Are my eyes really blue?

…but you can’t quibble with our alums.

Muhammed Yunus 2006

Al Gore 2007

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

BACK-TO-BACK NOBEL PRIZE WINNER

PWN3D!!!!!!

(yeah, your boy is NEVER claiming his undergrad school again. How glad am I that I didn’t get the tattoo?)

I had a bloody excellent 4-day weekend after leaving OldNewJob (or is that NewOldJob?) and as I type this am getting ready to go in to work at NewNewJob for Day 3. Unfortunately, things being how they are, I’m afraid that I may not have work email for two weeks and may not have a badge until after the first of the new year, which is kind of a show but can’t be helped.

The scary thing is that I have had more than one flash of “maybe I could do this for another 10 years.” I don’t know if it’s just Phase 1 or what, but it’s strange sensation that I think you humans call “optimism.” =)

Yep – that really was Vanderbilt going down to Auburn to shat the bed. Effectively a five-touchdown loss (a garbage-time drive for a TD against Auburn’s fourth-string D hardly counts), it’s becoming painfully obvious that this isn’t going to be the year. Kentucky’s a fraud as a top-10 team, but they’re still better than us, and Georgia won’t be caught sleeping again. There are a lot of games left to play, and 3 wins in the next 7 could get it done, but there aren’t 3 wins out there to pick up.

Meanwhile, the SEC…Arkansas lost to Alabama lost to Georgia lost to UT (BADLY) who lost to Florida lost to Auburn lost to MISSISSIPPI STATE. Auburn whales on Vanderbilt and Florida but spits the bit to MSU and South Florida? (Don’t come talking up South Florida. Nobody ranked 6th in the country should be tied 7-7 at the half with Florida Atlantic. Another fraud team.) I don’t know if the whole SEC is really that good or if everyone’s that inconsistent, but right now, if Florida goes down bad tonight, I think you have to consider the possibility that the SEC this year consists of LSU and a bunch of spastics.

Speaking of fraud, Wisconsin at #5 loses on the road? Badly? Add the Kentucky loss, the substandard South Florida performance*, all the top-10 losses last week, and you have to start considering the very real possibility that nobody knows anything, and that the foreordained LSU-Pac 10 matchup is really going to happen. (Consider, too, that the #3 team in the Pac-10 could conceivably go 11-1 and wind up in the Sun Bowl, and you will have proof once and for all that the Pac-10 doesn’t take care of its teams.)

I wish I had an answer for Vanderbilt, but short of a trade to the ACC, I don’t.

* South Florida is this year’s Rutgers: feel-good team out of a mediocre conference, with one or two good wins and an utterly diabetic schedule otherwise. They were sweating the fourth quarter against Florida Atlantic, and if you have to hang on by your nails against a Sun Belt team, you’re not a top 10 program. Anybody who votes the Bulls up this week deserves to lose their ballot.

…when they shrinkwrap your car on your last day.

So I see the usual suspects down South are up in arms again about how Vandy should be playing Middle Tennessee. This is hogwash, and rather worse than hogwash, for reasons I will now enumerate.

Let’s start with the obvious one: whenever your opponent is giving you advice, it would generally be a very stupid thing to take it. That is a fact of life and it’s one too many people (especially media types) don’t pay enough attention to. The fact that the Blue Raiders think a game with Vandy would be a good thing for the Dores DOES NOT MEAN that it would be a good thing for the Dores.

Second fact: Vanderbilt is in the SEC East, which might be the hardest division in sports right now. Let’s do the rundown, courtesy of the AP:

Kentucky (8)

Florida (9)

South Carolina (11)

Georgia (12)

Tennessee (NR)

Go back and look at that again. Four of Vandy’s five divisional rivals are RANKED IN THE TOP 12. Add in Auburn, Alabama, and Tennessee, and seven of Vandy’s eight conference games are against teams that are either in the top 25 or have been there at least once this year. At this point, we could schedule the Poor Claire Sisters and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and nobody could say a damn word about it.

(As an aside, it’s a show that the AP has Steve Superior’s Gamecocks at 11 and the coaches’ poll has them at 18. Proof, if any were needed, that the coaches’ poll isn’t worth the paper I used to wipe over it. But I digress.)

Anyway: we’re NOT a top 25 team. We may never be a top 25 team in my lifetime. We don’t even have the luxury of the pity vote that Spurrier throws Duke every season. We are going to struggle like hell just to clear .500 every single season. We’re not competing for a conference title, we’re not contending for a BCS berth, we’re not going for a national championship. We’re just trying to break the cycle.

So when we have those four non-con berths to fill every year, there is only one criterion: WILL THIS GAME CONTRIBUTE TO RAISING THE PROFILE OF THE FOOTBALL PROGRAM?

In the case of a Michigan, sure. Absolutely. Play Michigan in Ann Arbor on ESPN, and you get the opportunity to be seen nationwide, to hang tough the whole way, to make people give you a second look. You don’t think Vandy could pull the same thing that some I-AA school seems to do annually now? I guarantee you we’d beat Stanford if we played them tomorrow. In Palo Alto. You play games like that, you stand a chance of a good loss, one that makes you look better for having made the effort and gives you something you can take away.

