Follow that link above, vote for Lane Kiffin for Esquire’s sexiest woman alive. She’s already beating 1-seed golfer Natalie Gulbis by a wide margin.
Doitdoitdoitdoitdoit!
Gotta wonder, is the creator of this poll a ND, UCLA, or Tennessee alum? We’re thinking they’re a Vol.
Hey-O Conscripts!
It’s that time of year again! Time for us all to discuss our brackets with co-workers as we pretend we’ve been watching college basketball for more than the last 2 weeks. And what better way to show off all that now-ledge than to sign up and play in Her Loyal Sons Bracketitis III!?
Details:
Prizes? We don’t need no stinkin’ prizes! And acknowledgement? Hell, if domer.mq is doing poorly enough early enough in the tourney, you can consider this pool all but forgotten. Hoorah for autocracy!
So join up because, well, because it’s fun! And if you join 26 other pools, it’ll be 26 times the fun!
The top prospect in the 2010 college recruiting class, Seantrel Henderson, is expected to sign with SoCal this week. Ostensibly, Seantrel, who I believe was at one time committed to ND, or was it Florida, or Occidental? Eh, whatever, man. That’s soooo 2009/2010. It’s all about the new hotness in the 2011 signing class now, baby! Anyway, yeah, ostensibly, Seantrel was waiting for SouthernCal to meet its fate in its NCAA investigation before making any rash decisions that would affect the entirety of his remaining time here on earth, but, yeah, sore thumbs and all that…
But on Monday morning in a text-message to news media outlets, his father, Sean, said that his son’s ACT scores, which he received last Friday, made him academically eligible. With that news, he said, his son would sign with U.S.C. on Thursday.
Here endeth the drama. Unless, you know, he doesn’t actually sign. Again.
From the great Smart Football, here are the 4 rules for drafting a QB if your name is Bill Parcells.
| Parcells Rule |  |
|---|---|
| He must be a senior, because you need time and maturity to develop into a good professional quarterback. | Nope |
| He must be a graduate, because you want someone who takes his responsibilities seriously. | Not sure, actually. Anybody? |
| He must be a three-year starter, because you need to make sure his success wasn’t ephemeral and that he has lived as “the guy” for some period of time. | Check. |
| He must have at least 23 wins, because the big passing numbers must come in the context of winning games. | Nope. |
This is not your father’s college football world. And now you can go and look and see just how much it has changed thanks to some great work by Brian Fremeau on his BCF Toys site.
The AP final top-25 was significantly more connected in 1989 than 2009. Only nine ranked teams played at least four games against other ranked teams last season; in 1989, 18 ranked teams did so. Twenty years ago, the AP top-10 either played or shared a common opponent with an average of 17 other ranked teams.
Go check out the link. It includes spirographs, and they are awesome.
The NCAA just wrapped up their hearings regarding Southern Cal infractions this weekend. Some highlights of what happened outside of the closed-door sessions provided by the NYT:
The hearings were secret, and participants were required not to reveal anything to the news media. A decision will be made only after hours of conference calls between the members of the committee on infractions.
But there were signs from the hearings that make it highly improbable U.S.C. football will leave this multimillion-dollar, four-year investigation with a wrist slap. The first and most glaring hint came from a hotel bellhop, who practically grunted while pushing an industrial luggage cart full of documents out of the meeting room. There were seven boxes on the cart, including a six-inch-thick binder labeled U.S.C. Response Volume 1.
Tom Yeager, a former chairman of the infractions committee, noted in a telephone interview last week that the inside joke among committee members was whether or not a case was a “one-box” case or a “two-box” case.
When that joke was relayed to David Price, the N.C.A.A.’s vice president for enforcement services, he said that U.S.C.’s case in front of the N.C.A.A. was the longest in his 11 years with the committee.
Yes, yes, go on…
Price also said that most times the committee met, it heard cases from several universities, and this one was dedicated to U.S.C. In contrast, Alabama’s case before the N.C.A.A. in 2002, which resulted in five years of probation, a two-year postseason ban and crippling scholarship reductions, took two days.
Fascinating! Only two days, you say?
It’s the people that make me hate college football. And by “people,” I mean everyone. They ruin an otherwise entertaining exercise of tactics, strategy, and athletic competition. Between the college “kids” who are freaking 18-22 years old and should know better than to do some of the stupid things they do, and the coaches who get paid in ways that would make Goldman Sachs employees blush to do things that would make members of the Russian Mafia shake their heads, the people involved in this sport are intolerable. Still, there exists no living entity in this sport more repugnant, more pathetic, and more deserving of mass extinguishment via meteor collision than the fans. And there is simply no period of time during the college football calendar year worse for college football fans’ resumes than “crunch time” at the end of a recruiting year; a time apparently viewed by many vocal fans as a time to shine like wet dog feces in the sun. God damn, I freaking hate the fans.
