Roundtable: Bidding a not-so-fond farewell to the offseason

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September 3, 2009

The Doc, Holly Anderson and Doug Gillett wrap up the week with our written equivalent of tossing a beach ball around the office. This week’s topic: Whether the offseason should let the screen door hit it on the way out. (Answer: nope.)

Doc: Oh, offseason. How will we miss you? Let us count the ways.

Holly: [crickets] Will we miss it?

Doug: I won’t miss it. I’m so happy to be trading "Who didn’t vote Tim Tebow All-SEC?!" in for actual football games that I just about need to smoke a cigarette right now.

Holly: A-men. I’m more than ready to get down to judging Lane Kiffin by Actual Football Games rather than by him running his mouth. Although he’s very, very good at at least one of those things.

Doc: For sheer irritation, "Tebowgate" paled in comparison to "Notre Dame omitted Charlie Weis’ losing season in the media guide," a completely bogus story from the outset that was picked up and later repeated ad nauseum despite being completely bogus, just to fuel the latent Irish hate simmering under the surface. Or above it, whatever. Lame meme.

Holly: Not for me it didn’t (pale, that is). At SEC Media Days, I was counting, and after Spurrier put the ballot mystery to rest, he received not one, not two, but FIVE additional "Well, how’d you manage that, smart guy?" questions. I almost stabbed my own eyes out with a complimentary coffee stirrer.

Doug: A more recent irritation, and one having more to do with people’s responses than the story itself, is Erin-Andrews-Peephole-Gate or whatever you want to call it. Some of the reactions I’ve seen to Andrews’s GQ spread, Oprah appearance, etc. have truly made me ashamed of my gender. It’s almost as if being spied on — illegally — in her hotel room means EA now must wear ankle-length burlap sacks and never have her photo taken or appear on TV again, ever, lest she be accused of "asking for it."

Doc: We can go forever on that subject (and we will not), but I’ll just say that as a professional television personality, you can’t be more modest than E.A. She hasn’t shown up in Maxim, hasn’t done commercials, doesn’t even show any cleavage. She just shows up and does her job.

Holly: And she’s good at her job, which is something that tends to get lost, and that’s a shame.

Onward: Early contract fight aside, Mike Leach has been far too quiet this summer. Bring on the crazy-ass student section at Tech.

Doc: I feel downright nostalgic for the Leach contract flap.

Doug: I’m looking forward to Leach being even more irascible and, therefore, entertaining now that the whole world appears to have assumed he doesn’t know what he’s doing just because he doesn’t have Graham Harrell anymore.

Holly: Is there anything at all we’ll miss about this summer? Nothing comes to mind, especially with so much of our last week devoted to the various travails of Michigan.

Doc: I think I’ve already blacked out everything that came after Lane Kiffin’s endless string of secondary violations.

Doug: Not a whole lot springs immediately to mind, though in the depths of my lizard brain I do sort of miss all those brain-dead Paul Finebaum listeners (Finebots?) completely and unequivocally lose their minds over Clay Travis asking Tebow if he was a virgin. You would’ve thought that Clay had stood up in front of the Republican National Convention and accused Reagan of being gay.

Doc: I’d say Tebow’s virginity trumped Tennessee signing Daniel Hood for moral outrage, but not by much.

Holly: Even the Fulmer Cup’s been quiet this summer.

Doug: That is empirically true: For the first time in three years, the Fulmer Cup winner won’t even have broken 20 points in the final standings.

Doc: And the title really belongs to one guy. Pistol-whippin’ Trent Pupello singlehandedly buoyed this year’s Cup; off the top of my head, I don’t recall a single other notable arrest by a current player.

Holly: That does roll off the tongue trippingly.

Oh, and how could we forget Dr. Lou and Beano Cook pegging Notre Dame for a title run? My inbox hasn’t stopped smoking.

Doug: See, it ticks me off that those guys have jobs at ESPN and I don’t, because I can make completely hopeless, asinine national-title picks that are WAY more interesting than Notre Dame. Wofford Terriers to upset the Gators in the BCSNCG, baby! Now, isn’t that a lot more fun to debate about than Sweet Lou lisping his way through the usual boilerplate about how good Jimmy Clausen really is?

Holly: Wait, I got it. One thing I’ll actually look back on with some fondness this fall: The AP/Gannett flap over the SEC’s new media restrictions, because watching the AP criticize another organization’s policies as ridiculous is really, really hilarious.

Doug: Sorry, every time I started looking into either of those organizations’ policies, I just got really confused.

Doc: All right, that’s a rap. So long, summer.

Doug: I’m going to miss you, Brian Butler! I’m gonna miss you, Notre Dame media guide! And I’m gonna miss you most of all, controversy over who didn’t vote Tim Tebow for first-team all-conference at SEC Media Days!

Holly: Take me with you, plummet of Mitch Mustain’s prospects! (Seriously, August, get outta here. We got games to get to.)

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