2003 Week 4
September 18, 2003
I was really excited to learn that ESPN was doing a weekly behind the scenes show on Notre Dame football.
So I tuned it in a week ago Tuesday night to see what was going on. It started out pretty interesting, showing the Notre Dame team in its locker room, wearing their new light blue uniforms (is that part of that deal where they sent their basketball coach to North Carolina?).
But then I became concerned. They were showing some of the players smoking Tide detergent (hey, this isn't 'Bama) and sticking catheters in their jimmies to see who could fill a bag the fastest. They even had girls hanging outside their locker room, which I know is a violation of the rules at an all-male school like ND. And don't get me started on the locker room noises, man, it sounded like my good friend Lee Corso after a beef burrito.
After viewing this ESPN show about Notre Dame's "playmakers", I had to wonder just where Coach Dillingham was during all this.
Obviously someone told Coach Dillingham what was going on behind his back, because it appears that he suspended half the team. That would explain why the Irish got beat up in Anne Arbor last weekend. I give Ty credit for taking strong action. I noticed that backup QB Ty Dillingham Jr. did not play, so give Coach Dillingham credit for suspending his own boy.
Here's hoping that the Irish straighten things out after the scandal of that ESPN show.
I have to issue a correction from last week. Many people wrote in to say that I was wrong about the Alabama intrasquad scrimmage. I had said that the "OU" on the Alabama helmets referred to the offense, but everyone said I was wrong, especially because the "OU" team played both offense and defense. So it's clear that the "OU" referred to "Other Unit".
The biggest upset last weekend had to be the Arkansas win at Austin's Darrel Broyles Memorial Stadium last Saturday. The Hogs really took it to the tea-sips. Arkansas' looking really good for a SWC title and a trip to the Cotton Bowel.
The other game that got a lot of attention was the Ohio State overtime win over North Carolina State.
Now I've been a bit unsure about these overtime rules in the past. This time the two teams played for a full 60 minutes of overtime. Each team was putting up some points. It was really exciting. On the last play NC State, trailing by 6, moved down to the 1-foot line, almost in position to tie the game up again or perhaps take a lead (OSU had foolishly gone for two and failed after their previous TD).
Then the refs came in, blew the whistle and said that the 60 minutes was over and that the game was over. Apparently they were using rules from that sissy sport soccer. In soccer the teams play 60 minutes straight until the ref blows a whistle and says it's over. So the 60 minutes were up before NC State could line up and run another play and the Buckeyes walked off with the OT victory.
Two of the most shocking results of the week came from Big Ten country. Not satisfied with playing cupcake MAC teams, the Big Ten reached some new lows in scheduling and paid a heavy price for it.
Wisconsin lost a game to Las Vegas High School. I don't get Barry Alvarez. One year he plays Cincinnati and loses to the Bengals, the next year he plays a high school.
Even more shamefully, Michigan State lost to La Tech, that college from France. JoePa used to play that French team every year, but at least PSU would win the game.
MSU was so embarrassed by the loss to the Fightin' Frogs that Coach Perles entered the witness protection program and changed his name to John Smith.
La Tech isn't the first foreign team to play in the US. A couple years ago I told you the story of the first European team to play football against an American 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, 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.