a couple of weeks ago, but has it really reached the point where we just ignore the first week of the season?
And if we do ignore the first week of the season, what's the point of having a broken system to determine who the champion is? Because pretty soon, if they keep winning, Oregon is going to pass undefeated Boise in the BCS rankings. Already Iowa, Cincinnati, one-loss USC, and TCU have all passed Boise since the first BCS standings were released three weeks ago. What's Boise done since that first week's release when they stood at No. 4 in the country?
Beaten two teams by a combined score of 99-16.
I'm not arguing that individual results should always govern the rankings between two teams. But I am arguing this, if the regular season means anything at all, you have to rank an undefeated team above any team that they've beaten.
Absolutely, positively, have to do that.
On to the Starting 11.
1. The fact that Tennessee was going to wear black jerseys on Halloween was one of the worst kept secrets in the history of the Internets.
For months, fans, media, and everyone else who cares about what color jerseys a team wears (count myself outside of this group) have gone crazy with speculation. Tennessee's athletic director, head coach, and everyone else associated with the program shot down the possibility that the Vols would wear black for months.
Then they did.
Raising this question, is it really worth lying about the color of a jersey? Why not just say: "We don't comment on jersey colors," months ago and leave it at that?
I know that UT claims the decision wasn't made until the week of the game, and while that might be true in a legal sense, it had been under contemplation for months judging by all the smoke surrounding the issue. I truly don't care what jerseys my team wears, but was the "surprise" really worth it?
I don't think so.
2. By the way, if Oregon hadn't played Boise State in the first game of the season, where are they ranked right now?
Probably fourth, right?
One of the really sad things about the current system is that Boise can't get teams to play them home-and-home for this exact reason, play a patsy at your place and you get a guaranteed win and don't deal with any long-term injury to your reputation. Play a tough team on the road and you sabotage your season if you lose.
Boise gets ripped because they haven't scheduled well enough. Well, isn't a tremendous part of that because they need to play enough home games to make some revenue for their school?
They're already playing six road games. That leaves them with just six home games. Most other major college teams in America are playing 7 homes games, often 8.
This is the system we've created, good teams won't play other good teams because they don't need to and then when they won't play we criticize the team they won't play for not having a tough enough schedule.
Awesome.
Doesn't anyone see that logical flaw?
3. Isn't it time we penalize college football players for malicious intent rather than malicious success?
Brandon Spikes tried to eye gouge Georgia's Washaun Ealey on Saturday. Urban Meyer, who doles out good ole boy justice with the best of them despite not actually being Southern, suspended Spikes for a half.
Against Vanderbilt.
Florida could probably start me at middle linebacker for a half and still beat Vanderbilt.
That's not even a joke, I really think they could.
But one of the most interesting things about this entire situation is that we're suspending Spikes because he was unsuccessful at what he attempted to do. In other words, Spikes's own incompetence as an eye-gouger actually saved him from a more severe penalty. Shouldn't we penalize a player based on intent rather than the actual result? Especially in sports since part of the reason for the punishment is to dissuade others who see the punishment.
4. Case Keenum, who may win the Heisman by default, threw for 559 yards against Southern Miss on Saturday.
On 54 pass attempts. He wasn't sacked.
Not once.
What's more, Keenum has attempted 398 passes so far this season and has only been sacked 10 times. Counting the sacks Keenum has dropped back to pass 408 times, probably more since he's scrambled for yardage several times, but only 10 times have defenses managed to sack him.
That means almost 98 percent of the time when he drops back to pass, the ball is leaving his hand before a defender gets to him. Can you imagine how debilitating that is to a defensive line? To know that, on average, if you rush the quarterback on 50 consecutive plays you're going to get to him once?
How mentally tiring must that be?
I've read quite a bit of praise for Keenum so far this season, but I haven't read anything about Houston's offensive line and the job they've done allowing Keenum to attempt so many passes. Kudos to them.
5. Iowa's magical season continues and soon they'll be in the clubhouse at 12-0 with two weeks of football remaining.
I haven't seen anyone write about what a tremendous advantage it is for Big Ten schools that they don't play games the final two weeks of the regular season. Iowa is now 9-0. They have two home games against Northwestern and Minnesota sandwiched around a road game at Ohio State. Assuming they win all three, the Hawkeyes get to sit and watch undefeated Texas, Alabama, Cincinnati and Florida deal with the mounting pressures of the season.
