Well, as much excitement as there is in Gainesville with the new coaching staff, new quarterbacks, new indoor practice facility and new hope, the season now comes to a very sobering fork in the road. Tennessee Volunteers week is here, something rarely associated with the concept of sober. In most years past, this has been reason to celebrate and rejoice, as the chances of a Vols victory over the Gators in most seasons have been about as blank as a Knoxville dental x-ray. But this year Florida is in serious rebuilding mode and is very vulnerable to the Fightin’ Road Kills.
For teams like Ohio State and Florida State, the real season starts in their final scheduled games against Michigan and Florida, respectively. But I digress. I don’t want to complain about the tough SEC schedule versus the pantywaist Ohio State schedule. We’ve already got one Bret Bielema (we used to have three Bret Bielemas, but he ate the other two). And even in the SEC and the PAC-10, who play real schedules, most teams played huge early season games the last two weeks and now get a breather opponent. So this week, fans will be looking for alternate activities for excitement as a diversion from some pretty boring football. And since one of the few games to generate any real interest across the country will be inundated with that nauseating, unending loop of “Rocky Top,” I will serve up a musical counterpart for each game; a sampling of tunes that though thoroughly wretched, would still be more enjoyable than “Rocky Top.”
Western Michigan at Ohio State (3:30, ABC)
There is only one reason this game is being broadcast on a national network instead of the Big Ten Network or online-only: the melting of Urban Meyer. Consider this the college football equivalent of seeing how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop. After bringing Ohio State to the national title in a quick thee years, one more than it took him to win his first natty at Florida, the pressure is on and the Buckeyes’ head man is feeling the heat, struggling to put away a bad VPI team in Week One and then barely escaping with his football life by a mere touchdown from MAC entry Northern Illinois last week. Urban has started to take on the appearance of the sunken-eyed zombie who wandered the UF sidelines in 2010, dragging one foot behind him like the Mummy of Ankha aimlessly lumbering in pursuit of Scooby Doo and Shaggy, every now and then stopping to blurt out, “Coin! COIN!” Well the coin Meyer sought back in 2010 was to use for bus fare out of Gainesville before he disintegrated into oblivion. And he may be searching his pockets for loose change as we speak. Florida fans will recall the many stages of Urban Decay from his time in Gainesville. Losing just two games on the road in the first half of his rookie season in Gainesville made him break down and cry in front of the media. Losing his first game to Nick Saban gave him the phlegms so bad he thought he was having a heart attack, and resigned the next day to spend more time with the his office desk chair for a year.
After recharging his batteries for a few months at ESPN, where he was the network correspondent on the subject of what everyone ELSE was doing evil in college football, we have seen his magical melting act begin again in Columbus. After losing the Big Can’t-Count-To-Ten title game in 2013, Meyer looked like the Crypt Keeper with a serious jones for Pappa John’s and dank stadium tunnels. After losing their bowl game to a lowly member of the ACC, he looked like a charred pine tree after a bad forest fire. After losing his quarterback for the season last year and struggling to subdue a service academy, all the smoking branches fell off the tree. After losing for the third time in four games, he appeared to be a matchstick burned in serpentine twists to its core. One more loss and he would have been nothing but a pile of ash. But a new quarterback, and then another, rose from the ashes to save his bacon and his health. However, with the pressure of national title expectations and a faltering team on the field, he appears back on the path to a pile of ash.
A pile of ash that can probably still beat a team from Directional Michigan.
Alternative Activity: In July, Thrillist ranked Ohio as one of the worst states in the nation. You won’t find too many to disagree. Ohio is the midriff of the country: located somewhere in the middle, round on both sides and should always be covered up from view. One of the more pleasant activities in Columbus is to drive up the road to visit the Cuyahoga River because yes Ohio is so bad they actually once set a river on fire! And not just once: at least thirteen times! How is that possible? The river doesn’t flow, it oozes. People who can’t swim don’t drown in this river, they get stuck and three years later die of toxic poisoning.
Song of the game: “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman. This breaks with the theme of horrendous songs to fill in for “Rocky Top,” because it is a great song. But it is by far the most appropriate song to fit this game. Tracy was born in Ohio, and throughout this entire song she keeps asking to be given just one good reason to stay. And nobody can ever come up with one.
I’m Melting, I’m Melting, What a World, What a World: 37
The One Percent of No Percent: 13
Open at Florida State (0:00 pm)
I want to discuss the Semis in this picks column, even though they are not even playing a game. Because I don’t like to pass up any opportunity to discuss a downward spiral at that Wayward Home for Lost Boys Out West. And you don’t even have to look at the pleasingly average performances thus far against terrible competition (even though it is nice to reflect on their barely beating a pathetic Boston College team, only leading Texas State by 4 with under six minutes ‘til halftime and being tied at 7 with lowly USF at halftime).
Have you noticed the game times they’ve been given thus far? They opened at night, which is typical for a patsy opponent, but an 8:00 starting time just tells the alumni they are not worth getting a good night’s sleep. Last week they are stuck on Friday night when most college football fans are watching or in attendance at high school football games. And of course in week 2 against South Florida, they didn’t even rate a nooner. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that FSU has a lot of the clout it garnered over the last two years…nothing says “respect” like playing a cross-state rival in the oh-so-hallowed pre-noon kickoff slot. I guess the image of Jameis Winston doing that spot-on Garo Yepremian impersonation in the playoff game last year is still lingering. Getting sacked by Manti Te’o’s girlfriend has its disadvantages.
Alternative Activity: There is mounting evidence that the Florida armadillo leprosy outbreak is rooted in Tallahassee. When cow tipping loses its allure, FSU students go after other animals. It’s a scourge that can go unchecked in Tallahassee because when authorities observe residents with skin falling off their faces, the natural assumption is that they are just one of the Bowden clan. But with armadillo awareness at a high point, FSU fans will be doing the second-most enjoyable activity in Tallahassee: going online to Ancestry.com trying to find the missing links between FSU alumni Burt Reynolds and Richard Simmons.
Song of the game: “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke and Pharrell. What other song better encompasses FSU’s institutional cheating and its Baghdad Bob approach to any rapey behavior?
Where the Men Are Men and the Women are Punching Bags: 0
Bye (to their short-lived, ill-begotten resurgence): 0
Vanderbilt at Ole Miss (7:00 pm, ESPNU)
Alternative Activity: Playing the Verne Lundquist drinking game (drink every time Verne calls a current player by the name of a seventies British pop singer) will only work for so long. Eventually fans will have to go on a Ghost Tour. That’s right, Tennessee is home to the host harrowing environment, where scores of the undead float aimlessly about, moaning and pawing at anyone with a life force that passes near. But enough about Dollywood. Yes, ghost tours: this is a thing. Things, actually. Take your pick from a Haunted Downtown Nashville Tour, the Haunted Tavern Tour (get ready for numerous microbrews of spirit puns) and the Nashville Hearse Tour. Because nothing says “fun” like riding around town in a car that used to cart dead bodies around. And why am I talking about activities in Nashville when this game is being played in Oxford? That’s a very good question.
Of course, when it comes to ghost tours, Oxford is no slouch itself (enter obligatory Caddyshack line here). There you can tour Rowan Oak (a Mississippian’s attempt to spell Roanoke), home of William Faulkner, where the acclaimed author fabricated a ghost story about his concentric garden (because who wouldn’t), only to be ironically haunted by non-fabricated ghosts. And ironically haunting is a tough act to pull off. Oxford also claims haunting at the Meek-Duvall House, The Lyceum and St. Anthony Hall (no relation to Anthony Michael Hall). If you think people wouldn’t be caught dead in places with such awful names as The Lyceum and Meek-Duvall, think again.
Song of the game: “Oops!… I Did It Again” by Britney Spears. A Mississippi native and confirmed rebel, Miss Spears’s ditty is exactly what Ole Miss fans will be singing when the NCAA hammer comes down once again on their heads.
Reb’l B’ars: 52
Commode Doors: 17
Southern at Georgia (12:00 pm, SEC Network)
There are few stronger statements that this is a week to seek alternative activities than this game being broadcast on the SEC Network.
