Rose Bowl

Post-Spring BlogPoll Roundtable brought to you by Burnt Orange Nation

Which offseason story are you most tired of, and, on the flip side, interested in? (e.g. Reggie Bush's house, Jimmy Clausen, etc.)

If I lived in a perfect place, besides the Porsche in my garage and the Kate Beckinsale in my bed, it would be taken as concrete fact that those who favor college football to the NFL were lovers of the highest caliber, blessed with immense intellect, a 98-mph fastball, the culinary skills to make bouillabaisse, and an ability to run the 100-meter dash in less than four seconds. First round selections in the Pro draft wouldn’t go as slowly as something Herman Melville wrote; Ron Jaworski’s talents would join Kirk Herbstreit’s; and the mouths of every NFL fan scolding my manliness for only paying attention to the games on Saturday would go silent, their lips locked around bottles of lukewarm Bud Light. But that is too ideal; too ideal for reality. Instead, smiling at the insignificant dysfunctions of the NFL rather than fighting to argue its more prominent frailties are the only solace I can find.

For that reason, the Reggie Bush situation was tolerable. For the past two years he was arguably the world’s most entertaining football player, and he was playing in college instead of the pros. More than anything, I look at it as the NCAA is giving damaged goods to the NFL. And, as the date of the events would have it (just a week prior to the draft), Bush was damaged in transit, not by the previous owner. Once he finished the Rose Bowl, he became the NFL’s problem. He was a booby-trapped gift – the Trojan Horse, if you will.

USC will be forced to figure its shit out eventually, but if someone told you ESPN manufactured the entire story just as an excuse to get Mel Kiper 20 minutes with an oxygen mask and a fresh bottle of Dasani, would you be that surprised? Essentially, instead of talking about how fat and lazy LenDale White was, you heard about how much trouble Reggie Bush was getting in. I’m pretty sure ESPN even showed us one of those patented camera shots, with Shelly Smith in the foreground, the Bush house in question in the background, and a few moving guys piling shit into a van in between. Because that’s the formula for “commotion”, obviously. (And to be honest, the most frustrating part about it was probably how the all of these roundtable discussions just had to be had concerning whether the situation affected Bush’s draft stock. You know, as if getting your parents into a nicer house made the best football talent since Barry Sanders – with much more marketability – a character-issues liability. I mean, people don’t hesitate to buy a Ferrari just because the previous owner got a speeding ticket with it.)

As for Lord Clausen, Ian nails it. Though for Michigan fans, it wasn’t so much the praise he got, but how little the other recruits got in comparison. Shit, Scout.com didn’t even think Clausen was the second best prospect in his class, and I think we all agree ESPN’s about one step from making a “Who Should Jimmy Take To The Prom?” poll on SportsNation. The way I look at it, if you’ve reached the point of hating something, why would you want that hatred to be tarnished? Just imagine if you found out the guy your girlfriend cheated on you with was blind and cured cancer in his spare time. So for me, the fact that Clausen’s virtually a clone of every douche bag I knew in high school does nothing but confirm Notre Dame’s predilection for things I don’t like.

Unless you’re a masochist, or a Penn State fan (which I guess is sort of the same thing) that just needs a reason to be angry, you don’t need to bother with oversaturated news content. I’d die if I had to read a thousand of these articles about Jeff Scja;kedizja being a first round baseball player (even though his ERA is poor (4.30), he has fewer strikeouts than innings pitched, and threw the most innings on the team, which rules out the “well he was too busy being an All-American receiver at the beginning of the baseball season” rebuttal) but I don’t have to acknowledge it if I don’t want.

As for what I am interested in, Erin Andrews’ rumored interest in being my girlfriend is a clear number one on the list. Well, most of that sentence is a lie, but I look at her and I see a girl I could fall in love with. Almost too much of that blond hair, enough confidence to blush on camera, an accidental charisma that sucks you like a time warp back to adolescence, and one of those voices you’d want to hear talking quietly to you before you fell asleep every night.

