Nov 9, 2009 - A is for Agartha. A mythical land posited as a kind of subterranean version of Atlantis by occultists at the turn of the 19th century in the 20th. According to the 1908 novel The Smoky God by Willis George Edmondson, you can get there by sailing to the North Pole and looking for a big hole. Sail into that hole, and you will find a mythical land with its own sun and a network of underground colonies inhabited by 12 foot tall people who inhabit the original Shangri-La. (Makes wanking motion with hand.)

USC, after losing to a 3-6 Washington team and Oregon, now sits ahead in the BCS standings of the same Ducks team that beat the brakes off them in Eugene last weekend. If you see any kind of logic in this, then we have a map to Agartha we will sell you for the low price of $22.8 million dollars to the penny. Get in on the bidding early, however. If AP and Coaches' Poll voters are the blindly faithful sort we think they are, that price is going up, and both will be sailing north looking for Agartha and the underground ghosts of 12 foot tall USC 2004.

B is for Beardless. Brandon Spikes appeared on the sidelines of the Vanderbilt/Florida game beardless, presumably because men without beards are clean-cut and prone to not making distractions of themselves on the sideline...unless you can't remember the last time you saw them without their distictinctive neckbeard, and then it's a complete distraction. Another game suspension for Spikes is clearly due until he regrows the full Kyle Orton neckbeard.

C is for Clifford, Jr.  The Heisman is irrelevant, but theater never is.  If you wanted moving one-man theater, CJ Spiller was the only drama to watch on Saturday night against Florida State: 312 all purpose yards done with Spiller's empty light flashing dangerously for all to see, legs cramping as the Clemson running back went to the sidelines like he was running with a gut full of bad sausage that wanted out in a hurry. Spiller ran for 165 yards and a score, had 67 yards receiving and a TD, and threw in 80 in the return game just for shits and giggles because people that outrageously talented love their shits and giggles, dammit. 29 touches and his second 300 yard game of the season means if you're not the type who is into awards--and I'm not--you should at least appreciate the applause coming from the cheap seats, Mr. Spiller. 

D is for Divot. If you wondered where we are at in the SEC Officiating Conspiracy Plot, we're here: first, the Rothschilds bribed the SEC to keep Alabama number one while the Russian Mafia threw their powerful bribe game behind the Florida cause, and Mike Slive, being controlled by orbital mind lasers designed by the Illuminati, fought to keep the whole sham under wraps by fining Urban Meyer. We were all under control until THIS happened:

Now we have the Second Shooter of SEC Officiating Conspiracy Myths, "THE DAMNING DIVOT." This is not joking: the divot where Patrick Peterson dragged his foot is now the wandering bullet in this JFK assassination myth, and will fuel the fully insane assumption of a grand conspiracy propelling Alabama and Florida forward towards an inevitable SEC title game matchup. If sense and intelilgence desert you and let you think this is possible, consider this: even if LSU was given the ball back after the interception, Alabama would have had to wait two, possibly three passes before Jarrett Lee threw the game-winning TD. For Alabama.  

E is for Eccentric: as in orbits, the sort that are anything but regular. Iowa fell from their orbit thanks to the frailties of the human ankle and a single missed block against Northwestern. Oregon got knocked from orbit by a large asteroid named Toby Gerhart. Ohio State bumped its way back into its old orbit and back into the Big Ten title picture with a muscular win over Penn State. Pitt is the number eight team in the AP poll. We are firmly in Oddville in 2009 and it will get weirder, gentlemen and lades. It will get nothing but weirder from here on out.

F is for Fitzgerald is a Cold, Cold Bastard. Pat Fitzgerald is letting this one go right at your head and doesn't care it it takes the whole damn thing off at the neck.

"Even though we're similar academically, we're in a little different boat as Stanford and Notre Dame," said Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald. "We've been consistently winning since 1995. They're still saying they can do it, but we're doing it."

G is for Grohmentum. The infectious momentum propelling a team rapidly into the arms of nowhere in particular, or at least to some variation of 5-7, a.k.a. "Grohmentum." Even this form of energy seems to have died for Virginia, who lost a 52-17 debacle against Miami and now has only three conference games to go from 3-6 to Al Groh's standard of winning an improbable 7 to 9 games a year. You say this is mathematically impossible, and I say you are not familiar with Al Groh's amazing job-saving powers <----nude pictures of UVA chancellor engaged in unspeakable acts with antique furniture.

H is for Hacky Sack. West Coast tip drills would have to have some element of hippiness to them, even at the most brahsome and jello-shooterish school in the Pac-10, Arizona State.