Alternative Activity: The double-barreled cannon. Yep. It says what it is and is what it says. Back in the Civil War days, folks in Athens who were too old to be allowed in the Confederate army – or near open fire or sharp objects – joined something called the “Mitchell Thunderbolts”. The job of the thunderbolts was to work on army-related projects and protect the city of Athens while the local regiment was away fighting battles. That’s right…the “Mitchell Thunderbolts” were old men whose job it was to tinker around the house and yell at strangers to get off their lawn. The only notable project they came up with was the double-barreled cannon. The idea was for a cannon to have two fused barrels to simultaneously fire two cannon balls that were connected by a chain. The purpose of this was that as the cannonballs flew through the air, the chain would cut the enemy soldiers in half…if they happened to the directly in the path of the only vaguely controllable trajectory of the cannon balls and within the very narrow space between. Problem is, as you can imagine, that the Apple iCannon had not yet been invented and with the technology of the day, it was impossible to time the two cannon barrels to fire simultaneously. There was also the problem of inability to replicate perfectly sized cannon balls, so the differing shapes and sizes would cause the balls to take different paths and even cross paths, rendering the whole concept of the cutting-the-enemy-in-half moot.
Being men (this one had nothing to do with age), they decided the laws of physics were unimportant and they built the thing and test-fired it anyway. It failed miserably, with the lack of simultaneity causing the chain to snap and the cannon balls to fly off in random directions, nearly killing some rather stupidly positioned witnesses. Of the fortunate surviving witnesses, one recorded that the test firing “plowed up about an acre of ground, tore up a cornfield, mowed down saplings, and then the chain broke, the two balls going in different directions.” And then….they test-fired it two more times. On the second test, another witness recorded that, “The thicket of young pines at which it was aimed looked as if a narrow cyclone or a giant mowing machine had passed through.” On the third test, the chain snapped immediately and one ball tore into a nearby cabin, knocking down its chimney. The other spun off erratically and struck a nearby cow, killing it instantly.
Remarkably, the men of the Mitchell Thunderbolts considered the test-firings a success. Truly in the mold of Dawg fans, they. The Confederate army did not. They deemed it a complete failure, so naturally it was given a plaque (on which it states that it was a failure) and preserved for nearly a century as – get this – “an object of curiosity.” I am not making any of this up. Go see it for yourself. It will be far more entertaining than this game.
Song of the game: “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men. This awful ear worm is appropriate because every time the Georgia Bulldogs take the field, we all hear the voices of The Bwaaa-haaa! Men. But also because it’s been so long that nobody can remember when that song was relevant, but it is a good bet it was more recent that the last time Georgia or Vandy were relevant.
Drawlin’ Dawgs: 64
Suth’n: 10
Tennessee at Florida (3:30 pm, CBS)
Tennessee is back! Back to delusional fans and mentally incapacitated local sports media. Yes, some Knoxville sports talk jockeys actually said before their last game that Tennessee had a great chance to beat Oklahoma and if they did, they can start to discuss the national championship drive. As in, this year. They must have been so busy applying their expertise to this game that they failed to watch the previous week’s game wherein lowly Bowling Green racked up 433 yards and 557 total yards on the five-star Vols defense. As they say, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to eat their words on the air Monday morning.
This week, Tennessee fans and media are again trumpeting the Varmint’s foregone conclusion of a huge win, only this time the possibility seems a lot more likely. Florida’s new staff comes in with a lot of inherited problems. Accustomed to enjoying Tennessee Week as a joyful romp down memory lane sprinkling Lulu & Junior jokes all over the internet like Johnny “The Great” Pumpkinseed. But this week has been different. It’s been dark. It’s been deep.
This week has been much like in Shawshank Redemption the night that Andy Dufresne announced that it was time to get busy living or get busy dying. Gator Nation is spending this week like Andy’s buddy Red: we have had some long weeks in the stir; alone in the dark with nothing but our thoughts. Time can draw out like a blade…this has been the longest week of our life. But then we realized it is actually just a football game and we get to go play Tennessee next, shooting for eleven in a row. Florida has never won that many in a row against the Vols. Even in the Spurrier glory years of tormenting Phil “Great Pumpkin” Fulmer, the Gators’s longest streak was five. What’s more, an 11-spot will surpass Tennessee’s longest win streak in this series, as they won the first ten games played, from 1916 to 1953. Who could forget those battles? It helped that six of the games were played in Knoxville and only one of them was played in Gainesville: the last one, which was the closest of those games, a 9-7 Vols victory.
