2009 Week 8
October 29, 2009
We've reached the midpoint of the season and the action has been fast and furious of late.
Probably the best game of the week was Clemson's overtime win against Miami.
Now I'm still a bit confused about these overtime rules. I understand that each team gets an equal number of chances, but after Clemson scored six points you'd think Miami wouldn't have settled for a field goal. I don't know what Coach Coker was thinking there.
While last Saturday was the fourth Saturday in October, which meant another fine Tennessee vs. Alabama showdown at Jordan-Denny Stadium. This one was a field goal kicking contest, with the Tide coming out on top 12-10. Four field goals always tops out three field goals and an extra point.
We are seeing far too many field goals of late, I think it's the influence of that awful European sport, soccer. We're already seeing enough scrawny guys who lack vowels in their names on the field kicking balls. They're also booting field goals.
Soccer's example is showing up elsewhere in football too. Pretty soon we'll have alleged college football players falling over screaming without even an ACL tear. The stoic Joe T Heisman reaction to a broken leg will be a thing of the past. They'll stub their toe and immediately be yelling for a green card.
I mentioned last week that ESPN told me they wanted me to come in to address some of their sexual harassment issues, how I should speak to employees while wearing a thong to help them visualize the problems caused by such harassment. Well, when I got there I learned I had been tricked.
Some guys in uniforms locked me in a room and started asking about an incident involving my good friend Lee Corso. Apparently Lee had a bit of a problem in the UNC press box bathroom at halftime and set off some vibrations which were strong enough to shatter glassware as far away as Charlotte.
They brought me in because Coach Corso said that earlier that day he had had some of my famous bean dip and that he ended up with a distended colon and was unable to work for three weeks. The interrogator then said he was from the Pentagon and that the Defense Department is researching the use of my bean dip as a weapon. They figure one barrel of my bean dip would be enough to clear the enemy out of two provinces in Afghanistan.
But I digress. In a dramatic WAC showdown, the University of Texas at Houston narrowly beat Air Force. Regular Houston and the Texas A&M Horns both won and moved up in the Southwest Conference standings. Western Virginia laid a hurting on Yukon. In a Saturday matchup of pro sports stars, the Cincinnati Bengals beat the St. Louisville Cardinals 41-10.
This whole mix and match approach with NFL teams, Canadian teams, and even baseball teams participating in college football has gone too far. I tuned in that bike racing channel last Thursday and instead of that cancer-ridden freak they were showing football.
It turned out that they were showing college football from the new University Football League. They had games being played by some new colleges specially created just to play football. So you had San Francisco College playing at Florida Atlantic and Florida Pacific's sister school, Florida Okefenokee. And Nevada-Las Vegas was hosting NYU.
Now NYU was one of the legendary programs of my youth, but they shut things down around 1930. Back then football didn't involve scholarships or ringers, you just had regular students playing. The most athletic people at NYU were theatre majors and they actually comprised most of the team.
One of them, a guy named John, was a pretty good running back. Being a dancer he really knew how to stretch for the first downs. One day, in an unfortunate incident, he did the splits while being tackled. He landed on a sprinkler head, which ruptured him down there and out popped a small, less orange replica of the Syracuse mascot.
John, in great pain, told the sideline doctors that it was okay, how he was born with a 50% bonus in the gonad department so was now just like any other average male. He then passed out and spent three months in the hospital before recovering. His fellow actors, shocked at the severity of the injury, decided to play it safe and quit football. NYU's program went into a downward spiral from which it never recovered.
The story of John's medical condition inspired a latter-day filmmaker. That's why Steven Spielberg cast John's granddaughter Drew in the film "E.T. - The Extra Testicle". You see, the man named John who lost some of his potency went on to become famous two-balled actor John Barrymore.
And now you know the rest of the story.