USC won 14-9, but not before letting Arizona State take the game to the wire with a freshman quarterback heaving Hail Marys into the endzone fruitlessly as time expired. Were it not for an interception returned for a TD by USC, Arizona State would have beaten USC 9-7 and handed them their third Pac-10 loss, and we would be discussing how triply ridiculous the Coaches' Poll ranking the Trojans above Oregon truly was. (Because even with three conference losses the Coaches Poll voters would put USC above the Ducks because....well, because they're USC, and you're not.)

I is for Irony of the Worst Kind. From an account summarizing the timeline of the stabbing death of UConn football player Jasper Howard:

De'Quan Muhammad, who was arrested last week, is alleged to have lied twice to police about being at the scene. Sources said several witnesses placed him there based on what he was wearing: a yellow and red Pittsburgh Pirates hat and a multicolored T-shirt with the word "Fatal" written across the front.

J is for Jest. The one team bailed out to the greatest degree by Stanford's defeat of Oregon is Boise State. Though the Broncos take a hit to their strength of schedule, they now have a clear path for voters to place them above Oregon now that the Ducks have two losses. (There is still a very clear conference strength argument that may be made against Boise's inclusion in the BCS, but putting them in got a bit more defensible thanks to the Cardinal.) TCU faces Utah Saturday, and is on upset alert thanks to Utah's 5-1 record against the Horned Frogs. Should they stumble, Boise State wanders in as the obvious mid-major leader, something that helps them immensely since voters are simple people and get confused when you have more than one "non-BCS team with a perfect record" to "put below USC in our polls." Have we mentioned the lunacy of the coaches' poll enough here? Better question: Can it be mentioned too much? I think not. 

K is for Kafka/Kutcher As Mike Kafka awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of quarterback, the kind who, when the conference is down as a whole and littered with ineffective quarterbacks learning the ropes, can be the second most prodcuctive player in the conference by yardage? If that seems as sinister and surreal as giant cockroaches and secret trials, then consider the Big Ten's actual yardage leader is Purdue quarterback Joey Elliott, and you will see how in flux the Big Ten's offenses truly are.

The other K is for Kutcher, as in Ashton, who was on the Iowa sidelines this weekend. His punking of Ricky Stanzi did not go over well with the home crowd.

L is for Ludicrous. As in bets you would have taken before the season and lost this weekend? How about Jonathan Crompton, SEC leader in passing TDs? Double down for Jonathan Crompton having more yardage and TDs than Tebow passing? And that we'd be able to type this without this MacBook melting between our fingers out of the sheer insanity of typing this? All true, though Crompton's racked up most of his TDs against miserable teams like Memphis and Western Kentucky. Then again, Crompton struggled against teams like Wyoming last year, so this clearly is progress.

M is for Memphis. Bid a fond farewell to Tommy West, fired after a 2-7 2009 season to date and a general air of sad malaise surrounding the Memphis program. It is a bad year when most of your fans dress as empty seats for games. It is a worse year when you can't even go to Ye Olde Book of Good Ol' Boy Jokes in a comprehensible fashion.

N is for Nauseated. Indiana are the kings of pain in the Big Ten, losing their third conference game decided by a field goal or less. Yes, Michigan, you're close, but not quite, and no, Illinois, you don't count because teams as bad as you are do not count here, especially when you beat the Hoosiers 27-14 at homecoming in the annual late season Ron Zook Job-Saving Fandango (now humming along at two games straight with a 35-32 victory over Minnesota.)

O is for Onus. Christian Ponder was the only reason Florida State beat Jacksonville State this year, much less anyone else. Out for the remainder of the rest of the season with a separated shoulder, his 2717 yards passing, 14 passing TDs, and endless scrambling were the entire offensive identity of this team. Only Temple RB Bernard Pierce surpasses single player value to his team, meaning that it is a sad thing Ponder will not finish his season, and that Florida State is going to be even worse than they have been going down the stretch without him. Salut, and condolences, Mr. Ponder.

P is for Poseidon, Bored. Navy beating Notre Dame, after a drought of a half century for the Midshipmen, is now so routine that it's not even worth jumping up and down about:

"I wanted to run on the field and jump up and down, but I was kind of tired," said linebacker Ram Vela, who had an interception and fumble recovery. "We’d done it before and we went into this game not really placing as much emphasis or too much importance on it. We just treated it like another game."

Yup, just another routine victory for Navy. At Notre Dame. On national television. Ho-hum. We just have to look forward to the Delaware Blue Hens, a really tough opponent we have to respect.

