Oct 26, 2009 - A is for Absolution: We forgive you, Jimmy Clausen, for shoving Rich Gunnell in the chest after an otherwise tidy 26/39, 246 yard 2 TD performance, for Rich Gunnell was fulminating at the mouth, and hath displayed poor sportsmanship after thou extended thine hand to him in friendship.

You are forgiven, though thou'st continues to behave like a minor circuit WWE heel in the public spotlight when its light falls upon you for no particular reason other than thy name art Clausen, and 'tis possibly a genetic and familial heritage thou cannot shake but for superhuman effort. Also, we suspect thee of sunning thyself in the greater reflected glory of Golden Tate, which is fine because he is freaking incredible, and jumps into opposing bands with great festivity. Anyone would do the same. Amen.

B is for Buttress: The center beam of the siegeworks built around Virginia this weekend by Georgia Tech came in Tech's masterful opening drive of the second half against the Cavaliers: 10:47 in duration, 18 plays, and 82 yards for the score to put the Yellow Jackets ahead 20-6 and effectively end the game. The drive contained 17 runs and one pass, and ate most of the third quarter up in savage, pounding bits. At the end, the Cavaliers had to feel like they'd been thrown into a rock polisher with a full load of gravel, something the time of possession more than hints at: 42:43 for Tech, 17:17 for Virginia. Well-constructed brutality all around by Paul Johnson and his angry engineers. 

C is for Conclusive: Dustin Doe did not fumble when he crossed the goal line on an interception return against Mississippi State Saturday night; he merely allowed Miss State defenders to casually "down" the ball for him courteously in admitting that Doe had not only made a nice play, but was also a fine dancer as demonstrated by his adept sachaying into the endzone. SEC officiating does not reek to high heavens of widespread incompetence even with clear replays; it merely acknowledges the elaborate rites and dramas of manner unfolding on every play.

D is for Defaced. Also, Taylor Mays did not rip James Rodgers' helmet off in an attempted decapitation Saturday night during the USC/Oregon State game.

What you actually see there is the traditional greeting given to strangers and newcomers on Mays' home planet of Ul'xaarth, a beautiful heavenly body located several hundred light years away and populated with 6'3", 240 pound men who can run 4.3 40s with ease. The greeting is called "attempted decapitation," too, but the pronunciation is a mere coincidence. Remember: they're not referees making bad calls, they are intergalactic anthropologists explaining the complicated nuances of social interaction in sports. I hope that clears this all up for you. 

E is for Endgames. The final moves to the chess match ending the BCS aren't even three or four rounds away, but take heart, fans of chaos: a Cincinnati/Iowa national title game is still on the horizon, provided eight improbable things happen. Half of me wants to jump headfirst off the nearest staircase thinking about this while the other half wants to grab a torch and set fire to the BCS in the grandest meltdown the system has experienced since Oklahoma slid onto the BCS Championship runway smoking and already on fire in 2003.

F is for Flightless. Like ancient birds and the modern ostrich, Ball State needs not your ability to travel and survive. The Cardinals beat Eastern Michigan 29-27 despite only tallying one yard of passing on the day in securing their first victory of the year. 

G is for Golem The lifeless and unstoppable clay automaton of Jewish folklore may be the best analogy available to explain how lifeless Texas A&M, as dead as a team can possibly be, a team so dead they may have had to invent new, exciting variations of the term dead like "Super Extra Kansas City Tangy Dead" to explain how dead they were after losing 62-19 to Kansas State last week. The golem got the proper instructions this week, though: all you have to do is write the right words on a piece of paper and insert them into the mouth of the beast. For Texas A&M those were "Ali, boom aye," since he had his team watch the Ali/Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" before the game for inspiration.

H is for Harried. The Aggies figured something else out about Texas Tech: this year's model of the Red Raider Point Generator cannot protect the quarterback, a truly bizarre discovery for a.) any team to make, since Red Raider qbs don't typically get knocked out of games, and b.) an Aggie defense playing horrendous football coming into the game. Graham Harrell didn't miss a start during his career at Tech; Taylor Potts has already suffered a concussion and was knocked out of the game Saturday, as well.

I is for Incapacitating. The Texas defense knocked the already battered Monsieur Blaine Gabbert (he's more fun if you pronounce it with a cartoonish French accent) out of the game this weekend, bringing Texas' total of incapacitated qbs to three, joining Sam Bradford (with an assist from the Church of Latter Day Saints) and Colorado's Cody Hawkins on the body count racked up by Will Muschamp's defense. If Texas survives the gauntlet down the stretch and becomes the presumptive national title favorite, go ahead and counter their provisional opponent's claim of "Our qb can make plays!" with "Our defense will unmake your qb and have him taking prescription painkillers like a dog with their head in a sack full of bacon." 