For half a month, they do nothing and can only be helped by the games that take place around them.
I know the long layoff has been mentioned before in terms of a Big Ten team's performance in bowl games, and the lack of a championship game is often trotted out as evidence of a hugely uneven playing field, but I haven't seen anything written about the tremendous advantage that comes from sitting out the final two weeks of the season.
It's worth thinking about as the pressure mounts to see who will be playing in the title game.
6. Random observation from the Jacksonville Airport: They have an entrance for a seeing eye dog at the security screening area with a sign above indicating such. It's next to the wheelchair entrance.
Multiple questions: A.) Whom is this sign for? Presumably the blind person can't see it, right? I'm no expert on canines, but I don't think they can recognize the sign either. B.) How many blind people with seeing eye dogs are traveling such that they need their own line? For instance, have you ever seen a blind person with a seeing eye dog at the airport before? C.) Wouldn't anyone with a brain naturally assume that the blind person with a dog doesn't have to walk through the regular line? In other words, who is doubting that they go through the handicapped line? D.) Where do the seeing eye dogs go on flights? Do you check them at the gate like a stroller? Are you automatically in the A boarding group at Southwest? If the dog is on the plane, where does he sit?
Anyway, this is the most unnecessary sign I've sign since the White House prohibited weapons' list featured guns, knives and nunchucks. Because, you know, who hasn't planned a trip to the White House and brought along a set of nunchucks in case of a ninja attack.
7. Why did Wake Forest let their kicker attempt a 60-yard field goal to end the game against Miami?
Setting the scene: Wake is down 28-27, there are four seconds remaining, and the Demon Deacons are at the Hurricanes' 43.
Your kicker, Jimmy Newman, has a career long field goal of 42 yards. (Sam Swank, Wake Forest's longtime strong-legged kicker, graduated after last season.)
What do you do?
Not kick, right?
Seeing as how this is 18 yards further than the kicker's career long.
Well, Wake kicks.
Predictably the kick was is wide right and short by about 15 yards. It lands in the front of the end zone. Does this really make sense? It's kind of embarrassing, actually. Wouldn't you have better odds of a Hail Mary here?
Granted, Wake Forest was playing with its backup quarterback at the time, Ryan McManus, instead of usual starter Riley Skinner, who left the game after taking a knee to his un-helmeted head on a fourth-quarter run. McManus, a senior, had two strikes against him entering the game. 1) He had more tackles in his career (two, on punt coverage in 2007) entering the game than pass completions (one). 2) The highlights of his online bio including calling a "key timeout" against Baylor and that he "loves to play." What exactly gets cut so that these factoids might make the biography? He enjoys both inhaling, exhaling and wearing socks?
At any rate, even with McManus why wouldn't you at least take a chance your quarterback could throw it 43 yards or at least try some sort of hook-and-ladder or series of laterals?
We'll be talking black jerseys, Cocktail Parties, and whatever else tickles your radio fancy. Listen live here and, as always, give us a call at 615-737-1045.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- By the end of the first quarter Saturday, outside the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party in Jacksonville, a drunken mass of humanity sprawls in baking parking lots and beneath cool shade trees, the largest collection of people in America who cannot walk in straight lines. By now, the ratio of men to women has shifted, perhaps for the only time all day, to something approaching equal numbers. Women wearing bikini tops and tight dresses warble on flip flops or bare feet, men, Florida fans mostly, have discarded their shirts and stand bare-chested in the bright sunshine propositioning women as they pass.
"We still got beer left," a group of shirtless Florida fans, Cocktail party Romeos, call to a group of bedraggled Georgia girls, Capulets in red heels.
"We're looking for liquor," says one of the girls, moving past.
A scalper stands off to the right of the passing couples, four tickets held tightly in his right hand, jaw clenched.
