Brent Musberger just said on national television—and I quote literally—“the road to Glendale is paved with Trojans.”

I wish I were making that up. What’s worse is now I can’t get that image out of my head.

Brent also just said that a Notre Dame player was penalized for “pulling out early.”

From Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side, explaining the passions surrounding the Egg Bowl to outsiders:

The game served as a proxy for the hoary Mississippi class struggle, between the white folks who wore shirts with collars on them and the white folks who did not. Mississippi State was a land grant college, originally called Mississippi A&M. The desperate contempt Ole Miss football fans felt for Mississippi State was echoed in the feelings of fans of the University of Texas for Texas A&M and fans of the University of Oklahoma for Oklahoma State—formerly known as Oklahoma A&M. These schools were not rivals; they were subordinates. Theirs was not a football team to be beaten but an insurrection to be put down. This notion was most vivid in the Ole Miss imagination: that the state of Mississippi, with the sole exception of the town of Oxford, was once a Great Lake of Rednecks. In recent decades the earth had warmed, and the shores of Great Lake Redneck had receded, so that, strictly speaking, perhaps it should not be described as a lake. But still, the residue was a very large puddle. And the one place in the puddle deep enough to ruin a shiny new pair of tassel loafers was Starkville, Mississippi.

Orson Swindle at EDSBS has posted part one of a two-part interview with Moneyball author Michael Lewis, wherein he discusses his new book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game and the primary subject of that book, Ole Miss offensive tackle Michael Oher.

The following passage of the interview warmed the cockles of my heart—by way of explanation for the warming, the Ole Miss political science department used to house the criminal justice program until it was spun off along with the rest of the programs that a four-year university (much less the College of Liberal Arts) had no business operating into a separate school:

[ML:] On behalf of [Oher’s] mind, I would say…I’e watched him over the past few years, and he’s become a much more verbal person. He is intelligent–he’s not stupid. He’s shrewd, and he’s sensitive. The way he’s impressed me is not with his grades in the classroom, though I’m sure he’s worked to get them and they’re not entirely fraudulent.

OS: We’re not talking about Auburn, here.

ML: Well, I do think we’re talking about that. All these schools have the smooth track for the football players–

OS: Sociology at Auburn, Criminal Justice…

ML: It’s funny. You watch the Saturday football games, and if it’s West Virginia playing, all the football players are “sports management” majors, but if it’s Ole Miss playing, all the football players are “criminal justice” majors. So you get the sense that every school has its major for the football team, and it’s different from school to school. All the Ole Miss football players aren’t majoring in criminal justice because they have a deep and sincere interest in criminal justice. It’s that that’s where you go to get the grades.

And Michael is majoring in criminal justice. That’s not a great sign, but he’s doing well. And this is what is true about him: he’s not just “not dumb,” he’s intelligent and sensitive. When he sits down to write something, it’s actually impressive. He’s got things to say. The mind he’s got is a good and interesting mind. That that is true despite his first sixteen years on the planet is amazing.

Incidentally my copy of Blindside was allegedly going to be shipped to my mom’s house in Memphis by Amazon.com today for delivery Wednesday, according to the checkout screens, but given the current delivery estimate of next Monday I doubt that actually happened. Regardless I promise a review soon.

Update: Never mind; I just got an email from Amazon.com that has a tracking number saying it will be delivered tomorrow. So, depending on how engaging a read it is, I may have a review up by the end of this weekend.

The Auburn game pretty much felt like the games against Georgia and Alabama this year: a game the Rebels could have won—perhaps even should have won—but for a few mistakes on both sides of the ball that are the result of two major factors: playing true freshmen and playing Schaeffer, who is still learning the offense due to arriving on campus in mid-August.

The good news for the Rebels is that they probably don’t have to worry about doing worse than last year’s three-win mark, with four wins highly likely and an outside shot at five wins if the Rebels can steal one in Red Stick against an LSU squad that’s not having its best year.

If it’s fourth down, and you’re on defense, and you are ten yards past the line of scrimmage, you should never under any circumstances intercept the ball… because, when you do, you just cost your team ten yards of field position.

This weekend’s disgusting display of thuggish behavior by the Miami and Florida International football teams is a black eye on college football—and one that Miami president Donna Shalala is not treating very seriously to say the least.

Given the Miami program’s long and storied history as a rogue organization under a series of coaches, the NCAA would be more than justified in imposing the death penalty at this point—and if Shalala had any guts, she’d impose it herself, along with demoting Miami out of Division I-A and banning the program’s alumni (I advisedly hesitate to use the word “graduates”)—including former Miami receiver Lamar Thomas, who functioned as a de facto cheerleader for the brawl from the television broadcast booth—from having anything to do with Miami football in the future.

