NEW ORLEANS. As Lousiana State University quarterback Matt Flynn carried the crystal national championship trophy around the Superdome last night, one could forgive him if he wanted to savor the moment. But not Flynn, who passed for four touchdowns in the Tigers 38-24 win over the Ohio State Buckeyes. "Unh-uh, baby," Flynn said as coach Les Miles gave him a bear hug. "We got one more to go."
LSU's victory in the BCS national championship game sets up a showdown between the SEC champion Tigers and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, "the other SEC", as LSU All-American defensive end Glenn Dorsey put it with contempt.
" . . . and that's not all--you'll also get these Kryptonite Steak Knives free, when you . . . "
The Southeastern Conference is a twelve-member college athletic association headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. The Securities and Exchange Commission is the US government agency with primary responsibility for regulating offers on late night cable TV. Both are referred to by the abbreviation "SEC", a fact that has made for animosity between the two bodies that reached a peak last night when a Southeastern Conference team won the national championship.
Securities and Exchange Commission mascot
"They think they're tough, but they don't play a schedule as strong as ours," said Christopher Cox, Chairman of the government agency. "We go up against Fortune 100 companies and their lawyers and accountants, not Middle Tennessee and Mississippi State."
SEC lawyers--scary.
The Securities and Exchange Commission will field a team drawn from its Washington, D.C. office, the headquarters of the agency with the deepest bench. "A lot of people think we're just a bunch of pasty-faced lawyers, but that's not true," said Donald Russo, head of enforcement in the agency's New York office. "We've also got pasty-faced paralegals and file clerks."
"You call that full disclosure of material risks to investors?"
LSU coach Les Miles said he would try to contain the SEC's vaunted enforcement powers by blitzing, but SEC Chairman Cox said he wouldn't alter his style of play for the winner-take-all battle. "We don't just throw people for a loss," he said. "We throw them in jail."
NEW
ORLEANS, La. Final BCS rankings released tonight placed North Korea, a
Communist dictatorship, ahead of Ohio State and Louisiana State
University based on the complicated system adopted in 1998 to decide
college football's national champion.
Kim Jong-Il: After the game, time to relax.
"I'm
shocked," said LSU head coach Les Miles, whose team defeated Ohio State
38-24 in the Superdome for what they thought at the time was the
national championship.
Tressel: "If he threatens to eat your dog, just ignore him."
Hwang
Jang-yop, press secretary for the Worker's Party of Korea, applauded
his country's achievement. "Sun of the Nation and Mankind, Kim Jong-Il,
has again scored immortal exploits for the Party, the Revolution and
the People, achieving a quarterback rating of 2,013.06," he said to
reporters by conference call from Pyongyang. The NCAA's quarterback
ratings are based on a quadratic equation, which Koreans, unlike
Americans, are trained to understand.
Les Miles: "Look at his goofy hair!"
The
BCS formula uses two "human" polls, along with six computer rankings,
to determine the best team in the country. The computers consider a
number of statistical factors, including won-loss record, strength of
schedule, miles per gallon (highway) and "good" cholesterol.
North
Korea has never been considered a football power in the past, but under
an agreement reached during the second Clinton administration, it
received credit for removing 8,000 fuel rods from a nuclear reactor.
When the last of that material was disposed of over the Christmas
holiday weekend, North Korea moved into second place in the BCS
rankings. Last night, it redeemed a Domino's discount pizza coupon,
pushing it into first place.
LSU coach Miles complained that the
coupon had expired in the Asian time zone where North Korea is located,
but Communist party officials there pointed out that it was still valid
in the U.S.
"This is so much whining on the part of the enemies
of the people," Hwang Jang-yop said over the squawk box. "Glorious
Leader Kim Jong Il's open-field running makes your Mr. Jacob Hester
look like a little girl in a Punt, Pass & Kick competition."
It’s the dead of winter. You live in a four-sport town, but the World Series is over, your favorite NFL team is out of the playoffs, and your local NBA and NHL franchises have Saturday night off. The last bowl game of the season has been played.
Your wife or girlfriend turns to you and utters the six words that, strung together in the proper order, bring nausea to the stomach of any red-blooded American male.
“Is there any skating on tonight?”
Your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth, as if with peanut butter, because without a rooting interest to guide you, you can’t rattle off a televised sports event of greater significance than a non-title bout in the junior flyweight division of the WBA. Or is it the WBO? WBC?
You’re trapped. And, since it’s Saturday night, you decide to be nice to her–for ulterior reasons.
You hand her the remote, and head for the fridge.
