WARNING: Clip contains profanity!

From Knocked Up:

Heh.

A very funny movie, that is — especially when you’re expecting. :)

USC’s 16 penalties against Washington last night “was not a school record, it just felt like one,” Scott Wolf points out. Well, yeah — I could have told you that. I remember vividly when USC set its school record for penalties, which was also the Pac-10 record for penalties: 21 of ‘em. It was September 25, 1999, and the #16-ranked Trojans lost to upstart Oregon, 33-30 in the first conference game of my freshman year. The Trojans would ultimately finish the season 6-6, 3-5 in conference, though head coach Paul Hackett would save his job for one more year by beating UCLA for the first time in nine tries (despite committing 16 penalties in that game as well). Only after following up that season with a 5-7 mark in 2000 (after again starting the season in the Top 25, #15 to be exact) did Hackett finally get canned.

I mention the 1999 Oregon game because you might recall me referencing it a week-and-a-half ago in my post “On being an Irish fan,” as an example of me mocking the Trojans back when they were laughably bad:

[I]f I dig through my old photos…I believe I’d find a picture from the fall of 1999 of my dorm-room whiteboard after a USC-Oregon contest in which Paul Hackett’s Trojans set a new Pac-10 record for penalties in a game. My reaction wasn’t to wail and scream and gnash my teeth and wring my hands; I don’t do teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing; it’s not my thing. Instead, my reaction was mockery. I don’t remember exactly what the whiteboard said, but it was something along the lines of congratulating the Trojans for their glorious Pac-10 record.

I found that photo, BTW:

Anyway… back to last night. What to make of USC’s performance? Boi From Troy is happy because pretty much everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and the Trojans still won. This sentiment was expressed last night at the college-football blog 100% Injury Rate:

The only team that can beat USC is USC. And let me tell you why. Quite simply, there is no team in college that can go on the road, commit three turnovers, have a punt blocked, commit 16 penalties for 160+ yards, and lose two great O-linemen - all against a decent opponent - and win. No one. LSU can’t do that, Cal can’t do that, Ohio State can’t do that. USC played one of those games where they literally did everything they could to keep shooting themselves in the foot and still beat a decent Washington team. That is incredibly impressive. Of course, if USC plays like they did on Saturday against LSU, Cal or Ohio St. they’d be crushed. But the fact remains, they did everything wrong on Saturday against Washington and still won. That’s pretty remarkable. USC is the only team that can stop USC. And they almost did it on Saturday.

On the list of things that went wrong, in Boi’s view, was the officiating:

(more…)

Another tropical storm, Melissa, has come and gone this weekend while I’ve been too busy blogging about college football to pay attention to the tropics. Also since my last update, Lorenzo has made landfall and died over Mexico, and Karen has petered out over the Atlantic. Alan Sullivan explains:

This season is just plain strange: it has brought an exceptional number of duds. Evidently long-range forecasters like Dr. Gray were half-right. Preconditions for a real storm-fest were present, but tropical systems have been snuffed by unusual upper winds that I began to notice in May. Only Dean and Felix escaped, running straight west at very low latitude.

Sullivan also thinks the National Hurricane Center is “getting sensitive to blogosphere charges of count-padding.” He notes a line in the discussion from when Karen was designated that he interprets as meaning, effectively, “Hey, guys, we didn’t even want to name this one, so back off.”

The new college football polls are out. In the AP poll, LSU moves ahead of USC by a meaningless margin of 2 points and one first-place vote; the Tigers and Trojans are essentially tied. USC maintains a reasonably comfortable lead in the coaches’ poll. (The new Harris Poll — which, unlike the AP, actually counts for BCS purposes — isn’t out yet.)

Frankly, I agree with the AP on this one. As I said yesterday, I’d have put LSU #1 on my ballot this week, if I had a vote. But it doesn’t really matter anyway. If both teams win out, they’ll play in the title game. It’s only if one or both falters that the race gets interesting.

Apropos of which: Cal is #3, Ohio State #4 and Wisconsin #5 in both polls. South Florida rockets all the way from #18 in both polls to #6 in the AP poll, #9 in the coaches’ poll. Boston College, Kentucky, Florida and Oklahoma make up, in differing orders, the rest of the Top 10.

The Gators clearly have the inside track to the title game among the one-loss teams, IMHO. If they win out, which would entail capturing the SEC crown and probably beating LSU twice in the process, they will certainly be ahead of any other one-loss teams in the pecking order, and possibly ahead of any undefeateds from the Big East as well (though I don’t think it would be justifiable to put them ahead of USF, given the Bulls’ win at Auburn). I imagine there might even be an argument about a one-loss Florida team vs. an undefeated Big Ten or ACC team, given the number of “quality wins” Florida would have to collect along the way (and given how last year turned out).

Anyway, next week’s supposed marquee games will, as it turns out, feature #1/2 LSU vs. #9/7 Florida and #10 Oklahoma vs. #19/16 Texas. Looming larger now are Ohio State-Wisconsin on November 3 (though I suspect the Badgers will lose before then, possibly next week at resurgent Illinois) and USC-Cal on November 10 — the latter a very possible #1 vs. #2 matchup, if both teams win out till then and LSU loses to Florida next week (or to Kentucky, Auburn or Alabama in the weeks that follow).

P.S. Florida’s loss yesterday means one thing for sure: we won’t have to deal with the nightmare scenario of LSU and Florida splitting the season series (i.e., the winner of next week’s game then loses in the SEC title game), each finishing with one loss (to the other), and then arguing over who deserves a spot in the BCS championship game — or even contending that they deserve a championship-game rematch. Now we know for sure that at least one of them will finish with at least two losses. Thank goodness.

And now, for a little change of pace from football… here’s one of my all-time favorite bits of Star Trek dialogue. It’s from the episode “A Matter of Time,” and Captain Picard is trying to convince a time-traveler — who claims to be a historian from the future — to use his foreknowledge to help Picard decide whether to take a risky action that could save, or kill, millions of people on the planet below. Here it is, for your viewing and/or Brendan-mocking pleasure:

“It’s not theoretical, it’s not hypothetical, it’s real!”

Kill the Rally Monkey.

*Signed*: Red Sox Nation

PS: And go Indians–kill the Bronx Bastards!