Columnists had a field day debating the class merits of Dave Christensen’s “flyboy” speech. (AP)

College football’s offseason encompasses late winter and early spring, a fine time in the turning of the seasons and on the calendar to focus on self-reflection and improvement. For today’s meditation, kindly internalize Bryan Curtis’ sportswriting-themed tribute to Ambrose Bierce:

class (n.) — one of the sportswriterly virtues. A “classy” athlete is a deferential one, both to us and to his opponents. A “classless” coach is one who skips the postgame handshake.

columnist (n.) — a writer who produces less copy than a blogger.

commit (n.) — short for “commitment.” On college sports recruiting sites, it means a high school player who has pledged to play for a particular school. A commit who’s wavering about his decision is said to be “soft.”

Is this the real Kliff Kingsbury, or an incredible simulation? (AP)

• Kliff Kingsbury is on Twitter. His hair does not look artfully tousled. He is wearing a suit and tie, and that tie is not a skinny tie. No v-necks are immediately visible. This may in fact be a wax dummy of Kliff Kingsbury pictured here, which would go a long way toward explaining why it hasn’t tweeted yet.

• We are now contractually obligated to call him Bear O’Brien for one calendar year. Penn State’s head coach has been bestowed with the Bear Bryant College Coach of the Year Award, marking him as the most alliterative winner in the award’s history. Congratulations, Bill O’Bryant!

• Coach-hirin’ follies! Florida defensive coordinator Dan Quinn is leaving to rejoin the Seattle Seahawks; Gators assistant D.J. Durkin has been elevated in his place … per our express wishes, Clancy Pendergast will replace Monte Kiffin as USC’s DC … Rutgers will reportedly lose offensive coordinator Dave Brock to Delaware … Rick Smith, who’s coached defensive backs at South Florida since 2010, will join Ruffin McNeil’s staff at East Carolina as defensive coordinator … now-former Boston College OC Doug Martin (not, so far as we know, nicknamed “Muscle Hamster”) is headed back to New Mexico State in the same capacity.

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Manti Te’o has yet to make any public comments on the Lennay Kekua hoax. (AP)

Monday night, after the release of statements regarding the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, Notre Dame staged a press conference with athletic director Jack Swarbrick intending to fill in some of the gaps. (Te’o will speak for himself, Swarbrick said, but hasn’t yet as of Thursday morning.) We got some answers, but many came away with even more question marks.

You can read a full transcript of the conference here, but the main thrust of Swarbrick’s remarks and answers was to shore up Notre Dame’s contention that l’affaire Lennay Kekua was a hoax from start to finish, with Te’o a victim the whole way through. Swarbrick emphatically assured his audience that he had gotten “accurate” information from Te’o, but when the questions turned to inconsistencies in the various public statements Te’o had made about Kekua, Swarbrick just as emphatically declined to answer:

Q. There were some reports earlier in the year when this was going on that Manti and Kekua had met and spent time together in Hawaii. Did he explain how those came to be? 

Jack Swarbrick: He did, and, again, I’m going to let Manti tell the story because he deserves that right. What I will tell you, this was exclusively an online relationship.

And the creepiest revelation: Swarbrick said Te’o was tipped off to the scheme when he received a phone call in early December from the girl who’d been playing the part of Kekua, informing him she wasn’t dead, and that at some point, an attempt to “restart the relationship” was made.

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College football fans shall be deprived of Duck pushups for months at a time, but we shall prevail. (AP)

Good morning, dear readers, and welcome: You Are Looking Live at between seven and eight months without proper football.

[a moment's pause to allow for the removal of handkerchiefs from pockets]

For those of you who weren’t with us last offseason, a few notes on what to expect:

• Not a whole lot in the way of recruiting coverage. There are several fine folks who track the movements of 17- and 18-year-olds as though they were endangered species of sharks. We don’t really get invested in these kids until they take the field in August. The SI.com mothership will be the best place to look between now and signing day for information of this kind.
  
• Not a whole lot in the way of NFL draft coverage. Same principle: College football players are ours while they are college football players, and no longer. (One of these days we’ll write a Schrödinger’s Quarterback story about this principle.) You’ll be able to find plenty of draft coverage out front.
• Lots and lots of coverage of any scooter-related arrests that might crop up this spring and summer. Oversized elite athletes riding scooters they are frankly too large for and attempting to evade police: If it’s funny once, it’s funny every time.
• An update to the coaching carousel tracker, sometime today. Several arrivals and departures were lost in the run-up to the title game, and we cannot let this moment pass without marveling that Syracuse may be the only college team to end up losing its head coach to the NFL.
• An endless string of diversions. From now until the final depth charts out of fall camp are released, we’ll have to make our own fun, and there are only so many prop bets one can make regarding whether or not Texas will have named a starting quarterback by the Longhorns’ season opener. (That’s still a thing, right?) If you have a mascot story, blurry Instagram photo, amateur rap video, epic poem featuring Nick Saban’s pompadour, or any other piece of content with a tenuous relationship to college football that you think might help pass the time on the endless march of the offseason, send it this way and we will do our best to share it. The easiest way to contact us is in a comment thread (below) or via Twitter (over there in the right-hand sidebar).

