Are my eyes really blue?

“Football is back.”

With that one quote, Roger Goddell summed up everything that is wrong with the NFL.

Football never went anywhere.  Football was going to happen in September no matter what.  Over a hundred division-I college teams and hundreds more at lower levels.  Thousands of high schools.  Tens of thousands of pee-wee teams.  Hell, the CFL and Arena leagues have been chugging along for weeks already.

But the NFL firmly believes that it is the only football in the world and that there is no substitute for the NATIONAL. FOOTBALL. LEAGUE.  The smugness, the institutional arrogance, the sheer ego of a league whose bloat encompasses almost every month of the sporting calendar – fortunately for them, they have pulled their nuts out of the fire before the opportunity for autumn without the NFL could be realized.  Which might have demonstrated that there is more to sports than one single hidebound, conservative, stick-in-the-mud league with no creativity and no soul.

This is the problem with being responsible: people will take advantage of your responsibility.  Like right now, when the gang of mental defectives in the House of Representatives is trying to drive the full faith and credit of the United States off a cliff, knowing full well that in the end the Democrats will cave to their demands – because the alternative is fiscal Armageddon.

See, what the retards know is that they will be hailed as heroes by the assorted collection of fossils, rednecks, and slackjaws that supports them – along with their amen corner on Fox and AM radio and in the Wall Street Journal – and that the rest of the media will in their High Broderism declare both sides somehow equally at fault.  So there is absolutely nothing to be lost by throwing reason and responsibility to the wind; in the worst-case scenario you will merely be condemned as an equal part of the problem.

So what can you do?  There’s no accountability moment.  You can’t call new elections.  You’re stuck with this gang of monkeys for another year and a half, and in the meantime you can bang the drum for why they should be turned out of office, but even then you’ll be going up against media of limited intelligence and a public with the attention span of a fruitfly for anything other than “reality” television and white girls in trouble.  There is no SWAT team you can send in to kill the hostage-takers.  There is no Navy SEAL squad that’s going to make “we do not negotiate with terrorists” stand up.  Because that’s what we have here: “we will destroy the economy unless you do as we say.”  Right now there’s no third way. There are only two options: give in and hope they actually do as they say they will if they get everything they want – and hope it doesn’t become the pattern for the next eighteen months – or throw your hands in the air, watch the country go over the cliff, and hope that the responsible parties get the blame.

This was inevitable.  From 1994, when the GOP’s sole policy aim has been “destroy Democrats”, everything has led to this point.  Anyone paying attention in 2009 should have known we would wind up on this path.

Just make sure you have cash and top up your passport.

Norm Ornstein has forgotten more about Congress than every single person working in American media today will ever know.

And he’s right.

We are so screwed.  Because we let people decide that stupid was just fine.  And now we’re going to drive the economy off a cliff because we have people in charge who are too fucking dumb to know what gravity means.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

Is this really happening?  Not content with raiding Virginia Tech the eve of National Signing Day for this year’s class, Coach James Franklin and staff appear to have poached SMU commit Elston Lane – yet another WR speed merchant to go alongside Batey and DeClouet and of course Brian “that guy’s faster than Walt Flannigan’s dog!” Kimbrow in next year’s crop of freshmen.

If.  Big if.

Because now we have to consider something that we may never have had to think about previously.  We have thirteen kids who are technically in the fold…in July.  It’s a long way to February, and in between will be a football season.  And that makes me uneasy.

See, despite the fact that he is already the single greatest recruiter to set foot on the Vandy campus, probably even including Dangerous Dan McGugin, James Franklin is still a first-time head coach in his first year at Vanderbilt.  You have to go back twenty years to find a Vanderbilt head coach who delivered as many as five wins in his inaugural season, and Gerry DiNardo was coming from a stint as coordinator for co-national-champion Colorado.  You have to go back to 1935 and Ray Morrison to find a new full-time Vandy coach who finished over .500 in a non-war year, and he basically inherited Dan McGugin’s last team.

Now, I could be totally off the grid here.  We could be in for the shock of a lifetime.  But guys who take over a program mired in the dreck generally struggle that first year no matter how good they are.  Jim Harbaugh – who just took Stanford, STANFORD FOR CRYING OUT LOUD to the Orange Bowl – won ONE (1) game his first season on the Farm.  Hell, I don’t think Nick Saban had a winning record his first year at Alabama, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to win in Tuscaloosa than in the West End.

And this is not a terrible thing.  It’s not great, but it’s not doom forever if we don’t shock the world the first year out.  Nobody will pronounce the James Franklin Experience a disaster if we finish up, say, 3-9.

But my question is: will we be able to keep thirteen guys in the fold through a 3-win season?

I’d like to think we can.  CJF has apparently made much of telling everyone that nobody’s spot on the depth chart is safe and everybody he brings could take somebody’s job – and lose it to the next guy brought in.  I think the 2011 new guys have to believe that a three-win season only makes it that much more likely they’ll get a shot at an SEC starting job immediately.  I’m sure that’s what CJF is preaching, in any event.

