BREAKING NEWS: Joe Tiller Falls Asleep at Table Trying to Read Morning Paper Again

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN -- Sources have confirmed that at approximately 7:28 AM this morning, retiring Purdue football coach Joe Tiller collapsed at his breakfast table in West Lafayette, into what doctors are calling a "very brisk slumber". Tiller, 65, was reported to be in "good health and high spirits" only moments before the dreadful incident by his wife, Arnette, who observed him gingerly sipping a half a cup of decaffeinated coffee and leafing through the front section of the Lafayette Journal and Courier.

"He seemed perfectly fine to me," a frazzled Arnette remarked to reporters on the scene. "I went into the living room to answer the phone, and five minutes later, I came back and found him... like this."

Paramedics on the scene conducted a thorough examination on Tiller. His face was still pressed firmly against page three of the newspaper and his hand was still gripping the half-full mug of decaffeinated coffee. After observing the warm, expanding puddle of drool pooling over the advertisements in the right column of the Journal and Courier and his gentle, steady stream of snoring punctuated by occasional snorts and loud, wet lip-smacks, they diagnosed him as "asleep" and determined his condition to be "stable".

When asked if this scare would jeopardize the rest of the season, the doctor on scene was optimistic. "You'd be surprised how often I see this condition, particularly in people Joe [Tiller]'s age. About ninety percent of the time, the whole thing blows over within thirty minutes. After emerging from the condition, the recovery is very rapid, and he should be back to full speed within hours. The prognosis is very positive."

This hasn't been the first such health scare for Tiller. In fact, just yesterday, he collapsed in a strikingly similar incident, again at his breakfast table, and again fewer than five pages into that morning's Journal and Courier. Tiller was roused from his condition after only fifteen minutes, and reported that he was having a "lovely dream about reading the newspaper and then taking a nap."

Charlie Weis Needs New Transportation. The House Rock Built to the Rescue!

There were a lot of embarrassing things that happened on Saturday in East Lansing, but easily the most preventable one was Charlie Weis' humorous inability to, you know, like move more than five feet in any direction. Several times, the broadcast feed cut over to Weis after a punt to show him hobbling torturously inch by inch toward the new line of scrimmage on a busted knee. About three plays later, he would make it over to where the action was, just in time to see another Irish punt and embark on another lengthy journey. It was sort of like watching a salmon struggling to the point of near-death in their Sisyphean swim against a brutally harsh current... heartbreaking, in its pure hopeless fatalism, but nonetheless part of nature's way.

While The House Rock Built can't really offer any advice to helping the on-field problems with the Irish, our crack scientists have come up with a wide range of solutions for Weis' motility problem that are cost-effective, easy to implement, and immediately effective. When was the last time you saw a Notre Dame coach do anything that would be described that way?

Solution One: Segway

By far our most intuitive and straightforward solution. For a few grand, you can get all the functionality of a personal motility device without any of the embarrassment that might come from tooling around the sidelines in a Rascal scooter. Plus, I know for a fact that Indiana Excise police has dozens of these things, since their storm troopers patrol pre-game tailgating to squash out any underage recreation with their shoot-first ask-questions-later brand of vigilante justice. I'm sure they can spare one, particularly since the Irish football team are their most valuable customers.

Admittedly, there might be some problems with this. For example, the high-powered gyroscope processor in the Segway might violate some archaic anti-laptop rules. Similarly, Weis' largesse might exceed the weight rating for a Segway, to which I offer this simple solution: A chariot pulled by two eunuchs on Segways.


Ha Ha! Problem Solving!

Solution Two: Hannibal Lecter-Style Gurney Thing

If practicality is your game, then the Segway makes sense, but something tells me that the Irish need a little extra boost in motivation after last week's flat performance. To whit, I recommend the Hannibal Lecter Gurney Thing. One sight of Weis being wheeled around in this thing by two orderlies in all white and opposing teams will run and hide. It's motivational gold.


