Coach Schnelly and his wife, Beverlee, celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary at the 2013 Kentucky Derby.
For The First Time This Year We Wish We Worked Offseason Weekends, Vol. 3: Schnelly at the Derby! This is your regularly scheduled reminder that Howard Schnellenberger has a Three Wolf Moon-style painting of himself as his Facebook avatar.
To start your Friday: Howard Schnellenberger testing out a texting and driving simulator twitter.com/CardChronicle/…
— Mike Rutherford (@CardChronicle) January 25, 2013
No caption necessary.
• Never recreate from your memory. Always imagine new places. We have found the scariest sentence in the world. Ready? “‘I cannot discuss at this juncture my relationship with the NCAA,’ said [Nevin Shapiro attorney Maria Elena Perez], who added that she has retained her own counsel and plans to release her side of the story in the coming days.” YOU CAN’T GO FIVE LEVELS DOWN YOU’LL END UP IN LIMBO FOREVER.
• Coach-hirin’ season! New Mexico State offensive coordinator Doug Martin, whose return to Las Cruces was announced by the school just last Thursday, has been named interim head coach following DeWayne Walker’s departure for Jacksonville … LSU is doing things to keep Les Miles at LSU, for which we should all be grateful … Dan Enos’ contract at Central Michigan has been extended through 2016 … James Coley leaves Florida State to become the offensive coordinator at Miami, with new Twitter blasts surely to follow (“TIME TO PUT UP THOSE HURRICANE SHUTTERS, MIAMI OPPONENTS!”).
Looks like we got a bear in the air in Nick Florence, boys. (Cal Sport Media via AP Images)
• While you were lolling. We’re still at that honeymoon stage where we’ll watch anything remotely resembling college football, even if Kentucky’s school commercial did run immediately before the Wildcats dropped a pass and fumbled on consecutive plays. Louisville triumphed in this early rivalry game, 32-14. [BOX | RECAP] In evening action, Baylor walloped SMU, 54-29, with a 341-yard, four-touchdown passing performance from RGIII successor Nick Florence. [BOX | RECAP]
• We have a vote for a thing! Some nice people with unsound judgment have given us a vote in this year’s FBS Independent Players of the Week awards. Week 1′s top vote-getters: BYU quarterback Riley Nelson, BYU tight end Kaneakua Friel, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o and BYU punter/kicker Riley Stephenson.
• Please secure your homes against an incoming barrage of Apollo 13 jokes. We may have called Ohio beating Penn State correctly, and UTEP putting a scare into Oklahoma, but that just makes our first really big Inevitable Wrong Thing all the more potent, doesn’t it? Houston, our pick to win C-USA if UCF is ineligible, got dropped 30-13 by Texas State (that’s Texas STATE, yes) on Saturday, and this morning the school announced offensive coordinator Mike Nesbitt’s resignation. Cue Louisiana Tech sports information, with the Stat of the Week:
@siholly So far this season Louisiana Tech has faced/prepared for three offensive coordinators and played zero games. Stat of the week?— Patrick Walsh (@LATechPWalsh) September 3, 2012
Jerry Sandusky was found guilty on 45 of 48 criminal charges. (US PRESSWIRE)
The last time we took a daylong car ride, Jim Tressel resigned. The time before that, USC’s NCAA sanctions came down. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that our spending four days in a car last week triggered a blockbuster breaking news moment: Craig James announcing that he won’t be returning to ESPN for the 2012 college football season. According to the Houston Chronicle, James “has been contacted by other networks to gauge his interest in returning to TV,” but the one with most of our football on it will be free of his vacuous presence. Glory be. Just keep a repatriated Darren Rovell off GameDay and we’ll all have a fine and jolly autumn.
In decidedly less funny and markedly more important news: Jerry Sandusky is going to jail for a very, very long time. We haven’t done much talking about this case here, because we find alternating between serious discussions of sexual abuse and photos of college athletes enjoying pedicures to be uncouth and weird. We subsist on jokes in the offseason, but not on these jokes. Some people disagree. That’s their absolute right, but we’re with this guy. We also have the utmost respect for those with the stomach to cover this story, and do it well, including SI’s Luke Winn.
Back to what we’re better at. Items of interest from our week off that we cannot let pass without comment:
No Hall could contain Howard Schnellenberger. (AP)
“On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.” — Real thing that the real King Arthur definitely really said
Behold, the NFF’s 2012 College Football Hall of Fame class:
And after the jump, everything you need to take away: Read More…
Assorted light reading from the week that was to speed you through your Friday:
We’re back in our homeplace for the weekend to take in Tennessee’s spring game, which means we have a perfect excuse to trot out this gem again. It is supposed to rain, so drag along your inflatable Davy Crocketts, y’all.
