The Alphabetical: College Football, Week 15
from
The Sporting Blog
Each Sunday during college football season, Spencer Hall offers a letter-by-letter analysis of Saturday’s college football games.
A is for Absolved. As in the BCS, temporarily. Repeating the existing policy of this column: the only sure, clearly defined championship a team can win (and which a fan may crow about justifiably) is their conference championship. Fans of Florida, Oklahoma, and even the Ragin Cajuns of the Sun Belt ... get your gloat on, as someone (your football team of choice) has earned it for you. The BCS is this kind of franken-creature built from the cartel of the old bowl system that may or may not pick your superb one loss team from the pile of superb one loss teams in the nation. This depends less on absolute quality than the vogue of the moment, the prejudices of voters, and in some cases, the ignorance of the chosen electorate.
Depending on the system to get things right is like depending on your favorite mechanic to properly diagnose a budding brain tumor: that’s not what it’s designed for, and that’s not what it can do. What it does is make a lot of money and, in most years, produce interesting matchups which, at the end, are held up and gainsaid as the “National Champions.”
It is elegant and occasionally thrilling fraud, but it is not a proper way to determine a national champion every year.
B is for But: The BCS has produced a compelling matchup to end the season this year, and the one many -- including guru/cyborg football overlord Phil Steele -- called for at the beginning of the season. Oklahoma-Florida is one of four or five compelling matchups that could have ended the season, and will be a blazing shootout of a game if the previous 13 games are any indicators of their collective talents.
You may not accurately call it a national title. You may also not call it boring, and that, for the moment, is what we of the college football peasantry have to settle for. You’ll drink beer. You’ll watch it. It won’t be work. The goodness of this should not be overlooked.
C is for Cajuns. Their name in old editions of
NCAA 2000something spelled out “UL-LAF” on the scoreboard, which I always pronounced as “You’ll laugh,” a statement applying to their defense as you ran over them with whatever musclebound team of demons you’d chosen to be in that particular game.
Laugh no more at the Ragin’ Cajuns. Michael Desormeaux and his unpronounceable last name (Dez-Uh-Moe, according to our Lafayette contacts, is
close) threw for four TDs to beat the Blue Raiders of Middle Tennessee State, finish at .500 for the season, and ensure that we get some free gumbo down the line for mentioning the Cajuns in this space. Allez!
D is for Devastated. I sit in the press box typing up a recap for the Florida-Alabama game. A television is turned to the Big 12 Championship game. Chase Daniel passes to Jeremy Maclin and the score becomes 10-7. The thought flashes past:
Maybe Mizzou’s got a chance! I put my head down and start typing.
I pull up from my computer 20 minutes later and the score is 38-7 Oklahoma. The Sooners offense is not a scheme, it is a conveyor belt for opposing teams to step on with a bolt gun waiting at the end. Shhhh, other team. It’ll happen so fast that you won’t feel a thing. Just ask anyone the Sooners have faced for the past six weeks.
E is for Egregious. Slowed by injury all season, Cal’s Jahvid Best attempted to collect all his yardage lost to the trainer’s table in one game: 19 carries for 311 yards and four TDs. He averaged 16.4 yards a carry, or the equivalent of 5.47 Woody Hayes Units per touch. (“Three yards and a cloud of dust.”) Jahvid is clearly our Charles Bronson
MANDOM MAN OF THE WEEK, and will receive 500 bottles of 35-year-old Japanese cologne as his prize.
F is for Fury. You know it’s a nasty, nasty game when even the kicker takes shots, as Alabama’s Leigh Tiffin did against Florida. Tiffin’s absence while recovery from a concussion forced Alabama into a confused fake field goal that became three crucial Florida points on the ensuing possession.
G is for Gargantua, Farewell. Goodbye to Falstaff-sized Aggie running back Jorvorskie Lane, who leaves the college game as his school’s all-time leader in total rushing TDs with 49. You may have spent your senior season lingering in the fullback spot and looking misplaced, but we’ll always remember you as the Kool-Aid Man in maroon barreling through the line like there was a shopping cart full of cheeseburgers being towed in front of you as bait.
Au revoir, big dude: as the spread offense ... um ...
spreads, you may be the last great big back for a long, long time.
H is for Horror. The Oklahoma Sooners finished the season with a 4,000 yard passer (Sam Bradford,) two 1,000 yard rushers (DeMarco Murray and Chris Brown) and a 1,000 yard receiver (Juaquin Iglesias). Really, they’re not so much an offense as a terminal illness you can only mitigate, not cure.
I is for Iconic. If you would like Georgia’s season summed up in one sad image of deflated national title hopes, here you are:
J is for Just Noticed Spencer Forget to Include a ‘J.’ There are something like 50 letters in the English alphabet. You can’t possibly expect Spencer to know them all. Signed, TSB editor.
K is for Killer. Thumbs up
for the Army’s “Enforcer” uniforms. There’s not enough camouflage on the football field these days, we say. Now for the next step: Nike unveiling a uniform made exclusively of LCDs designed to help the player blend in with their background like the Predator.
L is for Loopy. As in what Bill Plaschke must've been
when he wrote this about the 28-7 loss by UCLA to USC:
In a game that will be remembered for the return of the crosstown colors Saturday, USC scored most of the points, but UCLA applied all the welts. The Trojans outplayed, outclassed and outscored, by a count of 28-7.
The Bruins, however, outfought.
Yes. That’s precisely what I assume when I see a score of 28-7. When I see a prairie dog plucked helplessly from the sky by a marauding hawk, I think:
“Man, that hawk got OWNED.” I also think the iceberg in
Titanic was the real loser and that the T-Rex will, in the end, get the last laugh on the meteor that
temporarily wiped out the dinosaurs. (I say temporarily because I believe
Jurassic Park was a documentary, and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.)
M is for Man’d up. Never say, though, that Rick Neuheisel is
afraid to face the public following a loss.
N is for Now Available! Tickets for the 2009 ACC Championship Game, which you should reserve now to avoid the rush of over 5,000 fans all charging for only 20,000 tickets! Last year in Jacksonville, VT and BC fans bought 11,000 of the 20,000 tickets allotted for them in the ACC Championship; this year in Tampa that number
dove to 5,000. Cameramen covering the game studiously avoided wide shots of the stadium.
O is for Offkey. Another player receiving a bittersweet and off-kilter farewell: Pat White of West Virginia, who finished his career on a snowy, freezing mess at Milan Puskar Stadium with a relatively modest stay in the stat sheets to match a relatively modest 13-7 win over South Florida. The top rushing QB in college football history deserved better than his coaches’ meddling with the Mountaineer offense this season.
P is for Powers. Gary Danielson, he has them. Go to the 3:45 mark of this video and watch Gary Danielson tell you exactly what will happen, and then watch events unfold thusly:
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No. 57, Carl Johnson of Florida, is the key to that play: watch him pull from the left guard spot and cleanly smack the onrushing blitzer away from Tebow. Big feet save the day again, allowing the glowing Heisman boy to get all the credit. (Not that he doesn’t deserve his share, but don’t forget the play of Florida’s line, which took over the fourth quarter of the SEC Championship completely.)
Q is for Quadrillionth. One-thousand-million-million, or roughly the fraction of a chance Texas has of getting a rematch with the Sooners in Miami. “Could” means it is still possible, but it is also possible that I’ll be devoured by wolves when I open my door this afternoon. If this happens, by the way, suspect number one should be Mack Brown.
R is for your Rece Davis Witticism of the Week. On College Football Final last night:
Rece Davis: “Washington-Cal, and maybe the Huskies will bow up one more time for Ty Willingham’s last game ...”
[A shot of Jahvid Best sprinting untouched through no fewer than 342 people in Washington Huskies’ jerseys appears on the screen.]
“...or perhaps not.”
S is for Striking Your Coach With a Closed Fist. Sorry, coach. I just get excited sometimes.
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Who says the ACC championship isn’t exciting? (HT:
Barstool Sports)
T is for Trash-Talking.
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U is for Undignified. The exit Rudy Carpenter got from Arizona State doesn’t square with what you might have imagined the quarterback would have faced in his final game: 13/31 with 124 yards, a TD and an interception in a 31-10 loss to in-state rival Arizona.
U could also go for “Unexpectedly successful:” Arizona finishes 7-5 in a season many expected to be a hatchet season for Mike Stoops, who finishes with the first winning record for the Wildcats since 1998. Stoops was on the cliff’s edge with the wheels half off and leaning following a September 13 loss to New Mexico; way to keep the Conestoga on the mountainside, cowboy.
V is for Variable. Rutgers quarterback Mike Teel had three TDs and seven INTs in his first seven games. In his final game versus Louisville on Thursday night, he threw seven touchdowns, and posted 20 TDs and five INTs over his last five games. Consumer warning: results may vary when using Mike Teel, Quarterback-like substance.
W is for William Butler Yeats.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The answer, judging from eyewitness testimony at the Georgia Dome, is Alabama, a team that finished even the worst of its plays with thunderous tackling and pad-rattling anger. Until Florida put the choke on them in fourth, they slammed into every play with a power and intensity far greater than their collective Rivals stars on the depth chart would have predicted. Once Saban gets the recruiting pipelines flowing, this team will be a two-deep tree shredder running at full bore.
X is for Xenomorph. “Good luck with your surgery, Sam.” Sam Bradford played the Missouri game with a broken non-throwing hand and still led the Sooners past 60 points. When you lead your team with that ease past your opponent in the conference title game and Lisa Salters can say “good luck with your surgery” on the way off the field ... I think your awesomeness rends some kind of hole in the universe somewhere. If Bradford wins against Florida and then says
”So long, and thanks for all the fish” before flying into the universe to find a new planet ... you were warned here first.
Y is for Yoke. Or a man-leash, or something to keep Urban Meyer from wondering out 10 yards onto the field. Invisible fencing companies, please contact the SEC to suggest a bulk contract for all coaches to wear your company’s fine, humane pet/coach restraint devices at:
Southeastern Conference
2201 Richard Arrington Blvd. North
Birmingham, AL 35203
458-3000
Representatives are standing by to hear your company’s ideas. No Powerpoints, please.
Z is for Zanzibar. Or where this column may as well be, drinking a cup of tea while gazing at the electric blue waters of the Indian Ocean for the next few weeks before the bowl season cranks up. Hit the anonymous tropical wonderland of your choice and rest up before the St. Pete bowl on December 20th (which yours truly will be at to kick off the bowl season. The glamour never, ever ends.)
