The Larry King-ish Stream of Consciousness Column for 10/5

In this edition of the LKSOC…Vince Dooley takes bad parenting to a new level, Boise State gets leapfrogged and I start to feel old:

◊ Vince Dooley, be a good father and admit you want Tennessee to kick Georgia’s ass

I found the following quotes from former Georgia coach/AD Vince Dooley regarding this week’s Tennessee-Georgia game to be very interesting:

“It’s family first, but I’m certainly not going to be pulling for my son in Sanford Stadium,” he said.

The coach acknowledged it will be strange hoping Tennessee defeats his beloved Bulldogs, although his affections have their limits.

“You don’t all of a sudden love that ugly orange,” he said. “I don’t. But I have a great appreciation for the fans.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Please Vince, spare us the politically correct, gotta-play-to-the-UGa-homers bullshit. Your S-O-N Derek is coaching the University of Tennessee. You know, the product of your loins who has a chance to carry on the family name in the sport of college football long after you’re gone.

Just why are you showing so much loyalty to the school whose president, Michael Adams, repaid all your years of service by bouncing your ass onto the street?  And besides, it’s not like you got your degree there, you’re an Auburn grad.

I bet you’re being the better man by telling the AJC that crap.  Deep down inside, you want a Tennessee team that just missed upsetting LSU to come into Sanford Stadium and stomp a mudhole in Georgia’s ass.  I know you do.

◊ Boise State gets leapfrogged sooner than I thought they would

Look, we all knew it was going to happen, that some team would put together a decent string of wins and take away that third spot in the polls from Boise State, no matter what Boise State did on the field.  I just thought it would take a few more weeks than it actually did.

Following a 52-31 win over Stanford, Oregon is the team that got enough love to bump Boise State down a notch in the polls.  You know, the same Oregon program that’s not that far removed from getting beat by Boise State (that was on September 3, 2009).

I find it a little curious that Oregon got that much credit for being Stanford.  While I love the job that Jim Harbaugh has done there by getting a lot of mileage out of a throwback style of football, at the end of the day, it’s still friggin’ Stanford.  In terms of overall talent and number of signature wins, it’s a program that’s still lacking.

What did Boise State itself do to deserve its poll demotion?  Well, pretty much nothing.   They beat WAC rival New Mexico State by a 59-0 count.  You know, the way a good team is supposed to do when faced with inferior opposition.  The Boise State naysayers can crow all they want, but I guarantee you that if the Broncos and Ducks hooked up right now, the Broncos would win by double digits…just like last season.

◊ Just a moment on baseball, because it is October, after all

Here’s another reason why the Baltimore Orioles are now commonly referred to as “the once proud Baltimore Orioles”:

Brian Roberts knocked himself out of the Baltimore Orioles’ lineup. Literally.

The veteran second baseman explained Monday that he missed the last six games of the season for concussion-like symptoms after hitting himself in the helmet with a bat.

Roberts, who missed much of the season with injuries, thinks it happened last Monday, after a ninth-inning strikeout against the Tampa Bay Rays.

“In frustration [after a strikeout], I whacked myself on the head with my bat in the ninth. I had my helmet on,” Roberts told reporters. “It’s something I’ve done a million times, but I still can’t tell you for sure if that was it. But that’s the only thing that I can point to because that night and the next morning, I just didn’t feel good. So it’s been going on since then.” (ESPN.com)

The dude gave HIMSELF a concussion, how blessed is that?  I bet he subconsciously did so to miss playing in yet another string of meaningless season ending games for Baltimore.  If Major League Baseball is a pair of Jim Palmer’s Jockey underwear, then the O’s are pretty much an ill-timed shart.

◊ The Not-So-Great Wall of Chicago

Speaking of things that can give you a concussion, how about that Chicago Bear offensive line?  In the highest rated NFL regular season prime time game in quite some time, the Bear front wall allowed New York Giant defenders to accumulate what seemed like 58 sacks (it was actually 10).

The Giants knocked Jay Cutler out of the game with a concussion and then damn near killed Todd Collins after that.  No joke, for a few seconds I thought Collins was dead.  Following the game, a revised list of America’s most dangerous occupations was released, it goes as follows:

1. Coal miner
2. U.S. soldier
3. Detroit police officer
4. Chicago Bears quarterback

That’s why I found the following tweet from former Illinois quarterback Juice Williams to be so damn funny:

If Juice does get the call and actually does see the field, he’ll get MANY chances to show off his mobility.

◊ A tweet that probably made Dickie V. crap his pants…

No announcer/analyst/studio host sticks his nose further up the backsides of more college basketball coaches than Dick Vitale.  Of course Stuart Scott is every bit the brownnoser as Dickie V., but Stu prefers the ass cracks of NBA’ers and NFL’ers.

