Hey, DORKS

This is why you don't chase the points. You may hold on to this game, but had you just kicked the extra point instead of going for two to go up by 7 with 13 minutes left, you wouldn't even be sweating it right now.

Never go for two unless you have a crappy kicker and you're able to average better by always going for two, or if it's to get a tie/up by a FG very late in the game (<2min).

I guess it was kicked...

From CFN's Big Ten(sic) week 5 predictions comes this gem:
"Who to Watch: ...Linebacker George Hall ...coming up with a great game against Minnesota last week. After undergoing surgery in August on an injured keg, he appears back to normal and should be the team's leading tackler over the rest of the year."

Surgery? I usually just head off to the corner stor for a new one.

If your team is in a conference

and you like it, you're a pinko commie america hating bastard. Why? Revenue sharing. Lenin liked it. Stalin liked it. You apparently like it to, comrade. Take, for example, the Big Ten(sic). You play in the Big Ten(sic), you get 1/11 of the Big Ten(sic)'s TV contract. This is utterly ridiculous, as the contract was signed by the network to get UM, tOSU, and the occasional Iowa/MSU/Wisky game. They don't give a rat's patoot about you, Mr. Hoosier. Nor you, the Illini (errr... in keeping with the NCAA's mandate on politically correct team names, the "Fighting Illini" shall henceforth be known as the "Angry Indigenous Woodlands People", or AIWP for short. ($1 to Lee)). So, the conference signs a contract that they are able to obtain because of 2 teams ("From each according to their abilities") and distributes to the entire conference ("To each according to their needs"... where have I heard that before?).

Likes revenue sharing

So if you're one of these down in the dumps teams that can't win, can't recruit to your school because you're out in the middle of nowhere, can't sell out your stadium because none of the students from your school actually gives a crap and they're all unwilling to road trip back, then by all means, join a conference, and take the money that some team from a school with actual football talent earns. But if you're a good, God-fearing, red-blooded American, take your cue from the Black Knights of the Hudson and leave your conference immediately. If you don't...

He wins.

mmmm... pudding

Someone over at ND Nation found this wonderful rant of Detroit radio guy Mike Valenti- it starts about 7 1/2 to 8 minutes in. Truly one of the better on-air meltdowns ever.

Mike is as mad as hell, and he's not gonna take this anymore.

Among the gems spewed out:

"you had them by the throat, and instead of cuttin it real deep and watching the blood spurt all over, you let them get to halftime so 'fatboy' can feed them pudding"

"I did my job! I did my job!"

"I'm not going to call out individual players" (immediately preceeded by five minutes of Drew Stanton bashing, and immediately followed by some more).

"Note to John L. Smith: Learn the f-in rules and understand that your timeouts are not like cell-phone minutes! they don't carry over!"

"Pucker! Pucker! Pucker!... 34-17 against Michigan... pucker pucker pucker!"

There's another file that has the entire show (4 hours), in which Terry Foster loses control during the call in segment immediately following this while trying to get Mike to calm down. It's truly a beautiful day to be Irish.

You know when a punt goes out of bounds

and you see the ref running up the sidelines, then slowing to a walk, with his arm over his head, and you're wondering where he's gonna stop... Am I the only one who starts yodeling?

"ooohhhh-dee-oooo-dee oooohhhh-deee-ooo-deee ohhh-dee-ooooh-deee-ooohhhh..."

It's been nearly a week

and I'm still laughing at this. Of course, had this guy's kid been in the stands with me on Saturday... there would've had to be a much, much larger caption balloon.

Dammit, I hate when that happens...

A couple days ago, I was in the grocery store, and I had a sudden hankering for Planters cheese balls. No other would do, they had to be Planters, and they had to come in that cardboard can. But there were none to be had, and I got home, and found out they are never to be had again, as the product line is discontinued.

I'm upset. But even worse, now, for some reason, I have a hankering for one of the steak sandwiches they serve outside the Knights of Columbus building before ND home games. At least that's something I can get in a week's time when I go to the Purdue game. But it's going to be a long week's wait. Oh, and Sparty is going to get it worse than we got from Patrick Swayze and Lea Thompson last week.

a memo to the ND student body re: tailgating

Tailgating, and drinking at a tailgate is a serious business. Take it seriously, you sonsabitches. Enough with all the damn cornholing. The name alone should keep you from playing. But what really sickens me is that when I see it set up in the parking lot, there's only one thing I can think of: Reggie Dunlop and the Hansons. I'm Reggie, I've been doing this tailgating thing for 15 years... and then these kids show up, and THEY BROUGHT THEIR FUCKIN TOYS WITH THEM! Look. A good tailgate has no props. There is the beer, and the grill, and a bunch of people drinking and a few having some burgers and sausages and maybe some chips or something.

