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.

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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.

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We know. We know that getting riled up about this after losing to Navy is just sour grapes. Screw it. Had ND laid a hit on a guy like the one in this video, it would have been national news. Global. Putin would have been calling for Weis’ dismissal.

Whoever the coach for ND is next year, I hope they remind the players of plays by Navy like this one. And I hope the Irish respect Navy enough to give them an actual effort next year and kick their asses up and down the field.

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Here’s your internet meme castration, Brandon, you pansy. May your future hold dementia, financial ruin, and herpes.

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When the news first broke about Notre Dame playing Western Michigan, I wasn’t too upset. It wasn’t officially announced by Notre Dame, yet, so we hadn’t had a chance to hear from Jack Swarbrick on the matter. I figured there were many mitigating circumstances around the situation.

But then Jack Swarbrick did discuss the issue, and now I’m not happy.

We had a number of teams working very hard to try to move other games, to get their conference to make concessions in the conference schedule, do whatever. The one that was able to get it all done and get it done with the least complications was Western Michigan.

On its face, that’s a fairly benign statement. But even a moment’s thought causes a great deal of frustration. The quotation means that Western Michigan was “first” to have all their ducks in a row, and Swarbrick just jumped at the chance to fill the hole in the schedule. The quotation also means that Swarbrick didn’t understand what his “nuclear option” was. Western Michigan was his Nuclear Option. Western Michigan was what should have happened had all else failed. We don’t know what other teams among the “number” were “working very hard” to get on ND’s schedule, but when WMU raised their hand and said, “Ooh! Ooh! Oooh,” Swarbrick should have been saying, “Hey. That’s great. We’ll take it into consideration,” and then just kept on waiting for the other teams among that number. By Swarbrick’s own claim, he had options. He just didn’t have the patience, the cool, or the willingness to play to his power position to take advantage of them.

There is hope. There’s a real hope, to which I’ll cling to until the end of the year. At that point, the future schedules for 2011 and 2012 should be finalized. Perhaps this disaster is just a one-time thing, and Jack will resuscitate our faith in him with strong, historically relevant opponents on those schedules. But if Charlie Weis is in desperate search of a “Signature Win,” Jack Swarbrick is now in desperate need of a “Signature Opponent” or two. Or three. The 2010 schedule now features Utah, Tulsa, and Western Michigan all within a 30 day stretch of the calendar. While we fully acknowledge that Utah has had a fine recent history, and Tulsa can even look competent on the field of play, Jack Swarbrick is trying to pull a fast one when he says…

“It reflects a not very sophisticated view of what’s going on out there,” Swarbrick said of any backlash. “Utah is going to be in a BCS bowl this year, in all likelihood. Utah had a number of years where it was in national championship contention and is having another very good year. Two years ago Tulsa had a great year and in a lot of ways is one of the more dangerous teams in country.

Swarbrick either doesn’t want to admit or doesn’t fully understand that in “today’s landscape,” it’s a near craps shoot as to which teams will be good 1 or 2 years from now, so rather than throw darts at a list of the 120 D1 programs in the land to find an opponent who might be decent relative to decades of historical futility, it’s a far finer plan to identify the traditionally solid programs and get them on the schedule. We’re not asking for “top 10″ competition in place of WMU, but perhaps a program that’s made it into the top-25 several times in the last decade would be a good qualification.

There is one other hope to which we’re clinging: That Jack Swarbrick knows all this and just doesn’t feel like now is the time to admit that the WMU game reflects an abject failure on his part. Yes, he was put in a difficult position due to the previous AD and some miscommunication with other programs, and yes it was a difficult challenge, but it’s a challenge he’s failed no matter the spin. We can only hope that in private, off the record, he’s frustrated by this failure, but in public he’s bound by social constraints from proclaiming that the program that just filled a hole on his schedule that desperately needed filling was the absolute worst result he could have achieved short of not filling that hole at all.

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We’d be horribly remiss if we didn’t mention the most horrible and sad thing to happen this weekend in college football: The death of UConn DB Jasper Howard. He was murdered near the UConn student union the night after a game in which he had a career-high 11 tackles and a forced fumble which he himself recovered.

Randy Edsall pretty well summed up the shock of this terrible moment:

“One of my sons has been taken away,” he said. “There is nothing in my job description that says you have to identify bodies.”

We’re terribly sorry for the loss.

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Thanks to Loyal Son: Wertzy.

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We twittered or twerped this last night, but now that we’ve actually read the story, it’s worth a full post.

Feagin’s downfall started with a cocaine deal, detailed in U-M Department of Public Safety police reports. The coke deal ended with a U-M dorm room on fire, a fellow student headed for jail and Feagin back home in Florida.

At first, we were going to try and be all magnanimous about this, and talk about how nobody should take joy in Michigan (sucks!)’s pain here, but then this bit came up…

Justin Feagin was no stranger to drugs, or to run-ins with the law.

“I have admitted to people I know that I used to sell drugs in Florida,” Feagin told investigators, according to police reports the Free Press obtained under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act.

