We've entered college football season. Hark, it lurks but three days hence. And, perhaps even more importantly, we've entered the top 5 of college football. Today's Florida previews is brought to you by Orson Swindle/Spencer Hall, a man who can slit your team's throat so skillfully you're still laughing while the blood gurgles out of your throat. He blogs at EDSBS.com where he's quick to discuss his smoldering flame for Trev Alberts. He also has the prodigious chest fur of a 1970's porn star. Enjoy.If you don’t care about college football, leave. This being Deadspin, I’m sure every other reader or so has a “MEH” or “kol-ledge foot-bawl?” comment preloaded and ready to go. If this is you, I implore you: go fuck yourselves with a petrified cockatiel. (Edit: A live cockatiel would do, too. It will struggle, thus giving you the full anal torsion you crave! Like mother, like commenter.) I’m sure Busted Coverage has some “Chick you’d vault onto your pole,” or “pictures of a girl who wouldn't fuck you ever,” or something else that will keep you amused for the three minutes it will take you not to read this. Take that deathless witticism ready to spring from the mental toaster oven like a shit-filled Hot Pocket, and go have that snack by yourself, anger ninja. Also unwelcome would be any of Clay’s shit about Florida girls having fat arms, us all wearing jorts, or “America’s Wang.” Oh, you watched the Simpsons between 1988 and 2000! How erudite you are without being effete! And the fat arms! No fat chicks! RUMSFELD, brah!!! It's awesome that every chick on the internet would fuck you, but you won't give it to them because YOU HAVE STANDARDS, BRAH! For the assholes left in the room, one half-assed review of Florida coming up, presented by a cut-rate bizarro Dwight Schrute. Note: NOT Dan Shanoff. STRENGTHS Our ability to recruit bulky, hopelessly evangelical middle-class white quarterbacks. Tim Tebow was described as “a fullback at quarterback” before he threw for 3286 yards and 32 TDs last year. Now he is being touted as “the best 9-4 quarterback who ever won the Heisman” by grown men who are afraid of their pastors, namely Georgia fans. Cockatiels, petrified and live, in double doses for them all. He’s good, you’ll hear too much about him, and ESPN will assign a stalker female reporter to shadow his every move. We’re hoping it’s Erin Andrews. I don’t read enough about her on the internet, though the guys at http://yetanothercreepyphotofErinAndrews’clearlyoutlinedlabiayesyesnodude.com are doing a fine job filling the void in this sorely needed coverage. Our coach, who had his soul removed in a surgical procedure known as the “Parcells Excision”, feels no joy, and has sat his windowless office all offseason texting recruits, watching film in the dark, and running through hallways full of hired thugs with a hammer to unwind. Any of these is possible, since after three years no one knows anything about Urban Meyer other than that he has no fingerprints, occasionally "revises his statements" made to recruits during the recruiting process, and that he considers Bill Belichick a friend. Given this last fact, he is either an imbecile, or a vampire, or both. Our speedy types like Percy Harvin et al. Percy Harvin has missed four games over the past two years due to a wide array of injures including tendonitis of the knee, cancer of the eyebrow, and pellagra. He’s sure to miss time this year with even more exotic injuries, something not as devastating as it may appear with receivers Louis Murphy, Riley Cooper, TE Aaron Hernandez, and running backs Emmanuel Moody and Chris Rainey flashing “viable” in the options menu. Rainey in particular bears notice. He used the word “dang” in an interview and all but admitted taking illegal benefits in high school. He is a self-described “white-girl man.” He also runs a 4.2ish 40 and appears in one of the three Youtube videos of college football highlights not set to Saliva’s “Click Click Boom.”
We’ll be fine on offense as long as Chris Rainey gets the vanilla quim brulee he craves, and Tim Tebow hears nothing of it. WEAKNESSES The secondary and the heart of the defensive line. Florida was 94th in the nation last year in pass defense with freshmen at both corners and at one safety position. The other safety, Tony Joiner, got caught in the middle of the season attempting to steal his car from a towing company’s impound lot. This constituted the most successful attempt Joiner had at a takeaway all season long. The secondary is now a year older at the corners, but has gotten younger but more talented at safety with the addition of ballyhooed recruit Will Hill, who if he follows sophomore safety Major Wright’s example will display his eye-boggling talents by not just misreading developing plays, but by misjudging them in spectacular, occasionally disastrous fashion. As for the defensive line, Florida is so thin up the middle that they’ve considered adopting a 3-3-5 look. The coaches also reinstated Ronnie Wilson, a former offensive lineman originally kicked out of the program in early 2007 for discharging a semiautomatic weapon in the middle of downtown Gainesville, and then moved him to defensive tackle. If he brings the gun onto the field, we’ll be wildly successful. If not, it promises to be a merely mediocre defensive season, which would be a pleasant but marginal improvement over 2007. The possibility of ESPN’s suffocating, all-crushing love descending on us. ESPN’s love is herpes for the fan of any team: once acquired, it never really goes away, and though contracting it is a sign that you did something right, it also burns and flares up when one least expects it. Also, for the uninitiated, it causes pus-filled cankers to break out on your junk, or at least that’s what you’ll tell your significant other when that kind of thing happens. I caught it from Jeremy Schaap’s Thursday’s profile piece on Tebow. I swear. It’s a curse USC and Texas fans know well—ESPN’s slobbering, we mean, not herpes. (That’s an LSU specialty. We mean that in as complimentary a way as possible.) INSERT RIVAL HERE, YOU SUCK At the moment, it’s Georgia, a fan base who combines the monosyllabic brain of the Ohio State fanbase with the spicy proud dumb of your standard SEC fan. I’ve written about this before, but to restate: they have a single phrase answer to everything, and this answer does not vary one nit from Valdosta to Augusta. Florida fans: JORTS! LSU fans: CORN DOGS! Anything else: GAY! They’re the helpless, bleating seals of the SEC Animal Kingdom, and like seals should be clubbed from time to time and sold for their baseball caps with the pre-frayed bills—which they all invariably have. They also all wear red Dickies, which make you impervious to punches!
Or not!