Old time tailgating... like Eddy Shore

A non-sequiter...

I must post this, because it still disturbs me to know of its existence. And if something disturbs me, I must pass it on and disturb others. And I wish I had a digital camera at the game last weekend, because as I was leaving the game I saw something which was nearly as disturbing. There was a chick who was about 10 feet behind me who was fairly attractive and seemingly pretty tall, for a chick. Until I got off the ramps that let one down from the upper deck of the stadium, and I realized I was looking at her, on level ground, she wearing flip-flops, me being about 6'2"... and I was looking eye-to-slightly-below-chin with her. That's just flat not right.

Sometimes, those guys at "College football news" piss me off

They do so again this week with their rankings. Well, not the actual ranking, but their little snippet next to it. "With a joke of a schedule ahead, a win at Michigan State will mean a 10-1 record going into the showdown with USC."

I'm used to the standard crap about "Is ND going to win the CIC trophy this year?" But let's look at this rationally: ND's schedule is the three academies (an oddity to play all three, though many would have you believe it's an annual occurrence), 1 middle of the pack and 1 bad ACC team(GT/UNC), 4 Big Ten(sic) teams spanning from the perennial top to the perennial just above IU(UM, PSU, MSU, PU), and 2 mid-PAC-10 teams, followed by the semi-annual post-thanksgiving USC game. So, that's the academies (who are actually decent this year), 6 mid-level BCS teams, 1 bottom feeding BCS team, and two teams which have a combined 50 Rose Bowel appearances, including at least one in each of the last three. Now, is this a schedule that's the equivalent of 1989, where ND played something like 4 of the final top 10 and 8 of the final top 20? No.. but this isn't by any stretch a "joke". The only thing that makes it seem that way is that the two teams that seem most likely to be conference champions happen to come at the beginning and the end of the schedule.

(and, I might add, with the apparent suckage of the ACC, I wouldn't doubt GT could take that crown, leaving ND with the potential to have gone 11-1(bear with me in my little fantasy for a few minutes, this team is more likely 8-4 to 10-2, and a key injury or two from an absolute disaster) against a schedule including 3 BCS representatives. Of course, if this were to come to pass, many would still bitch that ND got a bowl slot it didn't deserve, and ND needs to join a conference. But conferences are downright un-american, as I shall prove without a doubt in a post in the next few days.)

And on top of it all

Sergeant Tim McCarthy was almost as off as the team was. I don't remember what he said, but it wasn't nearly as good as "If you have one for the road, you may have a policeman for a chaser" or even "The automobile may have replaced the horse and buggy, but the driver should stay on the wagon".

Man, that whole weekend sucked.

The view from South Bend was at least as ugly as it must have looked on TV

That was certainly worth driving 220 miles each way, paying 60 bucks for a ticket, another hundred for a hotel, 10 bucks to park in some guy's yard a mile off campus, and getting a blister on my foot from walking probably 7 or 8 miles yesterday.

On second thought... no, it didn't. And what I saw of Sparty's game on TV in the JACC lot (some guy had his Directv setup hooked up to a small generator with a ~27" high def flat screen in the back of the truck, much better than having an aggee sturgeon re-wire the TV and using an old power cord (with one end stuck in someone's pocket) for an antenna) wasn't encouraging for next week. A couple of observations from the stands:

1: The OL can't block. Maybe UM has some great DL (and they probably do), but this has been a recurring theme for about 8 years, with a slight reprieve last year. Even then, much of the success had to do with Quinn finding a little bit of space in which to move about 1-2 steps to make a guy miss, re-set his feet and hit someone with a pass.

2: Quinn isn't sharp. Hasn't been all year so far, other than a couple really nice throws to the TE against PSU last week and the closing drive of the first half the last two weeks. Maybe now that he's considered to be an overrated flop instead of a surefire Heisman winner, he'll loosen up a little, relax, and make the throws he made all last year.

3: The receivers are still dropping passes when they actually get there. This seemed to start in the Fiesta bowl last year, and is starting to become a really annoying pattern.

As an aside, I know what the ESPN angle is going to be all week: "This is just like Ty Willingham's second year..."

Which, if ND happens to lose 5-6 more games, it will be. I don't see that happening. Maybe 2-3. Besides which, unlike Ty's second year, we actually have a halfway decent recruiting class forming (including future 32-time heisman winner "Jivetime" Jimmy Clausen). And, unlike that team, despite getting blown out, it still appeared that there was some small chance of winning even into the late 3rd quarter (if we'd just stop screwing up, which didn't happen).