With that in mind, here’s a tweet from Kentucky coach John Calipari that probably sent Vitale into spastic convulsions of glee.  Unlike other college coaches who pretty much roll their eyes at the guy, Calipari actually shows Vitale some love here:

As a result of this, do you have any idea how much on-air love Dickie V. will show Calipari now?  I suspect we’ll get nuggets like “NCAA titles don’t matter, baby, John Calipari is the greatest coach ever!” and “The NCAA should be ashamed of itself for the Enes Kanter witch hunt!”

◊ …while Malcolm Delaney’s tweet makes me feel so white

Staying on the Twitter vibe, I came across the following tweet from injured Virginia Tech basketball player J.T. Thompson.  First, let me provide some background: this is Thompson re-tweeting something initially posted by his teammate, Malcolm Delaney.  The “#TTTT” hash tag  refers to “To Tell the Truth Tuesday.”  Here’s Delaney dropping his truth:

I am going to be brutally honest here…it took me a few minutes to decipher what the hell his tweet meant, but I think I’ve got it.  Basically, what Delaney is saying is that no African-America male will marry a woman who was already attached when he met her.  Or something like that.

Yup, it’s days like these when I just don’t feel as hip as I used to.  I’ve reached that special age that Chris Rock spoke about, when a man really isn’t old, he’s just too old to be in the club.

◊ San Diego State is having a solid season so far

Try this one on for size: San Diego State is 3-1 and really should be 4-0.  Yup, if it hadn’t been for that monumentally boneheaded defensive screw up in the last minute at Missouri, the Aztecs would have a perfect record.

I’ll tell you what I love about the job head coach Brady Hoke is doing: his team is strong in the kicking game.  Kicker Abel Perez is the current MWC leader in kickoffs for touchback with 11 and the Aztecs lead the conference in net punting (40.8 avg.).

Also, San Diego State leads the MWC and is 7th nationally in total offense at 509.5 ypg.  A good chunk of that yardage is being put up by freshman running back Ronnie Hillman, who’s run for 532 yards and 8 touchdowns so far in what could be shaping up to be a 1,400 yard/17 touchdown type of season for him.

As SDSU prepares for its road game with BYU, what you’ve got is a pretty dramatic shift from recent history: the Aztecs are currently on the board as 5.5-point favorites.  Of course that’s a function of how far the fortunes of BYU football have fallen this season, but don’t discount SDSU.  If they take care of business in Provo, the schedule lays out well for them.  The Aztecs could be 8-1 going into a November 13 trip to TCU.

College football notebook 7/18

Gerald Munns suffers from linebacker’s disease

Doug Haller of the Arizona Republic wrote a piece yesterday to shed some light on the Medical/Compassionate Withdrawal that Arizona State linebacker Gerald Munns was granted in 2008. Munns returned to the team last year and is set to embark on a senior season in which he’ll back up Vontaze Burfict.

Here’s my problem: after reading it, I can’t really tell if there was an actual medical diagnosis applied to what was wrong with Munns:

Life is complicated, so let’s keep this simple.

There are parts of 2008 Munns doesn’t care to discuss. Parts he wants to forget. He speaks about it for the first time openly, but also carefully.

In short, Munns experienced a perfect storm of emotions, a head-thumping collision of what he says were personal, family and football issues.

A broken finger made matters worse. At the time, Munns strived for perfection on the field, a place where such a thing doesn’t exist. Physical and mental breakdowns take place in every contest, on nearly every snap. (Arizona Republic)

The way Munns tells the story, it sounds like, well, he was suffering from being an angry, tightly wound linebacker:

“I place a lot of stress on myself as a football player because I feel like I perform well when I’m putting pressure on myself,” Munns said. “I like that. But I was getting to the point where I couldn’t control it. It can take you to a dark place when there’s no satisfaction. You got to be able to sometimes give yourself a pat on the back, as silly as that sounds. I wasn’t able to recognize my limitations.” (Arizona Republic)

Missouri’s on the verge of another nice in-state recruiting haul

Gary Pinkel began to turn around Missouri’s football fortunes when he started to convince more in-state kids to stay home and play in Columbia.  As the win totals increased for the Tigers, so did Pinkel’s stranglehold on the state.  Take 2008, for instance, when he and his staff convinced seven of the Rivals.com Missouri Top 10 to sign with them.  That group included studs like quarterback Blaine Gabbert and tight end Andrew Jones.