J is for Jupiter's Beard!

Insert the Ron Burgundy oath of choice here, because that is a heinous but entirely accidental hit on Michael Palmer by a pair of Miami defenders late in the game. Kyle Parker returned the favor by concussing Miami's hopes at an ACC title this year, thus further downgrading Miami's sliding hopes with a howitzer volley of a pass to Jacoby Ford in overtime for the winning score in a 40-37 lollapalooza of a game. Georgia Tech, the team Miami beat, stands atop the Coastal Division after this weekend. If none of this makes sense given what you thought a month ago, this message has been brought to you by the ACC: making confusing football storylines since the 2003 expansion.

K is for Killing Floor. Max Hall is brave. Very, very brave. It's not that he was sacked five times by TCU. That's bad in itself, sure. The manner of the sacks is what mattered, since they seemed to get successively worse with each one, with Jerry Hughes coming up with new and ever-more-creative ways to attempt to break the BYU QB in half. Hall was beaten up like a dummy in the cut scene in a Zucker brothers comedy where they begin with the real actor, and then sloppily and intentionally switch to the actors pounding the daylights of a ragdoll. That's how bad it was, and not just for Hall: TCU outmanned them point by point, and in brutish fashion. In a year of low scores and defensive brawls, TCU might just be the right team to gatecrash the BCS for real.

L is for Letdown.

The sad emo/mope rock reference of the week goes to Jonathan Crompton, but not for the usual reasons of obvious disintegration in front of your eyes you've come to expect from the Tennessee quarterback. The Vols' much-maligned quarterback had what was statistically the best day any quarterback has had throwing against the skinflint Alabama defense, hitting slant routes and seam patterns with a startling snap and ease. Sadly, Lane Kiffin forgot this with 40 seconds or so on the clock and refused to allow Crompton, easily having his best day as a game manager this year and throwing for 265 yards on the Tide, to move Tennessee closer to the goalposts.

Instead, Kiffin placed the game on the foot of Daniel Lincoln, the kicker who had to hit a 44 yarder on a day when Alabama had already blocked one kick from a shorter distance. Team Speed Kills called this a side effect of NFL blandness, but outright faithlessness might be another fair charge here, too. Jonathan Crompton has helped Tennessee lose a lot of games. This was not one.

M is for Mangled. Bob Griese may have committed a minor instance of racial insensitivity in suggesting Juan Pablo Montoya was "off eating a taco." Consider progress on this front, though, and marvel at our progress as a nation and a people. Montoya is Colombian, and if Griese had wanted to be truly nasty he would have mentioned a cheap shot at Colombia's past troubles with the drug trade and kidnapping industry. Instead, his brain skipped directly to "taco," putting him more in the category of drunk co-worker firing on half of his cylinders at a post-work cocktail hour than "blatantly racist." In a sense, that's a form of progress: we're moving toward ignorant insensitivity instead of specific racism as a nation. Well done, Bob.

N is for Noggin, Unused. Bob's progeny, Brian Griese, deserves the more specifically football-related criticism on the day for his work during the Clemson/Miami game. He guffawed at Clemson's offensive signals system, saying "How does he read those crazy signs from the coach?" when Dabo Swinney was making what appeared to be fairly simple signs toward Kyle Parker, who had no problem reading them for a stellar day. This is a minor quibble; a major complaint can be made toward his criticism of Dabo Swinney's decision to take time off the clock at the end of the game to settle for a game-tying FG to send the game to OT on the road. Griese, Jr. lit into Swinney for not trusting Parker to end the game, conveniently forgetting Parker's toss of a pick on the previous redzone possession. Parker then threw the game-winning TD a possession later in overtime on 3rd and 11 to end the game, trusting his qb with a bit more breathing room to win the game for the Tigers.

O is for Occluded. To cause to become closed; to obstruct; to describe Florida's miserable redzone offense, now 87th in the nation after sputtering versus Mississippi State on Saturday night. 

P is for Pitiless. Noel Devine, tiny ramjet powered hedgehog of a running back, and pitiless ender of games, is the AND NOW A MIRACLE HAPPENS you can just toss haphazardly into the equation of a game when you need something like that. Trailing late 24-21, Devine blipped through the Connecticut defense for a 56 yard TD run to put WVU ahead. If WVU's team profile matched Devine's, he would be on your shortlist of Stiff-Armed Trophy finalists, as well as any other number of insane superlatives you care to pile on him. He is one of the few backs capable of taking all the lovely dry-erase marker you care to pile on a whiteboard in defensive scheming and erasing it with a few quick-twitches of his reflexes. You don't play contain when you face him; you play "mitigate."