This year, I'm still pretty optimistic for a nice season, I can actually picture this team winning out, which would be nice. Next year... well, we're going to field a team with I believe 9 seniors, about 15-16 juniors, and 53 underclassmen. (see the above note about poor recruiting after Ty's first year- next year's junior class had about 6 members when Ty was put out to pasture, and Charlie was hamstrung to an extent in recruiting by having other responsibilities right up until signing day).

So over at Blue Gray Sky...

they have a ranking of the top 9 mohawks. I'm just outraged at the oversight that left off perhaps the greatest of them all:

Stripe.

I'm sorely disappointed- usually those guys are on the ball.

Every now and then, I have to get this out of my system.

IT WASN'T A CLIP, DAMMIT!

Ok, all done.

It's Tuesday, and there's no football tonight.

I have beer though, so all is well.

And the Tigers won, so they're that much farther from choking it all away. At least it keeps the people who've been waiting for the other shoe to drop since mid-May quiet for another day or so. Relatively speaking anyway.

Keep the faith, and Bless You Boys! (and if anyone has a link to an audio file of the "Bless you boys" song from 84, pass it along. (and to the RIAA- I'll gladly pay a quarter to whomever owns the rights to this if need be, but I know damn well I'm not going to find it anywhere but on the internet, you money grubbing bastiches))

It was true then, just as it's true now...

He knew the score...

All proper credit to (I believe) NDN's FightonforMorrissey. And of course, your local NRA kook.

NBC Sports does something right for a change

Once the game with PSU was finished, they took their tape, edited it down to just the actual football (cutting out ~15 seconds per play for the officials to make the spot, stop/start the clock, etc) and now have it up on their site as a streaming video, such that the entire game can be watched in about 42 minutes. A couple of the bigger plays, they left the replays in, but generally, it's just show the play up to the tackle, then cut to the teams lining up for the next play.

This could catch on. And you only have to watch the stupid Vonage commercials they showed approximately 6.02 x 10^23 times during the actual broadcast once per quarter.

Memo to College Football:

Fear the DORKS!

AP and Coaches polls out...

no big shockers, seems to be the standard "take last week's poll and adjust everyone who lost down 3-5 spots." Teams move up almost solely according to which teams were in slightly in front of them and lost. ND, tOSU, and USC appear to control their destiny now, everyone else has to hope that one of those three loses a game. Kind of a sucky system, but it's what happens when you take something like the old jumbled up system of bowls and try to force a championship on it without throwing it out entirely and putting in an actual playoff. I say, bring back the bowls, and do them properly. Finish this thing on Jan 1 the way it was meant to be, keep 1 conference tied to each major bowl (the rose can have the Pac-10 and Big-10(sic) back if they want.), and get rid of all but a few of the consolation prize bowls. Anyway, now is a good time for me to be starting to think of why I hate U-M. More later.

That was one ugly game by ND...

well, the first half was ugly. The second half, it seemed hard to screw up. And they didn't. Big play early by the defense put the game mostly away. Then in a seemingly bastard move, the Robot Genius went for the fake punt on about 4th and 3 from the PSU 40-something. It worked, got ND down to the PSU 4, from whence they eventually scored. And that pretty much was the end of the game. But still, how ND went into the half up 20-0 is a bit of a mystery. It seemed like every running play PSU had went for 5-8 yards. Morelli threw something like one incomplete pass in the half. Oddly enough, I'm more upset/worried about the season now than I was last week after the 14-10 win over GT. And ND won by 24. And at one point held a 38 point lead. Maybe I'm just nuts. More commentary on this game and others and the world of college football in general when the beer wears off.

Those were the days, my friend...

Used to have this as a poster. I have to find another copy.

Counting down to the doom of PSU... just a few more hours now.

An odd and morbid thought...

How is it reflected in a team's record if their plane crashes on the way to the game? Do they forfeit the rest of the season? And how do Vegas and the bookies handle the bets placed on those games?

Another minor note on today's BSU- (an) OSU game

It struck me, as they cut to the BSU band playing, that they were playing the old Budweiser commercial music. And then I took a second and realized- there probably isn't a one among them that remembers when Budweiser used that music. (And on top of that, they probably don't even know what follows the words "Here's to good friends...". Or what an Energizer commercial was like before the bunny.)

Damn, I'm old...


(Oh, and for those of you who have forgotten the pre-bunny Energizer ads... Say hello to my little Aussie football friend...)