If this all sounds sort of hopeless, just look at the punny joys that originated from a Monday night liveblog typo from an anonymous commenter, with Bama up approximately nineteen touchdowns on Notre Dame and a roomful of bored readers: Read More…

• Duck hunts. Not to be outdone by the LSU-Alabama trailer that dropped earlier this week, Oregon has released its own hype video in honor of the Ducks’ upcoming trip to USC. Among its highlights: The Duck learning to play Oregon Trail and doing the team’s laundry under threat of dysentery from a school employee, the Duck searching for a watch he does not wear, a covert laundry detergent handoff from gold-medal decathalete and Oregon grad Ashton Eaton and the implication that the Duck possesses a commercial driver’s license, which wouldn’t actually surprise anyone. Our one quibble is spelled out neatly by YouTube commenter “ChocolateJesus2K:

Wash uniforms? Oregon doesn’t wear the same thing twice.

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Of course Nick Saban and Vanilla Ice have the same birthday.

— David Wunderlich (@Year2) October 31, 2012

• Well, naturally. Along with John Candy, John Keats, Peter Jackson, Dan Rather, Pope Clement XIV and Willow Smith, Saban is an Oct. 31 baby. But we have to agree that saying “Nick Saban was born on Halloween” is a bit of a misnomer:

Nick Saban wasn’t born on Halloween. Nick Saban was born, and then we invented Halloween to try and deal with it.

— sir broosk (@celebrityhottub) October 31, 2012

Moving right along!

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• It’s always somebody’s hate week, I. Texas A&M’s official compliance Twitter account gets in on a popular anti-LSU meme:

There are no violations in the NCAA database that mention corn dogs. Hot dogs? Yes: 1 secondary & 1 major. But no corn dogs.

— Brad Barnes (@TAMUCompliance) October 16, 2012

Three things:

1. We’ve never seen a corn dog consumed at an LSU tailgate. Are we at the wrong parties?
2. Begun, these GIF wars have.
3. What was the major NCAA violation involving a hot dog??

• It’s always somebody’s hate week, II. It is our sworn duty to report receiving an email from the Auburn athletic department with the following introduction:

Auburn Compliance to Host Seminar on Wednesday
NCAA Compliance Series: Ethical Conduct

Don’t say we never did nothin’ for you, Vandy.

• What’s wrong with ‘the storm clouds are gathering?’ Barking Carnival begins the somber journey into the tempest-tossed land of “Fire Mack Brown.”

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The most dangerous comeback is the one you never see coming, as Boise State taught Oklahoma in 2007. (AP)

I’m reminded today of this blog’s mission statement, as first told by a dismissive commenter two or three jobs ago and set down as gospel in my introduction to SI last summer: “Laugh about things, and stop wishing you won state when you were 30 years younger.”

SI.com wraps its preseason college football coverage every year with the Crystal Ball, an annual tradition that involves assorted staffers gathering data, weighing stats and instincts, and making handfuls of grandiose predictions that will all look extremely silly in just a few short weeks. Nowhere is this highlighted more potently than in last year’s edition. Remember that time three of us, including yours truly, tabbed LSU as the flop team of 2011? Wasn’t that neat?

The 2012 Crystal Ball features seven national championship picks shared between Alabama, LSU and USC, lots of preseason love for Utah and West Virginia, growing confidence in Louisiana Tech as a BCS buster and assorted prophecies of doom for Boston College. Putting this thing together is a week-long slog for writers and tech types alike, and it’s going to look at least partly goofy by as early as Saturday night. So why bother?

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62% of the country is dead wrong on the most important question facing the nation this week. twitter.com/11W/status/240…

— Eleven Warriors (@11W) August 29, 2012

• PEOPLE. WE ARE A DAY AWAY. GET IT TOGETHER. In other wrongity-wrong map news, please enjoy playing “how many mistakes are in this picture” with this map of college football rooting interests (via @RedditCFB).

• And now, the weather. To yesterday’s list of teams affected by Hurricane Isaac, you may now add Louisiana Tech, which has moved its Thursday opener with Texas A&M to Oct. 13, and South Alabama, whose all-n00b debut versus UTSA will shift from Thursday to Saturday.

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Fox Sports South’s The NEW College Football Show (or the NEW TO YOU College Football Show if you’re like us and didn’t get the channel last year) begins its second season at the end of this month, and in order to keep the NEWness all NEW and stuff, has cut a fresh set of promos. Here’s the one we can’t stop watching, starring Tommy Bowden and a chalkboard that tags along behind him like a wooden paddle-duck toy:

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