50-48 #51: THE DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN BOBBY PETRINO, CARL SNAVELY, AND ED GENERO: THE OFFICIAL 50-48 OLE MISS RANT

50-48 #51: THE DEGREES OF SEPARATION BETWEEN BOBBY PETRINO, CARL SNAVELY, AND ED GENERO: THE OFFICIAL 50-48 OLE MISS RANT

For those who only read the stat sheets, Bobby Petrino’s return to coaching with the Arkansas Razorbacks was marred by a 23-21 shellacking by the “University” of Mississippi Rebels at Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium on Saturday. But this contest wasn’t about one football game. It was a test of one man’s ideals. The Razorbacks did the school proud, and they did that man proud. Bobby Petrino. He won because they played.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We here at 50-48 are confident that 50-48ican Peter Samuel “Cards” Aiello will fully cognize and appreciate the above reference, but we are unsure if others will. Ladies and those under 25 have something of an excuse. For all others: We will not tell you from where the reference comes. You ought to know. For shame.]

So, the Razorbacks lost to the Rebels this weekend. But we here at 50-48 are not decimated by the defeat. But before we get into that, let’s briefly recount the salient facts of the game:

We take comfort in the acknowledgment by reporters and pundits from both sides of the Mississippi River that the Razorbacks were robbed of victory by a completely bogus call by a dirty necrophiliac pedophile of a line judge. We appreciate Mississippians’ candor at such an admission, and we acknowledge that such acknowledgments are what make the great state of Mississippi not Texas. But there were actually THREE horrible calls, all made by line judges, that grossly affected our chances:

THE PHANTOM GROUNDING CALL: In the first half, Casey Dick (in the throes of yet another in a long line of horrible games) threw a pass to the Ole Miss sidelines after moving outside the tacklebox and finding none of his receivers open. The back judge, whose duty it is to make intentional grounding calls, recognized this, whistled the play dead, and moved to re-spot the replacement ball for the following down. But the line judge standing by the Ole Miss contingent, upon hearing their boos, decided that though he was nowhere in position to make such a call, he would go ahead and call intentional grounding to satisfy the irate and imbecilic fans behind him. Dear Ole Miss fans: The tacklebox and the hash mark are two completely different entities. We here at 50-48 understand that you know far more about alcoholism, illiteracy, and the intricacies of stringing innocent black people by the neck from trees than you do football, but a little effort isn’t asking too much. Or maybe it is. “Book-learnin” is not an undertaking formally practiced at the “University” of Mississippi. (For verification, see the current veneration of John Grisham and compare it to the former veneration of William Faulkner. Or just talk to anyone from Oxford. Dumb fucking assholes.) Regardless, they had every right to boo. Expressing one’s ignorance is an important part of the football experience. The line judge, however, has no excuse. This is one of those pricks we knew in college who would snort the white shit on the table because he saw Al Pacino do it in a movie. Fucking wannabe. Fucking loser. His goal in life was to be a referee, and even at the advanced age of middle-fifties-ish, he’s still a line judge. We—like everyone else who believes in truth, justice, and the American Way—hope he fells himself by one of his own bullets the next time he traipses out to the woods at 4 am to experience the joys of “huntin season.” But he wasn’t done fucking with us yet:

THE PHANTOM TOUCHBACK: After an Ole Miss punt sailed into the endzone and that very same assfaced line judge marked it as a touchback, he once again heard the befuddled, ignorant Rebel fans booing. So he kept his arm raised, walked out of the endzone, and spotted the ball on the two-yard line. NOTE TO FUCKSTICK LINE JUDGES EVERYWHERE: Stealing 18 yards from a team won’t make your wife come back. She’s still fucking that stockbroker. It won’t make your hair grow back, your dick get bigger, or that collection of Star Trek action figures you keep in your closet grow any more complete. The limited edition Captain Kirk doll, the one where he’s having tantric sex with the green robot woman, will always elude you. You will always be nothing. You will always be a fucking child. You will die alone, and no one will ever remember you exist. You are meaningless. And speaking on behalf of 50-48, Razorback fans everywhere, and all people already consigned to hell: I hope I see you there you dirty motherfucker. After the snakes remove themselves from your eyeball holes, I’m going to personally skull-fuck you while the rest of your body is writhing in fiery agony.

Unfortunately, however, his wasn’t the call that hurt the most:

THE PHANTOM INTERFERENCE CALL: London Crawford has had a rough career. He’s really fast, and really nice, but can’t catch for shit. Still, he’s been improving, and when he came down with Casey Dick’s horrible pass with less than thirty seconds left in the game to set up the game-winning field goal, his redemption with Razorback fans was finally complete. Until, that is, the line judge watching the play called offensive pass interference. It seems no use to delve too deeply into this one, as anyone who has seen the game or the replay clearly admits that no such interference exists. Again, let me give a quick nod to all of those professional sports watchers who actually acknowledged the bad call. It is refreshing. That call cost us the game.

Or did it?

We here at 50-48 stopped blaming officials for losses after an inglorious career in pee-wee league basketball. (Well, we didn’t. But we’re trying.) You don’t like the grounding call, then throw it to one of the TWO receivers who were open when you threw it away in the first place. How many balls did Casey throw to the sidelines prematurely? A gazillion.

You don’t like the false touchback? Drive down the goddamned field and score anyway. The bottom line is that if you had told anyone in that stadium that the SEC officials would have made three bad calls in the game, s/he would have said, “Well, no shit.” SEC officials are terrible. That is why 50-48 has always advocated for the Big Ten system, whereby officials are reviewed and graded each week, then assigned to games accordingly. If this were done, both of those line judges would be bartending next weekend. Fucking cunts.

