Saturday, 25 July 2009

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

So it turns out that the Head Ball Coach was, after all, the man responsible for exercising independent judgment depriving Tim Tebow of his presumed rightful place as a unanimous first-team all-SEC selection. Now, on the world’s hierarchy of snubs, this may rank slightly behind the Honduran army’s failure to care very much that their de facto ex-president Manuel Zelaya is playing hokey-pokey with their border, but we can rest assured that ESPN was on the case with intrepid reporting not seen since BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan’s exploits in foiling the Iraqi information ministry.

And ESPN remains on the case today, with columnist Pat Forde brazenly calling for coaches to fill out their own ballots or Let Someone Else Vote rather than spend their valuable time doing things that are more useful to society. We all know that voters in the other college football polls are devoted full-time scholars of the game, watching all 60 minutes of all 120 (and counting!) I-A (sorry, FBS) teams in action every week before painstakingly filling out their ballots without consulting anyone else or, heaven forbid, just recycling their ballots from the previous week with a few “bumps” based on watching the 5–10 minutes of highlights from an entire day that ESPN chooses to show on College Football Final between Lou Holtz’s bouts of senility and live shots of the GameDay crew in a pitch-dark stadium parking lot surrounded by drunk, screaming teenagers. And if the college coaches can’t uphold these fine traditions, well dammit, let’s find someone who can.