2005 Week 9
November 3, 2005
I'm sure glad October is over. Can't stand that daylight savings time and those later sunsets. You don't have to worry about seeing a deer darting onto the road when it's pitch black outside, you can just ram through them.
Speaking of ramming through, did anyone see what Coach Superior's boys did last Saturday to Tennessee? I haven't seen a better performance by a bunch of Cocks since Emanuelle Part VI.
One of the other great games was the big comeback by Texas. Old John Mackovic Brown has turned things around for the Aggies, with a second half flurry leading to yet another beatdown of those Okies.
Virginia Tech beat Boston College to take control of the Big East race. Florida State blew out Maryland to take control of the league's other division, the Big East West.
I also enjoyed watching UF knock off the visiting Georgia Bulldogs in the defensive tussle at the Florida's Gator's Bowel.
I got a strange phone call last week from Chicago. These Big Ten schools really like playing all those odd trophy games. You name a matchup, there's a trophy, whether it's the Old Oak Spittoon, the farming services of Floyd Rosedale, Paul Bunyan's Ass, the Brown Slug, or the Hugh Grant Trophy.
So before the not so big Wisconsin vs Illinois matchup, there was this request from the Presidents of the two schools. They wanted to make the Wisconsin vs. Illinois game be the "Battle for Beeno Cook's Liver".
I told them I was still putting my liver to extensive use. They said they could settle for using one of my previous livers and asked for the phone number of the Pitt Medical Center. So we'll see how that works out.
Many of you wrote to ask me about Miami's uniforms last Saturday. As far as I can tell, they had green uniforms with gold pants and gold helmets, with some sort of bloody blotch on the side of the helmet. It was the ugliest thing I've seen since my good friend Lee Corso's televised rhinoplasty.
Now throwback uniforms have a long history in college football, such as Notre Dame's famous lime green jerseys that they break out for big games against Rutgers.
There are also the designer uniforms, such as UCLA's little black uniform created by the famous Christian Peters Dior. Unfortunately the matching spike heels weren't very effective for pass rushers.
Way back when college football got started, teams really couldn't afford fancy uniforms. You've seen how playground basketball teams play "shirt vs skins"? It was the same way for football back in the 1880's. Football uniforms were pretty expensive in those days, so there were only about a dozen or so outfits available for the game.
The teams would have the coin flip before the game to give one team the option of choosing uniforms or the ball. The winning team would invariably pass on taking the ball and would instead race to the sideline to grab the uniforms. The other team would have to be the "skins", and would take off their shirts and strip down to their white long underwear (sorry, we didn't have the option of boxer shorts back then).
At halftime the teams would switch ends of the field and the uniformed team would strip down and let the other team put on the uniforms for the second half. As this was the Victorian era, pretty soon it was decided that this changing of clothing shouldn't take place in public, and that led to the development of the locker room.
Because long underwear didn't offer much in the way of padding or protection, the uniformed team had a big advantage. They would always try to build up a big lead in the first half, then try to hold on for victory when, in the second half, they were reduced to wearing their skivvies.
An 1892 rule change forced all teams to don uniforms in all games. This rule changed was caused by an unfortunate incident involving the marginally clad Yale star Pudge Hessenpfeffer and an upturned garden rake.
Pudge went on to medical school after that, and, inspired by his rake experience, invented the colonoscopy.
And now you know the rest of the story.