Slants and Drops

Ahoy, kids. The House has been riding the rails this last week, sidetracked by his 9-5 job: professional hobo. Needless to say, some time jumping on boxcars and eating tins of beans with his one-eared dog has helped alleviate the sting of last week's old-fashioned beatdown. It's sunny outside, the birds are chirping, and we still have 12 weeks of football to enjoy, so let's not get too pouty and move on down the line.

• Obligatory post-game commentary. Obviously, it was a disaster. Not quite "Hiroshima" or "Titanic"... more like "Edmund Fitzgerald" or the Sloop John B. At any rate, it was tiny boat vs. furious ocean, my fist vs. brick wall, Triangle Man vs. Particle Man, or any other historical one-sided fight you can think of. I'm pretty sure the Irish wouldn't have scored a touchdown if the game was 30 quarters long, which it mercifully wasn't.
  
  
  I feel so broke up, I wanna go home.
  
  Hey, them's the breaks though. A brand new offense lining up against a Tech defense that eats n00bs for breakfast, it wasn't too hard to make sense of what happened, particularly with Tech's propensity to come out of the gate and humiliate green offenses (they've done it four openers in a row). I think they've got a good squad, and I think that (future all-Hairmerican) Phillip Wheeler is damn lucky that they don't test players in the NCAA for being 3,000 year old mutant robots forged in the smithy of hell. I think the NFLPA screens for that, so you're probably looking at the peak of his career now.
  
  To use a baseball analogy, sometimes your ace gets kicked around for 10 runs in the first inning. That's how it goes. You yank him, put in the mop-up guy, take the loss, and get ready for the next ballgame. Yeah, the gameplan sucked, yeah, the quarterback decision sucked, and yeah, there were blunders and errors in execution all over the place. The good news is that it only counts for one loss. Bring in Jimmy Clausen, let the youngster take his licks, and look for something to be happy about every week. Wash down with a quart of Wild Turkey and call me in the morning. The doctor is in.



• Dink and Dunk Have Turned Pro. What started out as a goofy quarterly comic strip has turned big time, as the fellas have made their way over to The Fanhouse. A bigger audience, a weekly strip, and (of course) some cold hard cash for your boy. Keep your eyes peeled. Hope it doesn't go to their heads.
  
  



• The House is Watching Some Pistol on Saturday. That's right, we're taking this hobo show on the road and riding the rails to Evanston, IL to check out Northwestern and Nevada in an epic grudgematch of kind of purple teams. Between the Nevada Pistol, the... um, brainy Northwestern co-eds with great personalities, and the fresh lake air, it should be a good way to start off week two.

That's all I've got for now. Catch you on the flipside.