And there was Brady Quinn running like a running back/bitch for the sideline trying to get in and there came the defender and hit him, and the drive had been stopped. And it being Notre Dame, their drive stopped, their dream season looking in jeopardy before the season has really begun, a flag was thrown, a personal foul was called, two plays later a touchdown was scored, shortly after that GT had mounted a drive only to have it stopped by a phantom drop via the replay booth, and just as Texas cut the head off one demon, yet another appeared. And it was bad.

***

Up front, I admit it: I have not been a good football writer this year. I have not considered football of late, in part because Santa Fe pre-empts football games regularly, and in part because I'm still recovering from the vicious hate that USC inspired in me last year. When I have hit the point that I find myself rooting for Texas, I am about two moves away from being discovered fat and naked on my bathroom floor, needle in my arm and suffocated by my own chicken-littered vomit.

Yet it is football season, and primal beast that I am, I find myself lured back into its wiley ways. To wit: I watch perhaps two hours of television a week, and I watched 12 hours yesterday  alone, none of it having to do with the one team I do actually care about, Poke State, which scoreboard-wise appeared impressive. For those of you at the game, please email me your impressions of the team's strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the secondary and at QB, and through your first-hand knowledge I will begin to form my own opinions.

***

First up was Texas-North Texas State. This wasn't much of a game, and Colt McCoy (what a Texas name, by the way) looked sharp for a knob. Texas' offensive line is absurdly good, but their ballhandlers are hysterically undisciplined, even though their talent is obvious. Barring an anti-miracle, Texas will not repeat, thankfully (unless it's Notre Dame/USC they're playing in the final game for that repeat), because their freshman quarterback is, well, a freshman. Studious types correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time a freshman led his team to the national title was when fur-coat wearing Sooner Nation legend Jamelle Hollieway did it in 1985.

After growing quite bored with the Texas game (I was knee deep into barbecueing - verb, not noun) I waited for the Tennessee-Cal game. This was funny, because to use the term a second time, the various media bitches who love the Pac-10 were predicting Cal (yeah, that Cal, the Cal aka Berkeley, that scumpond of academia) would waltz into Tennessee and waltz out three hours later with a blowout. Lee Corso, who everyone loves to hate to love to hate and so forth, was pointing out that the spread had switched four points in a week, and 'those guys in Vegas know something,' that knowledge being that only Corso and other media figures, albeit highly entertaining, are fools when it comes to Pac-10 football. The Pac 10 is the worst major conference in the country each year, and even if Washington and Oregon trounce the evenly rated Sooners, the Pac 10 still sucks. USC struggled with Arkansas, for Chrissake, and Arkansas is terrible. It would be too much to hope for that T. Boone bribe SoCal to come to Stillwater, for the score might get out of hand but it would be worth the night in jail to pelt and douse Pete Carroll with hog feces.

Sooner Nation got its jollies at 5 pm MST, when UAB came to town. UAB was better than I expected, but OU - imagine this - has serious issues on offense and defense. Adrian Peterson, Joe Jon Finley and uber-returner Reggie Smith appear to be the only Sooner ballhandlers who seem to actually want to handle the ball. I thought Kevin Wilson called about 80 percent too many passes for Paul Thompson, who does not specifically suck, but should not be relied on to win any games. That role, of course, goes to AD Peterson, who is still the best running back in college football. Watching the game at San Souci with my parents, I was telling my father that I don't think AD even cares about his stats, all he really wants to do is knock the living shit out of people. Recall the college careers of Earl Campbell and Walter Payton, and you can see a glimpse as to what Peterson could be. Rather than running out of bounds when defender and sideline meet, Peterson will always lower his shoulder and knock the ever-living shit out of whomever is getting in his way. This will be an average season for OU - I say three losses - but Peterson, for lovers of the redundant term "smashmouth football," is the Big Kahuna of the game.

On defense, it was Rufus and Rufus only who appeared to be a) in shape b) ready to play, and c) sorely pissed off that his D was getting chumped by a mediocre squad headed by the lesser-known of the Brown boys. Rufus is a relic, I guess, of the Mike Stoops era, when OU's defense could literally win football games when the offense wasn't getting it done. Recall that OU's defense has never recovered from Mike Stoops's exit, and I lay the bulk of OU's sobering losses to K-State, USC, Texas, TCU and others to Stoops's absence.

***

After the OU game was mercifully put to bed, I flipped back and forth between Notre Dame-Georgia Tech and USC-Arkansas, both of which were dull as dirt. Notre Dame would likely have won the game without two atrocious calls, but this being Notre Dame....

[One would think the fucking economy and the War on Terror rests on whether this overrrated Notre Dame squad wins or loses.]

...the officiating began to suck when the game's end was in question. I rarely blame officials for the outcomes of games (last year the only two that come to mind were the Texas Tech win over OU and the astoundingly bad officiating in the Indy-Pittsburgh NFL playoff game) but I thought one anonymous fan summed it up for me: as the ref shouted out his dubious personal foul call against Georgia Tech, someone tagged him with a water bottle. Amen.

USC-Arkansas was so boring it hurt. USC is in that "rebuild not reload" phase right now, but I hope they start going down quickly. The thought of a USC team overachieving this year is too much for me to stand, and the unlikely but possible spectre that USC and Notre Dame could play their annual borefest with both undefeated is far too much for my simple soul to bear.