Friday, January 5

The 50 Most Loathsome People in College Football: 40-31.

It's Friday, and the 50 Most Loathsome People in College Football keeps rolling on. If this is your final destination, we thank you for choosing Hey Jenny Slater for your blogging needs; if you are connecting to another installment, a gate attendant will be along tomorrow with Nos. 30-21. Thanks and have a great day.

Previously: 50-41.

40. Jimmy Clausen
Charges:
Raised the bar for callow rookie obnoxiousness before he'd played a single game at the college level. Orchestrated one of the most ridiculously overblown recruit signings in recent memory -- stepped out of a Hummer stretch limo at the College Football Hall of Fame to make the televised announcement he was signing with Notre Dame. Acted like a complete douchebag in the California state high-school championship game. Also has stupid hair.
Exhibit A: We're supposed to be going ga-ga over someone whose "bloodline" (older brothers Casey and Rick) includes 0 national titles, 0 conference titles, and a 4-8 record against their division arch-rivals. Whoopee.
Sentence: Serving as a tackling dummy for the Atlanta Falcons.

39. BuLLdawg
Charges:
Whatever his intentions, BuLLdawg is the CFB equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons fanatic, a poster boy for every overzealous, hypercaffeinated fan who has ever infarcted a message board or comments thread with staggeringly lengthy posts that attempt to win arguments through attrition, pounding dissenters into submission with an avalanche of repetitive, irrelevant, often misleading facts. Rather than bringing glory upon their respective teams, they bring shame upon themselves by revealing unequivocally to the world that, no, in fact, they don't have anything better to do than feverishly search the Internets for proof that Coach X's record is better than Coach Y's in nationally televised games on artificial turf on the second Saturday in October.
Exhibit A: This. Just for good measure, he posted it twice.
Sentence: Banned from attending Georgia football games for the next 50 years; instead, he must spend those Saturdays in a two-man chain gang with Michael Lasseter, scrubbing the latrines of AirTran jets with toothbrushes.

38. Rhett Bomar
Charges:
Fucked over his team, the 2006 Oklahoma Sooners, thinking he could get by with the oldest sleazy-booster trick in the book -- taking paychecks for work he wasn't actually doing -- but apparently didn't get the memo that that steez has been the next best thing to a neon sign reading "NCAA INFRACTIONS PRACTICED HERE" ever since SMU got the death penalty two decades ago. Even before his "employment" at an unscrupulous car dealer, he was by all accounts a cocky, thoroughly unlikable asscrack in the manner of Ryan Leaf, whom of course we all miss terribly.
Exhibit A: Had already gotten caught drinking beer underage -- not at home or at a private party, but at a frickin' New Orleans Hornets game.
Sentence: Serving as the human hemorrhoid cushion for Kim Jong-Il.

37. John Heisman
Charges:
Picture the '83 Nebraska Cornhuskers playing a schedule consisting of the entire Sun Belt Conference, Duke, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt, and you've got the M.O. for Heisman, who built his near-messianic status on the backs of opponents so humiliatingly overmatched even Kansas State would be embarrassed to book them. His one national-title season came at Georgia Tech in 1917, a year many other schools had suspended their programs entirely so that their boys could fight in World War I, and included tilts against such titans of the gridiron as Furman, Washington & Lee, and some entity called Carlisle. Even the award named after him is overrated.
Exhibit A: In retaliation for Cumberland College beating Georgia Tech at baseball in 1915, Heisman threw a tantrum to get Cumberland on the sked in football the following year, despite the fact that Cumberland had discontinued its football program. Proceeded to run up a 222-0 score, the biggest blowout in football history, on a Cumberland team cobbled together from frat boys and random students.
Sentence: Well, the dude's dead, so we'll just have to change his eponymous award from the iconic stiff-arm pose to a statue of Matt Leinart getting blown by Paris Hilton.

36. John Swofford
Charges:
Set into motion a truly craven domino line of team-bogarting that resulted in Utah State, New Mexico State, and Idaho actually being picked up by a desperate conference. Ruthlessly sodomized the Big East in his quest to turn the ACC into a "superconference" and didn't even call them the next day. Sees nothing wrong with having divisions called "Atlantic" and "Coastal."
Exhibit A: Diehard FSU and Clemson fans now forced to trek a thousand miles up fucking I-95 every two years to spend a weekend in sunny, palm-tree-lined Boston.
Sentence: Forced to watch the Big East streak by his own conference in terms of respectability as Florida State and Miami degenerate into six-loss insignificance. Oh, wait.