Two years ago when the Cardinals lost Game 5 of the NLCS to the Astros I saw a woman wearing grey pants standing at home plate. Jeff Kent had just hit a homerun off of Jason Isringhausen to win it in the bottom of the ninth, and the woman wanted to talk to him. You knew Jeff didn’t want to be standing on the field anymore – away from the girls he probably deserved, and the cigar smoke he wanted to inhale. And you could see it on his face, the “I’ll be there in a second” glance back at the dugout and the impatient smile that came with it. But then he finally turns toward the camera for a minute – all of that detonated firework smoke every movie in the 70s seemed to be filmed in hanging in front of his face – and it’s not Chris Myers holding the microphone up to his mouth. It’s the woman with grey pants, but she’s in focus now. It’s Erin Andrews. And she was never just one of those hired vixens who could enunciate well, either, but Erin Andrews. The kind of girl I would have held hands with for six months just to earn enough of her trust to kiss her for six minutes.

I guess she asked him a few questions or something after that, but for a short time, watching her lips move, I was almost a little jealous of Jeff Kent. I love the Cardinals almost enough to let them cause me as much pain as Michigan does every October, but I have to say, when Fox ended its telecast and started with the M.A.S.H reruns, it was Erin Andrews who I couldn’t stop thinking about.

The off-season story is her disappearance from my Saturdays, and how much I can't wait to see her when she comes back. Sideline reporters have 200 seconds per game to do their jobs, and more often than not you know whether they’re worth listening to within 10 of them. They have to be almost perfect, because when you’re watching them you’re not watching the game. They won’t win that fight. But with Erin, she never needed to win; she wasn’t fighting anything. She was a reason to watch.

Your head coach comes down with a mystery illness and has to step aside. You get to hand pick the replacement for the 2006 season. Who gets your vote?

Since this is purely a hypothetical and all, I’d take the stoicism of Lloyd Carr, the militaristic demeanor of Charlie Weis, the swagger of Urban Meyer, the tan of Chuck Amato, the ebullience of Rick Mangino, the audaciousness of Steve Spurrier, the reputation of Joe Paterno, the grandfatherly innocence of Bobby Bowden, the pantry of Phil Fulmer, the exuberance of Pete Carroll and the visor of Bob Stoops.

Coaches are always depicted as caricatures, whether out of sheer convenience on the part of frustrated fans, the coach’s own appreciation for actually having a defined persona, or in the case of a guy like Lloyd Carr, simply growing more stubborn and socially conservative with age. Bowden, Carr, Paterno and Mack Brown are of the Senior Citizen classification that – like the grandparent you respect too much to force into a nursing home – has a career of achievements that basically makes them invincible.

Pete Carroll hops around in his mock-turtle necks and windbreakers as the guy who 25 years ago would have been doing everything in his power to smoke someone else’s weed and get laid without making a next-day phone call. To me, I just envy that USC has a coach who really seems to fucking enjoy his job. When USC’s done winning a minimum of 11 games a year, Trojan fans may plead for an approach like Weis’s. Meyer is all business, but where is his passion? And Spurrier is damn-near flawless, but where is the part of him that realizes he isn’t?

I think that’s always been my biggest issue with Lloyd. Not that he nine wins is the best I can get, but that he doesn’t care enough to try and turn Lloyd Carr the Coach into someone who can give me more than that. Diversity and open-mindedness are not gimmicks.

Lastly, we'll mix the football and the blogging together here. If you could have anyone switch allegiances and start covering your team, who you gonna pick?

Ian, and the EDSBS boys are two of the best reads you’ll probably find anywhere – sports or otherwise – but I don’t know that they’re the kind best suited to cover Michigan. For that, I have to say the Bruins Nation. UCLA and Michigan are similar in a lot of ways, from their history, to their disliked coaches, to their second-class standing in conferences with powerhouses well ahead of each of them. It takes a lot of talent to capture the emotion wrought from underutilizing talent while getting your throats stepped on by your rivals. I think Nestor would do it right.