Wait–come back. You can learn to stomach figure skating. Really. Just follow these easy “Learn-to-Love Skating!” guidelines:
She’s Not That Into Them. You dread the thought of watching guys salchowing around in sequins and stretch pants. Don’t assume she wants to watch men, or even pairs, however. For reasons that are unclear down deep, but readily apparent on the surface, women like to watch women. You don’t watch the WNBA, do you?
Kowa-bunga!
Look at That Outfit! In case you only pay attention to women’s figure skating when sombody takes a tire iron to an Olympic hopeful’s shinbone, the women’s outfits leave nothing to the imagination, as the foundation undergarment industry used to say.
“The yellow caution flag is out.”
Pretend It’s NASCAR. Just as some fans go to stock car races for the crashes, and some hockey fans only get excited when there’s a fight, it’s fun to watch skating for the falls. If the networks were smart, they’d zoom in on the point where the panties hit the ice and circle it with a John Madden-model video pen to show the circumference and depth of concave impression. “Looks like Maria must be wearing husky sizes now, Carol!” “I think she’s been gobbling down too many linzer tortes, ####.”
Katerina Witt: “Yes I was a Communist informant–so whatski?”
Pick a Villian. Pro wrestling promoters learned long ago that it takes a villain to raise the ratings. Katerina Witt was for years the Barry Bonds of women’s figure skating–unloved, even at the top of her game. If you’re the type that hates dynasties, rag on Michelle Kwan.
Pick a Favorite. The flip side of picking a villain is to select a sentimental favorite–the wide-eyed, white-skated equivalent of the Chicago Cubs. You can then gush over her every toe loop. Sorry, Irina Slutskya is taken–I saw her first!
“Michelle was robbed!”
Get Mad At the Judges. Everyone knows that skating is as crooked as boxing. When your favorite skater finishes her routine, take a deep breath as she picks up her teddy bears and long-stemmed red roses and heads to the “kiss and cry” area. Get ready to explode when the scores are announced. “Only 9.8 for artistic expression!” you scream. “She was robbed!” Storm out of the room, check score of Australian-rules football game on the den TV. Pull a nose hair or two until your eyes water, grab a Kleenex and return sniffling to the couch.
The woman waiting for you there will give you a big hug.
WASHINGTON, D.C. Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke sent the stock market soaring today as he announced an immediate reduction in the number of post-season college football games, saying that "bowl inflation" was undermining the sport.
Bernanke: "Senator, did you even know there was a Poinsettia Bowl?"
Addressing Congress later in the day, Bernanke decried what he termed a "bowl bubble" that had been blown up by the demand for male-oriented holiday television content. The time would soon come, he warned, when teams with sub-.500 records would get bowl bids.
"If there's a bowl game on today, the office can't be open."
"Demand for televised sports events has increased exponentially over the past five decades as idle male workers, seeking to avoid gainful employment during the last payroll period of the year, cite network 'bowl' designations as a basis for deferring or avoiding altogether the manual labor that must be performed in order for worker productivity to return to normal yadda-yadda-yadda," Bernanke said in the dry, academic style favored by central bankers.
"Uh, yeh, I've got like a fever and an upset stomach, so I won't be in today."
Equity traders took the bowl reduction as a sign that the productivity would increase, and placed heavy bets in the manufacturing and service sectors. "With fewer bowls," said Craig Fiske of J.T. Edmunds Securities, "there's less absenteeism in Q4 and less water-cooler ####-chat in Q1."
Gator Bowl: The beginning of the end.
After the hearing Bernanke relaxed a bit, visibly exhausted by the volatility he has presided over in his first year as Fed chairman. "When I was a boy there were four major bowls--Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar," he told reporters. "Each had a basic commodity in it and that meant you didn't have runaway bowl growth. New fruits and vegetables don't pop up every day, you know."
The beginning of the end came with the Gator Bowl, he said. "Nobody eats alligators, nobody grows alligators--alligators contribute nothing to the economy. Now you've got bowl games named after towns like Fort Worth that don't have a friggin' Starbucks, fer chrissake!"
Christmas comes but once a year, goes the old saying, bringing panic, also fear.
That's not how you remember it? Maybe your local pro football team has already been mathematically eliminated and your alma mater finished its season with a press conference at which the head coach said he was leaving "to spend more time with his family." Yeah right.
If your still have a team in contention, however, you face an awful dilemma: Continue to watch or attend games, or go shopping for a Christmas/Chanukkah/Kwanzaa/Pagan Tree Cult Holiday gift for your better half. Or your better one-third, if you drink a lot of beer.
