2011 Week 8
October 26, 2011
Well, the fourth Saturday of October has come and gone, and that legendary southern rivalry was reinvigorated once again as Nick Satan's merry minions crushed Coach Dooley's Volunteers by a big margin. Ole Vince is getting more than he bargained for in his return to coaching.
There were a lot of other fine games played Saturday night. Texas Tech stunned Oklahoma in Norman and I have to believe that Coach Leach was thrilled. Stanford bombed Washington. And USC stole a game from the Irish in South Bend.
Now I do have one concern, having teams from the West Coast adjust their schedule to fit East Coast TV needs. That game at Notre Dame started at 8 p.m. Eastern time, add in the three hour time change and it was way past Coach Monty Kiffin's bed time. Same thing with the Stanford/Washington game, the start of the game was changed to accommodate East Coast viewers but nobody is thinking of the fans attending the game having to wait all night for kickoff and having the game run past 2 a.m. Pacific time.
Earlier today I was getting pretty excited, what with the World Series potentially ending tonight, but apparently the game was rained out. I noted earlier this week that if the World Series was being played in my bedroom, I'd go sleep in the kitchen. Of course it's been years since my bedroom has seen any ball action.
I've never seen a football game get rained out, heck, some of the greatest football games of all time were played in the muck. Just a couple years ago Orlando featured a mud bowel in the post-season matchup between LSU and Penn State. You'd never see a baseball player get down and dirty the way Coach Miles does, nor would you see a baseball player play any sport in the mud.
Syracuse bid farewell to Western Virginia in a blowout win last Friday. I still think the Mountain Men would be better off competing for the Jack Lambert Trophy than moving their entire state next door to Oklahoma. Though a Western Virginia move to the Great Plains would raise the average IQ of both leagues.
The most exciting finish was the Michigan State Fighting Chippewas' win over the Wisconsin Badgers. Now I'm still a bit confused about these overtime rules, especially in the Big Ten. I remember tuning in one game a decade ago where Michigan State and Michigan were going into overtime tied at 3 and they settled it by playing a game of hockey.
This time they wrestled around the goal line until the ball broke the plane. After a while I realized they decided to settle it by playing rugby. At first I thought they were playing a different foreign game: Austrian Rules Football.
Austrian Rules Football was devised in the very violent 1920s. Players were allowed to kick the ball like in soccer, shove each other near the goal line, punch each other in the jimmy, and slash each other with knives and, eventually, swords. It was very popular in decadent Vienna and fans looked forward to the match between the home team and Salzburg.
A vicious young Vienna player, Ernst Schmidt, had sharpened an extra long sword for the match. Late in a tie game he used it to stab a pair of Salzburg players, shoving it into one player's left side, through him, and out the other player's right side. As the two men started to collapse, the leftmost man's right leg instinctively swung forward, launching the ball toward the goal and past a stunned goal keeper for the win.
Due to the carnage on the field, it was decided that live action Austrian Rules Football was not a good idea. But, thanks to Ernst's inventiveness, the sport was preserved in a different, inanimate form.
Creative Austrian inventors recognized the deceased Salzburg players by making wooden mockups of the players, shoving a steel rod through them, and building a table game where impaled players could shoot the ball past the goalie. And that's how the fine table game Fussball was born.
And now you know the rest of the story.