Update: Prof. Karlson proves prescient; I too wondered what exact qualifications Shalala had for running a major research university, and never really thought being known in recent years solely for being a FOB, despite her previous appointment at Wisconsin, was either a necessary or sufficient condition.

Great, another game the Rebels could have won if they’d just played a little better down the stretch. This trend is starting to get annoying—and I’m probably more annoyed at the outcome of this game because it wasn’t a blowout like I expected it to be.

Ole Miss–Alabama will be on national TV this Saturday on CBS (presumably in glorious 1080i HD). My inner cheapskate is happy, but the part of my brain that is aware of the Rebels’ abysmal record in Tuscaloosa isn’t—even though Alabama’s record this season isn’t that great in league play either.

Saturday night’s Ole Miss–Georgia game reminded me somewhat of the 2003 contest between the Rebels and LSU, which also saw the Rebels’ QB falter in a late comeback effort after a close-run contest. Certainly the atmosphere at Vaught-Hemingway was comparable.

That said, not even Brent Schaeffer’s biggest boosters would say he’s the next coming of Eli Manning, and the 2003 LSU contest had much more on the line: a berth in the SEC title game and LSU’s national championship prospects and unbeaten record. Instead, this contest saw our prospects at bowl eligibility slipping further away, with the Rebels needing to win 5 of 7 just to have a shot at going to a bowl for the first time since the 2003 Cotton Bowl contest.

Realistically, I don’t see the Rebels making a bowl, despite the marked improvement in play on both sides of the ball since the Missouri contest—and had the Rebels played as well in the previous three contests as they did last night, we would be looking at a rather dangerous 3–2 or 4–1 squad with the whole division ahead rather than a team that will be lucky if it bests last season’s three win mark.

Update: Clarion-Ledger Ole Miss beat writer Robbie Neiswanger has more on this theme at his blog.

EDSBS has dug up a song about Ed Orgeron. If only football coaches got entrance music like professional wrestlers do…

EDSBS reports on the latest Orgeron rumor making the rounds. I’d normally believe the rumor was true, but the idea of Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat deigning to go down to the Oxford police station blows much of its credibility out of the water.

We suck. Even worse, State eked out a win in OT against UAB.

I have a feeling that even Ron Franklin won’t be able to make next week’s Ole Miss–Georgia contest tolerable to a national viewing audience.

When your team has already lost to East Carolina and a team that just got its ass whipped by perennial SEC-cellar-dweller Kentucky, it’s probably time for a change; at least, that’s apparently Memphis coach Tommy West’s thinking as he cans well-travelled defensive guru Joe Lee Dunn.

Would that Coach O could fire his defensive coordinator… except, well, that’s Coach O. D’oh.

Here are some photos from the game last weekend, for the curious or otherwise disturbed.

I have to say I had a pretty good time in Columbia this weekend, despite Ole Miss’ general ineptitude leading to a 34–7 drubbing at the hands of Mizzou. I also enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with one of my professors from grad school days, Marvin Overby, and getting together with Frequent Commenter Alfie and the gang for a Midwestern tailgate and pub crawl.

In other football-related observations:

• Line of the weekend: Brad Nessler, Paul Maguire, and Bob Griese are calling a game on ESPN (Oklahoma–Washington, I think). Maguire sets up Nessler to plug his doing play-by-play on the late MNF double-header game, and this exchange follows:
  

  Maguire: What about me and Bob? We’re not doing anything Monday night.
  Nessler: You’re not doing anything now.

• Incidentally, that game was worth watching for Bonnie Bernstein alone.
• NBC should have left the “players introduce themselves” video packages with the rotting corpse of ABC Sports where they found them.
• Fox’s NFL graphics package looks a hell of a lot more professional this year than in years past. CBS… not so much.
• The solid ABC bug on ESPN on ABC needs to go away. Now. Before plasma TV owners start calling in death threats to affiliates.
• ESPN needs to give up on trying to hype its “talent” to get people to watch its shows. Telling me that I can hear Colin Cowherd spew his ignorance on ESPNU while I get queasy from the SkyCam (and Cowherd), or trying to dupe me into watching the Sunday night SportsCenter with Stoo-yah Scott by promising more of Chris Berman’s stale act, is not effective promotion of the brand unless I accidentally find another Disney network to watch instead.
• People sitting in a studio don’t need to be using hand-held microphones. Either body-mike them or use a frickin’ boom mike.

Finally, any sports bar that has blown $5k on a widescreen flatscreen television should not be showing a stretched standard-definition broadcast of anything, much less a football game available in high definition. At the very least, switch off the damn stretch mode—am I the only person alive who thinks that exaggerating people’s width by ⅓ is a bad idea?