Q is for Quizzical: Cal may have lost, but they did keep 'Quizz Rodgers from having his fourth one-hundred yard game in a row in a 31-14 loss to the Beavers. Quizz's unused yardage credits went to Toby Gerhart, the Stanford running back universally referred to as "brawny" and "deceptively fast" because he is a white running back. Gerhart had 223 yards on 38 carries (an unfathomable number in this day and age) and three TDs in the 51-42 upset of the Ducks. If you want to die, take a shot every time announcers refer to him as "gritty." Comatose by the half, dead by the third quarter.

R is for Resolute. Paul Johnson plays to win, son. With a half a yard to go in overtime, Johnson eschewed the field goal at home to get half a yard, the first down, and ultimately the winning TD for Georgia Tech, a team somehow sitting at 9-1 with a defense consisting of Derrick Morgan, Morgan Burnett and nine tackling dummies. Field goals are three points, which is less than seven, and son, if my math is correct if i get one of those and you get a field goal, I have more than you do. Feel free to take as many as you like. Paul Johnson will be over here in the winner's circle with the touchdown prime rib, thank you very much.

S is for Solid. Ohio State may really be the Bank of America of college football: too big to fail, too staid to change, and ultimately standing tall at the end of the day in spite of obvious structural issues. Terrelle Pryor didn't hit fifty percent of his passes, the Buckeyes lacked a hundred yard rusher, and neither mattered in a 24-7 victory over a laggardly Penn State team dominated by their own offensive incompetence and the Buckeyes' suffocation of Evan Royster (36 yards on the day.) The Buckeyes are all too happy to shop from the bargain bin of ugly win down the stretch in the Big Ten.

T is for Triangulation. Zach Collaros is a superb quarterback, but he is one of five quarterbacks Cincy has used in the past two seasons behind an offensive line blocking daylight if need be in order to get the Bearcats down the field. Jeff Quinn has done a masterful job coaching the line, and deserves more credit than he is getting for the plug and play ease with which Brian Kelly has been able to switch qbs at Cincy. If you see continued crazed production out of an offense no matter who takes the snaps, triangulate a bit and note the solid work of an offensive line playing in perfect, beefy sync. Cincy's line has only allowed eight sacks all year, a key stat in an offense as pass-friendly as Kelly's.

U is for Unsung. Also doing solid work despite abysmal conditions: Stacey Searels at Georgia, the offensive line coach whose unit is not to blame for the dismal performance of the Dawgs' offense. It's not the line's fault that Joe Cox throws interceptions when he tries to throw the ball away because his arm is too weak to get it out of bounds. 

V is for Vacuum. South Carolina lost to Arkansas 33-16 this weekend, bringing the total points scored by South Carolina in their past four games to 49, an average of 12.2 points a game for a team coached by Steve Spurrier. Even by the diminished standards of post-Redskins OBC, this qualifies as dismal, and that's saying something given the Gamecocks offensive anemia under Spurrier.

W is for What's Wrong With Kansas? Todd Reesing's hurt and their defense is overwhelmed, turning the state of Kansas football back to its turn of the millenium dynamic in a single year: a notch below Kansas State in the Big 12 North and wondering what truck hit them where to make a perennial contender in the North a 1-4 conference team scratching at the door of being barely bowl eligible. Meanwhile, Kansas State is 6-4 and in charge of the Big 12 North, meaning its 2000 and we really need to go update our Geocities web page before heading to the rock gym and working on all those houses we're trying to flip.

X is for Xcommunicate. George O'Leary is the landlord, and he will try to evict you from a press conference whether you like it or not.

Y is for Yinzers. Sometimes pollsters have to, by virtue of the rule of blindly upping undefeated teams in polls, take a team to unprecedented heights in the polls simply because there are no undefeateds left. Last year the round robin with this came via the Big 12 South and the Texas/Texas Tech/Oklahoma/Oklahoma State knot, one gradually undone in November thanks to the vagaries of conference scheduling making the early slate easy and backloading the docket with hard conference games. This year to a lesser degree we have the Big East doing the same, with Pitt riding its own boomlet skywards in the polls along with Cincinnati.

Pitt plays an important role in two endgames. They play Notre Dame next week, and can put the stank on the end of the Charlie Weis era with a solid beating of the Irish. Additionally, Pitt also plays Cincy in the final week of the season, and could the Bearcats' BCS hopes with a season-ending defeat. This assumes a lot for a team that lost to a terrible NC State team, though; I can't help but feel like I'm waiting for Pitt to show up, and not this team playing solid three-phase football for most of the year in Pitt's jerseys. Yinz gonna have to watch and see with the rest of us, however. 

Z is for Zilch. The combined number of wins the Bowden family had this past weekend.