BLOG ROUNDTABLE

Mr. Trev Alberts over a Fire Mark May.com has invited us simple country folk with a penchant for pet rocks to join their fancy, big city blog round table for a lil’ segment. It’s basically a Q&A for college football bloggers across the internet to fill the gaping void that is the college sports off-season. Feel free to write your own responses in the comments section.

Your Home Field Advantage

Give the more zealous portion of your fan base a religion. What's this cult following? Feel free to give the splitters a derogatory nickname.

Chili: Our fan base right now is not cohesive enough to group them under just one religion. The easiest sect to categorize would be the die-hard Tommy Bowden fans. They are the Heaven’s Gate Cult. Bound by an unwavering devotion to a highly religious, castrated figurehead (as the Tommy haters would say), these Nike-clad devotees hope for a promised miracle. Like Marshall Applewhite, Tommy’s best skill might be recruiting, though their teams tend to waver and fail when the spotlight (Halle-Bop, Virginia Tech) is on them.

Your biggest rival is in town, and College Gameday is coming....to your citaaaaaaay... Create a blatant corporate sellout promotion to appeal to the mass unwashed.

WM: If they’re not already full up with ads for Naturally Fresh, Tom Winkopp, Jackaroo, Coca-Cola, whatever cellular provider is hot, and Bi-Lo, maybe we can sell out a little more. Hmm…. Is nothing sacred?

Chili: I say we have the Kia of Greer (HAY FRIENDS! (it’s a local thing)) Get in the Game challenge. We pull a seat number out of a hat, immediately grab that fan, be they a man, woman, or child, elderly, healthy, or sickly, and suit them up and put them in one offensive or defensive drive for the Tigers. Buried in the fine print on the back of each fan’s ticket will be legalese giving them no option to opt out of our enticing offer (duct tape may be necessary to secure compliance). It should be fascinating to see how the average fan, probably still drunk from pregaming, belly full of chicken wings and coleslaw, reacts when put on the gridiron against some of the best athletes in the country at full game speed. DFIG and Kia of Greer are not liable for any bodily harm or long term effects of concussions incurred as a participant in this promotion.

Add one local delicacy to your stadium's concessions. Post-tax pricing is optional.

If we could add one local delicacy it would be wings courtesy of the legendary Esso Club. But we couldn’t just stop at the wings, you have to also pile on the fried pickles, fried mushrooms, and $1 PBRs that make an afternoon on the Esso porch one of life’s great leisure experiences not involving two chicks at the same time, dude.

WM: It's in my highest opinion that the Esso provides Tiger Town with some of the best wings. Maybe even in all of the outer lying areas as well. It's always been my belief that stadiums should just nut up and serve hot wings at sporting events to the people in the bleacher seats.

With an unlimited AD budget, add or subtract one thing to your school's game day experience that has nothing to do with football.

WM: One word: more night games. Which... isn't really one word I guess. But we would make would be to make every game a night game. Death Valley at night is a hundred times better than it is for some awful, sweltering 1 PM game or even the quaint 3:30 kickoff. Call me old fashioned, but I just don't like sweating out our morning buzz during a noon game while baking in the sun with no way of perpetuating my inebriation. Also, night games would potentially cut down on the amount of crying babies and kids. I know all you family folks will think less of me for saying that, but please, hear me out.

Chili: Yeah, Willy Mac has a real sore spot for crying children. True story, at the Georgia game in 2003 there was a crying baby two rows back from us. Willy Mac had a couple or eighteen beers in him and was so angered by the sobbing infant that his face was as red as the Georgia logo. “I’ma get dat baby!” he shouts as he grabs the infant by the soft spot and drop kicks it down the bleachers. True story.

As far as new additions to gameday go, anything is better than that fucking awful Zombie Nation garbage. Way to rip off the electric game day atmosphere of… Georgia Tech. We’ve been over the tragedy that is Zombie Nation plenty of times over the past year but I’ll just say I’m more embarrassed that we added that to our game day experience (and that people liked it) than I am that we lost to South Carolina. Almost.

Let’s see… one gimmick for game day. Well, I’d like to see more utilization of the Hill in the east endzone. Sure it’s the highlight of an iconic stadium entrance, but the minute the team finishes their entrance the carpets are rolled up and fans cover the hill. Let’s cover the hill in orange tarp and have a constant flow of cold beer trickling into a pool of sudsy brew at the base of the goalpost to form the most fantastically drunk slip n slide ever (all due respeck to Trick Daddy).

Like this, only oranger and blurrier and drunker...er.

General NCAA questions

Coin a hilariously unrealistic stereotype that you would like to "make stick" for this upcoming season.

Chili: Chan Gailey compulsively knits AIDS quilts. Bobby Bowden won’t set foot in a room unless it contains a lit fireplace and framed 8x10 of Burt Reynolds. Every time Tom O’Brien opens a new bar of Irish Spring he has to cut a chunk out of it with his Old Timer and snort deep the odor of Ireland. Jim Grobe is an expert on ancient Roman culinary arts and recently built a vomitorium onto his home with his ACC Championship money. Steve Spurrier only enjoys golf because of the supple young caddies.

"You're safe here, Bobby."

Redesign your conference or independent schedule with reckless abandon. Be prepared to include compensation for jilted schools and conferences in your explanation.

