Mike the Tiger and a tiger shrimp: separated at birth? (Jennifer Abelson)

Come for the use of “menacing tiger shrimp” in a headline, stay for an LSU football allegory of startling clarity:

As summer approaches, fear and intrigue is building in south Louisiana over the latest menace prowling the waters of the Gulf of Mexico: the tiger shrimp. [...] The worry is that even more will be seen in the coming months, as last year’s stock may have exponentially reproduced. The shrimp, which have black and white stripes across their backs and tails similar to their jungle namesake, eat more and grow more quickly than native Gulf shrimp, prompting concerns they will out-compete the native shrimp for resources.

[Via @thecajunboy.]

We decided just a couple short weeks ago, when the college football playoff location debate was really gaining traction, that the logical eventual destination for all postseason action was Qatar. With a proven commitment to hosting sports tournaments and dedication to fighting nature itself in order to stage survivable events, it was an easy conclusion at which to arrive.

And already, a challenger has emerged. Just a quick hop across the Persian Gulf or an eight-hour drive along its coast will take you, the jet-setting sports fan, to Dubai, where we’re sure you’ll agree there’s already a great cultural base for the kind of pageantry necessitated by our beautiful game:

Only in Dubai do people drive around with Tigers riding shot gun. twitter.com/StantonWarrior…

— StantonWarriors (@StantonWarriors) May 13, 2012

A modest artist’s rendition of the scene at the 2025 national championship game, after the jump: Read More…

Unlike baseball, college football is actually supposed to have an opening weekend. (REUTERS)

All this chirping about based ball’s Opening “Day” just makes us pine for five months from now, when college football will accomplish in five days what baseball crams into nine or so. Is it too early to start making out our Week 1 mayhem wish list? Probably!

Thursday, August 30

• South Carolina @ Vanderbilt. James Franklin taunts Jadeveon Clowney after the Commodores pull off a late go-ahead touchdown, and the ensuing fracas manages to convince SEC officials to suspend the South Carolina stalwart. Seeking revenge, Steve Spurrier departs Nashville with five or six of Franklin’s scholarship quarterbacks, to feather his depth-chart-fiddlin’ nest back in Columbia. No one is truly satisfied, but no lessons are learned.

• Minnesota @ UNLV. TCF Bank revokes Golden Gophers’ stadium sponsorship after team refuses to pay $5,000 in ATM fees following return from Vegas.

• UCF @ Akron. Zips win, and Terry Bowden gets free jousting privileges at all Medieval Times locations for life.

• UMass @ UConn. In their FBS debut, the Minutemen rout the Huskies, relegating Connecticut to the MAC by a previously unnoticed realignment provision. All involved parties agree this is probably in everyone’s best interest.

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Assorted bits of light reading to speed you through your Friday.

• Fear the Fruit. Delta State’s “Fear the Okra” campaign continues to delight and horrify in equal measure.

• Welcome to the College Football Hall of Fame Tent, sponsored by Coca-Cola. We prefer to think this is just a power play enacted as sort of a protest movement against those who would block the enshrinement of Stephen Garcia’s hair.

• What, no Sam Bradford? Starting Monday, you can vote for RGIII’s EA Sports sidekick.

• All in the graven idol game. Auburn’s Heis-men statues will be unveiled at the Tigers’ spring game. We’re holding out for a statue of Pat Dye.

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And now, a raccoon in an LSU jersey watching the BCS title game. (We’re checking on his eligibility at quarterback now.) Isn’t your day a little better?

Photo source: WDSU, via @38Godfrey.

Larry Coker's UTSA Roadrunners will play their first FBS season when they join the WAC in 2012.
(Icon SMI)

The 2012 WAC football schedule has been released, putting to rest this spring’s burning question: Which teams are in the WAC this year? The conference has kindly answered this for us with a handy press release and chart. Highlights for the year ahead:

• Defending conference champ Louisiana Tech draws the hottest Thursday night slot of the year, beginning the season on opening day (that’s August 30, for you sickos setting countdown clocks right this minute). The Bulldogs have to do it in Shreveport against Texas A&M, but it’s a jewel of a matchup stacked against the likes of Idaho-Eastern Washington, New Mexico State-Sacramento State and Utah State-Southern Utah. It’s also one in which you shouldn’t necessarily write off the Bulldogs as a competitive opponent: Sonny Dykes’ brand of offense should be coming into its own this season, and Tech played new Aggies coach Kevin Sumlin’s Houston Cougars to a one-point loss last season.

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Obie gets to take off the suit (probably), but staging December and January games can be a full-time gig. (AP)

We joked Monday about how we would’ve loved to work for the Fiesta Bowl during the John Junker heyday, because who doesn’t enjoy attending $30,000 birthday parties? But you, gentle readers, may be as surprised to learn that bowl employees work more than four days a year as our own mother was to learn that we work more than four months. While recuperating from the crush of bowl season, Campus Union spoke with bowl worker bees and executive types busy putting bows on their 2011 games while laying the groundwork for the 2012 postseason. Here’s what we learned.