Adding some frothing at the mouth would help, too

Solution Three: Exotic Contraptions

If the University is really serious about getting Weis up and down the field in a hurry, though, it will invest a little bit of money in an elaborate machine of my design. So far, I have two prototypes worked out. First is an elaborate horizontal dumb-waiter, which can be wheeled manually or (my personal recommendation), cranked by a steam-powered turbine and ultra-high speeds. Not only will this solve the problem of getting Weis up and down the field, but it will also help to prevent any future collisions, as he'll be able to get downfield before the punted ball even arrives there. Now that's progress!



Or, my personal favorite, the gigantic catapult! Accurately calibrated, this 15-foot trebuchet will use centripetal force to launch its payload to the exact spot of the line of scrimmage, where there will presumably be a large pile of mattresses or a net to brace Charlie's fall. Or, hell, if we lose a few more games like this, forget the mattresses. Two problems solved at once.

Knowshon Moreno Has Been Upstaged, Again

It's a tough year for Heisman hopeful Knowshon Moreno. We at The House Rock Built can sympathize with his beleaguered Heisman campaign as he struggles against all odds to break through the crippling anonymity that comes with playing in the oft-overlooked SEC.

Picture the scene: you've just made an outstanding, career-making play by hurdling over a sprawled defender, electrifying the crowd and catapulting yourself into the hearts of football fans and Heisman voters everywhere. You take off your athletic tape and pads and plop down on your sofa, eager to watch the talking heads on ESPN fawn over you for hours on end, and see: absolutely nothing. Devastation.

But you persevere, and gradually a grassroots movement develops on the internet to make a big deal about your spectacular achievement. Things are going pretty well... that is, until disaster strikes. You see, now that we've been able to re-watch the play, it turns out Moreno's accomplishment wasn't even the most impressive thing that happened on that play. If you watch in super-slow motion, you can see Michigan running back Sam McGuffie catapulting over both Moreno and the CMU tackler.

A legend falls from grace.

A Brief Treatise on Jimmy Clausen's New Hairdo

Allright, we've all seen it. Somehow, deep under the radar, the golden boy at Notre Dame decided to grow a profoundly absurd new hairdo for all the world to see. Now before anyone gets hasty and mislabels the new 'do, it's important to get it straight that it is not a mullet. It clearly violates the "business in front, party in the back" ethos of the mullet, as it is "party everywhere". So, what do you call the new look for 2008?

Simple: hockey hair. The wild, stringy locks and flowing mane protruding from the helmet has been an iconic look in hockey for nearly 80 years, and has graced the domes of athletic legends like Dennis Potvin, Guy LaFleur, Brian Engblom, and yes, even The Great One Himself. So while people may laugh at his absurd hair, if you slap a Canadiens jersey and a handlebar mustache on him and change his name to Jacques Clauseneaux, it all looks perfectly natural.

Car ton bras sait porter l'épée, Il sait porter la croix!

The Stinging Bite of the Newspaper Smackdown

Rick Neuheisel made some waves earlier this week by taking out a full-page ad laying the smackdown to cross-town rivals USC.

Needless to say, we here at the House Rock Built admire the chutzpah of throwing down the gauntlet, particularly in doing so in such an old-timey fashion. Seriously, newspapers? In an age of television and radio and, ahem, blogs and such, taking out a newspaper to send a message is recklessly old-school. By god, I don't even think Pete Carroll even reads the newspaper. It would be much more effective to send a message via, I dunno, facebook or Twitter or some shit.

Mission accomplished, thousands of dollars saved.

Not surprisingly, Neuheisel isn't the first coach to take to the press for local trash talk, although there has been a pretty big layoff between the last prominent newspaper ad, when the 1889 Rutgers football team dropped the gauntlet on intrastate rivals Princeton. Sadly, Rutgers dropped its next 13 meetings against Princeton, which goes to show the dangers of hubris.

Rogue Bigfoot Hunters Trap and Kill Leprechaun in Northern Indiana

SOUTH BEND - Hot off the heels of their recent capture of Bigfoot in northern Georgia, soldiers of fortune-cum-cryptozoologists Rick Dyer and Matt Whitton made good on their promise to hunt down and bring to justice a veritable who's who of mythical creatures ranging from Sasquatch to the Loch Ness Monster by bagging one of the world's most elusive and intriguing cryptoids, the leprechaun.