Chili: Instead of redesigning the ACC (hey, I like it how it is), I’m simply going to retool our 07 schedule. Our in-conference schedule for 07 includes FSU, NCSU, GT, VT, Maryland, Duke, Wake, and BC. The only game I’d change would be the game at Maryland. I don’t necessarily hate Maryland; I just don’t care about them. Their fans are degenerates, their football atmosphere is a joke, and hell they’d probably beat us. I’d rather play Miami. Our home and home series with them a couple years ago produced two legendary games and I think it’s a match up that could become a good second tier rivalry. It’d be easy to exchange Maryland for Miami. For one, we switch one of the worst college football environments and worst, most crime ridden college towns with another. We’re switching burners and vials of crack for roller blades, jorts, and uncut Bolivian. Plus it’d be easy to buy off Maryland with about a dozen hot dogs from Skins sent to Fridge’s office. HAHA FAT JOKE ROFFLE.

Our nonconference schedule includes Louisiana Monroe, Furman, Central Michigan, and the Gamecocks. We’ve gotta play USC, and Furman is a traditional opponent, so keep both of those. I’m more a proponent of a tough out of conference schedule than others who support loading up with cupcakes, so I say we scrap Louisiana-Monroe and Western Michigan and find tougher opponents. Does this mean wiping away two guaranteed wins? Maybe, but I’d rather face tougher teams and get more national exposure. I would like to see us play Georgia to keep that traditional (albeit lopsided) rivalry going. As a concession, we deliver to Louisiana-Monroe…. tickets to watch the Clemson-Georgia game. Fair enough. Replace Central Michigan with regular ol’ Michigan. I don’t know why, but I've really wanted to play the Wolverines more than other high profile out of conference teams. I’d like to play these guys in a home-and-home. I think the Big House would be a great road trip, plus I hear Michigan girls are sluts. As a concession, we give Central Michigan a monkey skull full of circa 1993 Aladdin’s Castle tokens.

Legal tender in Malaysia.

WM: The first thing I would do is crap in my undies. After I’ve finished cleaning myself, I’d get straight to the drawing board. What I’ve come up with is the South Eastern Atlantic Conference, or simply, the SEAC. It would be the end all be all of conferences and by far the toughest to play in. It would be solely dedicated to football and all other sports would be thrown out the window. My new brainchild would label the following in its ranks : Clemson, Sakerlina, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Florida State, Florida, Auburn, LSU, Alabama, Arkansas, Furman, and Vanderbilt (the last two solely for academic purposes, even though they’ll put up a good fight). They’d be split into SEAC Atlantic Division (Clemson, Sakerlina, UGA, GT, FSU, Furman) and the SEAC Gulf Division (Flawda, Auburn, LSU, Bama, Arky, and Vandy).

In this conference, no game is a given. This way, the major out-of-conference (Clemson/USC, UGA/GT, FSU/UF) games will actually count for something and these rivalries will take precedence when conference scheduling comes around so they will still be at the end of the year. Charge damn near a grand per ticket for every game and lets burn this mother on down! (Insert Harold and Kumar clip) The What’s Left Conference will consist of Georgia Southern, Duke, Nowf Kerlyna, NC State, Kentucky, Tennessee, Miami, VT, UVA, Ole Miss, Miss State, and UCF. Why UCF? Cause Boston is entirely too north to be included in any conference consisting of entirely southern teams.

Following up on your new realignment, blow up the BCS and devise a national playoff system, money grabs and missed exams be damned. Using your new fantasy conferences is optional.

WM: I agree with Mr. Trev Alberts here and have to agree with leaving the non-BCS bowls alone. As far as the BCS bowls are concerned, as opposed to a two week extravaganza, make it three weeks. Just another reason to blow one last week of paying attention to the real world and stretch out the college football season a little more. Let all the BCS teams play the first week. Take the winners and let them play the next week and the final week will be Natty week.

Chili: As convoluted as the bowl system may be, there are upsides that should be preserved if switching gears to a playoff system. The communities that host the bowl games and the teams who participate in them benefit financially in a way they might not if a home-field-advantage style playoff system was in place. The solution is to have a 32 team playoff structured similarly to the NCAA basketball tournament. Naturally the BCS level bowls will be the hosts for the semifinals, maybe rotating who hosts the championship game. For the lower round games, old bowl venues will host multiple games over a weekend to attract large enough crowds, similar to the earlier rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament. Obviously this leaves many bowls out in the cold. My solution is to bring back preseason games like the old Kickoff Classic games that could replace some of this lost revenue. One (optional) preseason game, ten regular season games, a conference championship, and up to five playoff games produces 17 games, only 3 or 4 more than most teams play currently, not many more than most high schools, and less than a full playoff run in the NFL.

Elect one public figure to replace NCAA president Myles Brand. Anyone with proper name recognition is eligible.

Russian President Vladimir Putin would be perfect for the job. He has proven to be an iron-fisted leader in the true Russian dictatorial mold who would put the hammer down on the absurd BCS system and those pesky university presidents. Unruly teams would be sent to the gulags (Mountain West, Sun Belt). Who wouldn’t want to see Pooty Poot go all Politkovskaya on reporters who overstep their bounds (I’m looking at you, ESPN). Liberal use of thallium is expected.

That’s our take, discuss it in the comments section.