This is all to day that while we’re having a dream summer – a summer that is literally without parallel in our history as a sports-playing institution – there’s a very real chance that autumn will wake us up like a ton of bricks through the window.  If we get to Halloween with two wins, it’s going to be tough to keep the faith.  But if we steel ourselves now, and commit to pushing on through, we’ll get there.  Maybe not this year, maybe not even next year, but soon, this train is going to hit the rest of the league like…well, a freight train.

We just have to believe.  And we have to hope that the new kids keep believing, too.

I think anyone who grew up a nerd in the 80s identified with the X-Men.  If you were gifted, or gay, or a minority, or just struggling with puberty, it wasn’t tough to see yourself in the Marvel depiction of the travails of being a mutant.  And it was a lot closer to home if you were actually attending a “School for Gifted Youngsters.” (And the headmaster-figure was legit bald.  Albeit with a terrible rug.)   One of the geniuses of the Marvel concept of “fear of mutants” is that it’s always been applicable to something – whether it’s racism and apartheid in the 80s, or homophobia in recent years, or hell, even just the eternal struggle with being the weird kid.  In short, the struggle for mutants is about how society fears the different.

Long ago, I summed up the Southern brand of conservatism as “the pant-shitting fear that someone, somewhere, might be different.”  Nailed it, too.  Look at what W.J. Cash had to say about social conformity as the strictest rule of the post-Confederate realm – in 1941.  Look at the moral panic over illegal immigration – Georgia chose to have its crops rot in the fields so they could bash brown people again.  And don’t even get me started on my own college experience as the one student with no affinity group.

The key thing about the X-Men is that they don’t have a villain as such.  Charles Xavier has a dream, while Erik Lensherr is preparing for a nightmare, but they’re looking for the same thing: the safety and survival of mutants in a world that heretofore hates and fears them.  The Martin-vs-Malcolm parallels are done to the point of being ham-fisted, but they’re there for a reason.  Magneto doesn’t see himself as a villain, and Stan Lee didn’t see him as one either.  Magneto is there to save his own kind from the bigotry and ignorance of others.

And make no mistake, we’re not short of either.  If ignorance ever goes to $100 a barrel, I want drilling rights on the House of Representatives and every state between South Carolina and Mississippi.  Right now, we’re on the brink of an historic economic calamity – an actual default on its debt by the United States of America – because of people who are in thrall to bigotry and ignorance.  And they’re not budging.  On that or on anything else.

I want to believe in reason.  I want to believe that you can negotiate.  I want to feel like it’s possible for people to make a deal in good faith, grounded in facts and logic, and that a best-possible outcome is somehow attainable.  But more than that, I don’t want to suffer because somebody else chose to accommodate the spectacularly retarded.

I want to believe in Professor X.  But right now, I want Magneto.

Happy birthday to the United States of America, which can always be counted on to do the right thing in the end after exhausting all available alternatives.  Here’s hoping for 236 without a fucking catastrophe.

Cory Batey.  Caleb Azubike.  And Brian Kimbrow, by some accounts the top high school football prospect in the state of Tennessee.  And then, late the same night, Jaydrick Declouet of Louisiana jumps on the pile.  In one day, as many top prospects as Vanderbilt would get for years.  Twelve – TWELVE – commits for next season.  Some of the top talent in Tennessee and Georgia alike.  And in Kimbrow, a burner with 4.2 speed rated by some services as the second-best all-purpose back in the nation.

In. The. Nation.

It’s been almost fifty years since Art Guepe said “There is no way you can be Harvard Monday through Friday and be Alabama on Saturday.”  The last Vanderbilt coach to win a bowl game (before Bobby Johnson in 2008) wasn’t bitter, supposedly, but matter-of-fact about the incompatibility of top-ten academics and top-ten football.

And Coach James Franklin has said, in a word, bullshit.

His pitch to the kids, supposedly, is “why not?” Why not play the best football in the country and get a top-10 education to boot?  Other coaches are warning you how tough the academics are – do they think you’re not smart enough?  You can get an Ivy-caliber degree and you can play on an SEC football team right away – would you rather sit on the bench for years at Auburn or Tennessee, where you can be good, or would you rather come to Vanderbilt, where you can play right away, get a killer degree, and have a shot at becoming immortal?

The trick, obviously, is keeping the commitments through National Signing Day in February.  A lot can happen.  But I suspect that a lot of the kids from this year’s class – the Josh Gradys and Lafonte Thorogoods – will get a ton of playing time, and the current kids will see that Coach Franklin is serious about building the talent behind them, and he will point to how quickly that school in Palo Alto went from 1-10 to the Orange Bowl.  And Kimbrow has already said his word is good, and he’s not taking any more visits.

The most amazing part, to me, is that Tennessee is officially running scared – we now have triple as many kids in the fold as they do, and their fans are freaking out.  All of a sudden, we’re getting the kind of message board abuse that was usually directed at Florida or Alabama.  And the screams of the haters are…magical.

Is this real?  This can’t be real.