Feagin told police that he also had been arrested for battery and trespass “on two different occasions” in Florida and that “nothing ever came of either situation,” according to U-M Department of Public Safety police records the Free Press obtained. He also told police that he “had a problem with some guys at Studio 4 (in Ann Arbor) over some girls. There was a fight and the police were called.”

Feagin said he had not sold drugs in Michigan. But fellow student T.J. Burke, who had met Feagin through Michigan walk-on receiver Ricky Reyes, told police “it was common knowledge that Feagin sold marijuana” and that Feagin “hung out at our house lots of times smoking pot.”

So now we find ourselves quite happy to make fun of their pain, because, having applied for a new apartment recently, we know it takes about 30 minutes to do a criminal history check. As a result, this excuse doesn’t fly.

But seriously: it’s bad. It’s also one guy that Michigan apparently didn’t run as thorough of a background check on—or possibly any background check on—as they scrambled to reconfigure Rodriguez’s first recruiting class. As long as the incident remains isolated, fine.

Pretty sure arrests for battery and trespass would have shown up on that $25 dollar, 30-minute criminal history check. And if that was run, and those dings on the report didn’t set off enough alarms for RichRod to think, “whoa! Let’s step carefully here,” well, I’m feeling pretty good about games against UM(s!) in the near future. Clearly RichRod under pressure is rather marshmallow-under-pressure-like.

Update: Crap. DTK, in the comments, reminded me that we live in a dumb society that wants to try and rehab felons rather than punish them so long as they did any horrible and/or stupid things before they turned 18 or whatever age is deemed appropriate in whatever state is concerned. This kid’s from FL, so he could probably marry a 14 year old, but if he stabbed an old lady to death with a cocaine-covered, uranium-cored spoon, no background checks would likely ever pick up on it. Crap.

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We already knew this much: Come Sept 12th, either Notre Dame would defeat a fumbling and bumbling Michigan (sucks!) in Ann Arbor, shining a light on the program Rich Rodriguez seems hell-bent on beating with the mishap stick every day and twice on gameday, or Notre Dame would lose to Michigan (sucks!) in inexplicable fashion. And by “inexplicable,” we mean that Weis and company learned nothing, zip, zilch, zero over the last 2 seasons, and have instead decided to forge through the jungle of the 2009 season using nothing but a blunted wiffle-ball bat and last year’s run-blocking to clear a path.

What we did not know, is this, and it’s really disappointing:

Millen, the former Detroit Lions president, said he’ll be back in the state of Michigan early this fall, calling college football games for ABC.

He’s expected to broadcast the Michigan-Notre Dame game Sept. 12 in Ann Arbor. He’s getting back to work as a college game analyst for ESPN/ABC, studio analyst for NFL games on ESPN and the NFL Network.

We fully expect Millen to leap up at random moments in the telecast to let his broadcasting teammates know that he’s drafting either Golden Tate or Mike Floyd or both at the #1 spot.

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There’s simply no spinning this.

The final regular-season ballots in the USA TODAY Coaches’ Poll will no longer be made public beginning with the 2010 football season, according to a person with knowledge of the information who didn’t want to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to comment before an announcement today from the American Football Coaches Association.

Make no mistake about it, this was all done in order for the coaches to be as self-serving as possible. Coaches will vote for themselves first, those in their conferences second, and against anyone who might hurt their interest in any way somewhere in between.

This poll, one third of the BCS championship formula, will be made into a mockery even moreso than it already had been. It should come as no surprise that the group that made this decision is lead, by example, by one Tyrone Willingham.

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WalmartWolverines.com

A Walmart Wolverine is a self-proclaimed “huge” University of Michigan fan that never attended the University.

Excellent. (And yes. This is mean. I’m mean. I deal with it. So should you.)

Note that the site specifies those who “never attended” UM(s!). Because 80% of the state of Michigan “attended” UM(s!) at one point or another.

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Yeah, I know I said I was going to “do better” with the blogging, and the life, and the dietary habits… Well, sometimes you have to skip out on the diet when the right cookie is sitting in front of you, and right now, there’s one hell of a cookie being plated by Brian Cook.

There will be significant attrition this offseason. The first to fall:

In today’s weekly Big Ten teleconference, Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez said sophomore Zion Babb was no longer with the team. Rodriguez said the wide receiver hasn’t been with the team since Sunday.

So… yeah. I was sitting on this until I had some outside confirmation and this serves as outside confirmation since three guys were mentioned as a group of players who had already made their decisions. The other two who have told the coaches they are out: sophomore LB/S Artis Chambers and Sam McGuffie.

EVERYBODY PANIC.

This, of course, is excellent news for ND, as I had just awarded McGuffie the inaugural HLS Paul Reiser Award a couple of months ago for being a giant PITA against the Irish run defense.

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Editor’s Note: Thanks to Jonathan Chait, UM(s!) grad and gigantic dweeb, for the “inspiration” for this post. Ain’t karma a pain in the butt, Jonathan?

In the entire history of American sports hype, has there ever been any fraud more grossly fraudulent than Michigan (sucks!) football coach Rich Rodriguez?