"Game's going to be close boys, don't you want to go inside?" he asks, squinting his dark brown eyes to avoid the sun's rays. It's Halloween in Jacksonville, and all the world outside the Cocktail Party is a stage.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of football fans descend on Jacksonville for the Georgia-Florida football game. Some of them, a small minority, actually see a football game. The remainder, a teeming mass of humanity, remains outside the stadium and occasionally squints up at the looming structure as the crowd roars inside. Idly they may wonder whether Georgia or Florida has the better end of the game. Most likely, they don't react at all to what happens in the game.
Because they're too drunk.
This is their story.
Getting There
Since 1915, Georgia and Florida have played a football game. For virtually every year since 1933, the teams have played this game at a neutral site, Jacksonville, Fla. This is the most popular social event in Jacksonville. There is no second most popular social event in Jacksonville.
The term World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party was coined in the 1950s after a sportswriter witnessed a fan offering a drink to a uniformed officer. In 2006, SEC Commissioner Mike Slive wrote a letter to CBS requesting that they no longer use the phrase World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
"We would appreciate any initiatives you might take to avoid using the cocktail party reference. This is a great college football game, which highlights a traditional rivalry full of the passion of football in the Southeast. Our hope is to keep the focus on the game."
In so hoping, Slive has failed.
For 16 of the past 19 seasons, Florida has emerged victorious. Prior to this, Georgia won. At least according to the record books. No one really knows because those victories seem so far in the past now, grainy, archival footage of Bulldog greats dominating games that Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy checked the score of. Now, well, Florida wins.
That doesn't mean Georgia fans fail to travel to the game. They still come, tens of thousands of them, wearing their bright red and black Georgia polos and barking haphazardly into their fraternity brothers as they wait to board flights. Like the one I'm on, leaving from Nashville en route to Jacksonville. My flight is equal parts Georgia and Florida fans, middle-aged white middle managers in their uniform of choice, coaches' polo, tightly tucked into jeans or khaki pants, BlackBerry carrying case buckled on the belt loop. Accompanied by well-coiffed middle-aged women with astoundingly pert breasts and hair that, also amazingly, has not faded one bit.
As soon as we board our Southwest flight -- my friend Tardio has accompanied me -- these men spring into action to aid an attractive damsel in distress. It seems a woman can't fit her bag into the overhead compartment. Fifteen men attempt to aid her. Including a male Southwest flight attendant.
It is clear to all that the bag does not fit into the compartment.
But no one is willing to acknowledge failure.
After a five-minute struggle, the flight attendant places his hand on the young woman's bare shoulder, "Don't worry, we'll find a place for your bag," he says.
"Just once, I want to know what it's like to be a hot chick," Tardio says.
My friend Tardio has come to chronicle the Cocktail Party with me. And by "chronicle the Cocktail Party," I mean, drink. But that's in the future. Currently, Tardio, a medical malpractice defense attorney in the city of Nashville, is convinced his carry-on bag contains the greatest Halloween costume on Earth.
He has purchased a pair of blue doctor's scrubs. All his costume requires is a name-tag, which we will have to purchase in Jacksonville because the two of us arrived at the airport 38 minutes before our flight was scheduled to depart.
As we arrived at our gate 23 minutes prior to boarding, Tardio looked down at his phone. "We still had 10 minutes," he says.
He plans to write just one word on the name-tag that he will wear on right lapel of his scrubs: William.
On Thursday night, he conveyed his plan to me. "Get it?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"I'm Health Care Bill," he says.
Health Care Bill is currently reading the latest US Weekly magazine, purchased as we waited to board. "Sienna Miller is looking old," he says, scrutinizing her photo.
"No, she isn't," I say, "she's like 26."
"Really?" the man who will be Health Care Bill asks. "She looks older."
Welcome to Jacksonville
On Friday night, the cabs of Jacksonville descend on the city. And by city, I mean 400-mile radius of north Florida. Because, you see, no one is ever where they want to be in the city of Jacksonville. Also, it's nearly impossible, given that Jacksonville is the largest metropolitan city in America in terms of geographic size, to leave the city of Jacksonville no matter how far you drive. Or, for that matter, to actually leave Jacksonville's airport.
