college football

There is a reason that Tebow’s nickname at Florida is The Chosen One. Here’s a terrific example of the man’s character taken from the recent New York Times article, “X’s and O’s: Tebow Studies How They Work”:

He said he was annoyed by NCAA limits on his charity work. He said that he could not play in a golf tournament to raise money for breast cancer earlier this year and that he saw football as a way to spread his faith.

“It’s just smart,” he said of exploring his NFL options. “If you get an opportunity to take care of your family for the rest of your life.”

“But not just that, to start all the ministries I want to do and everything. I mean, that’s something that you’ve definitely got to look at it.”

I have way, way too many Gator hats. I’ll admit this. It’s a problem. This one, though, is one of my absolute favorites. My friend Ryan gave it to me about a year ago and I have worn it to death. I’ve been trying to find another one and am looking for help. There is a URL plastered all over the inside of it for zhats.com, the home of Zephyr hats, but their site is terrible. (If this site isn’t a perfect example of Flash gone bad, I don’t know what is.)

I’ve determined that the model is the Hype, but cannot find the same one anywhere on the ‘net. There was one for sale at buy.com at some point, but no more. I posted a plea to twitter after the LSU game and fellow Gator Leia found a similar cap, but I’d really prefer one without the orange highlights. If anyone has any leads, please do drop me a line.

• Stocks skidded Monday, with the Dow slumping nearly 778 points, in the biggest single-day point loss ever, after the House rejected the government’s $700 billion bank bailout plan.
• The Yankees will sit out the postseason for the first time in 15 years.
• Vanderbilt is in first place in the SEC East.

Time to start stock-piling water, kids.

Do you remember when Robin Williams attempts to teach Nathan Lane how to be a real man in The Birdcage? It’s one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies. Williams asks,

How do you feel about that call today? I mean the Dolphins! Fourth-and-three play on their 30 yard line with only 34 seconds to go!

Today it was the Gators and fourth and one with a little under a minute to go. Either way it’s the same. I just can’t believe it. Again. How does the Heisman trophy winner fail to get a single yard? You really can’t blame Tebow, though. That game was lost on the sidelines.

It was another brutal early season weekend in college football. (Didn’t this happen last year, too?) Yes, seven of the AP top twenty-five teams lost, but that doesn’t make it any easier if you happened to be on the losing side.

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In his first season the UCLA Bruins head coach Rick Neuheisel has lost one game by a total of 59 points.

In his first seven seasons the USC Trojans head coach Pete Carroll lost 14 games by a (combined) total of 59 points.

In less than 24 hours I will be once again sitting in front of a television and watching college football. The Gators kick off at 9:30 AM (Pacific) tomorrow morning and I’ll be watching them play Hawaii on DirecTV channel 788. And so will begin the most wonderful time of the year. Go Gators!

Mac users: You can use this link to subscribe to the Florida Gators 2008 Football iCal Schedule, published by Yahoo!.

My friend Andy loaned me the latest Michael Lewis book, The Blind Side, last week. (I seem to remember reading an excerpt from it in Sports Illustrated earlier this year.) It’s a great look at the high school / college football recruiting process in the SEC. The author does an excellent job of jumping between the histories of ‘legacy’ players in the NFL, the evolution of the left tackle position, and the story of Michael Oher, a freakishly large kid who wants to play ‘in the league’. If you’re a football fan you’ll definitely enjoy this one. And now I’ll have to start paying attention to Ole Miss to see how this kid performs this year.

Superman wears Tim Tebow pajamas.

On my desk right now is a football-shaped bowl of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers. I poured three entire boxes into the bowl a few days ago and am now in trouble. You see, I’ve been methodically eating them by color. I started with red and then went to orange. The problem is that now there are only purple, yellow, and green remaining. I had been planning on eating the green ones next. If I do that, though, then there will only be LSU colors left in the bowl. They are an SEC rival, so I just can’t do that. I can try to think of them as the Lakers, but I just don’t care enough about basketball … and the Tigers will still be in the back of my mind. I can’t eat the purple ones because that would leave yellow and green and that’s just hideous. I can’t eat the yellow ones because then there will only be green and purple and that’s even worse. I’m thinking that the best course of action in this situation is to just put the whole bowl on Molly’s desk.

The schedule for the University of Florida 2007 football season has been published. You can find it at the University Athletic Association website. They even give you the ability to import the schedule directly into Outlook!

It took me a few minutes to find it, of course. There is just a lot of stuff cluttering the site … Y’know … all about how we won the National Championship in basketball last year, and then the BCS Championship in football this year, and then the National Championship in basketball again this year.

You have to get out of bed pretty early to pull one over on the local coroner in Los Angeles.

Southern California kicker Mario Danelo was drunk when he plunged over a cliff to his death, but the cause of his death was “undetermined,” according to a coroner’s report released Monday.

He’s a football player in excellent physical health. He got really, really drunk. He climbed a large wall and fell over 100′. I don’t see the mystery here. Tragedy? Yes. Mystery? No.

The blog for inquisitive Gators, Saurian Sagacity, has done an interesting analysis of the effect of the 2006 NCAA football game clock rule changes. I was annoyed all year by the new changes because I felt that it was making the games shorter. I like college football. I don’t want shorter games. I want longer games! It seemed all year that the games were shorter, but the time I spent sitting in front of the TV didn’t change. And now I realize why.

Yes, the games were shorter by about eight minutes. But it’s not like the networks gave me that time. They took away six or eight plays per game, but we got to see around seventeen more commercials. That sucks. There are already plenty of commercials. It’s not like that cash is going to the schools to pay player salaries. Broadcasting college football is a license to print money. That’s why games are being carried by TBS and TNT now. It’s so lucrative as it is there’s no need to screw me out of those six plays.

The only real issue I have with this analysis is that I think it misses the point. What I’d really like to know is the difference between the number of plays run by quarter. The big change this year, I felt, was that the 4th quarter always seemed to be where the time disappeared. There were definitely some thrilling come-from-behind victories this season, but was it just me that thought there were more of them before the clock rule changes?

How cool is the World Wide Web™? Within 24 hours of the game I was able to use μtorrent to download the entire 2006 BCS Championship Game and watch it using the latest DivX player. The 2.2GB file took about 20 hours to download, but it’s worth it. I’m considering using the office projector to play the game on the wall behind me on a constant loop.

(While you’re waiting for the massive download, take a look at this awesome video of suffering OSU fans at the game, set to the tune of Beck’s “Loser“. It’s very evil and completely bad karma, but still great.)