2000 Week 7
October 10, 2000
I'm beginning to get concerned about this season. The quality of play appears to be down considerably. Last week there were only 2 season-ending injuries to quarterbacks.
Heck, the NFL has far fewer teams and still sees more quarterback injuries than college football. What dietary supplements are the college coaches feeding to their defensive linemen these days? Tofu?
When I watch college football I want to see some hitting, some sacks where the QB's knee gets twisted, some replays of Joe Theisman's leg breaking. I still like to watch that video (the one with 10 different angles in super slow motion plus X-rays) that Sports Illustrated gave me for getting a lifetime subscription (ha! In 1988 SI looked at their actuarial tables and my medical records and predicted that I was only going to live 3 more years, so they only charged me $50 for a lifetime subscription. They should know us Cooks all live to 100, so I've still got at least 8 good years left).
Let's hope we get some good hitting in the next few weeks, with quarterbacks being forced out for real injuries, like knees, rather than these wussy pinched nerves.
The most astonishing thing last week was Colorado's turnaround. That Gary Barnett is a master motivator (almost as good as his predecessor, Coach McCartney, and Barnett doesn't have that hot little coach's daughter Jenny McCartney to fire up the team in that special way).
Barnett told his team they weren't worthy of the bison logo on their helmet and had the helmet decals removed. His boys, properly motivated by their coach, went down to Austin and laid a hurting on the Aggies. Now Colorado can get rid of that dull single-color helmet look and put the bison logo back on.
I wonder if Bob Davis has noticed this. Notre Dame has made a nice turnaround this year. It may be time for Bob to reward his team by getting rid of the dull single-color golden helmet look and put the traditional little leprechaun decals back on the Notre Dame helmet.
Other schools use little decals to reward players for making big plays. One of the most notable schools in this regard is Ohio State, which recognizes players by adorning their helmets with little marijuana leaves.
OSU even put a great big pot leaf on their band's bass drum! My ESPN colleague Herb Street says that fans are always calling his Columbus talk show, asking what coach Cooper has been smoking. Isn't it obvious, fans? He's a ganja man.
One of the more interesting games last weekend was the matchup between Lou Holtz's resurgent USC Gamecocks and the Kentucky Wildcats. The game itself was pretty tight, with the Cocks eventually pulling it out from the Pussycats.
What really astonished me in that game was Kentucky's quarterback. I thought Dante Culpepper was a load, but this kid from Kentucky made Dante look like that shave-headed scrawny singer Sine-aid Stipe by comparison. That QB had to be at least 6'6 and 300 pounds and he was back there taking snaps against the Cocks.
This is not the first time a team used one of their biggest players at quarterback. You old-timers may remember the famous "Seven Blocks of Granite" offensive line. That was at Fordham University during the 1930's, a team coached by Notre Dame legends Fred Leahy and Otto Crowley, and featuring a young man who later grew up to be legendary coach Vince Lombardi.
Coaches Leahy and Crowley wanted to get a bigger, tougher team. They started by taking all their spare cash and setting up a real training table for these starving Depression era football players. Big juicy steaks, milkshakes filled with protein from monkey brains, and two plates a night of pure lard were enough to beef up these guys.
Pretty soon their players were all pretty huge and they figured they were all set. They put the biggest guys on the offensive line, and decided to go with one quarterback and three (yes, three) fullbacks.
The quarterback, Sherman Stepford, was about 6'5 and 320 pounds--and he was the smallest guy on the offensive team. He could run that modified T-formation pretty well though, and he was one heck of a blocker on sweeps.
The team opened its season with a road game at New Madrid University in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The New Madrid Bullfighters were excited to be hosting a prominent eastern school, and unveiled their new 10,000 seat stadium, one of the finest small college stadiums in the country at that time.
In the first quarter Fordham tried a new tricky play, a double reverse involving quarterback Stepford handing it off to one fullback, who handed it off to another fullback, who handed it back to Stepford, who had two fullbacks, a tight end, and two linemen as lead blockers.
Fordham executed the play perfectly, with Stepford slowly galloping to the left side, with four guys maybe one yard in front of him. Unfortunately, they were on a weak spot on the field and their combined weight led to a tragic situation.
Nobody knew that the new stadium had been built over a fault line, and the combined weight of the Fordham offense concentrated on that one weak spot led to an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, which laid waste to most of the new stadium, led to dozens of injuries, and forced cancellation of the game.
After that disaster the NCAA adopted a new rule limiting the size of offensive backs for teams that play in earthquake zones, which explains why the fault-ridden Pac 10 features so many pantywaist players.