Jacksonville's airport, a monument to the color gray, eschews several archaic design traits such as functionality and economy of space. There are approximately 14 departing gates, all roughly a mile apart. Occasionally, as we make our way out of the facility, we see people, lost highwaymen en route to the holy city of Mecca perhaps, splayed out on the gray floors taking a nap or eating a meal. When you exit the airport you pass a row of offices. As if, in designing the airport, someone thought, you know what will make people love our city more? If they see the hard-working bureaucrats of the airport instead of reaching the baggage claim in less than four miles.
Moving on Up
Health Care Bill and I snag a cab. In Health Care Bill's bag he's actually carrying two pairs of scrubs, one blue and the other navy. That's because on Thursday night, he convinced me to participate in his costume plan.
"You can be Health Care Reform," he says, "but we'll make you a name-tag that says R.E. Form."
Our cab ride to the Courtyard by Marriott off Butler Boulevard in South Jacksonville costs $60. At this hotel, we are 5.8 miles from the stadium. Amazingly, Tardio and I stayed at the hotel next door to this one, the Red Roof Inn, for the 2007 Cocktail Party. The only thing I remember about that hotel is that they sold condoms from the vending machine.
Tardio surveys the half-acre of parking lot between the two motels. "You've really moved up in the world in the last two years," he says.
Checked into the the hotel, Tardio insists that we call a cab to take us to Walgreen's so he can buy some name tags and I can buy my costume necessities.
In lieu of Health Care Reform, I put out a suggestion for costumes in Friday's column. Immediately, I received an email from Blake P. who wrote, "Clay – you definitely can't go wrong with Alan (and baby Carlos) from The Hangover. Easy with some aviators, a cheap baby holder and baby doll from a dollar store with aviators. Plus, you didn't have to shave your beard, so you got that going for you."
In the 10 minutes before we left for the airport, I walked two blocks to the Family Dollar store in my neighborhood in north Nashville in search of said baby. I pushed open the dollar store door, covered in white metal bars, and scoured the dirty aisles, my foot occasionally pushing trash up under the product stands, for five minutes. There were many babies for sale, but given that I live in a majority black neighborhood, the baby dolls were all black.
Every single one.
I found myself faced with an unexpected ethical dilemma.
Could I really walk to the ladies, older black women, working the cash register and ask if they had any white babies in the back? Perhaps placed up on a shelf somewhere in storage? Maybe mis-delivered when the white baby dolls were destined for the suburbs?
Essentially, was it racist to ask for a white baby in a dollar store filled with black baby dolls?
Could I preface my request by remarking that I voted for Obama, liked Angelina Jolie? Anything?
The baby is white in the movie, that's what makes the name Carlos funny. What were the odds that elderly black women had seen and enjoyed The Hangover. Could I really capture the requisite level of verisimilitude with a black baby?
What's more, how does Family Dollar, a national chain, ensure that only babies of only one race are delivered to their inner city stores? Do they have a key-code for truck delivery that ensures only black baby dolls are delivered to my store? Am I, a white man, actually being discriminated against? Shouldn't the babies be diverse everywhere, a rainbow of smiling, plastic dolls?
I call an audible and flee, sans baby, without asking a question.
Decisions, Decisions
On our cab ride to Walgreen's we debate whether we should wear our costumes on Friday, tonight, or Saturday. It's a difficult decision because Saturday is Halloween, but we'll have to wear them to the game. "I'm sure that lots of people will be in costumes tonight," I say. "I don't think many people will dress up for the game."
Tardio has the opposite opinion, but if I argue my side long enough, I know that eventually he will agree.
After procuring a white baby, a Draft Tebow shirt in Jacksonville Jaguars colors -- more on this later -- name-tags, a case of Coors Light, and aviator sunglasses for a baby doll, Tardio insists we go to the liquor store so he can buy a bottle of Maker's Mark for the game.
We return to the hotel, prepare our costumes, and walk to the only restaurant nearby, Applebee's. The Applebee's is selling jello shots on the patio, and inside the restaurant is packed with revelers rooting for Georgia or Florida.
"Let's sit at the bar?" Tardio asks.
"I'm not sitting at the Applebee's bar," I say. "And besides, it's packed."
It's true, there are no seats at the Applebee's bar.
It is 7:45 on Friday evening.