Q is for Quorum. The minimum number of people needed to seat a body of oversight, or what is lacked across the board in the SEC right now in terms of quality teams. Talent abounds, but turnover has taken a hard bite out of the coaching ranks and talent pool, leaving the SEC in a state of flux. Even Alabama and Florida, the titans of the league right now, clearly have serious issues resulting from the loss of offensive players to the draft and graduation. I am as blatant an SEC homer as exists, but this year there are other conferences putting together a more complete menu in terms of teams with depth and cohesion. That conference, for the moment, is the Pac-10. Now I'm going to hide in a bombproof bunker and wait for a while until I hear the bombshells stop landing.

 R is for Re: Q and Please Not in the Face. No one will believe this until bowl season comes by, but for once don't dismiss Jeff Sagarin's 1980s Apple IIe style as madness. USC is pumping along nicely, Oregon State has a superb offense, Oregon may be the best team in the conference now that the defense seems to be part of the math in Eugene, Cal can win as long as you don't tell them they're supposed to, and Arizona and Arizona State both field competitive, tough squads on both sides of the football. Stanford boasts the stout running of Toby Gerhart and the improving qb play of Andrew Luck. Washington adopts the role of kamikaze team--they might die, but they're certainly going to take some of you with them when they do--leaving Washington State and UCLA in the cellar as the two only really flaccid teams in the conference. Right now, they possess the most complete profile of any conference top to bottom, a choice made easier by the Big 12 existing only as a half-conference right now. (Just don't look at the Big 12 North. Please. We beg you.)

S is for Slant. Iowa stays alive with the beauty of the slant, thrown on the goal line repeatedly by Ricky Stanzi until one stuck for the game-winning TD against Michigan State. It has to be fun to be an Iowa fan right now, since you're already playing eight miles above the expected ceiling for the team's preseason expectations, and because you can revel in any victory no matter how hideous it may look on paper, because JUST WIN BABY. The Hawkeyes' national title game predicted score, per this column, remains at an 11-5 final against Boise State in Bizarro BCS Title game 2009.

T is for Top Hat. No one does puffy indignance better than Mark May. During any of his commentating on Saturday we just imagined him in a top hat, huffing about the abominable carriage ride he'd just endured on the way to the Gentleman's Club, and how an urchin besooted the sleeve of his fine tuxedo with their filthy hand asking for a penny. All future broadcasts are to be done with May in a monocle and long Whiplash mustache, please, ESPN. (We dare you, in fact, to see if anyone would notice.)

U is for Unvictorious: Miami of Ohio, Eastern Michigan, New Mexico, Western Kentucky, and Rice are the last remaining winless teams standing--er, lying prostrate on the pavement and not moving in college football this week. I would normally send sympathy and courage and advise going away from the light, brave winless teams of college football, but in your cases you should sprint directly for that sucker and head for reincarnation next year. Especially you, New Mexico, since your coach Mike "Punch-out" Locksley returns from suspension this week, and will likely feel pretty scrappy after a week off spent hitting the heavy bag in his garage.

V is or Versus, Sparkly Edition. Can we speak kindly of Versus' HD feed and note how sparkly it is, and how it makes even the most lackluster late Pac-10 game look like football played in a magical land sprinkled with fairy-dust?

W is for Wai. The Hawaiian word for "water," but which also means to flow, an stative verb describing Boise State's effortless movement around, over, and through the Warriors in a 54-9 swamping on the road. Staying in the heart of Waikiki had no ill effects for the Broncos, evidently. Also flowing nicely are the Penn State Nittany Lions, who swam into a sloggy Michigan Stadium and reminded Michigan fans of the cold reality that Rich Rodriguez is, in the words of Brian Cook, "a good coach in a big hole" by beating Penn State 35-10.

X is for X-1, which if you'll cobble together a little pidgin math assuming X= ten equals the number of turnovers Nebraska had on Saturday, an unthinkable nine in all in losing to Iowa State by the score of 9-7. Iowa State's winning point total equalled the number of turnovers given to them by Nebraska. Heads at Nebraska, they will roll on the offensive side of the ball.

Z is for Zeus. Stanford safety Will Powers' answer for "lookalike" in his profile on Versus' broadcast of Arizona State/Stanford's game late, late Saturday night. Powers does not have a huge white beard and cannot throw thunderbolts....yet.