Bye Week Saturday

While the Tigers took the weekend off to prepare and heal their owwies, I had a free day. Opening the door to an already warm morning, I found an empty 40 ounce bottle of Camo Silver Ice “High Gravity Lager” on the patch of grass outside my house. This sounded like just the sort of exciting new product I would have to make it my business to try.

ESPN GameDay broadcasted from Athens, Georgia, where the #3 Bulldogs would square off in the evening against the #8 Alabama Crimson Tide. I couldn’t in good conscience be upset about GameDay skipping Columbia when there was no game being held there. The show opened with a blatant ripoff of the Hank Williams, Jr. “Are you Ready for some Football?” Monday Night Football number, this one titled, as best as I could ascertain, “Yes, we’re Cominnnnn’…to your Cit-aaaaaaaaaaay!” The song, or, really, hoedown, was delivered via the country-western duo Big & Rich while a cute girl with perky breasts pretended to play the fiddle. The lyrics consisted of reeling off a bunch of college town names, none of them Columbia. I'm no Simon Cowell, but by any prudent standard the performance sucked at a level normally reserved for Milli Vanilli reunions.

The Georgia campus appeared fired up and black. Not the people, who were mostly white, but rather what they wore. This had been designated a “black out” game, meaning that fans were encouraged to wear that color (or absence of) instead of their usual red. Same for the players, except that it wasn't optional for them—otherwise, the Bulldogs might take the field looking like a checker board. In theory, this fashion turn gives 20-year-old football players a mental edge by providing a tangible sign that they’re playing in a big game. And it often works—for the other team. Every time Notre Dame switches from blue to green jerseys, they get ground into a turfy paste.

So Athens, normally awash in red on football Saturdays, looked like a Ingmar Bergan film cast with perky girls. Every student seemed to hold a sign, and the TV crew did an amazing job of showing the non-offensive ones (the ones that use sentences beginning with “E,” “S” “P,” and “N”) and cutting away just when “Lee Corso eats fromunda cheese” floated into view.

Because I’m watching the program, I could safely assume that I’m the target of the commercials, too. That’s the marketing goal, right? So at several station breaks, I was steamed to discover that apparently I enjoy the Olive Garden. By any entertainment standard, Olive Garden commercials underwhelm even more than their food, which is prepared by the renowned chefs who comprise their randomly-selected focus groups. One of today’s efforts features a table of well-groomed, suburban 20-somethings preparing to order. Just prior to the fine dining experience, there’s this exchange:

DOUCHE BAG 1: “So, I’m doing the math on this never ending pasta bowl—42 different sauce and pasta combinations!
DOUCHE BAG 2: “You do the math. I’ll do the alfredo!”

Everyone at the table cracks up at this cutting-edge zinger. Somewhere in America, an Olive Garden brand manager must be smugly smiling, satisfied that in the clever guise of dinner banter, a hard-hitting copy point enumerating the ways Olive Garden can give you diarrhea was unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Back from break, Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso run through their predictions for the day’s contests. Even though the Tigers weren’t suiting up, they garnered several mentions. Fowler pronounced the team “Missour-AH” one minute and “Missour-EE” the next, flip-flopping like a Show-Me State gubernatorial candidate. Chase Daniel hooked up for a phone interview and did his level best to say nothing controversial, inflammatory, or funny, inadvertently providing an audition tape for an Olive Garden commercial if this football thing doesn’t work out.

After about six hours of college football coverage and games, I get off the couch, my ass completely flattened, and take my semblance of exercise for the day—a 2-mile jog around Palmer Square that I've christened the “Hairy Palmer.” Thank you, I’ll be at my laptop all week.

Early that evening, I met my Cornhusker friend Heavy D for a Nebraska-Virginia Tech pub crawl. With the Huskers next on Mizzou’s docket, they merited my rooting interest. I wanted to ensure that they’d show up undefeated, ranked and ripe for a letdown next weekend. As we bellied up to the bar, the Georgia-Alabama game appeared side-by-side with Nebraska kickoff on the flat screens hanging above us. David R. was absent, sequestered in his Man Cave watching the Bulldogs and cursing the fact that his team took the field in black jerseys with plunging red necklines.

In rapid succession, both Nebraska and Georgia fell behind. The music in the bar grew louder in anticipation of the evening crowd and we suddenly felt ravenous. We made our way to Buffalo Wild Wings, proving that either a) I’m a hypocrite, and lame chain restaurant advertising actually works, or b) we wanted chicken wings. Nebraska trailed by 8 at the half but the blackout in Georgia had backfired to the tune of 31-0. Reminding myself to wash my hands several times so as not to remove my contacts with hot sauce-encrusted fingers, Heavy D and I called an audible, cabbing to the sports bars of Southport Avenue.

En route to our new destination, we received a text from a distraught David R. He predicted a biblical Alabama smackdown of 103-0. Further, he threatened to catch up with us before the Tide hit the century mark, an unprecedented evacuation of the Man Cave that would parallel Gus Grissom ditching the space capsule in The Right Stuff. Heavy D and I had our own problems. Surrounded by TVs, we could no longer find one showing the Nebraska game. We asked for help—every Chicago bar has someone in charge of the universal remote—but received none. My corn fed amigo fumed. Consumed with rage, he ordered nachos.

David R. caught up with us at Southport Lanes, a collared button-down covering the shame of his traitorous black t-shirt. The sports ticker indicated that the Nebraska game concluded with a 35-28 Husker loss. An uneasy feeling came over me. My friends’ schools had just lost their first games of the year, and I was the bastard sitting there undefeated. It’s akin to hitting a hot streak at a blackjack table while your friends sitting next to you pay for the casino’s lighting bill. You’re a dick by association.

By the time I hit the fart sack, sleeping on a compost heap of chicken wings and nachos, three teams ranked in front of the Tigers had gone down to defeat. Of the five teams featured on regional pre-season Sports Illustrated covers, Missouri now stood as the only one without a loss.