We drink beers out of yard glasses and eat spinach and artichoke dip.
"Can you imagine getting a DUI leaving Applebee's?" I ask.
"Can you imagine leaving Applebee's sober?" asks Tardio.
Beach-Bound
Back at the hotel, we get dressed. I've brought my family's brown Baby Bjorn under strict instructions from my wife not to lose it. I buckle the baby carrier, insert my white baby, affix the aviator glasses onto the baby, while Tardio dons his scrubs.
"Do you think I should write William on my nametag or Bill? asks Tardio.
"I don't think people are going to get either," I say.
Tardio scrunches his face. "F---," he says, "you've got me worried now. Is my costume going to bomb?"
"Yes," I say, "I think so."
"F--- me," says Tardio.
We compromise on "Bill." The quotation marks, we surmise, add the requisite symbolism necessary to make it apparent that Tardio's name is not actually Bill, rather, the name is a part of the costume.
Health Care Bill has no pockets in the scrubs so he has me carry his credit card, cash, two Titans vs. Jags tickets, and his license. Later, after I drop them on the floor, Tardio admits that he didn't mean to give me the tickets to carry as well.
Once more we hop into a cab, only this time it's actually a shuttle service driven by a man named Meza. This time we're destined for the Jacksonville beaches. After another $40 fare, we arrive at Brix, which is a bar made of bricks and pronounced like bricks except spelled with an X.
We stand outside, awkwardly peering into the bar.
"I knew it, no one is in a costume," says Health Care Bill.
Tardio is correct. We decide to go for a walk, fake white baby in sunglasses swaying in front of me, and find the bar with the people with costumes inside.
Thirty minutes later, having traversed the entirely of Jacksonville Beach, we have not seen a single costume.
"It's almost like," Tardio says, "the city forbids them."
The only costumes we see is for a group of happy costumed people who are climbing the stairs to what appears to be a loft party. We contemplate following them. Instead we get in line for Brix, I show Tardio's license for him, "Bill's not my real name," he says to no reaction from the bouncer, walk outside to the patio, and sit in the darkness.
We begin to drink.
Health Care Bill regularly surveys the crowd looking for someone, anyone in a costume. "I was worried about looking like unfun losers if we didn't have costumes," he says, "now we just look like losers."
We begin to argue over who has to go get the next beers from the bar, and reveal our costumes in the light of day.
I have to.
The bartender, a youngish woman with dark hair and mean expression stares at me. "I don't get it," she says.
"Did you see the movie Hangover?" I ask. "I'm....
"I get it," she says, unsmiling.
Someone dressed as David Robinson from Navy shows up. He fist pounds me, ignoring Health Care Bill in the process. Then other costumes, mercifully, begin to arrive.
We make our way inside. By midnight the costumed people are beginning to take over. We're moving into the mainstream. At least those of us who are in costumes.
Most people believe that Health Care Bill is, in fact, a doctor who has not had time to change after work. We test his costume on others, tell them it's three words long and that Bill is the last word.
No one guesses it.
What's more, "Doctor Blue Bill," is the best guess. Primarily because, "Doctor Bill," the primary guess, has only two words.
Three bars later and enough beers and shots to sink two less shameless men, we end up in the street looking for a cab. I call Meza, the man who drove us in his shuttle service earlier.
He's too busy to get us.
Mercifully, we find another cab. As we climb in, I call my wife, at two in the morning back home in Nashville, and leave a long message for her that consists of Health Care Bill jokes. She has no idea what is going on.
A few minutes into the cab ride, I begin to get text messages with things like this written, "Hey, good night, U are cute, lol."
It's from a Jacksonville area code. Health Care Bill swears he didn't give my number to anyone.
At 3 a.m., as the most recent text arrives, it suddenly hits me, our car service man, Meza, has me confused with someone else and is sending flirtatious e-mails to me on accident.
"I think it's on purpose," says Health Care Bill angrily ripping off his nametag.
"At least you didn't go with William," I say.
For a while I stand fiddling with the Baby Bjorn, attempting to undo it. But I can't seem to get the strap undone. So I climb into bed still wearing the baby carrying device. I take out Carlos, now absent sunglasses because they were stolen by a Florida sorority girl, and toss him across the room.
