Light assorted reading to speed you through your Friday:
• The Fighting Okra is NOT a medical professional. Look, as long as Delta State keeps making these videos, we’ll keep posting them, because SINISTER PLUSH OKRA:
Danny O'Brien is trading in his Maryland flag-themed apparel for Wisconsin's ever-so-slightly more traditional look. (US PRESSWIRE)
We’re hitting the road for our first swing through spring camps, so you’re getting your roundup reading today. Normal posting will resume Monday.
• Wisconsin wins Whimsy Wednesday! Wowsers! Bret Bielema (the alliteration hits just keep on coming) has landed high-profile transfer fish and Maryland refugee Danny O’Brien, and will attempt to stage an encore presentation of 2011′s smash hit, “Anything Your ACC Quarterback Can Do, He Can Do Better Here,” starring Russell Wilson. (It’s a working title.) Our sincere best wishes to O’Brien, whom we hope informed Randy Edsall of his decision by leaving a terse answering machine message explaining that Wisconsin is his “dream school.”
• This blurb also not sponsored by Allstate. No Allstate Police Blotter Item of the Week this week thanks to a strange lull in college football-adjacent crime, but we can’t let the week pass without recognizing the efforts of Boston College defensive lineman Jaryd Rudolph, who got himself busted making a sex tape of a teammate and a female BC student. It was an audio-only sex tape, making it the “losing to one-win Maryland” of erotica. (Sorry, Terps. Not your day. Here, have a metaphor.)
• Hail to the Sun Belt, sure is a fun belt, Ra! Ra! Ra! Georgia State to the Sun Belt one scant season after joining the CAA? Sure, why not? This is the age of San Diego State to the Big East, and nothing is sacred or sensical.
Tevin Washington (13) ran for 176 yards and broke the two longest runs of his Ga. Tech career. (Getty)
Snap Judgments from the Week 9 late shift. For swing shift Snaps, click here. For early shift Snaps, click here. For Stewart Mandel’s take on Joe Paterno’s historic 409th win, click here. For a recap of the Top 25 action, click here. And for highlights from SI.com, click here.
• Georgia Tech 31, No. 6 Clemson 17: You can spell “Global Thermonuclear War” without “BCS,” but why would you want to? In Week 9, the best winning move was not to play. Time to amend our list of seven undefeateds from earlier this afternoon. Still standing: LSU, Alabama and Boise, all on well-timed byes, Oklahoma State and Houston, beneficiaries of laughably lopsided blowouts and Stanford, which survived in a three-overtime nailbiter. Falling in the evening flight: The second team of Tigers in the BCS top five.
After two weeks of lackluster performances in the Jackets’ back-to-back losses to Miami and UVA, Tevin Washington has his hive legs back. And fear not: Tech largely eschewed that unseemly passing game that unnerved so many longtime viewers early in the season. Washington threw only in times of dire necessity, completing four of nine attempts for 60 yards and an interception. On the ground, he rolled up 176 rushing yards in solo attempts, including a breakaway dash of 56 yards, a personal best. The Tigers put up gaudy numbers of their own, with Tajh Boyd recording 294 aerial yards and Sammy Watkins 153, but four turnovers wasted considerable offensive gas.
There are readily imaginable scenarios in which every remaining undefeated team can lose, of course. But for this week, for the next few days of rewritten narrative, it’s safe to presume there will be no ACC representative in the national title game. [BOX | RECAP] Read More…
“University of South Carolina senior quarterback Stephen Garcia has been dismissed from the football team, it was announced today.”
The official release announcing the departure of college football’s most colorful quarterback does not do him justice, hence the feelings collage above. After Garcia’s fifth suspension and subsequent reinstatement, and just days after his umpteenth benching, it appears as though this dismissal might actually take.
South Carolina is certainly not alone in facing upheaval at quarterback this season. Of the 12 programs that make up college football’s most dominant conference of the past five years, only two (Arkansas and Georgia) have cruised through the summer and early fall of 2011 without suspension, benching, or other forms of controversy at the position.
But Garcia … oh, Garcia is special. At my previous outlet, we’d been following his career with interest since this angelic mugshot turned up in 2007. That fluffy hair! Those spectacularly ill-advised scrambles! The velvet blazer, the sword collection, the archery lessons! The fact that he had two brothers play for Harvard and landed in Columbia, South Carolina. The relationship with his head coach that could fuel a weekday telenovela. The public excoriations for being, reduced to his simplest form, a college athlete fond of beer. The readily expressed sentiment that yeah, maybe five suspensions were enough, but he just loved his teammates and they loved him, man.
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