Months of moving parts

Every postseason college football contests maintains a year-round calendar of sorts, though we were surprised on both ends of the spectrum by just how many and how few year-round employees are retained by certain games. (For comparison’s sake: The Outback Bowl employs five year-round staffers; the Music City Bowl has nine, most of whom double up with duties to the Nashville Sports Council; and the Orange Bowl has 30, with plans to bring on an additional nine full-time positions this year to accommodate preparations for hosting the BCS title game.) The timeline varies wildly based on available personnel, resources, the organization’s presence in the community and how the game approaches its own team selection process. The first scout I personally laid eyes on last season was a very nice lady representing the Champs Sports Bowl in Morgantown in Week 3 during LSU-West Virginia. Both squads, of course, would go on to win their conferences and play in BCS bowls, but that early in the season, bowl scouts share the same disadvantage as the rest of us: All they have to go on is preseason rankings and their own prognostications.

Still, for a game like the Chick-fil-A Bowl, which draws from two of the more voluminous conferences, scouting all potentially eligible teams in person in a single season is a daunting task. Volunteer CFA scouts go out in Week 1 to begin assessing various SEC and ACC squads, though the bowl’s selection committee does not convene until November.

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Friend of the program and LSU gadabout @thecajunboy tweeted this photo Friday night from a Mardi Gras parade:

Outstanding effort by Krewe d’Etat. No matter the target, we always admire trolling that shows real craftsmanship. Don’t miss the revoked Bobby Hebert press pass at the bottom right.

Marshall: Determined not to let West Virginia hog the headlines. (US PRESSWIRE)

Crucial reading on topics carefully curated to contain only stories of the utmost importance to speed you through your Friday afternoon. This is our love for you.

• News you can use. CBS is reporting that West Virginia and the Big East have reached a settlement agreement, and Boise State could be leaping in early to take WVU’s place. But of far greater urgency in the Mountain State is this tidbit out of Marshall:

A West Virginia college student is suing a fraternity for negligence, claiming he fell off a deck because a bottle rocket went off in another student’s rectum.
[...]
“Instead of launching, the bottle rocket blew up in the defendant’s rectum, and this startled the plaintiff and caused him to jump back,” and fall off the deck, the lawsuit contends.

• A poet can survive everything but a misprint. We have friends who are Actual Reporters who occasionally lament that they cannot, in their professional lives, take overt swings in print at players and coaches who displease them. To them, we say: Do not abandon hope. Seen a lot of mannered comedies? Restoration-era scribes knew better than just about anybody how to slice an offending party to ribbons with pure politesse. Some of the best stone-cold bitchery we’ve ever seen in ink has come from the Associated Press. It’s more of a structured art form, like composing a sonnet, but the constraints give the finished product an elegant beauty. Today’s lesson, from ESPN.com news services:

LSU quarterback Jordan Jefferson says he believes the major reason the Tigers suffered the first shutout in BCS title game history, a 21-0 rout to Alabama on Jan. 9, was because of the offensive game plan. Jefferson, on the same day he pleaded not guilty to a simple-battery charge stemming from an Aug. 26 arrest, second-guessed the offensive play calls in an interview with Atlanta radio station WCNN.

• And speaking of poetry. Is Butch Davis taking an advisory role with Tampa Bay rather than the DC job so he can remain on UNC’s payroll? Doug Farrar tweeted that Davis “has the ethical compass God gave a wolverine,” which we find difficult to argue. What animal would you associate with Davis, gentle readers?

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Wisconsin's Bret Bielema and LSU's Les Miles aired their Signing Day grievances with the media. (Getty)

We have been (professionally and brahsomely) enamored of Bret Bielema and Les Miles since 2006 and 2007, respectively, and the origins of what we would call these man-crushes if we possessed the proper plumbing can be traced to very specific events. Bielema captured our attention with that notoriously trollsome stunt he pulled against Penn State, wherein the Badgers ran out the clock on the first half with a newly acquired 10-3 lead by deliberately running offsides on two kickoffs, leaving the Nittany Lions no time with which to operate once a third was executed. (Wisconsin would go on to win, 13-3.) We have never lived in Big Ten country, but we have a casual favorite Big Ten school, and that is it, and that is why.

Miles, for his part, won our bloggy hearts with his now-legendary “Have a GREAT day” press conference, hastily assembled just prior to the ’07 SEC Championship Game to dispel rumors he was lighting out for the Michigan job. He didn’t go. We were sad about that. We had the best gameday sign that year, and also we did not like watching our football team lose to LSU a whole bunch. But we were Les Miles fans from that moment forward.

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