He bounces softly off the wall. Health Care Bill is already snoring.
It's gameday in Jacksonville.
The Hangover
At 11 in the morning, Spencer Hall, from the Web site EDSBS.com, calls. I tell him I"m still in bed wearing a baby carrier.
"Get up, bitch," he says, "I went to bed at four and got up at seven. And I slept outside."
Spencer is like this.
I could have called him and said, "I feel awful, I just had 14 quaaludes, a roofie, and a bottle of Jack, and Spencer would say, "I just had 28 quaaludes, four roofies, and two bottles of Jack."
He is already tailgating.
I put on my gameday attire, a Draft Tebow 2010 shirt, purchased last night. I do this for three reasons: A.) I believe this is the only way Jacksonville will keep a pro football franchise. B.) I'm interested in how people will react to the shirt and C.) I've never actually worn an NCAA violation that could be purchased for $12.99 at a local Walgreen's.
We procure another cab. Because we're gentlemen, we pick up two other people, Florida fans, to share our cab ride. Also, because it's cheaper. We explain that they will have to wait on us in the Applebee's parking lot because Tardio left his credit card there last night.
"'I just had a girl from Georgia in the cab,' he says. "She was wasted. I offered her a bottle of water and she said, 'Water? Why would I fill up my f---ing stomach with water?'" "I know there is going to be $4,000 in Oreo shooters charged on this thing," he says.
This cab driver is better than last night's. Primarily because he is not sending me flirtatious texts.
"I just had a girl from Georgia in the cab," he says. "She was wasted. I offered her a bottle of water and she said, 'Water? Why would I fill up my f---ing stomach with water?'"
The girlfriend of the Florida fan is an Oregon student. She has blonde hair, fair skin and is concerned that the Oregon-USC game may not be on local television here. Her boyfriend has other concerns. "We need to get you some sunscreen because I want to touch you later and I don't want you sunburned," he says.
Our cab driver drops us off on Bay Boulevard and we commence to take in the tailgate sites. Immediately, my t-shirt draws compliments from Florida fans.
Georgia fans? Not so much.
"He's a f------ fullback," screams one man in my direction. This will be repeated approximately 14 times. In all, virtually every Florida fan approves of the shirt.
In every direction around the stadium, people are tailgating in the bright sunshine. It's a perfect day, cloudless, blue sky with bright sunshine bouncing off of the St. John's River, music blaring in every direction. Cornhole bean bags bounce along the well-worn grass, flip cup and beer pong spills drip off old tables. Everywhere you look, alcohol flows like the river that divides Jacksonville.
Fans are clad in Georgia and Florida gear but they're also dressed in the colors of other, non-playing teams. As we walk, I see every SEC school represented. Many people at the Cocktail Party have come with no indication of actually going inside the stadium, or, it would appear, with any real care for the fact that a football game is taking place at all.
As kickoff nears, a portion of the tailgating crew peels off and heads for the stadium.
But only a portion.
Many more, tens of thousands, stay behind. We make our way to a family zone tailgate alongside the stadium. Above us, towering in the sky, the Georgia and Florida sections of the stadium meet in the end zone. A few fans, wearing their team colors, stand up on the back row of last row of the stadium. We can watch these men cheer and divine what is taking place on the field. The Florida fans are cheering. Back down on the ground, a large tent housing the Heisman Trophy provides a modicum of shade and here fallen tailgating soldiers of both sexes lay passed out in the shade.
A man, bedraggled and shirtless approaches us, "Are they not serving beer in here?" he asks.
"I don't know," I say.
"F----------k," he says, turning the u into a long, drawn out wail. "Why do they even have the game if they don't have beer?"
Now joined by my friend Chad, a Georgia fan, we stand amid a huge surging crowd, relatively young in age, much younger than the actual crowd in the stadium, baking in front of a projection screen showing the game. Another shirtless man stumbles past. Earlier his back was painted with a number 2 and Demps written above it, but now, in the heat, he's sweated away the paint so that all that remains is a trace outline of the body paint.
Florida has already scored by the time we arrive, a Tebow touchdown pass to Riley Cooper. Not to be outdone, we see a second Tebow-to-Coooper touchdown pass, and Verne Lundquist shares his favorite SEC anecdote. Did you know the two men are roommates?
