2003 Week 7
October 15, 2003
We're finally approaching the midpoint of the college football season and the wheat is beginning to separate from the undigested corn in the bowels of the college football world.
Last week's spotlight game was the Oklahoma/Texas Big 8/SWC interconference squabble at the Cotton Bowel. Hoo boy, I haven't seen a beating like that since a few weeks ago when my good friend Lee Corso took me to Madame Ovary's House of Pain.
After that evening my welts, when combined with my veins, made a neat tic-tac-toe pattern on my neck and my good friend Herb Street beat me best two out of three in the games, leaving all three square yards of my neck covered with X's and O's.
Speaking of skin marks, I hope Mack Brown enjoyed his welcome back to Austin. Usually a good long soak in a hot tub will get rid of those feathers, but the tar will take weeks to get off--I speak from experience.
I was saddened to see Ohio State's winning streak come to an end. It seems Coop is reverting back to Bruce Earl's tradition of losing to the Badgers in odd and creative ways. This year's Buckeye loss in Madison was the ultimate choke job.
The Ron Zook farewell tour made a stop in Baton Rouge for a game against LSU. It's clear from the result that the tigers in Vegas aren't the only Tigers being heavily medicated these days. Nick Satan needs to call up some curses from his Dark Lord and Master, or perhaps return to those blood-red uniforms and pentagram helmet logo.
The strangest thing for me last weekend was changing channels on Friday and seeing that ESPN and its sister network ESPNSI were showing football.
Now I think that is just a desecration of our great nationwide Friday night rituals (and I don't mean sucking down five mint juleps at the local pub then trying to drive home). High school football is sacred in this country, and here's ESPN running around putting high school games on television.
Not only that, during the middle of the high school season ESPN was arranging HS all-star games to be televised. Last Friday had one matchup between a HS all-star team from Florida and one from some Christian high schools in Texas. And the other game was between the best players from high schools in Minnesota and from Michigan. Doesn't ESPN know that these kids are in the middle of their regular season and don't need to be playing all-star games?
And not only that, what was with the helmets? Floyd Carr was able to loan a bunch of his streaked helmets to some high school kids, but when I call up Floyd and ask for a souvenir helmet to be buried in, he says they don't have any in my size. Heck, I wear a size 12 hat, they should have one my size.
ESPN also imposed some weird new overtime rule, where the team from the state of Michigan kicked a FG to go ahead in overtime, then the high school kids from Minnesota had to go the length of the field to try to tie it. I guess high school overtime rules are even more confusing than the college ones.
There's been a lot of attention on fan behavior in recent days. Last Saturday after the game in Columbus Missouri, a Nebraska player was supposedly seen knocking down a Mizzou fan. Charges were dropped because three hours of game film indicated that no Nebraska player was capable of knocking anyone from Missouri to the turf.
Missouri's quarterback came to the rescue of the unconscious fan. I now predict that Missouri QB Earl James Jones will win two Heismans and a Nobel Prize for medicine.
Last night the issue of fan antics came to a head again in the baseball game between Chicago and Miami, when a fan in the stands reached out and kept a White Sock player from catching a Cane fly ball. I understand that the fan in question who helped the Miami team is a Notre Dame grad, so I predict he will win a Heisman, a Catholics vs. Convicts tee-shirt, an honorary degree from Miami, and a few swift kicks in his Jimmy Johnson.
The other big news was the decision by the Atlantic 10 Conference to add a 13th team, Boston College. Now BC dropped football just a few years ago, after their legend Gordie Lockbaum retired, so it's good to see them get their program started again by getting back into one of those smaller conferences.
Unfortunately, some schools are upset that BC is dropping them from their schedule by joining the A-10. Yukon is threatening to sue for damages, apparently because the only program those Canucks could beat was a fledgling start-up program like BC.
Well, the ethanol drip is just about to kick in and I'm ready to sit back and watch another full weekend of college football. Hey, has anyone seen the Pony? I miss the Pony. They didn't haul him off to the glue factory, did they?