In a dramatic outdoor press conference outside of South Bend, IN, the infamous duo posed with their latest prey, stuffed quite ingloriously into a ramshackle freezer. The specimen, a diminutive, five-foot, five-inch bearded hominid with puffy red cheeks and a snappy green suit and cap, appeared quite convincing to the amateur and professional leprechaun enthusiasts in the crowd, although more skeptical cryptozoologists are awaiting further scientific testing on the remains before jumping to any conclusions.

"After thoroughly researching the mythology of the leprechaun and interviewing scores of eyewitnesses, we were able to sketch out a ten-mile range that we suspected comprised the leprechaun's habitat," Whitton remarked, clicking briskly through a PowerPoint presentation for the media on hand. "We noticed an abnormally large of sightings focused around the South Bend and Mishawaka area in Indiana, clustered mainly around an old, ivy-covered region nestled between two lakes that the locals call 'Notra Dayme'. The village folk warned us that it was a mysterious place full of strange religious intrigue full of great peril, but we persevered on into the uncharted areas and saw our stakeout through."

Whitton described spotting the bizarre, tiny magical humanoid creature in the very early hours of Saturday morning staggering out of a local drinking establishment, and the brief but harrowing firefight that ensued. In the end, magic or no magic, the pixie was no match for Whitton and Dyer's arsenal of modified assault rifles and body armor.

Noted cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, editor of Cryptomundo.com, responded with cautious hope about the veracity of the find. "While most contemporary experts on leprechauns felt that their habitat was limited to the hilly Irish countryside or, as some offshoot schools of thought have suggested, Mobile, Alabama, it's easy to see a migratory pattern that would place it in that region of Indiana."

Preliminary DNA tests on some samples from the corpse have been inconclusive, but further analysis will continue.

When asked what's next for the intrepid hunters, Dyer hinted that they are hot on the trail of a very bizarre half-human, half-orange cryptoid that has haunted the wilderness of upstate New York for nearly half a century. "We're closing in on him fast," he remarked, then added with a sly wink, "Don't be surprised if we're calling another press conference reaaaal soon."

Yarrrr, What Be a Pirate's Favorite Football Team?

A lot of people are making fun of Les Miles for this flub that he made during a press conference, showing off his awesome Michigan education by not knowing how to pronounce the state directly north of the one he lives in. But hey, Les, it's not all that bad. It's an honest mistake that I'm sure all of us have made at one point or another.

So, in the interest of setting the record straight for everyone so that there are no more embarrassing mistakes, here's the House Rock Built's definitive guide to state pronunciation. If any Michigan students are reading, pay close attention, because this course is worth 3 credits toward a Kinesiology major.

Are-Can-Saw:



Arrr-Kansas:

Coach O Gives His Tearful Farewell Speech

Breaking a long spell of silence, Coach Orgeron finally updated his personal blog after receiving the grim news that his tenure at Ole Miss has come to a tragic conclusion. We wish the Orgeron the best.

Tudday, da coachO considah hee-sef da LUCKYAHMAN onda FASSA-DIS URF!

Happy Thanksgiving You Pukes!

Orson asked me to whip up something festive for the holidays, and I can't think of anything more festive than the coach cooking you a turducken to celebrate this joyous occasion.

The University of Notre Dame is Transferring

Right on the heels of the transfers of Ronald Talley, Zach Frazer, Demetrius Jones, Konrad Reuland, and Chris Stewart, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish were dealt another serious blow when the University of Notre Dame itself announced its plans to transfer. While all of the others were third-string players unlikely to make an impact on the team this season, the loss of the University of Notre Dame and its 8,332 students, 780 faculty members, 26 varsity teams, $6.5 billion endowment, and 1,250 acre campus will have very serious consequences for the Irish's 2007 season, and quite possibly beyond.

"All in all, it was a pretty amicable departure," said University President Rev. John I. Jenkins. "It's been a really great 165 years, but I just think it was time to move on."