Georgia, wearing their black helmets and black pants, has failed to provide an early challenge to the Gators. Tardio pulls his bottle of Maker's Mark out and mixes it with a bottle of Pepsi. Five minutes later, we're surrounded by police officers, "You get two choices," say the officers, "dump it or leave."
Tardio dumps it.
With Georgia trailing 14-3, we leave en route to a rumored party thrown by a Florida Coastal Law Professor. The pass word is, "We're not with the party."
As we walk across the parking lot, we pass a man in a white Chevy Tahoe SUV, he's slumped in the front seat of the car blasting, "Forever Young" as loud as his radio will allow.
Now, in the parking lot, the smell of alcohol, dirt, and filth, sweat, and sunshine baking on asphalt melds together into a potent and pungent smell. Like a flood after the waters have receded. Everywhere are beer cans, discarded bottles, shattered glass, and now, the tailgating zombies are out, stumbling from one place to another, the wasteland of football Saturdays.
A girl, sitting on a curb, shoeless, dress haphazardly gathered around her mid-thigh stares up at us, shielding her face with her hand, "Do you have beer?" she asks.
"We're going for some," we say.
"Okay," she says, standing and falling into line behind us like she has just arrived on a deserted island and heard we knew where water is. Soon, two of her friends have also joined up, a collective search and rescue party with a blood alcohol level that would allow surgery without anesthesia.
I stop near a single port-o-potty marked, "Private."
"Did you bring your own port-o-potty?" I ask some tailgaters.
This went up while I was down at the Cocktail Party. I just filed a 4k word epic on the Cocktail Party late last night that should be up today. In the meantime, read the full mailbag here.
By the time you read this, I'll be on a Southwest flight to Jacksonville for the Cocktail Party. Already your costume suggestions are arriving, and I have to say, I think we have a winner. The suggestion is actually genius. It involves a Baby Bjorn, aviator sunglesses, and ... the pictures will be ready soon. But leaving that aside, let me give you a tip this weekend, the time changes. The f'ing time, it always screws you somehow. Even if, to be fair, the night after Halloween is a pretty epic time for an extra hour of sleep.
I've always hated the time change because I live in Nashville, right at the beginning of the central time zone. This means that during the winter it gets light at 3AM and dark here at 3PM. This is only a subtle exaggeration. The worst thing about this city is that it encourages people to get up way too early in the morning. I've lived on the East Coast, in the Caribbean, and in Europe. In all of those places, it isn't considered an asset to get up at dawn. (Right: Nashville, approaching evening cocktails at 6AM)
Here? It's an asset.
Anyway, as you can tell, I'm anti-time change. Even when it helps me by giving me an extra hour to make my flight back to Nashville on Sunday. Our beaver pelt trader of the week is Wes from The Ruins. Previously Wes has been on Real World Austin and many of the challenges. I first wrote about him back in September of 2006, and for a while there we were e-mail buddies. But he came out of retirement after three years this fall. And it's shameful for me to admit how pumped I was when I saw that he'd returned.
Spoiler alert.
He was eliminated from the challenge on Wednesday night. But he's the most entertaining reality star on the face of the planet, and the least we can do is hand him our beaver pelt trader of the week award.
Okay, on to our picks.
Last week Audrey and I both went 3-3 so my lead remains. I'm now 18-17-1 while she is 14-20-2.
My picks this week:
Indiana @ Iowa -17.5
Georgia v. Florida -15
South Carolina @ Tennessee -6
Texas -9 @ Oklahoma State
Southern Cal -3 @ Oregon
San Jose State @ Boise State -35
And here are Audrey's picks with her rationales:
Indiana since I learned how to pronounce it!
Georgia
UT
Oklahoma State
Oregon
Boise State that is so lost!
Yep, amazingly, we picked all six of the same results.
I'm dead.
Victoria D. writes:
So I'm watching the "Locker Room" sports talk show I recorded from Sunday morning ... and this guy just called in ... and said : "I'm not exactly talkin' murder, but isn't it time for Kiffin to pull a John Wilkes Booth and just get rid of this whole Lincoln problem."
