EDSBS.com is Awesome

EveryDayShouldBeSaturday.com is an awesome blog written by a Florida grad by the name Orson Swindle. He is the funniest writer and you really need to start visiting this site. Here are two posts about this weekend. These are long but worth it. Keep in mind he is a Florida fan:



Shackleton said the first and most important element of group survival was to keep morale up. Shackleton put this into practice during his Antarctic escapades by organizing soccer matches for his men on the pack ice, and by allowing them to date seals so long as they made no promises or babies. Most of the men, being British, honored their agreements. The stiff, formal manner of the seals surrounding Elephant Island to this day remind locals of that British sojourn a century ago, especially when they wear bowlers as they are wont to do.

The assembled miserable denizens of visitor's section NN6 in Bryant-Denny Stadium followed Shackleton's advice.

For instance: Alabama could use some more pregame montages. A coked-out Oliver Stone clearly consulted on their pregame, because Alabama's pre-game montage is preceded by its own pregame montage, which in itself has five successive pregame montages. All of them are set to the theme for Requiem for a Dream, and half feature Bear Bryant narrating solemnly over the footage.

None feature Bear Bryant becoming hooked on heroin and getting electroshock therapy, and that's a shame since it was a really important part of his life.

Alabama should add a solid hour to two hours of pregame montages in front of these montages, and charge admission. We decided this could be done with movies, which for a nominal fee and with some fairly easy digital tweaking would feature Bryant himself. The version of No Country For Old Men featuring Bear Bryant as Anton Chigurh would be reviewed by the Birmingham News as "The finest and most uplifting comedy ever filmed."

There were other ideas. They distracted from the wreck of a game happening three hundred feet or so below us. Watching games from the upper deck feels like you digest everything at a clinical but still delayed distance. The effect is one of watching football on cough syrup: crowd movements and cheers aren't synced up, everything but the play itself feels delayed, and still there's a kind of precognition you have from up on high that other don't. They can't see the safety overplaying the run fake, but you can.

The effect is not a good one in a blowout, especially when you can see the proverbial runaway baby stroller of a play rolling into the semi-truck traffic of the counterplay. We watched a lot of strollers roll into traffic in the first half of Saturday night's game at Bryant-Denny Stadium. They were all Florida's.

It was brute, negative football. Watching from up high you could see the safeties flex into the plays before they happened, little dots of Crimson meeting Florida Blue at every point. It was exactly like every other game we'd watched Florida play on offense since the 2008 SEC Championship Game: a series of eleven tangoes arranged so that at any point on the field one defender was matched up with one offensive player. Good offense dislodges these romantic moments: it takes those dots and puts them in space alone and unpaired. Good football offense is bad tango. This was excellent tango, and bad football offense.

Everything was designed around making you screw up first, a simple but effective wager that your opponent would jab, and then you countered, and then your opponent was on the mat spitting up teeth and talking long distance to imaginary interlocutors in Shanghai without the use of a phone or other wireless communications device. They called screens, because you were going to overrun them. They called simple, one cut runs with brutal blocking. If they didn't break one way, they took one simple cut and went the other way. You didn't need anything fancy when your opponent willing stuck his member in the bear trap each time.

They played like they didn't even like football: like it was a job with three or four simple, clear-cut rules. All the work had been done beforehand: the tendencies, the formations, the technique. The simple plays were executed with scalpel-sharp precision. The patterns were calmly nodded at and countered. On five wide sets defensive backs stood their ground, since the ball was going nowhere deep, nowhere close to deep, and would in fact be parked on a route somewhere in the three to five yard range (provided that the qb was not sacked, rushed into a bad throw, or otherwise beaten within an inch of his life.) On run plays no fakes were respected since they did not merit respect, but were faked anyway.

It was so efficient you might think Alabama hated football, and wanted less of it by turning a potentially competitive game into a suffocated and forgone conclusion. They might have hated it if they hated boredom. The only thing of any real consequence that happened in the second half was John Brantley getting the shit knocked out of him scrambling unsuccessfully for the first down marker. They might have hated it because those who excel at what they do hate easy things because they are boring and a waste of time.

This was both easy and boring.

Failure really can be fun provided you have the right attitude and a complete lack of involvement with the failure itself. Take Saturday night, or the past year and a half with the Florida offense. You know logically that this is something you have nothing to do with, no control or sway over, and little besides a general consistent bleat in the din of general public opinion. You are excepted from this statement if you are so wealthy you can write checks to build things at Florida without feeling them too much.

You have no control, and in a moment of remembering some kitchen wall copy of the Serenity Prayer you remember the bit about accepting things you cannot control. When Florida ran a screen that looked like an invisible moped accident, we thought this. When we ran John Brantley to the short side of the field on an option he would never, ever keep in any billions of probable realities, we thought this. It would have made us feel better if the Serenity Prayer worked. It also would have made us feel better if there were a shred of hope of this changing, but there isn't. They should point this out in the footnotes of the Serenity Prayer, but unfortunately David Foster Wallace is not its author.