Other conferences have something else.  The Big East was built on basketball from day one.  The ACC became so.  The Pac-10 was known for playing every sport there was, especially Olympic sports.  But the SEC has always been about football.  Three teams can hit the College World Series and finish 1-2-3 in the nation, Kentucky can be one of the great powers of basketball, the Lady Vols can rule women’s hoops, but all of that is secondary in the Southeastern Conference, where you are judged in your very essence on your football team.

And make no mistake, we have been terrible.  Absolutely terrible.  The competitive era ended around the time that Coach Guepe packed it in, and in five decades you could count the bowl bids on one hand (and the bowl wins on one finger).  0-for-SEC records?  Common.  Blowouts by five or six touchdowns?  Frequent.  Seasons measured on how often we managed to cover the spread on a ranked opponent?  Standard.

We don’t take recruits away from Tennessee, or Notre Dame, or Stanford.  It just doesn’t happen.  Our guys turn down Columbia or Tulane or Western Kentucky to play football in the West End.  We get a thrill in our heart to have a couple of three-star players in the recruiting class.  Even the success is touched with tragedy, as in the case of Rajaan Bennett (RIP), the five-star running back who never lived to set foot on campus as a student.

We’re a doormat.  We’re a disaster area.  Duke can win an ACC title, and Northwestern can go to the Rose Bowl, and Stanford and Georgia Tech can play in Orange Bowls, but it doesn’t happen for us.  We don’t get the talent, we don’t get the breaks, we don’t belong in the SEC.

But that’s not what’s happening.

It could be us. We could win games.  We could win bowls.  We could be ranked.  We could take what happened in the first half of 2008 and make it real and make it regular.  We could make people nervous about playing Vanderbilt, and not because they might overlook us. We could prove we deserve to be in the SEC.

Maybe it will all go to hell.  Maybe we’ll be 0-8 by November and everything will be falling apart.  Maybe it’ll be back to “Same Old Vandy” and we’ll look back at this summer and kick ourselves for being delusional.

But maybe not.  I want to believe.  And now it’s possible…

 

This post has been eaten twice by ecto, so I’m going to try again later in another medium…

Well, here we go again: Google is launching a Facebook killer. (If you need proof, just look at the fact that the launch of a limited public beta of Google Plus was all over the nightly news on Tuesday.) And this time, it won’t be a big bucket of used WTF, like Google Wave, or a sudden revelation that Google owns your privacy like Google Buzz. This one will be different, honest.

Actually, it may be.

It looks like Google is going to school on what Diaspora does (and what Facebook seems intent on preventing) – providing a means to granulate your social interactions. Not all-or-nothing, but discreet slices of your contacts, so you can parse out what your relatives see versus what your co-workers see versus what your actual friends at work see versus what your cool cousins see versus what your gang of reprobates back East can see…and just to minimize the suck, they have none other than Andy Hertzfeld on the interface design. If you’ve ever used a Macintosh, you’re using a Hertzfeld creation, so this should give you some idea how much better the UI will be compared to, say, Google Wave.*

The other competition, of course, is Twitter. Sure, Twitter doesn’t offer a lot of granularity, but it offers something better: completely pseudonymous accounts, free of charge, allowing you to have one or two or five (in my case) or as many as it takes for you to keep the aspects of your lives separate. Sure, a bit of a PITA, but all the official Twitter clients support multiple accounts. Easy peasy. To me, that’s why Twitter has basically displaced Facebook: it’s simple, it’s easy to use from PC or phone app or text message, and most of all, it’s a dumb network. Dumb networks are important, because they let you send anything and put the intelligence at the ends of the communication. Putting the brains in the network second-guesses what the users at the ends actually want.

That pseudonymity is probably why I won’t go very far with Google+ (although that ridiculous name is worse) – it ties into your existing Google account, which just leads to one more node in the data farm. Dave Winer has it right: just like Microsoft had to tie everything back into Windows, Google has to tie everything back into search – and more importantly, into their advertising mechanism. But hey, to all accounts, it looks good and works fast. Which is a step in the right direction.

The real problem is this: how reliable are the privacy controls? How deep is Google getting into your life? Because if there are limits and control over it, that might still make it a better option than Facebook’s oopsy-daisy approach (which reared its head again this week, possibly leading to my permanent departure). The problem of social networking is that you have to give up some of your data to make it work – and the people in the middle get hold of it, too.

Actually, though, almost all my friends have iPhones now. Maybe it’ll just be all iMessage all the time…

* Back in DC, a “wave” is the sudden feeling you get when you urgently need to take a dump. Actually, in retrospect, Wave was the perfect name for that product.

#1 – South Carolina

#2 – Florida (which went 1-4 against SC)

#3 – Vanderbilt (which went 1-5 against FLA)

For the NCAA committee that seeded us 6th, and the Baseball America polls that kept voting Oregon State over us all year right up until we clowned them out of the Super-Regional, and everyone else who suggested that we were anything but a top-5 team: DEEEEEEEEEZ NUUUUUUUUUUUUUTS.