There are fans who celebrate that one of their coveted recruits didn’t manage to qualify for a competing program. There are the fans who friend recruits on Facebook. There are the fans who declare that a new coach’s leash is a lot shorter with them now that a kid they didn’t approve has gleefully accepted a scholarship offer to fulfill a dream. There are fans who speak of “cohorts” and stars as though the future of a kid can be determined via those pieces of information with any level of success. There are fans who speak in outrage over recruiting and depth chart decisions without being able to so much as muster the ability to create an informed opinion on their nation’s politics. And there are fans who will demolish a recruit from one side of their mouth while trying to maintain their “classy” reps with faux shows of support from the other side.
And then there are probably the worst fans of all: The fans who take the pride they hold in their college football programs to levels that the bible has warned us about. The sort of pride that makes you fully understand why it’s a cardinal sin; because it’s flipping annoying, and anyone who would willingly be that annoying to the rest of the human population probably should do some time in hell.
To watch massive numbers of presumably grown people go into moralistic conniption fits that nearly threaten their imperfect balance on their high horses over who gets what offers – what the hell does that have to do with a moral plane anyway? – is just maddening. How the hell will humanity ever figure out… anything?
And save me your “pot, kettle” retorts and you what little wit you may possess if you disagree. I get it. I’m probably a part of the problem by hosting this site. Believe me, I’m considering what to do about it. But frankly, there are much larger, much more popular sites that are wrought with myopia and mental fumbles that would make stroke victims feel pitty, and so long as they’re around, until we find a better way, we may as well use whatever opportunity we have to point out their absurd lapses of critical thinking and the ugliness of their thoughts.
God damned people.
Coach Brian Kelly, your pledge name is Captain Marko Ramius, and so it shall continue to be until such time that we, the Loyal Sons, are able to determine whether you plan to launch your nuclear ballistics all over the Nation of Notre Dame, or if you really are doing something absurdly clever with your cagey moves like inviting a kid with one offer – from William & Mary – for an official visit just before signing day, cancelling walk-on try-outs and dashing the hopes and dreams of countless would-be-Rudys (albeit, temporarily), and making scholarship offers to eleventeen quarterbacks in the 2010 class. You sir, are an enigma. Like a Russian sub commander with a Scottish accent, you’ve got us totally perplexed and completely hooked. We look forward to seeing where this takes us.
Oh sure, there are some who’d like to hunt you down and sink you before we get to the climax of your little plan, but we’d like to see what you’ve got in mind. Just one thing: Be careful what you shoot at. Some things at Notre Dame don’t react well to misfired bullets*.
*Yes. We know that’s not even close to the actual quotation.
Since the 2010 recruits entered high school…
…Notre Dame’s football team has lost to the following teams:
Southern Cal, four times; Michigan, three times; Boston College, Michigan State, Navy, and Pitt, twice each; Air Force, Georgia Tech, LSU, North Carolina, Penn State, Purdue, Stanford, Syracuse, and UConn.
And that’s not even the horrible part that makes me feel old and creaky. Go hit the link to Classic Ground and prepare to be reminded that those “laugh lines” aren’t going away anytime soon.
No wonder The Shirt slogans all seem unoriginal. The makers must be running out of material that transfers easily to today’s high-falutin’ digital media.
Anyway, yeah, this weekend sucked (see below), but if we can Just. Win. Baby. we’ll be alright next year.
We’ve been thinking in charts a lot this week. Here’s how we’re seeing Urban Meyer today after the most recent bit of news.
Hey, remember all that crap Urbs fed the world when he talked about how he wanted to recommit to his family? Remember the tale of how his daughter was so excited to get his father back? Yeah. It was all crap, and Urban Meyer is a football coaching robot with no need for things like “love of family.” But he finds plenty of use in manipulating humans.
“Sharrif was really confused and put a call into Coach Meyer. When they spoke Coach Meyer told him that he had a ‘dream’ the night before, and that Coach Meyer saw himself on the sideline coaching Sharrif. Told him that is was a “message from God that I should come back and coach, as I guess if it’s my time to die, I’d rather die on the sidelines coaching you than anywhere else in the world.
“Sharrif talked to us the next day and said Ohio State is great and all, but Coach Meyer said he would DIE for me. That’s pretty intense…
Urban Meyer is going to be on the sidelines at Florida in 2010. At this point, we are certain of that, and we’re pretty sure that Urban Meyer is a heartless football coaching robot. We imagine it must be difficult for Urban’s children to deal with the knowledge that they’re somehow, through the miracle of modern science, genetically related to a man with a fission device where his heart should be.
11 on the “Oh, C’mon!” Scale.
Chow is returning to Southern Cal. We’ll wait to see if Reggie Bush is returning too.
Because the Volunteers are about to blow it up with rage.
Tennessee’s Lane Kiffin has agreed in principle to become the next head coach at Southern California, sources close to the situation told ESPN.com’s Chris Low on Tuesday.