Thought you'd get a kick out of that, I sure did, haha. Gotta love Southern football fans.
Okay, to deconstruct for those who might not be aware, Daniel Lincoln is Tennessee's kicker. He missed three field goals last week against Alabama.
As for the statement, how could Kiffin "pull a John Wilkes Booth" and not kill Lincoln? Did I miss the history class where Booth showed up at the White House and tried to gently persuade Lincoln to end the Civil War? The regular tea and crumpets dinner between the two? So I think this caller, given his analogy, is "talkin' murder."
I will say this, Kiffin should go after Terrence Cody instead. After the deed, he needs to grab the mic and scream, "Sic Semper Terrencis."
I believe this translates quite nicely as, "Thus always to Terrences."
Tim F. writes:
Conventional wisdom would tell you that Iowa couldn't hang with an SEC team in the title game. I wouldn't doubt this version of the Hawkeyes. They have risen to EVERY occasion this season.
The computers LOVE them due to road wins at Penn State, Wisconsin, and Michigan State. If a win in Columbus is added to that resume, the voters won't rank them below Cincinnati, Boise, or TCU. The glass ceiling doesn't apply to Big Ten teams.
If they could reach No. 3 in the coaches' and Harris Polls after Championship Saturday, then the computers may put them OVER an undefeated Texas squad and into a title game.
It could happen.
If Iowa ends up ranked ahead of an undefeated Texas, then the Longhorns are going to secede. Not from the BCS, mind you, but the entire state of Texas is going to return to the days when they were an independent country and leave the United States.
I don't think Iowa passing Texas would happen, but I do think the debate between an undefeated Iowa and an undefeated Cincinnati would be epic. Personally, I'd be inclined to favor Cincinnati, but Iowa's win over Arizona and Cincinnati's win over Oregon State should render a one-loss USC out of the picture. Only it wouldn't.
I'll write about this next week, but what if LSU goes into Tuscaloosa and beats Alabama? Then LSU runs the table from there. In the event of a Texas loss, does Florida have to play LSU in the SEC Title game and then the winner of that game play Alabama after in the BCS title game? Even above a no-loss Iowa or Cincinnati?
Maybe.
For the first time in a while this year, I have a sense that the end of this season is going to be incredibly messy.
Travis has become enamored of several objects, phrases or events which he frequenly references in the column. Among the most frequent:
'Bama Bangs - a term coined by Travis to refer to southern men's hairstyles that feature prominent bangs for no apparent reason. Brodie Croyle and John Parker Wilson are oft-cited violators of 'Bama Bangs rules.
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When Clay Travis, acclaimed author of Dixieland Delight, decided to spend the 2008 season up close and personal with UT football, he—and every other college football aficionado—thought he was in for a rollicking ride with one of the leading contenders for the national title. After all, when the Vols kicked off the season on September 1, the defending SEC East champions were ranked 18th in the country. As head coach Phillip Fulmer prepared for the game, he reflected upon a coaching career that included an astounding 147 victories, two SEC championships, and a national title. With 34 years at UT under his belt as both a player and coach, the Tennessee native had just signed a contract extension that projected to keep him at the university long enough to become the winningest coach in program history.
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There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory.
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The newly favored man is not really a man at all, but a hairless, effeminate, germ-fearing, non-meat-eating, exfoliating, wristband-wearing woman of the worst order. We as men are told that we must embrace the sacred feminine in ourselves, even if it doesn't actually exist, and become the very quintessence of woman, plus penises. This situation is untenable. This trend must stop.
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Clay Travis is the only former student manager in the history of college athletics to marry an NFL cheerleader. He managed to pull this off despite an irrational affinity for the television shows Dawson's Creek and My Super Sweet 16. While being raised in Nashville, Tenn., Travis developed a healthy obsession with college sports and Alyssa Milano. As a teenager his greatest accomplishment was taking a doo-rag wearing Luke Duke (balling as Tom Wopat) to the hole at the Nashville YMCA.
In the midst of a stellar legal career during which he specialized in rewarding the unjust and punishing the oppressed, Travis began writing for CBS Sports's SPiN section in September 2005...
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