National Championship Open Thread

Admittedly, we don't celebrate the pigskin around here as much as we used to. But we still enjoy a spectacle, and tonight's down-home extravaganza in Atlanta certainly qualifies as that.

In the spirit of the times, and our scattered consciousness, a few items to keep you entertained in the lead-up to the big game. Sort of a Gheorghasbord-style preview.

Much was made last night about Oprah Winfrey's Golden Globes speech, and rightly so. It was a powerful repudiation of the power structure of Hollywood and our society in general. It was moving while balancing fury and hope. Predictably, the Oprah 2020 memes began rocketing into the socialsphere. And that's where I pause a moment. Have we fallen so far as a society, has Trump debased our institutions so much that we're willing to reflexively promote someone who's both enormously successful and at the same time a peddler of nonsense like Jenny McCarthy and Doctor Oz? So it seems. I'll stick with Popovich/Kerr 2020.

Over at Sentence of Dave, the proprietor recently recounted the stories of a misspent summer, specifically the abject squalor in which the residents of a certain house in Nags Head lived. I recommend it to you as a lesson in young male inertia and a mark of how far some of us have come. No comment on how far we still have to go.

Obviously, we can't go too long without mentioning Tribe hoops, even while ostensibly focusing on football. FOGTB Fairbank passed along a note from his former colleague David Teel, who noted that W&M is currently making better than 50% of its field goals, 45% of its three-pointers, and 80% of its free throws. No team in the history of college basketball has ever finished with a 50/45/80 line. We're beyond plaid.

I consumed a shit-ton of Best of 2017 in music content over the holidays, and I was heartened to see KCMP (The Current) out of Minneapolis agree with me about the song of the year. Even more heartened to know that I'll get to see Jason Isbell play it live in Richmond in a few short weeks.



It's been widely noted that Nick Saban's never lost a game to a former assistant, going 11-0 against his prior underlings. It's fair to say that Kirby Smart's Georgia team represents the best squad any former Saban assistant has ever brought to a contest against the master. But come on. Do we really think a guy named Kirby, with that haircut, is going to beat Saban? (Spoiler alert: we don't.)

Says here that Alabama wins, and fairly easily. Say, 24-13.