Probably the highlight of Sunday’s Ole Miss–Memphis matchup is this play from true freshman Dexter McCluster, who may be the first player in college football to get the Arena league “offensive specialist” label (since I can’t figure out if he’s a receiver or a back), only slightly marred by the commentary by ESPN weasel Stuart Scott:

þ: EDSBS

The first two legal forward passes in American football—probably the play that separates the North American version of the sport from the various forms of rugby football—were thrown by the SLU football team 100 years ago. Somewhat ironically, these days SLU is better known for its success in association football (soccer) and its long-running rugby club team than for college football, which was ended here in the middle of the last century during a period of budget cutbacks.

The college football season has sort of snuck up on me this week, although I did get ESPNHD active in time to see South Carolina manhandle State on Thursday night. Today’s games have been moderately entertaining, including seeing overrated Cal get exposed by a newly-reinvigorated (although I’m not sure I’m willing to say “improved” before they face somebody decent in the SEC) Volunteer squad.

All this, of course, is an appetizer for Ole Miss-Memphis tomorrow afternoon; Frequent Commenter Alfie predicted (in a text message I got last Sunday) the Rebels will win 21–10, which seems plausible enough to me, so we’ll make that the official Signifying Nothing guesstimate of the week.

Craig Depken at Division of Labour looks back at the 1905–06 overhaul of football rules and looks ahead at the more modest changes to be implemented in the NFL this coming season.

I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that Disney has decided to ditch the ‘ABC Sports’ brand in favor of promoting all of its sports programming under the ESPN banner, especially considering that the network’s “Wide World of Sports” theme is more often seen being mocked on Cheap Seats than on ABC proper.

It’s just as well, seeing as the man most people today would identify with ABC Sports, Al Michaels, is now on NBC with John Madden and the network primetime NFL package anyway.

I’ve generally lost interest in the whole Duke lacrosse imbroglio, but KC Johnson notes some very interesting developments in the case that reinforce my prior belief that Durham DA Mike Nifong is, as the kids say, “completely full of shit.”

I now have an appointment to see Brent Schaeffer demolish the Missouri Tigers on September 9th. That is, if Brent can manage to be eligible to play by then…

Update: As Alfie notes in the comments, the Brent Schaeffer era has now commenced in Oxford.

I can’t believe I picked up a copy of NCAA Football 07 at Circuit City ($39.99, with the strategy guide gratis) and am simply too tired to play it.

I blame the heat. Or the hour I spent in Costco waiting for my car tires to be rotated and balanced. Or exhaustion from just watching people climb Alpe d’Huez on bikes.

EDSBS links a New York Times piece from yesterday detailing some rather creative use of independent study classes by a professor in the Auburn sociology department who was apparently in cahoots with an athletic tutor to give Tiger jocks cheap A’s. The money quote in my book:

[Carnell “Cadillac”] Williams said one of the two directed-reading courses he took with Professor [Thomas] Petee during the spring of 2005 was a statistics class.

Asked if that course, considered the most difficult in the sociology major, was available to regular students as a directed reading, Professor Petee said, “No, not usually.”

Mr. Williams described the class this way: “You’re just studying different kinds of math. It’s one of those things where you write a report about the different theories and things like that.”

The NCAA is, as they say, investigating, although I ultimately expect little more than a wrist-slap for Tommy Tuberville’s rogue program down on the Plains, in large part because this (and similar) petty corruption is widespread in college football. One example: I have it on good authority that at least one NFL star who was an Ole Miss criminal justice major was as dumb as a post yet somehow managed to maintain his eligibility through softball-lobbing instructors and professors, with generous assists from the athletic tutors. Most people who’ve spent any time around Division I schools can probably tell similar stories—particularly if they’ve been in or near what Prof. Karlson artfully refers to as the Division of Cooling Out the Mark.

That said, directed readings courses may be the soft underbelly of grade inflation more generally for athlete and non-athlete alike; certainly it’s hard to give out many C’s and D’s when you really have no other students to compare a directed readings student to, although in theory professors shouldn’t be letting bad students in independent study courses in the first place (so there may be a selection bias issue here).

Perhaps those of my former colleagues at Millsaps who mocked the administration’s investment in our on-campus football field will think again; a growing trend, particularly at Division III schools, is to recruit male students by starting, reactivating, or reinvigorating varsity football teams.

While I am mildly sympathetic with the argument that there are times when scholar-athletes spend too much time emphasizing the latter half of the hyphenate, I have to say that I’ve never had a problem with the athletes in my classes either at Division I-A schools like Duke and Ole Miss or at D-3 Millsaps. That said, the merits of achieving a 50–50 gender balance on campus are debatable at best, even at places where the admissions game is a bit less zero-sum than at the elite colleges and universities.