Welcome to TV Party, a weekly segment where we preview ten of the week’s most exciting match-ups in college football so you know when to grab some beer and ignore the outside world.
This week’s party is high risk, high reward. It’s like going to a club recommended by Weekend Update’s city correspondent Stefan. You will either having one of the best times of your life, or it could be the weirdest, most random and disastrous experience you have ever had.
[Author’s note: it’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted anything college football related and I would like apologize to the .01% of dedicated readers of my weekly posts. Sometimes day jobs get hectic and sometimes you tend to put your hobbies on the shelf for awhile. There. That’s my excuse]
The last Thursday in November is usually reserved for the gluttonous holiday known as Thanksgiving. It’s a time of year where extended families gather around a table and pretend to tolerate each other long enough to clean off their plate of pumpkin pie. But this shortened work week dedicated to mass tryptophan consumption, hectic Black Holiday shopping and drunken diatribes about Miley Cyrus from your crazy uncle would not be complete without the catharsis found in hating the hell out of your rival college’s football team.
The last Saturday in November has become the showcase for the most bitter rivalries in college football. A lot of the storied match-ups are here: Auburn-Alabama, Clemson-South Carolina, Ohio State-Michigan, UCLA-USC. The whole week is a build up of antagonizing opposing fan bases with Thanksgiving serving as a (sometimes) temporary muzzle on baseless accusations about other fan bases and the players that represent the university. Once all of the leftovers have been stored away, it’s an echo chamber of disapproval and disgust. To lose to the other side will mean 365 days of eating the crow you let loose with every jab at the opposing team. To win means laughing endlessly at your opponent with all the joy of a sick child as he burns ants using the rays of a summer sun and a magnifying glass.
Rivalry week taps into the petulant child in every fan base and it would be unjust for us at TwH to not feed into the fervor that this week brings. That’s why I bring you a biased look at each rivalry as well as how I view their fans.
If getting fired after being pulled off the team bus from LAX to campus isn’t the most Hollywood thing ever, please give me another example. This felt like a seedy termination. A scene, not unlike the one in Dog Day Afternoon, where the main character fails, and the repercussions involve a swift execution. Lane Kiffin didn’t even step foot on the USC’s campus before Haden uttered the words that put Kiffin out of job and Ed Orgeron in control of a faltering program. Now, the hunt begins anew for the Trojans, who have slowly started to slide into irrelevancy as the Pac-12 has started to gain notoriety as the second-best conference in America. Gone are the days of USC and everybody else. USC can’t compete with Arizona State, or even downtrodden Washington State. The whole country says “adieu” to Kiffykins, the man responsible for Tennessee fever dreams and the underdevelopment of all-around awesome Marqise Lee.
While your favorite team’s coach may not have been fired as soon as he exited the plane, his days as head man may be numbered. Look at UConn. Now Earl Campbell’s taking shots at Mack Brown? The coaching carousel may be fired up sooner than expected.
Aside from learning that, yes, the world of college football is on fiiiiiireeeeee, what else did we take away from this marvelous weekend?
It was around the second quarter when the hemorrhaging really started picking up. At the half, Miami had scored an unanswered 49 points. Savannah State had seen this before. After all, they are a cat with nine lives that keeps getting paid to get run over by people that don’t like felines. The bleeding only continued into the third quarter with the carnage getting worse as time ticked away. In the end, a mangled, battered, and beaten football team was before the savage masses within Sun Life Stadium. The primal fringe of the Miami fan base stayed to watch as the Tigers received the ten count and then whisked away to seek medical attention. But it was too late – the Hurricanes had done their damage. “Dammit,” a doctor in a nearby Miami hospital screamed. “We’ve lost them!”
The pummeling of Savannah State for the third straight year in a row by an FBS team (they’ve lost by a combined score of 216-7 for three years) was pretty much a microcosm for this weekend, in general. It was also a reminder that programs who schedule teams like Savannah State are pretty much sadists. So, what else did we learn in a week whose one highlight included Michigan almost losing to a perceived lesser opponent? Quite a bit, actually.
In a week that was supposed to be relatively quiet, it seemed like the world was on fire. First, the noon games were punctuated by a win by the Miami Hurricanes who won a turnover battle against an absolutely ugly Florida offense that reached its logical endpoint on a penalty to end the game. Then, the late afternoon games were highlighted by Georgia’s victory over South Carolina where Mark Richt seemed like he was going to be fired if he didn’t win. The prime time spot featured a dominant Michigan team led by Devin Gardner and Jeremy Gallon’s beautiful display of football. Yet Michigan’s time in the light would soon be eclipsed by a Texas defense that proved that the following axiom has not been altered in the slightest: Texas is still Texas. Calls for Mack Brown’s head in Austin were interrupted by a “Fire Kiffin” chant that could be heard alllllll the way from the East Coast due to USC’s terrible, terrible, terrrrrible loss to Washington State. Yes – the world is burning specifically Los Angeles and yes, also Austin. Week 2, you are an unpolished gem.
Tuesdays With Horry 