Elsewhere in today being a really, really memorable day for college-themed music happenings: A decades-old NC State video that defies all description and a Texas A&M rap video. Going by the title, it seems very important that you know this is the OFFICIAL music video, as opposed to all those bootleg amateur college team-themed tributes floating around the youtubes.
Big E, boomin’ atcha. Eric LeGrand, on his way to walking and to putting his broadcasting studies to good use.
Like the first robin of spring. Pre-Snap Read’s essential annual preseason countdown begins with New Mexico. Click through to see a pair of disembodied hands dressing Bob Davie!
Howard Schnellenberger, ineligible for the College Football Hall of Fame? Allow us to retort:
QED, y’all.
Photo: AP
Take that bag off your head, FAU fan. Your team won a game! (ZUMAPRESS.com)
• State of the states tenuous confederations: With one sort-of week of the regular season remaining, three of the conferences covered in this space already have champions all but coronated. Four Mountain West games are slated for Week 14, including contests featuring TCU and Boise State, but none will impact the top of the conference standings — the Horned Frogs lead the pack with a 6-0 league record and can’t lose the lead at this point. The Sun Belt still has three games to play, with Arkansas State also holding a perfect conference record and insurmountable advantage. (Trailing the Red Wolves, improbably, is … Western Kentucky?) Over to the WAC: Four games to go, with none featuring conference leader Louisiana Tech, untouchable at 6-1. Among the independents, Air Force has already secured the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy with wins over Army and Navy, who’ll meet in Washington on December 10 to slug it out for second place.
To the still-competitive larger leagues: Ohio and Northern Illinois will compete Friday night for MAC supremacy at Ford Field, while Houston and Southern Miss will play Saturday in Houston for the Conference USA title.
• Bowltyme! As mentioned yesterday, five non-AQ programs have already accepted postseason bids. In chronological order:
Houston’s generation engine dispatched the most formidable regular-season opponent with relative ease, completing 33-of-46 pass attempts for 457 yards and five touchdowns. Just Case Keenum, doin’ Case Keenum things. The latest record he helped set this week was one for the program: It’s the school’s first-ever 12-0 season and ties its longest-ever win streak.
A 9 p.m. kickoff, 914 yards, 41 first downs and 12 turnovers? Welcome to the WAC. (Damon Tarver/CSM)
The week in lesser FBS luminaries:
• San Jose State 28, Hawaii 27: From Monday: “Most WAC game in recorded human history. A 9:00 p.m. ET start time. And 914 yards of total offense. And 41 first downs. And six sacks. And six punts. And 12 turnovers.” To that, let’s add a literal last-minute winning touchdown pass and the fact that San Jose State, a team that hadn’t recorded back-to-back wins in three years, has now won three of its last four outings. This is why we watch the WAC ball.
• Boise State 63, Colorado State 13: Boise State’s first conference win as a Mountain West team was a resounding one, albeit a foregone conclusion. This week we’ll drop the Broncos to second billing, so expected was this demolition of the Rams. But Boise’s doing everything correctly to maintain course for a BCS bowl. Four of its five highest-quality opponents were dispatched within the first four weeks of play, and the remaining foe, TCU, isn’t looking like it’ll present the marquee challenge non-AQ proponents were looking for. Survive and advance is never good enough for a non-AQ team; all wins must be statement wins. And with a margin of victory of 266-87 after six games, so far the gambit is paying off: BSU ranks No. 5 in the first released set of BCS standings.
• Arkansas State 34, FIU 16: A brief blurb on last night’s thoroughly disappointing debut of Sun Belt Tuesday is available here.
• Comings and goings in the annals of fantastic fake hotel check-in names: While FIU and Arkansas State were introducing a national television audience to such glowing monikers as Wayne Times, Jose Cheeseborough and Sirgregory Thornton, fellow undercover spy Bob Toledo was likely packing up his desk in the Tulane football offices. The Green Wave head coach’s resignation was announced Tuesday, just days before homecoming. His only crime was the apparently unpardonable sin of not being able to win at Tulane, which nobody has done since 2002. Toledo will presumptively take some time off to hunt down rings of international jewel thieves before settling into his next obvious football gig somewhere in the MAC.
Patron saint of internet dapperness Howard Schnellenberger tweeted this first look at the Florida Atlantic Owls’ new locker room.
Don’t panic, FAU faithful. It looks austere, but this is clearly the part of the new facility where they’ll be keeping the actual owls. You ever try to get those pellets out of industrial carpet?
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