#1: SOUTH ALABAMA JAGUARS (5-0, 45.200 avg. margin of victory, #1 last week) – The Jaguars handled they business last weekend, burying the Missouri S&T Miners, 45 to 6. I actually got a lot of feedback from some South Alabama-anians after last week, including a person named Carroll who gave me a lot of detail about how the school has built their program from nothing the past couple of years. It is truly amazing the amount of people excited for all of these smaller colleges you hardly hear about during football season. I mean, South Alabama is Division I-AA, so that’s fairly prominent in the grand scheme of college football, though by no means is it big time. Think of all the small Division III programs and NAIA outlaws and all the damned college football hooha going on in college towns around America every Saturday. It’s both amazing and very odd, all at once. At first I assumed this Carroll person was a woman, but then I remembered the great gamecock breeder Carol Nesmith who is also from Alabama, and also how the chief of police in Sparta, Mississippi, which had one of America’s highest crime rates in the late 1980s, was named Carroll O’Connor, so perhaps this South Alabama email person Carroll is an old school dude who eats corned beef hash and two eggs over easy at the local mom-and-pop diner and enjoys Red Sovine’s song “Teddy Bear” but not ironically.
#2: TRINE ROLLING THUNDER (5-0, 38.200 avg. margin of victory, #5 last week) – Trine whooped La Grange last weekend, 51 to 7, and maintained their #10 ranking in the Division III poll, and climbed back up to #2 on the Bully List. When I hear Trine though, I just think of this one painting job I had where half the dudes on the paint crew were part-time crackheads and older and black and there was this one guy who looked like a combination of a black man and a weasel in mostly human form, and he was sooooooo sloooooooowwwwww, and I’d be like, “C’mon…” – I forgot that dude’s name, but all of those guys had wacky nicknames they went by like Meat or Toots or Rye-Rye or George – but I’d be like, “C’mon Rye-Rye, you gotta pick up the pace if we’re gonna finish this shit by Friday afternoon,” and he’d never look away from the spot he was methodically and slowly painting and go, “I’m trine, I’m trine, paint don’t wanna flow right though.” And then he’d go to the gas station to use the bathroom and not get back for an hour and a half.
#3: OREGON FIGHTING DUCKS (6-0, 38.000 avg. margin of victory, #2 last week) – The Ducks went up to Washington State and handed them a 53 to 23 loss, and moved up to #2 in the Division I polls, setting them up to – if they do not stumble over anybody in the Pac-10 – make the National Championship game, which I’m sure will cause them to parade out their most obnoxious and ridiculous uniforms yet.
#4: MINNESOTA-DULUTH DIRTY BULLDOGS (6-0, 36.667 avg. margin of victory, #7 last week) – The Bulldogs beat Winona State Ryders, 59 to 17 last weekend, and are still the #2 team in Division III football. And even though that game was in Duluth, they are having their homecoming game this weekend (I thought you usually came back from a road game for homecoming?) against the University of Mary Marauders.
#5: WISCONSIN-WHITEWATER WARHAWKS (5-0, 36.600 avg. margin of victory, #3 last week) – They are starting to coast at this point, beating the Wisconsin-Stout Blue Devils, 30 to 7, but are still ranked #1 in Division III football, although Mount Union is closing the gap in voter points.
#6: SIOUX FALLS COUGARS (6-0, 35.500 avg. margin of victory, #9 last week) – Sioux Falls, the #1 ranked team in NAIA football, is a big fish in the NAIA’s small pond, and straight raped Briar Cliff last weekend, 66 to 21. This weekend, however, they play Great Plains Athletic Conference archrival Morningside (see #12 below) in a monster showdown so big, the game is not played until 6 pm, instead of the usual early Saturday afternoon game times they have. I would imagine there’s some sort of NAIA football package somewhere, probably like on a website, that this is the featured game of the week.
#7: BETHUNE-COOKMAN BLACK WILDCATS (5-0, 33.800 avg. margin of victory, #6 last week) – The Wildcats beat Delaware State, 47 to 24, at home last weekend, but are still not in the main I-AA poll (though they did crack one called the Sports Network/Fathead Top 25). Historically black colleges get no love in those polls, because Bethune-Cookman is the third team out of the list, and Grambling is fourth, yet it’s peppered with mighty whitey colleges like Richmond and William & Mary and UMass and North Dakota State. Racism is a disease, and I am a doctor, except not so much for racism so that’ll be like it always is. I’m more of a doctor who likes prescriptions, specifically painkillers. Not really, but sort of.
#8: MCPHERSON BULLDIGGITTY DOGGS (5-0, 33.600 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) – After falling off the Bully List for one week, the Bulldogs claw their way back into the #8 position by whomping up on St. Mary’s, 73 to 24. They are still the #7 ranked team in NAIA football, and I still don’t give a fuck, although I imagine small NAIA college Christian-based football contests spread across the vast flatness of Kansas would be an interesting sub-culture of American life to dig into one fall, and soak up.