Kiffin would replace Pete Carroll, who jumped to the NFL as coach of the Seattle Seahawks.
Kiffin, the former Oakland Raiders coach, led the Volunteers for only one season.
Sources told ESPN Kiffin will bring his father and defensive coordinator, Monte Kiffin, and assistant head coach and recruiting coordinator Ed Orgeron to Southern Cal with him, and wide receivers coach Kippy Brown will be named interim head coach at Tennessee.
Kiffin has been on the move of late. He was 7-5 in his one season at Tennessee and 5-15 in one-plus seasons with the Raiders before being fired in September 2008.
He was a member of the USC coaching staff from 2001-06.
Whoa (and I mean that in the Keanu Reeves way).
I guess that answers the question: How do you manage to get a coach to agree to take a job with the NCAA breathing down their neck? And how do you do it while being totally transparent with the new coach? Hire a guy who was in on most of it while it was happening.
Rivalry, consider yourself reborn.
An opportunity has been lost. ND Nation’s biggest enemy is riding off on a north western vector, having compiled a point differential over Notre Dame of 185 points in 8 contests – or about 3 TDs a game – so he can (probably) avoid any meaningful repercussions from NCAA violations and enjoy a pre-retirement pay package of about 6.5 million bucks a year for the next 5 years until he’s inevitably fired by an NFL franchise. And the best thrust ND can claim against Pete Carroll after all that time and all those missed opportunities is a 27-16 victory in 2001 before Pete had recovered the SC roster from the gutter. Immediately after hearing the rumors of Pete’s impeding departure from LA for the land of Coffee and Plaid, the mental image of Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter spinning wildly out of control but safely away from an exploding Death Star came to mind – naturally – but it’s an ill-fitting analogy. For Notre Dame there is no set of sequels where the good guys get a few more chances. In ND’s plotline, Vader gets to fly away to an easier way of life before retiring to Malibu so he can concentrate on his selection of “Song of the Day” and board shorts. The bad guy won in Notre Dame’s story, and as one final, gigantic middle finger to the Irish and their hopes of ever again winning a national championship, Carroll leaves behind what may more closely resemble a scorched and salted earth than a historically strong rival. For the past 8 seasons, beating SC was a benchmark for measuring ND’s success, but thanks to Pete Carroll, beating SC may soon provide no indication of ND’s place in college football for the foreseeable future.
Sure, SC could manage to hire a big-time coach or at least an up and comer. Lots of things are possible, but with what is apparently a major NCAA investigation into the entire athletic department looming, how likely is it? Not impossible, certainly, but improbable. How transparent could the SC athletic department be with any potential coach? Are they even capable of tranparency? With the Pete Carroll regime leaving LA with much of their sock drawer unpacked, will there be anyone left at Southern Cal who knows the full story? Is there anyone left who can prep the next HC with what sort of terrain may lay ahead?
No matter what, the SC era of dominance in the realm of talent collection is effectively over. SC is already losing commitments from the current recruiting class. It seems extremely unlikely that whatever voodoo enabled Carroll to collect 5 Star running backs like Urban Meyer collects phone charges from county lockup will be passed on to the next head coach at SC. But that dominance is really just a reason that quite a few college football fans began to scratch their heads and wonder why it was that we spent most bowl seasons saying things like, “Yeah, but if either team in the National Championship game had to play SC right now, SC would win.” All that ability on the field, all the renown on the sidelines, and SC still “only” managed to win 1 BCS title. Much of Carroll’s time was spent teasing the SC fanbase like a Canadian stripper on a lonely Detroit auto worker. But oh what a tease; the sort most ND fans can only imagine these days. Still, to get that rush at what cost? We’re not entirely convinced it will have been worth it.
What an absurd post-season. Gone are the days of Oakley marketing execs wincing every time a geriatric poster child is shown sporting their shades. So long to the notion of Charlie Weis dropping dead on a sideline before Urban Meyer. Farewell to the use of suicide as a prank. While Pirate Captains, inflated oompa loompas, and coaches who seemed to have been crazy in a good way are fired for abuse of their players, the really marquee names in the bad guy game are forced out by much more socially mundane things like arbitrary rules violations, aging, and angina. Meanwhile our nemesis to the North is mired in mediocrity at best. One not only wonders where to direct one’s hate, but also where to schedule some “marquee” games so as not to suffer the fate of Boise State.
Southern Cal probably cheated, they’re probably going to get called for it, and Pete Carroll is probably leaving town ahead of the lynch mob. That’s unfortunate. Notre Dame, for all their struggles in the time Pete Carroll was finding new and creative ways to beat the Irish by 31 points, needed SC to be as good as they were, whether it was fair or not. Southern Cal represented a giant guaridian of the gate into the highest tier of collegiate football, bizarre losses to Stanford aside, and all the Irish needed to do was knock them down. But now the guard is gone, that highest tier is much more nebulous than ever before, and the Irish are left guessing at which goals to target.
Go Irish, Beat Navy?
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