FanHouse GeneChizik

Here's the top lesson from Saturday: If you're a major program, never schedule a game you can lose as your season opener. Period. This should be a rule. Why? Because we fans sit around for nine months waiting for the college football season to return, and then, in one sixty minute game, the entire season is ruined. It's just not worth it. You roll out of bed the next morning and effectively the wildest dreams of the offseason, that your team could run the table and contend for a national championship, is over.

Ask Georgia fans what they feel like this morning. Ask Tennessee fans what the last two years prior to this season felt like losing the first game of the season in California. Losing the opening game counts as two losses, it makes you feel like complete crap. And don't even get me started with how good you feel if you win an opening game. You're a liar. You don't feel good, you just feel relieved. Nothing has changed about your season if you win a big opening game. You just get to dream for one week more. On to the ClayNation Starting 11.

The college football season is fast approaching, with many fall camps set to open this week. Thus it's time to lay aside our interregional bickering and turn our thoughts to, you know, what might actually happen on the field.

The big question in the Big Ten this season is whether Penn State's conference championship was just a momentary burp in the conference's Buckeye-dominated food chain, or whether things might actually be shifting just a bit in the conference. Do the Buckeyes claim the title again? Will the Nittany Lions defend last year's crown and make a run at the national title? Will there be some giant, world-rocking surprise team that comes in and knocks them both out of the BCS?

Make the jump and all shall be revealed.

From the "Totally Freaking Obvious" department: Florida Gators coach Urban Meyer, who has won two national championships in the past three seasons, told golfers at a Gainesville benefit tournament, "I'm not going to Notre Dame. Ever. I'm going to be the coach at Florida for a long time, as long as they want me."

In other news, gravity remains in effect and forks are still useful.

It's come to this, Alabama fans are tailgating outside of a new play based on Bear Bryant's life. Which is an improvement over what they would have been doing if Mike Shula was still coach, lighting themselves on fire with their red and white pom-pons in the parking lot. The play, entitled Bear Country, will be playing at Birmingham's Shakespeare Festival from August 6-20. It's already debuted to rave reviews and sellouts in Montgomery, Ala. In honor of the Bear, I decided that nothing would make more sense than a play about four fans tailgating before Bear's play begins. So here goes.

Characters:

Dale -- A 45-year old owner of an auto-body repair shop who fixes cars while wearing a houndstooth cap. His first child was named Bear, his second was named Bryant. He is now divorced.

First-year Iowa State football coach Paul Rhoads is definitely trying to drum up support for his program anyway he can.

Rhoads has joined a recent trend of football coaches across the country, jumping aboard a tour bus and coming face-to-face with the Cyclones faithful in Iowa. In scenes reminiscent of our nation's latest presidential campaign, Rhoads is shaking hands, kissing babies and making big promises during his city-to-city Tailgate Tour.

Auburn's new coach Gene Chizik has remained under the radar thus far. Fortunately here at the ClayNation column we became aware that each new coach has to stand up and introduce himself to the other SEC coaches at the annual coaches meeting.

Fortunately we were able to capture the entirety of this fabricated introduction. And now we can fabricate it for your enjoyment today. Meet Gene Chizik. Already his introductory speech is being called the Gettysburg Address of Auburn football.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, smart guy. You're thinking this post should be one letter long, and that letter should be 'F.' It's true that the Big Ten did little to advance its reputation during the season, and even less during the postseason. In spite of it all, there are still a few diamonds among the, um, whatever else it is the diamonds are scattered among.

They're scattered among things like 35-3, a 1-6 bowl game record, the fall of the Michigan dynasty, a tragically unwarranted and completely unjustified preseason overrating, several regressions to the mean, and the worst sendoff since the last episode of "Seinfeld."

So we'll go through the league team by team, painful as that is, to build up the successes and try to understand the failures of Big Ten football in 2008. Yes, I used "success" and "Big Ten football" in the same sentence without the connecting phrase "lack of." Deal with it, Buck. Every team gets an overall grade and a quick look at its prognosis for the 2009 season. For you Big Ten fans, I promise you it's not all bad news; for you Big Ten haters, I promise you it's not all good.

Or: Youtube videos as modern-day editorial cartoons.

Somewhere in the four-minute video below of an ample Auburn fan being goaded into eating a ketchup-dipped lizard is a parable for all folks liable to say "War Eagle" every fifteen minutes.

You don't want to eat the lizard at first. Who would want to eat a lizard? But by God you've got to eat something and it's the only thing available that's not disconcertingly colored. So you try. And you can't. And you try again. And other southern college football fans start mocking you. And then you're handed a Mountain Dew -- which would be helpfully labeled "Malzahn" if this was actually an editorial cartoon -- and finally, finally manage to choke it down. You're not exactly proud. But you're on board.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the latest headline at Track 'Em Tigers as of 3:36 January 2nd, 2008:

Chizik Is Quietly Gettting It Done

Mmmm. Ketchup.

(Via Fire Perno Blog.)

While it wasn't exactly the spite hite many were hoping for, we now know for sure that the Ames-to-Auburn pipeline runs in both directions. A week after Gene Chizik carefully wrapped his five wins and moved them to Auburn, Iowa State hired Tommy Tuberville's defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads to replace him.

The move hasn't been officially announced yet, but it has been confirmed by ISU officials. Paul Rhoads will be paid $1.15 million a year over five years with the usual pile of incentives. His hiring comes after rumors of Terry Bowden and Mike Stoops were floating throughout Cycloneland. After hearing about name coaches who might have been interested in becoming the head Clone, you wonder if Rhoads is a sexy enough hire to placate the fans.

Then again, Rhoads just finished his first season at Auburn, where his efforts were wasted behind a kittenish offense. The Tigers finished 15th in scoring defense and 27th in yards allowed but only got a 5-7 record to show for it. Before that, Rhoads was the defensive coordinator at Pitt for eight seasons, a job he got after four seasons coaching Iowa State's linebackers and secondary. But that's not the most important qualification he brings.

Charles Barkley made a pretty big stink recently when he said, publicly, that he believed Gene Chizik's hiring at Auburn was racially motivated. It wasn't shocking to hear that someone disliked Chizik's hiring -- most people at Auburn did as well -- but what really stirred the pot was the race issue. Yesterday, Barkley appeared on PTI, and while he was sorry towards Chizik and his family, he's standing by the issue that the hiring was racially motivated.



To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that I believe the hiring was totally racial -- it's not like the school was really doing the smart thing by chasing Tommy Tuberville out so quickly anyway. However, the athletic department made a poor choice (something, as Ciskie noted, isn't entirely unusual) and veered away from an African-American candidate who might have been better for the job. So, yeah, they're going to hear about it.