So if it won’t be a good loss, it had better be a sure win, because if you want a bowl game, you need six of them. Six wins to play in December, take a trip, be the only game on TV while kids throw the snow around (or the leaves and mud, whatever). You can probably get one win every year in conference – beat Ole Miss, or Kentucky, or maybe get an upset off Georgia or Tennessee. If you’re really lucky, you can string two of them together. But go back and look at that list of teams again. Tennessee tends to be ranked. And if Alabama and Auburn aren’t there, those seats go to Mississippi State (ask Auburn or Bama what pushovers Croom’s boys are). Or Arkansas. Or LSU. It would take a miracle to piece together three conference wins out of eight. Which means that out of those four non-conference games, you basically need to win exactly four. Every profile-elevating loss you risk means that you’re probably putting your six-win bowl season in a blender and pressing PUREE.

What, then, does Vandy have to gain by playing MTSU? Nothing. “Oh, it’s a natural rivalry!” So why aren’t they playing Memphis or UT every year? Proximity isn’t rivalry, or why doesn’t UAB play Samford every year? Hell, why doesn’t UAB play Auburn again? “It’ll build interest!” No it won’t. MTSU might someday be the 3rd most prominent college program in Tennessee, but probably not, and once you get more than 30 miles outside Nashville, nobody else gives a damn. “Vandy’s scared to play us!” I wouldn’t say scared, but it hasn’t gone well lately – but here’s the point: if there is an outside shot of a bowl, of a non-losing season, of breaking the biggest streak of futility in major college football – is it worth taking a chance on throwing that away for the sake of playing a non-BCS team from nearby just so they can say they played against an SEC team?

HELL no. If you said yes, take a cinder block and drop it on your head. Vandy gains NOTHING by playing MTSU except a handful of gate receipts and the opportunity to piss away a shot at something approximating success.

Maybe someday when the Commodores have been to more than one bowl game in a generation – hell, maybe when we can go less than a decade between winning seasons – when one loss isn’t enough to completely derail the program for the year, we can consider changing our scheduling for the sake of 30 extra seconds on the Channel 4 highlights and another 5000 single-game tickets. But the program keeps hovering right there at 5 wins, with something always bouncing just the wrong way to prevent 6. Until we break through on a semi-permanent basis, it’s not worth risking a single shot at Big Six on Little Middle.

Vandy: plays their worst game of the year, but saves it for Eastern Michigan and manages to steal a win. Bama: loses their second in a row, proving that while Nick Saban has effected change, a national title in the first year is probably too much to hope for. Cal: gets the win they had to get, on the road, against a ranked opponent – and winds up #3 in the nation for their trouble. Now every game is a trap game, all the way to November 10 and USC…it’s going to be a little bit more berserk than usual.

Well, my job change is officially public. I don’t know what to expect, and I’m honestly trying not to expect anything. All I’m looking for out of this next job is a reduced amount of manual labor; everything else is up in the air and I’m amenable. I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will make me crazy after six months or so, but the whole “new start” thing should keep me going for some time.

The things I’m worrying about now aren’t related to health insurance, or salary, or anything like that, which I guess is a blessing – I’m worrying about where my coffee is going to come from and what lunch arrangements are like. Not that I eat a lot of lunch. I’m also hoping against hope that I’ll be able to stream Virgin Radio at work, which is something that has gone by the boards in recent months because of all the running around, phone time, and dockwalloping I’ve been doing lately.

At some point I’ll be doing a post on memories of working here, although I don’t know if it will be public. I might want to come back someday, after all. =)

I know it was what, 13 years ago now?

Continue reading “Viva Nash Vegas”

…the 21st of September?

Continue reading “Do you remember…”

OJ is the national news media’s original sin. In 1994, we had a debate over national health care and a crisis in North Korea. And yet, CNN – the international gold standard for news, the channel that was in China long before and long after the June 4 slaughter, the channel that put three guys in a hotel in Baghdad while bombs rained down and fitted one of them with $100,000 sewn in a leather jacket to bribe his way out if needed – chose to spend literally every single day in live gavel-to-gavel coverage of a celebrity trial. In doing so, they lent their prestige and authority to the idea that this sideshow was something worthy of the kind of coverage given to outbreaks of war.

That summer, CNN destroyed news. You can draw a straight line from OJ to our current state, where “cable news” is nothing of the sort and “reality” television is the farthest things from reality imaginable. Now people actually think a bunch of yowling harpies or two screaming spittle-flecked morons equals news. Talking about what happened gets precedence over what happened. The fate of a bunch of coked-out sluts or some adorable missing moppet from another country leads the news. And now, the media totters on the brink of orgasm because they might get another crack at the whole OJ trial, with a whole new cast of characters and the irresistible lure of vengeance and retribution for having screwed it up the first time.

No. No, no, no, a thousand times no. Anybody who seriously considers themselves in the “news” business should want to vomit at the mere idea of devoting column inches or airtime to this copious horseshit. We. Are. At. WAR. Remember how September 11, 2001 was supposed to be the end of our frivolity and shallowness, how irony was dead and we would be devoted to the sincere and the serious? Well, it didn’t happen, and this is proof.

It’s not often I say this, but I mean it: if you disagree with me at all about this, keep it to yourself. If you seriously think OJ is important, worthy of news coverage, that it’s anything other than proof of our long slide into the abyss, then shut your mouth about it, bury it down deep, and never speak of it again, because if you honestly think it’s news, we cannot be friends. Period. Paragraph. The End. “I love OJ News” = “SHUT UP OR PISS OFF.”