Toward the end you run out of ideas and people to bounce them off of in a blowout. The clock wound down. Alabama courteously ran the ball to kill the remaining useless minutes left. Leaving before double zeroes is the only superstition we have about football games: you don't leave with time on the clock. Consequently we have spent a lot of time sitting by ourselves at the end of games. The gentlemen in front of us left, but said they wouldn't mind taking part in the impromptu discussion group again under better circumstances.

We concurred. "Got to keep morale up. Shackleton's first rule of survival in the Antarctic."

"What's the second rule?" they asked.

"Get the fuck out of the Antarctic."





And this one is hilarious about LSU this weekend:



You know a classic piece of live football atrocity when the highlight film begins with a converted 4th and 14, especially when it's against a Tennessee team that has no business being in the game in the first place, a Tennessee team playing a lawn chair at center, a Tennessee team with linebackers whose ACLs explode for no reason, a Tennessee team whose depth chart just reads "NOPE" at no fewer than seven major positions. Tennessee's there, and like a novice climber stranded in the death zone on Everest, you know it's a matter of time before they run out of oxygen, take off their clothes, and begin rolling in the snow like dying men suffering from mountain madness and cerebral edema.

Tennessee's already doomed in theory as the inferior team late in the game even on basic football princlples before you activate the computer worm capable of crippling the entire football matrix as we know it: Les Miles.


Some men just want to watch the world burn. Others set it on fire accidentally and call their friends to come over and watch. Les Miles is both.

Jarrett Lee throws a pass into triple coverage to start the sequence. Jarrett Lee, he of the multiple pick sixes and benching two years ago. He's back, and that's how bad LSU's offense is at this point with Jordan Jefferson attempting to "make pass go that way into hands." They now use him as a kind of running quarterback, which he's not. That would be Russell Shepherd, who is now a wide receiver who never gets the ball. Jordan Jefferson, the non-running QB, scored LSU's only TD to this point in the game on a wholly uncontested 83 yard run through the gut of the Tennessee defense. You knew the demons were in charge of this game from this play forward, and also that when you run on offense as nonsensically as LSU does, the only logical cure is to face an equally nonsensical defense. Tennessee rose to that challenge, and we toast you for this, Volunteers.

LSU gets the ball on the two as a result of a pass interference penalty (natch) and does what any good coach would do with three downs and a running clock with 32 seconds left in the game: call a quarterback sweep with your non-running running quarterback. Like much of Dangermouse and Cee-Lo's work together, the matchup of Gary Crowton's playcalling and Les Miles' attitude makes for sometimes nonsensical but always disturbing, affecting work.

The clock runs. You do two things when you might want to stop the clock on the goal-line down 14-10 with a running clock. You may spike it---wait, that's not happening. There's a thing about spiking the ball at LSU, if you'll recall. They could call time out, but they have no timeouts because Les Miles is pretty sure the federal government demands those back at the end of the year if you don't spend them all. Though they've been on the two yard line ever since the pass interference penalty, the LSU offensive staff suddenly remembers OH MY GOD WE HAVE A GOAL LINE PACKAGE and sets off a fire drill the People's Republic of China would call "disgracefully hurried and chaotic."

Huge men sprint off the field and onto it. The clock winds. Les Miles is seen throwing live chickens onto the field. Who knows where he got them, but they're all part of the plan now. The LSU sideline's complete anarchy triggers a disproportionate reaction on the Tennessee sideline. They send off three men, put in four, and one of the three sent off rushes back onto the field like a child terrified of missing the school bus for a field trip. (This child then ends up in the wrong town because they got on the wrong bus.) Derek Dooley wraps the headset cord around his neck and attempts to choke himself to death rather than watch what's happening. The crowd silences itself by placing a eighty thousand bourbon bottles in eighty thousand mouths at once and draining them simultaneously.

Then the most magnificent part of the play happens. This sentence appears in its own box because everything about it is spectacular:

Then the ball is snapped with the game on the line between two major college football powers with one team having 13 men on the field and another with a non-running running quarterback who watches in horror as the ball is snapped over his head and covered for a game-ending busted play. THIS ALL HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE.

Competence is overrated as a form of entertainment while incompetence can be side-splitting stuff. I watched this in a bar full of people in Tuscaloosa, and the reactions were giddy not because of any real mass hatred toward both teams, but because they knew that with a quality arsonist like Miles on the sidelines something was getting set on fire: LSU, Tennessee, or possibly both. Oh, and LSU scored on the next play when a penalty was called on Tennessee for too many men on the field because a 9-4 defense is effective but highly illegal, and Tennessee players started weeping on the field.

I'm applauding, all of you, as loud and as hard as I can in your general directions. We shall not see another ending to match this beautiful hatchet job until next week when LSU beats Florida at home 7.5 to 2 on a blocked extra point and a half a point awarded for hitting all three crossbars on a single missed FG attempt. It's in the rulebook, look it up.