In fact, the last time Tennessee beat Florida, it was a coaching battle between Phil Fulmer and Ron Zook. Since then, the two programs have had seven different head coaches in this game between them. When the Vols last sang “Rocky Top” after a win over Florida, the lyricist of “Rocky Top” was still a teenager. Casey Kasem was still hosting “American Top 40”. Two boobs were exposed: one on Janet Jackson’s chest at the Super Bowl halftime and one on Hollywood’s Walk of Shame when Gigli won the Golden Raspberry Award. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years and Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison for boring the hell out of the nation. The Train-to-TEN leaves the station at 3:30 and TENse Gator fans will turn their atTENtion to see if the TENacious Gators can TENd to maintaining the TENor of the season, break with sluggish offensive TENdencies and TENderize the TENtative, toothless TENants of Neyland; to flatTEN the hillbillies and heighTEN conTENtment over the inTENse new head coach’s TENure, all while beaTEN TENnessee fans fatTEN up on chicken TENders. It’s been TEN in a row. The the decade of dominance will exTENd.
Alternative Activity: Just like Nashville, Knoxville boasts the nation’s most scintillating ghost tours (apparently it’s the thing to do when you can’t stand any of the people who are currently alive in the state), and they even have a vampire tour. When Tennessee fans become undead, they are the only vampires in the world to subsist on the blood of road kill. However, the favorite activity in Knoxville is to visit the Mabry-Hazen House Museum. One of its primary selling points is the fact that the same family lived in the house for three generations. Sure you could just read that on their website or in a Pulitzer-quality sports column, but you really have to travel to the actual grounds, pay $35 and stand inside its sacred walls to really understand why it took 130 years to get someone else to buy this shack. But you not only get to see – and more importantly smell – the house, but you also get to stand in the yard while a matronly woman in vaguely Victorian era garb stands on the porch and tells you stories about the Civil War and the “Gunfight on Gay Street” (I will just leave you to your own commentary on that one). They say this experience provides the visitors with a look into the past. If they look back far enough into the past, they might even be able to see the last time Tennessee fielded a good football team.
And why am I again talking about ghosts in Tennessee when the game is in Florida? These are the undead, people. I’m not going to upset them with a snub.
The most appropriate thing to do in Gainesville this weekend is to visit Devil’s Millhopper. It is billed as the state’s biggest sinkhole attraction, which raises the question of how many others are there and why are they attractions? You tour the giant hole in the ground by going down a 221-step winding stairway into the 117-foot deep hole. Along the way you will see many geological artifacts buried throughout time and uncovered by the sinkhole, or that merely threw themselves in. Close to the bottom you will come across the careers of Ron Zook and Will Muschamp, and if you listen close enough you can hear the bellows of Stormin’ Norman Sloan echoing through the chasm. For some bizarre reason the hole is home to some plant species that are only found in this sink hole and the Appalachian mountains, which plow right through eastern Tennessee where sits the bright lanterns of Knoxvegas. How or why these plants have magically collocated in this sink hole is anyone’s guess, but the chances of solving that mystery are greater than Vol fans’ chances of going twelve seconds Saturday without mentioning the ghost of Peyton Manning.
Song of the game: “Rocky Top” of course, will be performed by the wretched Volunteer band, The Pride of the Southland, 8 million times. Slightly less vomitous is “Achy, Breaky Heart,” by Billy Ray Cyrus. This also in honor of the visiting Volunteers. While Florida fans may wear jorts, there is no comparison to the Vol fans’ transgressions in appearances. The Vol Navy has nothing on Tennessee’s Mullet Militia. That preposterous hairdo also known as the Tennessee Waterfall, the Missouri Compromise and of course the Achey Breaky Mistakey. I was going to offer a Miley Cyrus song, however I cannot find a single person who will admit to knowing one.
This One Goes To Eleven: 24
Butch-Slapped: 23
LOL! Butch-Slapped…priceless.