So naturally it raised a few eyebrows the following year when Missouri got beat out for a lot of the state’s top kids.  Arkansas came in and grabbed Ronnie Wingo out of St. Louis, Illinois swooped in and grabbed Nathan Scheelhaase out of Kansas City and Wisconsin made off with Wentzville’s Montee Ball.  In the end, the misses took some of the luster off the staff’s ‘09 effort.

Missouri re-focused and took care of it’s in-state business in 2010, though, inking the top three players in the state according to Rivals: offensive lineman Nick Demien, wide receiver Marcus Lucas and defensive end Kony Ealy.  Cornerbacks coach Cornell Ford was very instrumental in securing the services of Demien, but he was also the primary recruiter for two other in-state studs: Blaine Gabbert’s little brother Tyler (also a quarterback) and offensive lineman Anthony Gatti.

Ford’s showing his recruiting prowess again this year, helping Missouri put together what’s shaping up to be another great in-state haul.  He’s been the lead recruiter for Anthony Pierson, the lights out running back who’ll most likely play cornerback in Columbia.  Two other players in the current Rivals .com Missouri Top 10, quarterback Corbin Berkstresser and wide receiver Wesley Leftwich, have also given verbal pledges to Missouri.

Plays I still can’t believe actually happened: Matt Davison in ‘97

It was pretty damn tough being a fan of Missouri football in the 90’s.  Coming out of the disastrous Woody Widenhofer era of the 80’s, Bob Stull assumed the head coaching reins in 1989 and really didn’t do a whole hell of a lot better himself.  Here’s how he fared in Columbia: 2-9, 4-7, 3-7-1, 3-8 and 3-7-1.

Stull is now the athletic director at UTEP, where he’s proven to be just as big a boob in administration after hiring both Mike Price and Tim Floyd.  I guess his odyssey proves that there is a career path for failed coaches, that being the opportunity to hire and fire your very own coaching failures.

Larry Smith took over from Stull in 1993 and in his first three years on the job he averaged just a hair under 4 wins. He gave the faithful something to smile about in ‘97 and ‘98, though, posting 7-5 and 8-4 efforts, the second of which ended with a win in the Insight.com Bowl over West Virginia.

However, the turnaround didn’t last and Smith followed those two winning seasons with two losing ones. He was fired in 2000, bringing to a close a coaching career that began as an assistant to Bo Schembechler, first at Miami of Ohio and later at Michigan. Smith passed away a few years ago at the age of 68 following a long battle with leukemia.

Looking back over that decade, Mizzou fans don’t necessarily lament all the losses or savor the glimmer of hope that Smith provided. Instead, they shake their heads over just how snakebit their team was at times. That’s because the Tigers were victimized not once but twice by eventual national champions on game ending plays that live on in college football lore.

The first was the infamous 5th Down game against Colorado in 1990.  That year, Missouri was 2-2 and coming off of a win over Arizona State.  Colorado came to town with a shaky 3-1-1 record and on the brink of having a promising season spiral out of control.

Missouri was up 31-27 when Colorado got the ball late in the game and drove the length of the field.   With time running out, Colorado inexplicably got five cracks at the Tiger doorstep instead of four.  Not only did the Buffs’ Charles Johnson score on 5th down, I’m not even sure he broke the plane of the goal line.  Check out the video of that entire final drive right here.

Colorado “won” the game 33-31 and went on to share the national title that season.  If Mizzou fans thought that the powers that be were out to get them after that one, then events that transpired seven years later made those same people believe that no less a power than God himself had it out for their beloved Tigers.

On November 8, 1997, Missouri was a team coming off three straight shootout wins (37-29 over Texas, 51-50 over Oklahoma State and 41-31 over Colorado).  To make it four in a row, they’d have to take out a Nebraska team that was undefeated and had won its last three games by a combined score of 133-7.

Missouri took it to the Huskers that day, with quarterback Corby Jones leading an offensive charge that put his team up 24-21 at halftime.  Just as they had done inside Faurot Stadium seven years earlier against Colorado, the Tigers grabbed a late fourth quarter lead and left it up to the defense to secure the victory.

Down 38-31 with 1:02 remaining and no time outs, Scott Frost and the Nebraska offense got the ball back at their own 33-yard line.  He calmly directed them down the field and with :07 on the clock the Huskers were sitting at the Missouri 12-yard line.

Nebraska coach Tom Osborne debated before the play whether or not to call an option out of the shotgun.  Quarterbacks coach Turner Gill convinced Osborne to call a passing play, though, and the one the offense ended up running was Shotgun 99 Double Slant.  Frost took the snap, looked left, then fired over the middle in the direction of Shevin Wiggins.  This is what ensued: