The Spread, Week One: FOOOOTBAAAAALLLLLL!!!!

Hey guys, welcome to The Spread.

[insert elaborate opening credits sequence featuring skydiving royalty and Mr. Bean and some weird metallurgical dance number here]

So, by now I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “What is The Spread that I shouldn’t just stop reading right now and go back to what I was doing?” Well, stop asking yourself; you don’t know and you look ridiculous. The Spread is essentially just Poll Dancing with a new name, because as you know, I single-handedly changed the college football landscape with my constant ranting and raving about the BCS and soon we’ll have an actual playoff to determine the national champion and this happened because of me only and not for any other reason so don’t let anyone tell you different. So I figured since I’ll be shifting gears in this space, I’d come up with a new name for it and that’s what I did so give me my money.

Hey, Ohio State is not the only team with a new coach this year, although we might as well be for all the good it’s going to do those other poor Urbanless bastards. Here’s a list of guys who actually got head coaching jobs this year, presumably from people who think football is this or this:

Bob Davie – who got Notre Dame sued for age discrimination almost immediately after being hired and then never won a bowl game for the Irish.

Charlie Weis – who was almost as bad as Davie at ND, but did win that one bowl game against Hawai’i.

Rich Rodriguez – who is like Michigan’s Bob Davie if Bob Davie was even worse at winning football games.

John L. Smith – who is this guy.

Good luck with that.

Hey, there are college football games this week and not just reruns of all the various Alabama/LSU or Michigan State/Wisconsin games from last year. Brand new games, and some of them aren’t terrible! At least they aren’t yet.

THURSDAY Don’t watch these games. I know you kind of want to, because football’s been gone so long and now it’s back and you love football and so do I so we should watch these games right? WRONG! Don’t fall for it. ESPN is capitalizing on your starved passion and trying to trick you into watching a bad SEC game that you would never watch if it weren’t the only thing on. South Carolina and Vanderbilt? Seriously? You might as well have said A Four-Hour Claymation CHiPs Reboot Featuring The Voices Of Gilbert Gottfried, Richard Dreyfuss and Jennifer Tilly. Or maybe you were planning on checking out Texas A&M @ Louisiana Tech or UCLA at Rice or Minnesota at UNLV? I don’t even know you anymore.

FRIDAY Okay, you’ve waited long enough. Turn on the TV and check out Boise State @ Michigan State. The Broncos have been the darlings of college football since making a movie around Oklahoma in that Fiesta Bowl. But they’ve only played one Big Ten team in their entire history and that was a loss to Wisconsin in 1997, when 3 of the Badgers’ 8 wins were by a single point. The Big Ten remains the only conference that Boise has played and not beaten. You won’t often get my permission to cheer for another Big Ten team, nor will you often ask for it or ever care what I have to say about what you can do with your Yuengling-soaked vocal cords, but Friday you’ll get it. Use it wisely.

SATURDAY Obviously, this is the big day. It’s so big that you can watch football at nine in the morning without being on the West Coast! That’s when Navy/Notre Dame kicks off in Freaking. Ireland. and I will stop trying to convince you to watch it now because if you don’t watch a game from Ireland then seriously, why are we even friends?

Then you’ve got all your noon games, including Miami at Ohio State. Which is what you’ll be watching, so let’s move on.

The rest of the day’s games are just background noise for your five-hour celebration of the no-huddle wizardry you just witnessed. You should probably spend this time watching the game again and try not to pass out before Alabama/Michigan rolls around at eight. If you think you’re getting more of that Big Ten permission here, you are dead wrong, bucko, and I hope you don’t even want it. It really doesn’t matter who wins this game because it will mean that the other team lost and that can only be a good thing. But since it’s a football game we’re watching, we have to cheer for somebody and can you really cheer for this guy? I can’t.

MONDAY Go ahead and watch Georgia Tech at Virginia Tech if you want, see if I care.