35. Colin Cowherd
Charges:
Even once you get beyond the devil-may-care plagiarism, you've still got a radio "personality" whose self-satisfaction is as audible as his contempt for his listeners. If he were a stand-up comedian, he'd be the only one in the club laughing at his own jokes, and would then go on blistering diatribes excoriating the audience for not laughing along with him. Types e-mails in all caps and uses ellipses instead of periods and actual sentence breaks, the mark of a true knob.
Exhibit A: WE WERE SENT IT....WE HAD NO IDEA..BUT THE INCESSANT WHINING...MEANS I WON'T GIVE YOU CREDIT NOW..GET OVER IT
Sentence: "Waterboarded" in Dan Patrick's toilet.

34. John Mackovic
Charges:
The man who apparently read The Great Santini thinking it was a how-to book is no longer coaching, but he is writing a CFB column for some newspaper in Southern California, which is kind of like Ike Turner guest-hosting the Dr. Phil show. "Motivational tactics" evidently inspired by the Tontons Macoutes have alienated virtually every player, fan, assistant, or sportswriter he's ever come across. Peter Principled his way into job after high-profile job despite having only nine winning seasons in 21 years as a head coach.
Exhibit A: Inspired a player mutiny against him at Arizona in 2002; got fired the following year before the season was even half-over.
Sentence: Serving as Mike Tyson's life coach.

33. Beck Campbell and the parents of Springdale High
Charges:
Richly inhabited the stereotype of every overbearing, micromanaging Little League parent by trying to tell Arkansas head coach Houston Nutt how to do his job -- at a time when the Razorbacks were 10-3 and nationally ranked in the top 15. Happily sent their kids off to Fayetteville but then bitched when the coaching staff wasn't giving their kids exactly as many touches as they wanted.
Exhibit A: " 'Our boys are used to catching 60 passes a year,' [Ben] Cleveland told the Democrat Gazette. 'They want to go to a college where they get the same opportunity. Whether they're good enough to do that or not is a whole different question.' "
Sentence: Remanded to a halfway house under the supervision of Wanda "Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom" Holloway.

32. Heismanpundit
Charges:
Football snobbery -- and West Coast football snobbery at that -- on a staggering scale. Unflagging adherence to an ill-defined notion of "scheme," as evidenced by his fawning over the offensively innovative "Gang of Six" teams, criteria for which is subject to change at any given moment and is pretty much whatever he says it is, i.e. "Teams I like are good." His crusade to counter perceived "East Coast bias" is noble to a point, but only ends up going way too far in the other direction with his eye-rolling dismissiveness of the concept of "defense" and subtle jabs at the Southern football fans he views as grunting, unenlightened troglodytes. An overall level of pretentiousness that would offend George Will.
Exhibit A: September 3, 2005: "The scenario we envision: Boise jumps out quick, forcing UGA out of its offensive game plan before it has a chance to settle in. The game turns into an aerial contest that the Bulldogs can't keep up with. Thus, Georgia's significant talent edge is neutralized and Boise goes on to win comfortably despite a late Bulldog surge. By this time tomorrow, we'll have a verdict on whether Boise's scheme was indeed enough to overcome UGA's talent." The next day: "In the end, I was wrong for the right reasons in regards to the Boise-UGA game, while others were right for the wrong reasons. In the long run, I prefer the former to the latter."
Sentence: A 50-year term cleaning stadium grease traps and draining RV honey tanks at the Iron Bowl.