The last call is a bit harder to shrug off, as it came at the end of the game and quite literally stole victory from us. But the core reality of the thing is this: if you don’t want a call at the end of the game to steal victory from you, play better in the first three goddamned quarters. We missed a field goal in the first quarter, which would have given us the win. Chris Gragg dropped a sure touchdown pass in the second quarter. That’s ten points in a two-point game!

But then there are the two major culprits. Casey Dick is a walking, passing disaster. This was a game where we were hopelessly outmanned in most positions. After all, Ole Miss had Ed Orgeron’s players. We had Hootie’s. That was a disadvantage right there. And nowhere was it more apparent than at quarterback. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Casey had 75 more passing yards than Jevan Sneed. Snead was efficient and accurate. He spread the ball around, passed efficiently in all four quarters (instead of just the fourth), and found open receivers. This was the most important offensive discrepancy in the game, and if it wasn’t there, none of those calls would have mattered.

Of course, Snead was blessed that Razorback cornerback Isaac Madison was getting heavy playing time. Three-quarters of his passing yards came against Madison, including both of his touchdown passes. Isaac did not have a good game. It is no surprise that he is a Hootie recruit. Still, he’s only a sophomore, and with years of tutelage under Coach Petrino, he will get better.

So we suffered from some bad calls, missed some key opportunities, and had two players in important positions completely fuck up. Such is the recipe for disaster. Still, after all that, we only lost by two points. Though Orgeron’s players clearly had more size and talent than Hootie’s, we still came within two points of winning. Ole Miss ran the predictable, ugly Hootie offense, and he typically almost coached them out of a surefire win. Coach Petrino, on the other hand, demonstrated a complex and interesting game plan that, with even a modicum of execution, would have won the game.

This is something we can be happy about. But there are others:

Hootie proved what a gutless fucking coward he was in typical Hootie fashion, proving to everyone with a brain why he is taint-scum. With the Ole Miss players and cheerleaders ready to run onto the field prior to the game, and with the security guards screaming at them to go, Hootie held everyone back until the Hogs took the field so that he wouldn’t be booed. NOTE TO HOUSTON NUTT: You should have been aborted in the first trimester. You are lower than shit. NOTE TO OLE MISS FANS: Thinking Hootie is a good football coach makes you a fucking idiot. It is just a signal to everyone else that you know nothing about the game in any of its myriad facets. This, of course, is not a problem. There are billions of people around the world who don’t understand football. But thinking Hootie is a good person makes you complicit in all of the heinous things he perpetrates. It makes you no better than his whole dirty family. Anyone who thinks Houston Dale Nutt is a decent person does not deserve to breathe the same air as sentient beings.

Towards the end of the game, the Ole Miss fans in attendance began chanting “Houston Nutt, Houston Nutt,” as if we, the Razorback fans, would be somehow moved to jealousy by the refrain. Here again is demonstrated why the “University” of Mississippi is on the verge of losing its accreditation. You can’t hate them, because they’re just so fucking stupid. It’s easy to hate LSU fans because they’re mean, and at least they understand what’s going on down on the field. But poor little drunken, illiterate Ole Miss people are just so sad. They’re like the retarded boy at school who hits one of your friends. You can’t get mad at him because he’s retarded. He couldn’t help it. Poor little retarded Rebels. So, the “Houston Nutt” cheer fell on deaf ears, I’m afraid. The entire lot of us wanted to say in response, “Oh, no, sweetheart. You don’t understand. We want you to have him.” But they wouldn’t have understood. Autistic monkeys don’t understand anything. And the Ole Miss fan section was peopled with autistic monkeys.

That whole campus is peopled with autistic monkeys. And now they have a leader! “Houston Nutt, Houston Nutt, Houston Nutt!”

Of course, the best part about the game is that 50-48 was there in person! After we lost, I walked through campus happy. It is better to lose with 75,000 of your best friends than to win by yourself down in the south Louisiana hellhole in which 50-48 resides. For those of you 50-48icans who hung out with me, I really appreciate it. That is exactly what I needed.

So, there are some lessons, I think, to be learned here: 1) Hootie is a rat-fink fuckface. 2) The mothers of potential SEC line-judges should be eugenically sterilized. 3) Casey Dick is four short games away from graduation! 4) Being in Fayetteville, being in the presence of the Hogs, seeing that helmet, and singing those songs: that is the greatest feeling on earth.

So remember, Rebels: The next time you’re coming down from the high of victory, probably (we assume) by lynching a black boy for glancing at one of your buck-toothed, ugly-ass Mississippi white women, just know that we wouldn’t take Hootie back for all the money in the world. It is better to lose with dignity than to win with that pederast on your sideline.

You know, in 1940, the undefeated, #1-ranked Cornell Big Red entered a game against Dartmouth and won 7-3, extending their win streak to 19 games. But after the game, Cornell coach Carl Snavely reviewed the game film and realized that the Big Red’s only touchdown came on an inadvertent fifth-down. He consulted with the athletic director and with his players, then voluntarily forfeited the game to Dartmouth. That instance is by far my favorite in all of college football history. It demonstrates the kind of class and sportsmanship that is supposed to be part and parcel of the game itself—that which separates it from cruder professional forms.

Of course, Hootie and the autistic monkeys over at the “University” of Mississippi won’t concede the game to us even though they acknowledge that we were robbed. Their coach has neither class nor sportsmanship. But I imagine if he did, the lead in the Daily Mississippian would look something like I imagine the lead would have been in the Cornell Sun following such an honorable move:

For those who only read the stat sheets, Carl Snavely’s return to coaching with the Cornell Big Red was marred by a 3-7 forfeit shellacking by the Dartmouth Big Green at Schoellkopf Field on Saturday. But this contest wasn’t about one football game. It was a test of one man’s ideals. The Big Red did the school proud, and they did that man proud. Carl Snavely. He won because they played.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS