For the first time since I didn’t have a television while living in Santa Barbara from 1997 to 2001, I did not watch an NFL game in a week while the sport was in season. Judging by some of the highlights I caught while watching Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole on Fox Sports 1, I didn’t miss anything.
By the way, I’m caught up with their podcast.
I don’t know.
After Thursday, everything was thrown up in the air. Oregon lost to Stanford deflating everyone’s hardon for the impending BCS Championship Game against Alabama. Baylor beat Oklahoma which finally gave them an ounce of credibility. Florida State now has the inside track for that matchup against Alabama.
Except, what we found out on Thursday was that anything can happen from now until the end of the regular season. Take Alabama, for example. The only team that really put the fear of god in them this season was Texas A&M with that spread option offense. Who else runs that offense? Why, Auburn of course.
In fact, that Auburn offense that was led by quarterback Cam Newton and offensive coordinator Guz Malzahn was the only win by Auburn in the Iron Bowl in the last five years. So if Auburn wins that game, they go to the SEC Championship Game instead of Alabama. In other words, Alabama would not get a chance to get back into the BCS picture.
So Florida State goes to the game, right? Well they end their regular season having to go to the Swamp to face Florida. Florida is awful, sure, but it’s a rivalry game. Florida is fighting for the bowl lives having gone to 22 consecutive bowl games, the nation’s longest active streak.
Or maybe, it will be Alabama and Florida State in the title game.
That’s what makes November so much fun. Remember 2007, the year of the upset? Things were such a clusterfuck, South Florida was ranked No. 2 at one point. In late November there was a No. 2 vs No. 3 matchup between Kansas and Missouri. It was like everything we had known in life to that point didn’t exist.
It was beautiful.
Here’s the AP poll and below are my rankings.
The whole Miami Dolphins mess brings up a question: what makes a man?
The report from the Sun Sentinel last night that the Dolphins coaching staff asked Richie Incognito to toughen up Jonathan Martin brings up that ever elusive question on masculinity.
Does being obese and wearing skin tight pants once a week make you a man?
Does leaving a voicemail that you are going to shit in someone’s mouth make you a man?
Does sticking your dick into a vagina make you a man?
Does loving to have penises put in your mouth and asshole make you a man?
Does sticking your fist into someone’s face make you a man?
I don’t know what the standards for masculinity are. I hated the standards I was taught growing up: to just keep quiet, to walk with your chest puffed out, to just blend into the background. I’m loud, vulgar, bitch a lot and sort of swish around.
I’d like to think myself as a tough son of a bitch. The only real problem I had with gay bashing came in college, and that ended with my so-called “basher” on the ground after I kneed him in the chest. When someone gives me shit, I dish it right back.
As a sports fan, I get that these athletes perform amazing feats in each game that I could not imagine to do. That’s why athletes are looked up to.
But judging how many of them hit women, rape, murder and are all-around odious examples of humanity, should athletes be the basis of how we live our lives?
I’ll just say that when I have someone’s dick in my mouth or asshole (or maybe two different dicks in the orifices at the same time!), I’m certainly not thinking about some stupid football player. Unless, that is, it is a football player who is fucking me.
I watched the documentary Helvetica last night, and they spent some time talking about “grunge typography”. Of course Ray Gun Magazine was brought up.
The work of David Carson on the art of the magazine always felt familiar to me. You can see a good representation of the work on Google Images.
I suppose the movement played itself out, but I have to agree with the sentiment: Helvetica is boring. Any Joe Blow could type a company name in Helvetica Bold on a bold color, and boom! Instant graphic designer!
Then it gets me thinking. This website’s font is mainly Helvetica and its Windows bastard offspring Arial. I’ve actually done the bare minimum of design with this site. WordPress and its themes have made the painstaking task of designing websites obsolete.
Having constructed the tables for my college football rankings from scratch, it brought me back to when I was doing all of this by hand. Basically all of this to say that I might just redo this joint.
Sorry for all of this wallowing in sentimentality.
I can’t put my finger on why I don’t like Florida State. They are supposed to be the antidote to the SEC supremacy that has generated so much antipathy towards football fans outside of the South.
Perhaps it’s because of quarterback Jameis Winston. During Florida State’s media day back in August, he was asked by a reporter about his potential of becoming like Johnny Manziel. I believe the reporter phrased it as “Manziel Disease.” Winston replied, “If I ever get Manziel disease, I want all of you to smack me in the head with your microphones.”
That did not sit well with me as someone who has proclaimed my love for Johnny Football.
Manziel was the pirate helming a Texas A&M team in its first year in the SEC. He was the swashbuckling renegade ready to expose and rebel against the machine that is the NCAA. He wasn’t going to play by the long held non-written rules of decorum.
He was Johnny Football sent on this earth to play football and have fun. He rode that all the way to a Heisman Trophy, the first freshman ever to win the award.
So I saw Winston’s remarks as reactionary, a move to go back to the tradition, the boring, the safety of the NCAA.
Not helping his case is the constant blare of the “Tomahawk Chop”, the relative weakness of the ACC and how soft their non-conference schedule is. Nevada and Bethune-Cookman, a FCS school, were dispatched by a 116-13 margin. Idaho comes up on Nov. 23 with their only non-conference challenge Florida at the end of the month finishing out their regular season schedule.
I guess the Seminoles are for real. They beat then-No.3 ranked Clemson 51-14 at Death Valley two weeks ago, and on Saturday they knocked out No. 7 Miami 41-14. So this is a really good team.
Hell, they might just be able to beat Alabama in a BCS Championship Game.
But at this point, I’d much rather see Nick Saban lift up another Coaches’ Trophy in January.
Here’s this week’s AP poll and below is my top 10.
