Monday Morning Hangover

I think we’re starting a new feature here on the Barney Show…Monday Morning Hangover. It will be my replace Weekend Musings during football season and will focus on the weekend’s happenings. Why Monday Morning Hangover? Seems apropos (Big word right there. This is definitely not being written while I’ve been drinking. In fact, its being written Sunday morning.) Plus, no one has had more Monday’s where they’re hungover than me. Usually around 3 PM on Sunday’s I start getting board and say, “Fuck it, let’s start drinking.” This makes my case of the Mondays a whole lot worse than anyone else. On the bright side, I can’t feel any worse than Monday morning so my week only gets better (in theory). Anyway, here’s my take on this weekend’s action.

Obviously, I have to talk about the Appalachian St-Michigan game. I like how the biggest upset ever was watched by about 10 people. I was almost ready to drive up to Bristol and take some people out when they stayed with the Michigan St-UAB game that was a 30 point blow out until I realized it was on the Big Ten Network. So I watched ESPN news for an hour straight waiting for updates. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before, so you know that’s how big of a game this was (I even had to endure a repeat of a Maurice Jones-Drew interview for some reason. This was done Friday afternoon, before he found out about Leftwich. In the list of dumbass things to repeat on tv, that was up there).
I was home this weekend so I got my dad’s take on it.
Dad: “They (App St) would have been a 60 point underdog if they had a line.”Me: “What was the line?”Dad: “They didn’t have one. Vegas didn’t set a line because its Appalachian St-Michigan.”That’s reason # 5,478 that my dad should be analyzing football games on tv. No one mentioned that on ESPN or anywhere else. Dad would definitely give the gambling angle. Plus reason # 5,479 would be that he would fight Lou Holtz to the death on national tv. I don’t see any downside to this. (He was visibly giddy to see Lou’s reaction to the ND debacle. I think my favorite quote about my dad was, “Barney, I never understood your ridiculous hatred of JJ Reddick until I saw your dad’s hatred of Lou Holtz. Now it makes perfect sense.”)

Anyone else think the Virginia Tech coverage was a little ridiculous? I know a tragedy occurred there, but stop reminding us of that. I hate it when they shove sentimentality down my throat. I’ll admit I got emotional when they played “Enter the Sandman” with the entire student body jumping up and down, because A) that was cool and B) it meant football was back and I was very excited about this fact. There were no feelings about that shooting whatsoever. (I then changed the channel to HBO to watch their documentary about the Yankees effect on NYC after 9/11. I remember that the death of 3,000 innocent Americans was still not enough for me to root for the Yankees. In fact, I still remember how pissed off I was when Jeter hit that home run in the World Series, because they shouts from the dorm room woke me up. So maybe I’m not the right person to be talking about sports healing effects after tragedy.)
Here’s the link: http://awfulannouncing.blogspot.com/2007/09/welcome-back-vt.html
If that doesn’t get you hyped up, I don’t know what to say to you. Even the freakin’ band was jumping up and down.
After Va Tech came running out, my first thought was, “Does that banner say…Ookie?”
Then I realized that it said Hokies, which makes a lot more sense. I can still hope that one day they bring two O’s and say, “Screw it.” (You can see the Ookie part in the youtube clip as well).
Three possessions into the Notre Dame game I was saying, “This is going to be a long year.” At halftime, they ran one of those standard commercials by the colleges about things they do other than football (like anyone gives a crap that they have a tremendous physics department). Being that it was Notre Dame, they had a priest talking about work they’ve done in Haiti. That brought on this exchange:Mom: Why are they showing this during a football game?Me: It’s the Notre Dame game. They’re trying to remind people that they’re a Catholic university.
Mom: Oh, ok, that makes sense.
Me: I’d rather have less Catholicism and more speed on the outside. Georgia Tech is killing them.
The point I realized this wasn’t going to be a great year: When they introduced the starters on offense and my first thought was, “There are a lot of white guys starting this year.”

Cal is fast. They’re skill players looked ridiculous. Besides DeSean Jackson (love the spelling), they have a freshman named Jahvid Best. If this was 2005 again, me and Floyd Banks would be calling him a Problem. Maybe not now, but at some point, he’s going to be a Problem. He was 4th in the nation in the 100M last year. But he’s a football player with sprinter speed, not a sprinter playing football. He only had 4 carries last night, but I moved to the edge of my seat for all of them.

The Alcoholic Tour™ continued at my parents house. Nothing like drinking for 9 hours on Saturday (beer with the occasional bourbon) and 10 hours on Sunday (beer with regular bourbon) and still not really getting drunk. The highlight of all this was walking around at 11 pm, vomiting on a Temple and then in a park of an elementary school. Not that I was that drunk, its just that my stomach is so shot at this point, it can’t handle too much in it, and start rejecting stuff Mutumbo in his prime style. Good times. The vomiting wasn’t enough, because I still wasn’t able to sleep at that point. An hour of occasional bourbon shots and a trip to the bar got me past that. When people say that being an alcoholic is glamorous, tell them its hard work. You see the multiple shots at the bar, but not the drinking alone, vomiting on sacred structures and kid’s playgrounds and the like. Its like how I used to shoot 300 jump shots a day by myself or run 1000 meter repeats in the summer heat, except this is highly unproductive to my well being. But fuck it. Whatever, I really don’t care at this point.