31. Wayne Huizenga
Charges:
Sure, if you live in the Miami area then you're already well acquainted with Cap'n Wayne's dicking around with the Dolphins and dismantling the World-Series-winning '97 Marlins team. But how has he worked his unique brand of douchebaggery into college football? Simple: By founding the Blockbuster Bowl, a postseason bowl game created with the express purpose of marketing Huizenga's Blockbuster Video company. It was the first bowl that went beyond corporate sponsorship for an existing bowl and went straight to naked corporate pimping, no "Sugar," "Orange," or anything else. This event gave way to a tsunami of embarrassingly named, and in most cases just plain embarrassing, bowl games: Blockbuster Bowl begat Carquest Bowl, Carquest Bowl begat MicronPC.com Bowl, and from there we went to the MPC Computers Bowl and the Papajohns.com Bowl and who the hell knows what next. Thanks to Huizenga's pioneer spirit, fans of mediocre teams who have nothing more to look forward to than a postseason matchup with the #6 team from somebody else's shitty conference now have even less to look forward to, unless the Meineke Car Care Bowl is something that really blows your skirt up.
Exhibit A: With a new bowl popping up every time some Fortune 500 company gets a wild hair up its ass, there are now 32 bowl games for 119 D-IA teams, meaning that any given team has a better than 50-percent chance (53.8-percent, actually) of going to a bowl. This year those bowls included the Emerald (Nuts) Bowl, the Insight Bowl, the Papajohns.com Bowl, the Champs Sports Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Chick-fil-A Bowl, the MPC Computers Bowl, the Outback Bowl, the Capital One Bowl, and the GMAC Bowl. Enjoy.
Sentence: Tied naked to a goalpost at Bronco Stadium for the duration of next year's MPC Computers Bowl in exotic Boise, Idaho.

Tomorrow: #30-#21. You can neither stop it nor hope to contain it.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Carlisle was sort of a football powerhouse back in the day. Just a few years prior to 1917 they had a pretty good player named Jim Thorpe. Plus, there's a large army base there and in wartime days, a lot of college teams were based right near military installations and the players were guys about to head out (like all those "Pre-Flight" teams in the 1940s). Indeed, Georgia Tech's proximity to military installations and the fact that Tech was the site of one of the nation's few navy officers training facilities is the reason why Georgia refuses to acknowledge wins during WWII.

Anonymous said...

You're on a roll. Maybe the revised Heisman Trophy could also have a little pregnant basketball player off to one side?

Anonymous said...

Wow. If I were considered MORE loathsome than Jimmy Clausen, I might have to pull a quick Budd Dwyer on myself.

Jack said...

My personal favorite bit of Cowherd hatred is at FJM.

Anonymous said...

Let's see, Simmons, McConaughey, Ward, Cowherd, and I'm sure several others remaining. Is it fair to just lump them all together and make ESPN the clear cut #1? They've done some good things through the years, and show a lot of great games, but if Orson Swindle did another "Reasons I Hate ESPN" piece like he did after Stuart Scott's poetry piece about a Ravens/Bengals game, the list would probably get upwards of 4 digits long. The Apocalypse has begun, in Bristol, CT.

Going Number Two said...

Jimmy Clausen is way too low.

Anonymous said...

Just tremendous. Better that you torture Huizenga using the products of bowl sponsors.

Jay Allbritton said...

Excellent list. Wayne on there was inspired. I know you must have my beloved Urban Meyer or Steve Spurrier coming up, but this section is pristine.

Cowherd's commercials make me hate him, I can only imagine how terminal his show must be.

Anonymous said...

I love the fact that Little Clausen made this list when he hasn't seen a snap at the college level yet. I am looking forward to seeing big things from him over the next couple of years (in the a-hole sense) so he can move up this list. I am a South Carolina fan, and I was very happy to see him go to ND so we wouldn't have to put up with him and his father (who will be at every practice) for the next 4 years. That man is no Art Manning.

Anonymous said...

Funny stuff...but before you shred Carlisle as a non-entity, you should remember that it is where Jim Thorpe starred. Thorpe was coached at Carlisle by another guy you may have heard of: Pop Warner.

Anonymous said...

Good stuff, Doug!

Anonymous said...

Heismanpundit is all I can't stand about West Coast football 'fans' wrapped up in one neat little package.

"Oh, you play defense? How quaint."

Hey moron, defense wins championships. I'd much rather be pancaking your receivers like Aunt Jemima than playing Run 'N Shoot.

And Clausen's way too low. His hair alone should be in 20s.

Anonymous said...

I hope that limp-wristed "check MY bling, fellas" pose was photoshopped into that Li'l Jimmy jpg. Otherwise, the Domers might wanna be concerned that the action in the showers post-game might overshadow JC's work on the field.

Anonymous said...

hopefully Dennis Franchione is coming up somewhere on this list...

Anonymous said...

how you left out Tommy Bowden, I'll never understand. Maybe you just felt bad for the family as a whole.