Poop 2010 Vol 18: The End is Near

I come to you this week, a humbler, sadder, and bitterer sports fan. It's not like I went to Knoxville with the expectations of seeing the Steel Curtain Defense show up, but damnit, I wasn't expecting to see us let the worst team in the SEC...check that, the team that was formerly the worst in the SEC, hang half a hundred on us. This is a game that we should have won, handily, and we simply choked. Then to make things worse, the Steelers, my salvation in these all too frequent Rebel "rebuilding" years, came out and fully shit the bed against the most hatable team in the NFL led by the most hatable guy in the league, and giant vagina, Tom Brady. The one moment of sports salvation was the 5-1 Pens win that was on the TV guide, but ruthlessly not available when I hit "watch now." Oh, what cruel fate. It was a truly FML kinda weekend for all of us die hard Ole Miss-Pittsburgh Rebel-Bear-Steeler-Penguin fans. Onto a sad, sad poop. Get your tissues handy.

Weekly Words of Wisdom

Give him Six!

The words most shamefully and repeatedly heard by the Rebs Saturday

The Worst Sports Weekend Ever. EVAR

As I alluded to in the opening line of crap, this weekend sucked elephant sack. I had the great luck of being in Nashville the very week that my beloved, albeit crappy football Rebels were slated to play in Knoxville. I was pumped. I like Knoxville for the most part and have enjoyed my visits to the city. Even better, for as bad as Ole Miss has been, UT has been even worse. Clearly, this was a game that we should win. Well, Obviously things didn't go as planed and I won't bore you with the details of the game. Anyone watching saw the Vols get one fluke bounce after another. They saw our inept defense blow one easy pick after another, and they surely saw a concussed QB stay in the game long after it was obvious the guy was seeing double. If he plays that bad against LSU, I'll eat a steaming cow pie that I'm sure Ole Miss' little brother to the south east could easily supply. I will however; go into a brutally honest assessment of UT's gameday.

I'm sure to receive a great deal of vitriol from the orange clad readers and maybe even some nasty comments and boycotts but what else is there to discuss? Ok, like a bandaid. Tennessee has to be the absolute worst place on earth to attend a football game. There, I said it; now here's why. Sure, the stadium is big and even in the upper deck the seats aren't just completely terrible as far as line of sight goes, but in terms of overall game day experience, it's dead last in the dozen or so places I've been to for a game just above Bama and State. Having over 90 thousand people in a stadium doesn't make a great game day (and from my experience, 64,000 Steeler fans are a lot louder than 100,000 vol fans. just sayin'). I've been to a handful of games at UT, and in all those times, there has collectively been only a handful of people who tailgate or hell, even show up outside the stadium more than an hour before kickoff.

This concept is almost alien to an Ole Miss or LSU fan. We understand that the best part of college football is getting out early, going to an elaborate tailgate with food, music, TVs, booze, etc. and making a day out of it. I realize that UT doesn't have the broad expanse of tailgating real estate that LSU has, or the holy grail of tailgating sites that Ole Miss has in The Grove, but damnit that doesn't stop NFL teams from getting out to a parking lot and partying before kickoff. Even State manages to do some half assed tailgating in their sad attempt at replicating The Grove with the Junction. I guess the Vol Navy is ok if you have a boat and don't mind having a bunch of drunks traipsing across it to get from their vessel to the shore, as one completely unbiased and thoroughly unimpressed neighbor once told me about his stay in the "Navy."

So, the Tailgating is sorry, and while that's sad, it shouldn't be the end of the discussion. There's always the pregame band show. UT claims that it's the greatest thing on earth, "unrivaled by anything in sports." Uh, that's a negative Ghost Rider. It probably wouldn't seem so completely underwhelming if they'd just introduce the band and leave out all that inflated crap about how great it is. You get this great build up and are left saying, "that's it?" As much as I hate to say it, LSU has a great pregame routine and it really does get you fired up, even for a guy like me who loathes the Tigers. The UT pregame is a snooze fest capped off with a great song being ruined with a bunch of people yelling, "woooo!" that got tossed in somewhere along the way when I was in High School.

Now, as for the seats. I mentioned earlier that the upper deck had good sight lines and wasn't just altogether uncomfortable even though you're basically sitting on the dirty, sticky floor because of the way the bleachers are designed. Well that was until some enormous former Offensive Tackle showed up with his incredibly fat, stupid, and rude girlfriend. She sat down directly behind me and put her knees right into my back all the while making idiotic commentary about the game. I had to act like I was fishing for my phone and literally lean back into her to get the message through her illiterate skull that I had no intention of sitting with my face between my legs the entire 2nd quarter. To make things worse these people had two UT tag alongs that had the collective IQ of the hair off my dog's ass. One guy looked and sounded like eminem with a speech impediment and the other looked like a Memphis State Sig Ep (the Brothers out there will know that's not much different than the first guy, really).

After the "game" was over, I made it back to my car listening to Vol fans talking like they were on their way to Atlanta, and laughing at how the game had gone. Sure, I'd have been happy to win, and we deserve some ridicule for the way we played but I sure wouldn't be talking any trash considering that was their first conference win and that neither team has a bowl game in their immediate future. Upon reaching the car, people were just complete assholes about the traffic and I finally had to just force my way out of my parking spot. Turns out that these snotty people will yield to a Hummer. The ride back was more of the same thing I had encountered since the thursday before the game in the eastern half of the state; people who don't know how to use cruise control, can't figure out the passing lane/cruising lane dynamic, and generally drive like the texans I grew to hate so much while living in Louisiana. It seems to me that basic driver's Ed is a PhD program at UT and most of their "alumni" never made it that far.

The next day, I got up with plans to head to Chattanooga for some epic mountain biking before heading back to Nashville and that was quickly destroyed by the steady rain and I was forced to head back to our condo empty handed but confident the Steelers would salvage my Sunday. I was wrong and at the end I was stuck looking at my weekend in much the same way I look at my paycheck after Uncle Sam takes half of it and squanders it on people who just don't feel like working, God love 'em.

Well, I had every intention to come back and finish this poop before the LSU game, but seeing as how The cook off occupied most of my time, that never happened. so here's the unfinished poop to be soon followed by this week's poop.

Hope y'all had a good, safe weekend.