Rodriguez’s wimpering Wolverines now stand at 2-4. This record is only the faintest indicator of just how awful Michigan (sucks) is. They have lost to a MAC team for the first time in school history. They lost to Illinois by 25 points and nearly placed Juice Williams on the Heisman watch. Michigan’s only 2 wins came against Miami, but not the Miami that’s any good, and a Wisconsin team that thought 19 points was plenty to beat the Wolverines and actually stopped paying attention to the game at all.

Just how bad is Michigan (sucks!)? Of the 119 teams in Division I-A, Michigan (sucks!) is 109th in total offense, 102nd in passing offense, and 100th in scoring offense. Michigan (sucks!) is so poorly coached that they don’t even know how to properly hold a football. They rank 114th in turnover margin.

You get the point. I should stop now.

Ok. A couple more. This is the worst start for a Michigan (sucks!) football teams in 41 years. The last non-BCS conference team (excluding Notre Dame) with a losing record to defeat Michigan was Army in 1954.

This is not merely bad. This is ineptitude on a staggering, world-historical scale. Such a performance would be prima facie evidence for firing the coach even at a doormat program like Indiana. At a school like Michigan (sucks!), well… it’s simply impossible to describe how awful this performance is. It’s true that Michigan (sucks!) has suffered a dip in its talent level, attributable to poor karma going back to the days of Bo Schembechler. But if you go by recruiting rankings, Rich Rodriquez still has as much or more talent on hand than Toledo.

So, Rodriguez is obviously not a good coach – no good coach has ever underperformed so grossly – and he may well be a terrible one. So, why was he ever hailed as a good coach in the first place?

The giant edifice of fraud that is Rodriguez’s reputation is actually a series of smaller frauds piled on top of each other. The foundational myth that he was a decent football coach. Rodriguez came from the West Virginia Mountaineers, who had just choked in a soul-crushing game to Pitt (coached by Dave Wannstedt. DAVE WANNSTEDT.). However, every coach and player associated with a team that assembles a winning record in the Big East is usually subjected to a certain level of hype, and Rodriguez is no exception. But Rodriguez was actually quite ordinary. During his eight seasons as head coach, Rodriguez won no more than 9 games in any single season until Pat White arrived on campus. And oh, by the way, Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech left the Big East for the ACC during his tenure, before he really began winning, as well.

Having primed the national media to accept a mediocre performance during this “rebuilding year,” Rodriguez enjoyed a tidal wave of sympathetic publicity to start the 2008 season.

This first season was seen as the start of a new dynasty. In truth, Michigan (sucks!) was bound to suck, given the abandoning of the program by so many Lloyd Carr recruits who didn’t want to work with such a jerk. But Rodriguez’s first team isn’t even as good as their record suggests. Miami of Ohio has only won one game, against Charleston Southern. And Wisconsin just made Big 10 officials consider a mercy rule at home while suffering a slaughter by Penn State.

Coming into this year, Michigan (sucks!) was still picked to finish in the top 40. The difference between that predicted on-field performance and Michigan (sucks!) actual performance is a good measure of the difference between Rodriguez’s reputation as a coach and his actual ability.

Being a head coach at Michigan (sucks!) involves very different skills – not blaming players, teaching basic skills, not getting out-coached by the staff of Illinois – than being a fraud in the Big East. Even good Big East coaches, like Dave Wannstedt, struggle outside of their league. Maybe Rodriguez did sometimes turn castoff recruits into solid cogs in the gimmicky spread offense, but at Michigan, he can’t turn blue-chip prospects into unbroken pieces.

But don’t worry, Michigan (sucks!) fans. In a few years, the Wolverines will return to mediocrity again, when Rodriguez’s recruits (what’s left of them) get to play for a coach who isn’t horrible.

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Awful.

Dillon Hall Rector Fr. Paul Doyle shocked residents Sunday when he announced the residence hall’s pep rally, held every year before the first home football game of the season, was cancelled.

The pep rally, a series of skits mocking aspects of Notre Dame life, has been a Dillon Hall tradition since the late 1970s, lead pep rally scriptwriter Ryan O’Connor said.

Fr. Doyle cited two reasons for his decision.

“I failed to provide the necessary direction and support,” he said.

The rector also told his residents the pep rally “was not coming together in a timely fashion.”

Though this year’s event is not intended be rescheduled, Fr. Doyle expressed his intent to hold a pep rally in the future.

“I hope we can have a pep rally next year that is the sort of pep rally the Dillon men and campus community have come to expect,” he said.

We know Fr. Doyle. We know the sort of man Fr. Doyle is. We know (all too well) that Fr. Doyle will do everything in his power to protect “his men.” So we say with great certainty that this decision was not his.

It’s not that if, say, Notre Dame were to run the table and win the National Championship that the absence of the Dillon Hall Pep Rally would ruin the season for us. It’s just that, well, it would make winning a national championship fall under the “pizza and sex rule.” Even if it’s not as great as it could be, it’s still pretty good.

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