#9: UTAH UTES (5-0, 33.400 avg. margin of victory, #12 last week) – If anyone thought the Utes were not ready for their ascent into big-time college football next year in the Pac-10, last week’s game might’ve made the point clear. Utah went to Iowa State – a Big 12 school, though my no means a powerhouse – and dropped 68 points on them, winning 68 to 27. The next two weeks should be easy wins for Utah, then they have those pesky Air Force cadets, and the huge showdown with Texas Christian the first weekend of November. And they have a game scheduled against Notre Dame as well, which means everybody in America will be forced to watch it, even though Notre Dame fucking sucks and is stupid and sucks and goddamnit I wish they weren’t on TV every week because I’d rather watch about 49 other teams.
#10: ST. XAVIER COUGARS (7-0, 33.143 avg. margin of victory, #10 last week) – #3 ranked team in NAIA beat up on Marian, 56 to 25 last weekend. I knew a guy who was engaged to a chick named Marian one time, and she was sort of weasel-like and threw fits and pouted like a little kid. She probably should’ve gotten beat up as well, but really, once someone is an adult, it’s no one else’s place to beat someone else into a more useful human being. At that point, take your losses and move on, and let the woman-child weasel women be a railroad spike into the brain of some other man.
#11: BOISE STATE BLUE BRONCOS (5-0, 32.600 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) – The Broncos beat the Toledo Mud Hens, 57 to 14 last weekend, and have a schedule that should allow it to remain untested until Thanksgiving week at the earliest. Being no matter what they do this year, they will not get into the BCS Championship game, and the first BCS rankings will come out this Sunday (which should have Boise State on top to start with, but not for long), I should explain my most perfectly perfect plan for a Division I college football playoff system right here. In my system, only eight teams make the playoffs, and you still use the BCS rankings system, and bowl games. In those BCS rankings, your top six ranked conference champions get berths into the playoffs, which means conferences in down years or with shitty champions like the Big East or Mid-American Conference would get bypassed when teams like TCU or Boise State excel. This would also make all the conference championship games as important as ever, because that’s your main ticket into the playoffs. The other two at-large spots would go to the top two teams in the BCS rankings that were not already in the playoffs, except no more than one at-large berth per conference. Thus, you could not have 3 SEC teams or 3 Big 12 teams in the playoffs. Your bowls would be designated different games the first couple years, but basically how it would work is there’d be a rotating cast of bowl games involved in the first round of the playoffs. Of the four bowls hosting first round games this year, the two that put on the best overall experience would be granted semifinal games the next year. Of the two semifinal bowl games, the best package put forward would get the championship game the following year. So the different bullshit bowl committees would be competing with each other as well, and could still earn their money, and the NCAA would rake in the dollars, and we’d have undisputed champions, plus awesome fucking football around Christmas, New Year’s Day (the semifinals would be on New Year’s Day, to make that college football tradition special again, along with the I-AA championship), and then the title game the week after. It’s perfect, and someone should send this to some dumbass writer at ESPN (is Rick Reilly even entertaining to anybody?) so that it can happen.
#12: MORNINGSIDE MUSTANGS (6-0, 32.167 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) – Morningside beat the Dordt Defenders, 71 to 0 last weekend. That’s ugly. They are the #4 ranked team in NAIA football, and like I said earlier have their immense showdown with Sioux Falls this coming weekend in Sioux Falls. All of a few tiny parts of South Dakota and Iowa will be AMPED this weekend for this classic. Last year, Morningside was on my Bully List regularly until losing at home to Sioux Falls in the middle of November. They still made the NAIA playoffs, but lost again to Sioux Falls in the playoffs. In fact, four of their last 6 losses, going back to 2007, have come at the hands of the Cougars. COULD THIS BE THEIR WEEKEND? I’ll find out next week when I look at obscure college football scores on bizarre obsessive compulsive football-related websites with graphic designs from 1997.
#13: KANSAS WESLEYAN COYOTES (5-0, 31.800 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) – The Coyotes beat the Haskell Indians last weekend, 59 to 7, and moved up to #14 in the NAIA polls. They are the lowest ranked undefeated team in NAIA football though. This weekend they travel to fellow Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference undefeated NAIA ass-kicker McPherson (see #8 above), making this a pivotal weekend across the NAIA football landscape. Lol. Somewhere in the interwebs, somebody wrote that same thing, but was serious.
#14: WESLEY WOLVERINES (6-0, 31.667 avg. margin of victory, unranked last week) – Wesley destroyed the Newport News Apprentice Shipbuilders people last weekend, 64 to 7. They are ranked #3 in the Division III poll, and play in a four-team conference for some reason. They play Southern Virginia, which is in a town not too far from where I live, and that I’ve driven through may times, but have absolutely no idea where this college is, at all. But they apparently play football somewhere over there.
Gone from the list from last week: #4 Amherst Lord Jeffs (beat Middlebury, but only 38 to 31, so fell off the Bully List), #8 Mount Union Purple Raiders (shockingly were held to a 28 to 14 victory over Marietta; perhaps the Mount Union powerhouse is finally in a downturn), #11 North Alabama Lions (barely edged West Georgia, 17 to 10, but still ranked #3 in Division II), #13 North Central Cardinals (beat Augustana, but only 34 to 14), #14 Cortland State Red Dragons (beat Brockport, 35 to 0, yet barely missed this week’s Bully List because of average margin of victory).
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