And with that, the last of the respect for the non-USC PAC-10 goes away

Wow. I mean... wow. Losing to a second tier conference team is bad enough. But to get blasted to the tune of 42-14? That's just awful. And they're probably going to be a middle of the PAC-10 team. After Cal's recent bend-and-submit, things aren't looking good for that conference. But enough about the irrelevant teams who play on thursdays and saturday afternoon after the rest of the civilized world has gone to the bars, it's time to talk important things. Like ND. And their upcoming domination of the crotchety undead from State College.

I see an awful lot of extremely confident State Pen fans these days. I really don't know why. They like to ridicule ND's offensive performance last Saturday against GT, but don't seem to realize that they have a guy who managed 50% completions and somewhere south of 300 yards of offense. Against Akron. I don't care if it was raining, if you can't move the ball against a middling MAC team, you don't scare me. And for all the talk of "617 yards"- that was one game. A game in which we gave up 4 of the 6 longest scoring plays of the year. Penn State doesn't have Troy Smith, Ted Ginn, Santonio Holmes, or whatshisface the running back. Matter of fact, they averaged a little under 3 yards per rushing attempt. Again- this was against AKRON. So, I really don't think there's a whole lot to worry about as far as the zombie's lad's scoring. Maybe 14.

As for the gentleman warrior princes of Notre Dame (kudos to Marco for that moniker), they had an ugly start against GT. But, after about a quarter and a half, they figured out the blitz package, and moved the ball right down the field for a TD to close out the first half. Then did so again to start the second half (after a quick defensive stop). Then had a couple of drives with moderate success (though one ended in a punt) and took the ball back with a little over 5 minutes left. And, as was the clear goal of the second half gameplan, ran out the clock. I have a feeling the opening night jitters are done with, and that was really the only thing keeping the GT game from being a blowout (well, that and the fact the refs were on the take and called several early penalties that noone in the stadium saw but them, killing ND's opening drive- they tried to cover this up by later calling a questionable incompletion on Calvin Johnson from the replay booth, but really, that ball moved when he landed so it's not much of a makeup.). So, since ND is home, I figure the boys in black and white won't be so anxious to screw us over. ND will thusly put up about 35, a little sub-par from last year, but still respectable and still handily winning the game.

And as a final note, the mighty Chippewas of CMU will appear to be giving Michigan a good game, but will do themselves in with a retarded play call like last Thursday's decision to go for it on 4th and 8 from their own 27, and this will turn the tide and they'll lose by about 31. (with UM's final TD coming after they convert an on-side kick up by 24 with 2 minutes in the game, just so CCLoyd* can appease those who feel he didn't pound Vanderbilt by enough last week).


* L=50, C=100... 5 L's =CCL

Well, it's another college football season (at last)

And now that I've let the beer, gin, and whiskey wear off from the long weekend, I suppose I have some thoughts on the subject. For starters, I will pick on Michigan State. Wow- that was a weak performance. You guys were playing Idaho. I-da-freeking-ho. Yeah, their coach is buddies with John L and you don't want to be known as a bunch of RUTSing bastages piling on points late in games you've already won, but when you're playing a crappy team, win the game early. You guys aren't making it any easier on the 3-4 teams you're going to beat that are going to finish well ahead of your 5-7 record.

And Michigan- well, at least you picked an SEC bottomfeeder to beat up on to start the year as opposed to the usual MACrifices, which I suppose are bracketing the ND game. Watch out for that CMU team, were their coach not mildly retarded, they'd be coming into your stadium with a win.

Florida State and Miami- will one of you guys please buy an offense? I mean, yes, your defenses are very good. But to combine for under 300 yards? Sheesh, I can do that on my Playstation in a quarter.

And of course, the only important game of the opening week- ND/GT. The good guys won, and there was much rejoicing (yay!). It's interesting to see the amount of bitching about the officiating in that game, especially considering the majority of it is coming from GT fans, who neglect to mention several horrendous calls that went in their favor, 2 of them going against Rhema McKnight alone. Couple of notes for our Big Ten(sic) referee buddies out there- "holding" involves actually making some sort of grasping motion toward an opponent. Hitting him in the chest, knocking him on his ass, and continuing to run up field doesn't qualify. And it's usually pass interference when a player is attempting to catch a pass and the guy on the other team reaches around from behind him and pulls his chest down with one arm while ripping his helmet off with the other. All things considered, a horribly officiated game (and I think Johnson caught the ball your guy in the booth overturned, but unlike some, I realize that that was not going to be a game-changing play anyway)

My impressions from watching 1 full game and about 9 halves over the weekend? I'm pretty sure everyone sucks this year. This is going to be fun to watch.