For the anti-American, these and other signs of American power are more than disturbing. They are signs of a mounting, dangerous threat to all this is valuable in human life. There is, as usual, a long French tradition that identifies the triumph of America with the triumph of the machine over life, but here it is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who has best expressed the anti-American view. American culture and life, “Americanism” in Heidegger’s thought, is the hideous final destination on humanity’s road away from a meaningful way of life. America reduces life to the consumption of meaningless products and the experiences of meaningless events, and human relationships are emptied of everything worthwhile. This is the vision of a nongeographic but still imperial America that seduces one’s wife over the television, that steals one’s son and one’s daughter via the movie and the video game.

Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

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Weird game last night with the bizarre ‘Mack Brown’s stepson touched the ball’ instant replay that took a FREAKING YEAR TO SORT OUT. Surely people all over the country changed the channel as head official Penn Wagers stood there looking like a dumbass for 20 minutes. This was the same SEC crew from the infamous Alabama game. After watching the replay, there is no way that it was conclusive as to whether the Texas coach touched the ball. (Sound familiar, Rebel fans?) Say what you want about the over-regimented “No Fun League,” but they at least have good rules in place for instant replay that are clear and can be easily followed.

ESPN really rubbed it in by showing him over and over after the play. I felt pretty bad for the guy. If Texas had lost, I think Penn Wagers would have to cross another state off of his no travel list.

Ivan Maisel has a column about the rise of QBs from Texas playing at schools across the country. As he notes at the end, Jevean Snead will add to the total when he suits up next year for us. Maisel left out Jonathan Moxon, who of course went to Brown despite Bud Kilmer’s threats to “put his grades under review” and ruin his chance at a scholarship.

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This op-ed from the Wall Street Journal is about politics and the endless presidential campaign, but the conclusions that Daniel Henninger draws also apply to sports media circa 2007:

The nasty paradox of the modern, data-dumped media age is this: The more we know, the less we know. Weirdly, in a world of total data, people barely know what they want from politics–for themselves, for the country or the presidency.

It would be interesting to go back in time and try to explain to Bear Bryant how in 2007 some random guy used the Freedom of Information Act to subpoena Houston Nutt’s cell phone records, which then became public fodder for months on internet message boards. He would probably think you were from some kind of bizarro world that was similar to Earth, but where everything is different.

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Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control I did not get to see AvP: Requiem last night as I had planned. But maybe this was a good thing, according to one Brian Orndof:

It boggles the mind to even contemplate how dreadful “Requiem” is. The map leading to quality was clearly laid out by Anderson’s moronic work with his 2004 installment “AVP,” and any filmmaker with half a brain could’ve manufactured something that restores a little of the glossy ferociousness that marked both the “Alien” and “Predator” franchise over the last three decades with minimal effort. Instead, we meet directorial newcomers Colin and Greg Strause (billed as “The Brothers Strause”), two random FX flunkies who turn this sequel into a vile, joyless, murky, moronic, amateurish, contemptuous, numbing, unintentionally hilarious, and thoroughly diseased motion picture. It’s a perfect film for the Scrooges out there who like their multiplex fodder crude and unrelentingly insulting.

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Well, I can’t find my copy of I Am Charlotte Simmons, which contains the mother of all tailgate party descriptions. I think I will be able to find it over the holidays. Rest assured, if UPD were employed at this scene, as described by Tom Wolfe, their heads would explode. Compared to that, a few scattered games of beer pong at fraternity tents and moderately heavy Michelob Ultra consumption by 50 year olds wearing sweater vests in the Grove is nothing.

Here’s a description from a review in USA Today published back in 2004, when the book was released:

The closest the novel comes to making a moral judgment is in a scene in which an alumnus visits the university 40 years after graduating. He’s with his two teenage sons at a football tailgate party. They witness bared female breasts and a 2-foot-long novelty penis amid “four acres of sloshed beer” and “great fluffy fumes of piss.”

The alumnus is stunned: “Collegiate was collegiate, but this was indecent —immoral was the term that crossed his mind, but the very word had become obsolete. It had vanished from sophisticated conversation.”

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Congratulations to Micheal Spurlock and Coach Cut, who both had pretty good weekends.

I saw the highlight of Spurlock’s return yesterday with another Ole Miss fan, and we were trying to figure out what his signature play as a Rebel was. The only choice, really, is the 4th down run against Memphis in ‘05 that made Coach O undefeated for the first and last time in his head coaching career. Refresh your memory via Youtube here. Bonus: a reaction shot of a befuddled Joe Lee Dunn. That really does seem like a million years ago, doesn’t it?

I actually sat at the same table as Spurlock back in August at a Rebel Club meeting. He was wearing a suit, and I think he said that he was working at a bank. Good thing he stayed in shape. He might want to move to Tampa so he never has to buy a drink again. That no TD return streak they had going was really bizarre.

And Coach Cut will take over at Duke, where only a young and hungry Steve Spurrier has ever won. That is what you might call ‘daunting.’ But this move comes with the greatest Christmas gift any of us will get this year: once again, a television show starring Coach Cut will grace our TVs next fall. I can’t explain how excited I am about this development. I may get Tivo just for this. Seriously.

I did not think he would ever get another head job, but this is just about perfect for him. Absolutely no pressure, a decidedly non-rabid fanbase, and he can recruit smart guys who might actually be able to learn his schemes. And instead of braving the sectarian loyalties and single digit ACT scores found in Mississippi high schools, he will be offering the kind of recruits who will actually value a first-class education worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Hopefully, Cut will read Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons over Christmas to get ready. And you should too, it’s a great book. It has a great description of a Yankee-style college tailgate party that takes place at the thinly disguised stand-in for Duke that is the setting of the novel. I will post an excerpt this week.

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The night of January 2nd, 2004, I was feeling pretty good. I had just watched Ole Miss win an exciting Cotton Bowl to send off Eli in style (in perfect weather, no less. The whole day was like a postcard from start to finish.) I remember having a grand old time that night at our hotel bar at the hotel, whose name escapes me right now, that is shown at the beginning of the credits of the tv show Dallas. It was where the team and most of the fans stayed, and the entire hotel that night was crawling with Ole Miss fans at the mountaintop.

As we all know now, four years later, it has been downhill from there. That night it would have been inconceivable that Cutcliffe would be fired the next year. I did not realize how uneasy his relationship was with Boone and some big donors by that time. All of that was papered over while Eli was playing QB and Archie was in the stands every week, but it boiled over quickly once that steadying force was gone. And then, even more unbelievably, we hired a Cajun stereotype come to life who won 3 SEC games in three years and alienated virtually everyone except for the true believers that would get behind Stalin if he were our coach. Then we fired him a few weeks after he got the public vote of confidence after he lost to our rival in a game that was brutal even by his dubious standards.

And then, for the coup de grace of Ole Miss coaching bizarreness, we hired Houston Nutt a few hours after he was available. Houston Nutt, who for most of us 30 years old or younger was the personification of Arkansas football. The man I wanted to choke after the 7 OT game in 2001, which doomed our chances of getting to Atlanta, when he ran the length of the field when it was finally over with his fist upraised. Even now, a few weeks later, I catch myself at random parts of the day thinking, “He’s OUR coach now?”

But beggars can’t be choosers, and Ole Miss fans are starving for wins. We are suffering from winning malnutrition. The Orgeron Era left us weakened from football scurvy. What’s the last good win we had? Probably the 2004 South Carolina game (Cut’s last season) in which we were 18 point dogs. I was lucky enough to be there, but I was one of the few Ole Miss fans that made the trip. When was the last time everybody went back to the Grove happy and ready to stay there until UPD chases everybody out? We had the Egg Bowl victories in 2004 and 2006, and winning that game is always nice, but those games ended losing seasons and that puts a serious damper on how good you feel.

Houston Nutt did not preside over many losing seasons in Fayetteville. In the two losing seasons he did have, he still beat Ole Miss handily. In thinking about the ramifications of this hire, I keep coming back to one thing. Almost every time I flipped through the channels and found Arkansas playing on TV, I was happy. The games they played in were usually exciting. OT seemed to follow them around. They always competed, and you got the sense that the team loved playing for their coach and their school. They always seemed to be ready to play. That sounds like something Ole Miss fans will be ready to embrace.

How refreshing will it be the first time we actually play well and win a big game? It’s almost hard for to imagine, but it will happen again. The feeling of release and joy in Vaught-Hemingway will be comparable to that day in 2001 when we finally beat Alabama. I can’t wait to be there when it happens.

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A columnist for the London Times has an epiphany while watching the national anthem being played before the recent England-Croatia Euro 2008 qualification match. A little necessary background: Europe has a soccer tournament every four years to decide the European champion. If the World Cup is like a presidential election, this tournament is like off-year congressional elections. It’s important, but not as important as the World Cup.

Despite poor play up to that point, thanks to other favorable results England only needed a tie against Croatia at home in Wembley Stadium in order to advance to the tournament. Croatia had already qualified, so the game was an exhibition for them. This usually leads to boring 0-0 matches with little attacking. However, Croatia won 3-2 and English football had a total meltdown at the result on par with Emilio Estevez getting high and losing it in The Breakfast Club.

