2005 Week 10
November 10, 2005
I'm still calming down from one of the best college football weekends yet this season.
My good friend Herb Street turned me on to this new energy drink. I guess they named it hoping to get a sponsorship of a post-season game, because it's called Red Bowel. Red Bowel lives up to its name, at least when it's combined with a couple burritos, my roids can attest to that.
Miami threw a monkey wrench into the BS system ratings, with their win over Virginia Tech. That result has left the Big East race up for grabs, especially with Western Virginia's triumph over those foreigners from Yukon.
One of the stranger events of the weekend took place on both coasts. I tuned in and watched Florida State fall short in their matchup with Stanford.
While I love the red "S" on the Stanford helmet, I think it's a bit presumptuous for them to claim a National Championship with that abbreviation alongside the "S".
But right after they upset FSU, the Cardinals must have hopped the Concord or something and flown back to California, where their worn-out team got thumped by Southern Cal.
Time and again I've railed on these schools for playing doubleheaders (especially Miami!). College football is too strenuous of a sport and teams shouldn't take that risk. Instead of having a big win over FSU to celebrate, Stanford went 1-1 on the weekend.
One of the biggest stories was the Kansas upset over Nebraska. That's the Cats' first win over the Nebraska Cornholio since my childhood. That was around the time the Kansas/Nebraska Act was passed. That Act forebade the spread of good football into Kansas.
With the long Nebraska winning streak now at an end, further attention will be directed to this weekend's Navy at Notre Dame game. The Irish haven't lost to the Navy since the era of Mr. Onside, Doc Davis.
I've noticed how Notre Dame is finally living up to their fighting Irish nickname, with big contributions from players with great names like O'Zbikowski and McSamadzija.
Notre Dame is among the few schools that do not put names on jerseys, probably because they don't have enough room on the jerseys for some of those long Irish names.
It's been an interesting trend throughout college football history. While most teams have names on uniforms these days, in the olden days players not only didn't have names on jerseys, at one time they also didn't even have numbers!
Back around the era of Anus Alonzo Stagg and movie director/football coach Jack "Pop" Warner, substitution rules were very strict. You basically couldn't replace anybody unless there was a bone sticking out. Even Joe Thiesman wouldn't have gotten a break, at least not figuratively.
However, when there was a need for a replacement, coaches didn't have a way of deciding who to send in as the substitute. So the notion of assigning players numbers came about. You put #1 through #11 on the field, then if one of them got injured, you put in #12.
This was the real story behind the Texas A&M "12th Man"--one day the Horns were short on players and when one of the starters got injured, they had to take a kid out of the stands, put the #12 jersey on him, and put him in the game.
Now since this was sequential, substitute players knew that #12 was far more likely to get into the game than someone with a higher number. This led to some of the wimpier players who were afraid of contact wearing really high numbers, such as Ole 93 Tom Harmon and future football coach Lou Satan, who wore #666.
In fact, it was the whole sequential number system that led to another famous incident in South Bend. Coach Dan Divine made sure to give his walk-ons ridiculously high numbers so he'd never make the mistake of putting them in the game.
The player we now know as "Rudy" was smart enough to figure this out, so he swapped jerseys with a teammate. That way he had a lower number and that's how he got into the game at the end.
The player Rudy replaced, defensive tackle Ken Dike, was pretty disappointed 20 years hence when the movie came out, as Rudy got all the fame and public speaking fees, but the producers didn't think they could make money in that era, outside of those art theaters, on a movie called "Dike".