Topic: College Football

January 18, 2013

Sportsflicks: John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, or The Strangest Football Movie Ever Made

Tom Keiser

Sportsflicks is an occasional series that examines justly or unjustly forgotten sports movies. What better place to start than a William Peter Blatty-penned film featuring Arab stereotypes, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, and Shirley MacLaine?

January 17, 2013

No One Knows

Jeremy Gordon

The Deadspin story that unraveled the tale of Manti Te'o's fictitious girlfriend was a great piece of journalism. The story itself is a wild one, and pretty great in its own right. So why does the whole thing feel so bad?

November 13, 2012

In The Land Of The Fist Bump: Talking With Inman Majors About His College Football Novel, Love's Winning Plays

Jason Fry

A conversation with the novelist Inman Majors, scion of one of Tennessee's greatest football families and author of Love's Winning Plays, an alternately affectionate and savage satire of college football, college football culture, and grown men who wear golf visors at night.

November 9, 2012

The Art Of Bob Hope’s AP All-America Team Introductions: Part V: 1989

Tom Keiser

In the fifth installment of our ongoing series on Bob Hope's endearingly baffling college football zingers, we intersect the time-space-Hope continuum in the year 1989, with Nick Fury impostor Andre Ware, speed demon Rocket Ismail and apparent anti-abortion activist Tripp Welborne.

November 2, 2012

The Art of Bob Hope's AP All-American Team Introductions, Part IV: 1979

Tom Keiser

In the fourth installment of our ongoing series on Bob Hope's gently baffling and profoundly cornball college football zingers, we rejoin our hero in the year 1984, when George Orwell's dystopian vision of a Brigham Young national championship was realized, and Bob met future star Billy Sims, future pro wrestling bad-ass Ron Simmons, and Steve McMichael, who was sort of both.

October 26, 2012

The Art Of Bob Hope’s AP All-America Team Introductions: Part III: 1984

Tom Keiser

In the third installment of our ongoing series on Bob Hope's soft n' baffling college football zingers, we find our hero doing shtick with Mark Bavaro, ribbing a hulking and extremely country Bruce Smith, and looking small next to the giant, puffy steroid specimen who would later become "The Patriot" in the WWF.

October 19, 2012

The Art Of Bob Hope’s AP All-America Team Introductions: Part II: 1986

Tom Keiser

In part two of our series on Bob Hope's soft n' baffling college football zingers, we find the comedy legend collaborating with Brian Bozworth, Jerome Brown, a bunch of beefy white guys with Lego-man hair, and the rest of the 1986 College Footbal All-American team. 

October 17, 2012

Arrogance, Scheming, and The Big Ten: Now In Book Form

Logan K. Young

David Young's sprawling, well-researched and amusingly scummy Arrogance and Scheming in the Big Ten: Michigan State’s Quest for Membership and Michigan’s Powerful Opposition is a history of two schools at their worst and most craven, but also a backhanded tribute to some not very good, but very stubborn priorities.

October 12, 2012

The Art Of Bob Hope’s AP All-America Team Introductions: Part I: 1980

Tom Keiser

Every year, in the 1970s and '80s, Bob Hope went on television and dropped one-liners on the various members of that year's AP College Football All-American team. It was about as funny as that sounds, but also a good deal weirder.

September 28, 2012

Big Imping: The Ballad of John L. Smith

Evin Demirel

During his stints as a head coach at Michigan State and the University of Arkansas, John L. Smith has not proven to be much of a head coach. But he has never let that stop him from having his weird, public, maybe-sort-of-crazy type of fun. That may not matter as much to boosters and fans, but it's something.