Here’s Jeremy Clarkson’s explanation: We’ve been robbed of our Englishness

Hmmm. I’m afraid I knew we were going to lose moments before the match began. I looked at our players mumbling their way through the national anthem and realised they didn’t really care about playing for England. Because they don’t really know what England is. And truth be told, neither do I…

I believe people need to feel like they’re part of a gang, part of a tribe. And I also believe we need to feel pride in our gang. But all we ever hear now is that we in England have nothing to be proud about. In a world of righteousness we are the child molesters and rapists.

Our soldiers were murderers. Our empire builders were thieves. Our class system was ridiculous and our industrial revolution set in motion a chain of events that, eventually, will kill every polar bear in the Arctic…

Do you see? We can’t be proud of our past because it’s all bad, we can’t use British humour because it’s offensive and we can’t use understatement to deal with a crisis because the army of state-sponsored counsellors say we’ve got to sob uncontrollably at every small thing.

I want to end with a question. It’s addressed to all the equal opportunity, human rights, diet carbon, back room, bleeding heart liberals who advise the government: “I am English. Why is that a good thing?”

I bet they don’t have an answer. And until they can come up with one, chances are we’ll never win at football again.

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Via College Football News, a story about The Year in Coaches:

Coaches Unjustly Axed: Ed Orgeron, Mississippi. The Ole Miss job is a coach killer. Good luck, Houston Nutt. You left a volatile situation and entered a delusional one.

Notice the lack of actual reasons given for why Orgeron’s firing was unjust. If you can come up something convincing on that front, you should put your talents to use by drafting appeals for death row inmates convicted with overwhelming evidence. I am rarely moved to correspond with columnists, but I wanted to ask Matthew Zemek why he thought it was unjust to fire Orgeron. He responded by linking an earlier column about the firing. Here’s the gist:

But as poorly as the Rebels fared under Pete Carroll’s former assistant, the fault ultimately lies with the men who put Orgeron in a very difficult position. A university chancellor and an athletic director—with unreasonable visions dancing in their heads—hung Orgeron out to dry, much as a quarterback causes his receiver to get injured by lofting a wobbly pass into traffic on a crossing route. Much as that receiver gets obliterated by the oncoming safety, Ed Orgeron got smashed by Robert Khayat and Pete Boone. In the offseason to come, Orgeron could join David Cutcliffe and share some war stories about working for a school that has unrealistic expectations… and doesn’t know how to treat human beings with respect.

So it’s Robert Khayat’s fault that Orgeron was fired. In a narrow sense this is true, since Chancellor Khayat hired an unqualified person who he later had to fire once his incompetence was decisively demonstrated for the whole college football world to see. But that doesn’t mean the firing is unjust. If you mistakenly hire an unqualified person who then demonstrates his incompetence, it’s not unjust to fire him and pay him everything he was promised in his contract. It’s your job to correct your mistake. What Zemek really meant, but won’t say, is that it’s unjust to fire a guy who went 3-21 in the SEC and had lost 75% of the fans and 100% of the media with his demeanor because that’s what columnists who spend 5 minutes thinking about Ole Miss every year think we should be happy with in Oxford.

I would think there are very few 40-something defensive line coaches that would be prepared to be elevated to the position of SEC head coach. Orgeron was clearly not one of them, not just on the field but also with media and fan relations. Chancellor Khayat realized he made a mistake. Thankfully he recognized that his loyalty is to the school, not to Orgeron or his own reputatation.

And here’s something for every columnist eager to spend 30 seconds shitting on what unrealistic expectations poor little Ole Miss has to keep in mind: Coach Cutcliffe is a great man, but he has not and probably will never be hired as a head coach again (same for Orgeron). Cutcliffe had much more success in Oxford than Tommy Tuberville did. So how does that make Ole Miss a coach killer?

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The question the MPB lady asked Houston Nutt about his salary at his press conference/coronation certainly got people talking, and inspired a Rick Cleveland column where he did not try to defend the process but just said, ‘yes, it’s weird as hell but that’s just the way it is.’ That’s probably the best answer anybody can give.

Obviously, it doesn’t bother somebody like me. If you grow up with college sports playing an integral role in your life, it seems natural to pay whatever the market rate is so that you can compete in your league. But for someone from Europe, it has to seem really strange. And someone from the Third World must think it’s incomprehensible. Consider the Chinese educational system, as described by David Brooks in today’s New York Times:

Let’s say you were born in China…As you rise in school, you see that to get into an elite university, you need to ace the exams given at the end of your senior year. Chinese students have been taking exams like this for more than 1,000 years.

The exams don’t reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams — the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.

Roughly nine million students take the tests each year. The top 1 percent will go to the elite universities. Some of the others will go to second-tier schools, at best. These unfortunates will find that, while their career prospects aren’t permanently foreclosed, the odds of great success are diminished. Suicide rates at these schools are high, as students come to feel they have failed their parents.

Think about how different that life is than what we enjoyed at Ole Miss or any other school in this country. We are really lucky, even in years when your school goes 3-9.

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