This Week In Schadenfreude: Nov. 16

It was a matter of picking which member of college football's only intersectional rivalry would take prime placement above the fold. And while Notre Dame has plenty of agony going on, for the most part they've moved into "let's hire Gruden and offer Meyer the offensive coordinator spot" mode. They're split on whether they even want Notre Dame to win again this year; merriment at their sadness will be reduced until such time as Weis is retained or Notre Dame hires Glen Mason.

USC, on the other hand, is dealing with a crazy new reality and facing down the ... whatever the bowls are that aren't Rose Bowls. Trojan fans have dispatched someone to the archives to figure out where they are. After a 55-21 defeat to Stanford in which Jim Harbaugh pulled a Woody Hayes and gloatingly went for two on a touchdown that wasn't even the last one the Cardinal scored, the knives are coming out for Pete Carroll.

This comes from Conquest Chronicles and is testament to something deeply amiss with modern society (get off my lawn!):

I still believe in Pete Carroll...

BUT...

He now has a very slim margin of good will with a majority of the fans and alums.

What? Seriously? There is no way. Pete Carroll has --

Easy answer fire Pete and the loser son goes

Posted By: THE BIGGEST USC FAN EVER
Date: 11/15/2009 5:24:12 PM

with him along with all the NFL washouts. ...
Would Harbaugh come to SC?
I hope so.

Ah. Okay. Point taken. There is also this film noir script masquerading as a diagnosis of USC's fall:

And so it comes...back to the dark ages.....no recruits, no coaches in a league full of coaches.

How did it happen? The same way it started...arrogance.

He walked out of my life as soon as he walked in. I'll never forget his steely gray jowls, or the way he left me. I know him only as ... Chow.

To be fair, the bulk of USC fans are thankful for the last seven years of dominance and, while critical, are keeping it above the belt. Also this guy referenced the red shift of the universe:

The added wrinkle is

that PC hasn't found the "defensive guru" hat to be satisfactory. Since 2005 he's been trying on the "offensive guru" and "special teams guru" and "just plain guru" hats... at the same time. Yesterday it was confirmed that there's a limit to all his "awesomeness," only the Universe can stay in full expansion mode "forever."

+1; USC is this week's Tears of Unfathomable Sadness victor. The rest of the week in spleen after the jump.

BIG TEN

This will be a TWIS first, but the people we're pointing and laughing at after the Iowa-Ohio State game are not fans of either side but beleaguered newspaper hacks (in mentality, if not medium) livid at Ohio State's presumption. No fewer than three columns whining about the Buckeye reign in the Big Ten have been penned since Saturday.

You kind of expect it from Gregg Doyel, who's probably written a jeremiad about cereal at some point in his life. This weekend took him one step closer to the edge, and he's about to break:

This was revolting. Ohio State won the game, the Big Ten title and a spot in the Rose Bowl -- but what did the Buckeyes lose? And can they ever get it back?

Doyel's got some blather about how both teams "quit," uses "disgusting" three times, drops scare quotes around "victory" and does this all because he's shocked that a Jim Tressel team would take the most conservative route possible to victory. "Raging against his own ignorance" should go on Doyel's gravestone. For the first time ever, a "respected" national columnist is the Scott Tenorman of the Week.

Okay, so that's Doyel, a professional bomb-thrower. Pat Forde is 1000 times less insane and couches his column with a lot of "yes, they're going to the Rose Bowl," but still comes down on the side of whine:

You don't care. Because here in this tunnel-visioned, tradition-addicted conference, going to the Rose Bowl is just about as joyful a result as playing for the national title.

And you don't care because even after the fans voiced their dismay, hyper-conservatism triumphed in the end. Your painful-to-watch pragmatism was rewarded.

And then there's Jason King on Yahoo, who manages to slip an expletive into his column (!) en route to expressing the same sentiment:

"This is bulls---," Johnson-Koulianos said to no one specific, and there are plenty of college football fans who feel the same way about the Buckeyes and the Big Ten.

Most folk in the Big Ten are pretty sick of Ohio State, too, but at least we have reasons better than "runs too much."

(HT for this section: Black Heart, Gold Pants.)

And your default autoschadenfreude for Michigan after their 45-24 loss to Wisconsin last weekend:

There is an increased chance that sometime today I will read or hear something that cause my entire body to crumple and my head to thump audibly on the desk. So I guess that's different. Not different: for the second straight year the Ohio State week is only welcome because after it there won't be this unpleasant thing that happens every Saturday. The Notre Dame game seems like another decade.

Been there, done that, wrote the blog post, moving on.

BIG EAST

West Virginia lost a valiant battle against Cincinnati and may have gotten screwed in the process, so it's time for our usual jaunt to the West Virginia Scout board for the best in all-caps ranting. This one is so pure it could be the platonic ideal for these sorts of things:

Losses are UNACCEPTABLE

---

until Stew, staff, WVU and fanbase wholehearted believe this, we will remain an alsoran.

Emotional development ceasing in eight grade: check. Assertion that fanbase has direct control over outcomes: check. Grammatical error(s): check. "UNACCEPTABLE" in all caps: check.

To that board's credit, they've got a couple wags on there that tear him apart, one gently, the other not so much. Gentle:

Zapatista wrote:

Losses are inevitable... no matter which sport or coach is being examined.

...now, we can have a whole separate discussion on which coach provides the best opportunity to decrease those losses.

Not so much:

Too late. He already said they're UNACCEPTABLE. He used all caps, so he HAS to be right.

 

WVU1andONLY has won the internet this week.

A close second is "ShortyLong," who responds to this alternate universe theory ...

If Huggins was our football coach

---

how do you think we would be this year. I believe after our first loss we wouldn't lose again.

... with this ...

I don't think we would be very good because Bob Huggins is a basketball coach.

... which draws this response from the original poster ...

dude come on...how he gets his players to play...how he hates losing, and not just happy to be there. your an idiot.

... and we're done here. I love that message board. It gets five internets out of five.

BIG 12

Oh ... it's not good at Texas A&M. TexAgs.com is one of those uber-message boards along the lines of Spartan Tailgate or ND Nation that's developed its own culture after years of existence. All boards eventually divide into two warring camps based on optimism levels. Spartan Tailgate calls them "Sunshine Blowers" and "Demand Excellencers." ND Nation bans everyone in the latter group until such time as the moderators find themselves in it, at which point they ban everyone in the former group.

At TexAgs.com the derogatory term for the sort of folk who use UNACCEPTABLE in all caps is "potbanger" and a guy named "Batzarro" starts a thread for their use, setting the stage for this exchange:

rtrd: pot banger or realist?
Batzarro: It has been statistically proven that potbangers over the last 7 years have been realists.

Okay, zing! That's not why I bring it up. I bring it up because the next guy in this thread thinks the only thing that can save Texas A&M is nuclear war:

We're past the "pot bangers" vs "stand pat" debate - in today's hype oriented college football environment, where all the talent (player and coaches) gravitate towards the sexy programs, the A&M football program will never recover.

The next chance we'll have is "on the other side" of the total financial collapse of college football as a whole. Maybe we'll fair better when college football is a more "inter-scholastic" pursuit like all the other sports.

A zombie apocalypse would probably work, too. College Station is isolated and has lots of guns. Chances are they'd come out the other side an attractive place to play football.

ACC

Only one item of note happened in the ACC this week: Jacory Harris lost significant amounts of fly-ness en route to a four-interception day and loss against North Carolina. Miami falls out of the BCS at-large picture and causes Canespace to get emo (your emoblogger approves!):

Even John Lee Hooker, BB King and Stevie Ray Vaughn combined never had the Carolina blues like this. It was sad, very, very sad.

Is this what my wife convinced me to drive ten hours to see?

For the Hurricanes to come out flat and unemotional once again and score zero points in the first quarter on the road? ... For Randy Shannon to have his team unprepared to play, argue calls with referees well after plays are over and then losing once again to an inferior team and his mentor in Butch Davis? ... To hear more excuses and bitter disappointment from UM fans than ever before about why the Canes still "are not there yet"?

That is indeed an ugly road trip. One of the big negatives of being a Miami fan: every road game is a thousand miles away. Another: you're probably feeling like Nebraska at this point. Power days have gone away, seemingly permanently.

PAC-10

The rest of the week in the Pac-10 played out according to script, so there's not a whole lot to mine. A quick trip to Washington's Dawgman message board will turn up something insane about Ty Willingham, though. Right?

Why did we fire Ty again?

---

For going 0-12 without Locker, Polk and Savanah?

How many wins did Ty have the year before when Jake was a freshman? And how many is Sark going to get this year?

So why exactly did we throw millions of dollars away to bring in this chump?

Thanks, Dawgman!

SEC

It was sort of a bad week for Tennessee. Three guys got arrested for armed robbery and, adding insult to injury, drove away in a Prius. Then the weekend happened: Tennessee got their faces smashed by Dexter McCluster and maybe one or two other guys on Ole Miss, and linebacker LaMarcus Thompson suffering a scary injury that saw him taken off the field on a back board.

Memphispete reports back on an in-game comment by someone who actually deploys "dadgum" in a seemingly unironic fashion:

Immediately after the 71 yard run, during which he weaved in and out of Tennessee's inept defense,

Dadgum, that was a real McClusterf--- by our defense.

Um, never mind. Even if it made me nearly cry with laughter, it's still too crude to refer to.

Meanwhile, Rocky Top Talk's weekly haiku contest is off to a stirring start:

if the 'dores beat us
I will do something crazy
and get arrested

That's it for me. See you next week, when I post my dejected reaction to Michigan's millionth-straight loss against Ohio State.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.