2013 Week 13
November 26, 2013
I was hoping for some more closely fought matchups over the weekend, but the Idaho Fighting Vendors struggled against the Seminoles. North Carolina destroyed Old Dominion 80-20, you'd think it was the UNC men's basketball team against ODU's women's team. But the women hoopsters would have played football better than that.
There were a lot of cupcake games over the weekend. Alabama beat some semi-pro team from just over the border in Chattanooga. Clemson beat the Citadel team like it was hazing week for the knobs. And rival South Carolina taught secessionist wannabe state Coastal Carolina a few lessons about why it's a bad idea to try to leave the Union, 70-10.
In the big game that everyone watched in spite of my good friend Brent Musburger's stupor, Oklahoma State blew out undefeated Baylor, 49-17. T-Bone Pickens probably drilled a few dry holes in celebration, then he probably got back to work on finding oil fields. As for Baylor, I haven't seen a bunch of Baptists struggle to score like that since, well, last night.
Florida lost its rematch with Georgia, 26-20. Been a tough year for Coach Munchkin -- and UGA peed to make the bricks yellow.
Oregon had a tough road non-conference game in Tucson and got blown out by Arizona, 42-16. This sets up a big showdown between Zona and cross-state rival Arizona State (who beat Cal-Berkeley's satellite campus in Los Angeles). The winner gets the WAC title and a likely Fiesta Bowel invite.
In one of the other much-anticipated games, Les Miles and the LSU Fighting Tigers laid a whipping on Johnny Fussball and Texas A&M, 34-10. It was a tough defeat for the Horns.
One of the great trophy games occurred in Minneapolis, as Wisconsin beat Minnesota 20-7 to retain possession of Paul Bunyan's Ass.
The weather was a big story as well. Many of the games in the Midwest were played in bitter cold with ridiculously low wind chills. But the bad weather even spread south, as the Vanderbilt Commodes flushed Tennessee 14-10 in Knoxville on a frigid day.
I was talking to my new good friend "Sergent" Bob Neyland about the Vols' game and the conditions.
He told me about the time that he wanted to prepare his players for a late November game at Kentucky. The forecast indicated that conditions would be awful, with snow and 20 below wind chills. So on Tennessee's bye week Coach Neyland took his guys up into some nearby snowy mountains. They did all sorts of winter things to get acclimated, including cross-country skiing and even some dog mushing.
Then a sudden storm moved in and the coaches and players were trapped at over 5,000 feet elevation by a blizzard. They had already run out of supplies as they were only planning to be there for the weekend. By Tuesday, starving and weakening, they killed, cooked, and ate most of the sled dogs. Thus fortified, they got a break in the weather and marched back down to the surrounding plains and went to Lexington and laid a whuppin' on the Wildcats.
In honor of the sacrifice of his fellow canines, the one surviving sled dog, who was spared as he was the fastest of the bunch, was made the school's mascot and named "Smokey" after the mountain range where the ordeal took place.
Coach Neyland told me that Smokey was a fan favorite, even as he hobbled around on just three legs. I asked him why he only had three legs. "Beeno, Smokey was such a great dog that we decided we'd eat him one piece at a time".