2000 Week 3
September 12, 2000
This has been another fine week of college football, with some great non-conference matchups. I've always enjoyed these sorts of rivalries, since two teams will play each other once, then won't meet again for another few decades, so there are always arguments over tickets and so on.
This was especially true in the Nebraska at Notre Dame slugfest. I was glad to see the Notre Dame administration graciously give such a large allotment of tickets to Nebraska, allowing their fans the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these two teams play. Let's hope they meet each other again someday, and maybe this time they can let Nebraska host the game at Omaha's Memorial Stadium.
It seems they're changing the overtime rules every year though. I thought I finally got it straightened out last year after the Tennessee/Florida game, where each team tried a field goal and the one that made it won the game. That seemed fair, except it did remind me of the way they decide 0-0 soccer matches after most of the TV viewers have fallen asleep.
This time they let Notre Dame kick the ball, just like they do in soccer, but Nebraska opted to run the ball into the end zone, just like in rugby. It seemed to me that both teams scored and they should have gone to a second overtime, but instead all the refs left the field and Nebraska was declared the winner. I guess it was because rugby is more of a man's sport than soccer.
In other news, the first annual Big 10/MAC challenge concluded with the MAC pulling off another win with Western Michigan beating Iowa. The Big Ten conference season also opened with Ohio State pulling off the shocker at Minnesota. Coop's got those Ohio boys really revved up this year.
Penn State, after the humiliation of losing to USC and to Toledo, figured they would try to make things easier on themselves, so they scheduled La Tech and beat them by about 80 points.
I've spoken many times in the past about cupcake scheduling, but I think JoePa was scraping the bottom of the barrel this time, playing a French football team like La Tech.
For crying out loud, the La Tech players weren't even wearing helmets, they put on these stupid looking berets that barely covered the tops of their ears. They also called out their plays in some weird French dialect they called Cagin'.
The French people in the La Tech band followed their salute to Jerry Lewis by fleeing the stadium because the Penn State marching band played some Wagner. I don't why the theme from the TV show "Hart to Hart" would be so intimidating, but it's clear the La Tech people were pretty easily frightened. No wonder the Nittany Lions romped.
Last Saturday was not the first time a college football team played a foreign team. In the mid-1970s, during the era of detente, there was a matchup between Maury "Father of Nick and Brother of Lou" Satan's Miami Hurricanes and a football team from the Soviet Union.
Before the game was played the two sides spent days negotiating over the site of the game and, oddly enough, the shape of the field. They finally agreed to play at a neutral site on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Ocean and to play on a field shaped like one of those rhombuses.
The Russian team turned out to be a bunch of their elite Spiitsknotts troops, with special training in the martial arts, boxing, and the fullback trap. So Miami knew they were going to have their hands full.
The game itself got rough in a hurry, as two Miami defensive linemen had their windpipes broken by the Russian players and could no longer breath. They were pretty game though, almost as game as Arnold "2 Heisman Trophies" Battle was for Notre Dame last week, these guys stayed in the game for a full quarter before collapsing due to lack of oxygen.
Miami's team had a lot more speed than the Russians, and thus were able to outrun their opponents any time the Russians decided to pull out their numbchucks. That was the pattern of the entire first quarter, Miami players running like hell and some Russian guy chasing after them, screaming at the top of his lungs, and waving his numbchucks.
One Miami player was finally cornered. He struck back by kicking the Russian square in the numbchucks. That Russian collapsed because he, like the rest of his team, refused to wear a jockstrap. Pretty quickly the Russians put their numbchucks away and started to play regular football.
Late in the fourth quarter the score was Miami 19, Russians 14, and the Russians were moving in for a possible winning touchdown. The sky started to cloud up and it looked like a major storm was moving in. But that wasn't the problem.
The aircraft carrier's crew was so excited by the game that they let the ship drift westward into the Devil's Triangle. A Russian player was headed for the end zone as time ran out, then suddenly Maury Satan's family ties came through and the entire ship disappeared into a time warp, thus preserving the Miami victory.
Nobody knows what happen to the ship after it got zapped into the past, though some mystifying clues have been found by archaeologists in Peru. There's a place there called the Nazca Plain, with large drawings that have been there for centuries, and one looks a lot like an X's and O's diagram of a wishbone triple option play.
We know from their ancient texts that the Incas knew nothing of the wishbone (they were an I-formation people), so it may well be that the two football teams were zapped back in time to Peru.
On our next edition of "In Search Of", we're going to figure out where the good part of the Jim Beam goes after it leaves my liver.