You could take the path of Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley in "Beverly Hills Cop"--"Here's fifty bucks, go buy yourself something nice, I haven't got time." Don't try it--you'll never pull it off.
As a service to its readers, Gerbil Sports Network offers convenient point and click shopping to help you navigate the busy BCS-NFL stretch drive-holiday shopping season. Here are some great gift ideas that will warm her heart and light a fire under the mistletoe!
Pink camo hat: What's up with that?
Team logo pink camo hat: Die-hard male fans scoff at women who wear these, but we think they're cute! They look like something Barbie and Midge would wear if they joined G.I. Joe's battalion. $23.95.
"Hey, Midge--'Taps' means it's time to hop in the sleeping bag."
Team Logo Scrunchy: What's a scrunchy? Glad you asked! They're those things women use to make a pony tail! One size fits all, not available in Western Conference NHL teams. $8.95
Screaming Slingshot Superhero Chimp: Okay, so it's not a romantic dinner at the Ritz. It's still a lot of fun, and at only $6.99, it's a great way to save money for the expensive Valentine's Day present you're going to have to buy if you give her this for Christmas and want to have sex at some point in 2008.
Ice Skating Tickets: Chicks dig ice skating--it must have something to do with the sequins and the tutus. You can learn to enjoy it too, if your veterinarian got confused and neutered you instead of the cat.
"Was that a double lutz or a triple salchow?"
Thankfully, most ice skating shows are held in NHL arenas, so who's to say there won't be a little mix-up the day you buy the tickets--and end up with front-row seats to see the Boston Bruins face the St. Louis Blues!
Which will be a lot like the Ice Capades, but with helmets and mouthgards.
KALISPELL, Montana. Joe Ray Diggs, head coach of the Western Montana State University Mountain Goats, is regularly mentioned when a school with aspirations on cracking college football's top rankings is looking for someone to turn its team around. For his part, he makes no secret of his aspirations. "I love Mountain Goat football," he says, "but I'd love to get a chance to coach a BCS team on New Year's Day."
"You guys are tackling like a bunch of English majors today!"
Last year Diggs led the Goats to 7-5 record and a come-from-behind win over Middle Kentucky State in the Craftsman Weed Wacker Bowl, a victory that he thought would result in a raise and an upgrade in the facilities he needs to attract top recruits. "Two of our fans who had a little too much to drink sprained their ankles on the same play," he recalls, "and the Weed Wacker people sent out a separate motorized cart for each of them."
Ridin' in style.
Diggs contrasts that type of top-quality service with the primitive vehicle he must make do with for home games. "They gave one of the ag students a scholarship on the condition that he bring his vegetable cart to school with him," Diggs says, shaking his head. "Sometimes there's no room for a middle linebacker if he's got a load of potatoes on there."
What he has to work with.
Like a number of other up-and-coming college football coaches, Diggs is taking a hard look at the budgets of other departments at his school, trying to find areas where they can cut back in order to cover his $400,000 salary, plus the other items he considers "essential" if Mountain Goat football is to succeed. "I tell our alumni, the problem is simple--we don't pay our players enough."
"If we could pay our players more, you'd see more scoring on Saturdays."
Diggs' game plan? To attack the weakest spot in the arts and sciences line. "That would be the English Department," he says with a mischievous smile.
"Somebody cover that adjunct professor in the slot!"
Western Montana has a ten-member English department, with salaries ranging from $34,000 for an assistant professor to $70,000 for the chairman of the department. "There's a lot of duplication there," Diggs says. "I went to the book store and somebody named Shakespeare is assigned reading in six courses," he notes with a laugh. "I mean, hello? Use man-on-man to cover the guy."
"Try not to use the passive voice, and I'd double-team the temperamental wide receiver in the subplot."
English department members are understandably upset by the attention Diggs' scrutiny has brought them, saying they are only following standards set by the Modern Language Association, the leading professional organization for English instructors. "Just like Coach Diggs, we need to have qualified personnel at every position from Beowulf to the present," says professor Ewell Lee, a specialist in Victorian novelists. Checking the department roster, Diggs disagrees. "They've got one guy who specializes in Middle English," he says, growing angry. "Do I get a separate coach for middle linebackers?"
"Unless you can diagram a sideline-and-up pattern, I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go."
Diggs says he holds no grudge against the language of Milton and Hemingway, and is only trying to make Western Montana a stronger institution. "I want to have an English department," he says with a serious expression, "that our football team can be proud of."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