Needless to say, the University of Notre Dame is now one of the hottest recruits on the market, and coaches from coast to coast are clamoring to get the University to come for an official visit.

"No doubt about it, I'd love to have the University of Notre Dame come to DeKalb," said Northern Illinois coach Joe Novak. "I think the University's resumé speaks for itself. It's not every day you get a chance to recruit a seven-time Heisman winner, 79-time All-American with 11 national championship rings. I think having that kind of firepower would really help put NIU on the map and put us on the path for a MAC championship, if not multiple MAC championships."

The University has already picked up scholarship offers from Florida, LSU, Southern Cal, and Ohio State, to name a few. Due to NCAA regulations, the Unviersity would have to sit out for one year if it transferred now, but there appears to be a loophole that would allow it to get on the field a year earlier. If the University enrolled in a junior college before this month's deadline and earned an associate's degree this semester, it would be eligible to transfer in the spring semester of 2008 and play next season. A source close to the University says that this is the plan, and the University has narrowed it down to either neighboring Holy Cross College or to Pearl River Community College, which has a better space-age technologies program, which is the University's major.

Whichever team gets the services of the University will have a big catch. The University is a four-star recruit on Rivals.com and is currently ranked #96 in the Rivals 100, and is rated as the #2 Entire University for the class of 2008.

Not bad numbers, but a lot of those are wind-aided and hand-timed.

Without a doubt, this will be a big blow to the Fighting Irish in the short term. The University of Notre Dame will not make the trip to Purdue this weekend, and with the Irish already being 21.5 point underdogs, the situation has just become exponentially more hopeless. However, all is not lost for Irish fans. In an interview on ESPN radio, Tom Lemming spoke highly of the future of the Irish:

"Without a doubt, losing the University was a big blow to Charlie Weis and the Fighting Irish, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's going to be easy to replace what it brought to the team: the students, the athletes, the facilities, and, most importantly, that intangible leadership. However, if you look at this 2008 recruiting class that's lined up, it's clear to see that help is on the way. The Irish will struggle through these growing pains as they try to replace the University, but they'll be back with a vengeance in 2009, maybe even sooner."

Blogjammin': A Grimly Satisfying Evening With mgoblog

It's Michigan week, so you know what that means. It's time for me to don my traditional Mexican Wrestling mask and unitard and grapple with Brian Cook, the twisted puppet master at mgoblog. We try to be civil in our sparring matches, but once the ring gets filled with tapioca and the wrasslin' commences, it's kill or be killed out there.

Here's part one of our scintilating conversation, where we grapple with important topics like bratwurst made out of sex, world-destroying battles of übermensch punter-gods, the new Big 10 Morse Code Network, sushi on naked women, the sheer massivness of Ryan Mallett, and, occasionally, college football. Part two is over at mgo, here, so you can continue to soak up the madness over there. I'm gonna have a beer and a Vicodin, cause Cook eye-gouges and fishhooks like a crazy motherfucker. I'm in bold, he's in blue.

---

Fightinamish: You ready to tussle?

Brian Cook: Allright, I'm ready. I was finishing up my awesomely fun UFR for Oregon.

Lucky you!

It was awesome. I felt like I was having an ice cream cone made out of sex and brautwurst.

In South Bend they call that a "Charlie Weis". It costs $1.19 at most convenience stores. Cheese is extra.

Irish Cheddar, probably.

It's good stuff.

So should we start this thing?

Let's do it to it. So, right.  Watching the first half of the Oregon game, I kept thinking to myself that the entire Michigan team needs to, I don't know, see a therapist or something.  They look like a complete wreck psychologically.  Do you see the unraveling against Oregon as a direct effect of the loss the week before?

Well... insofar as the loss the week before indicated that our defense sucked, yes. Michigan has always had tons of trouble with spread option attacks until last year, Ohio State nonwithstanding, and that returned with a vengance for three simple reasons: our defensive line is bad, our linebackers are bad, and our secondary is bad. The rest of the implosion was bad luck (seriously: you put in a guy for one carry and he fumbles?) and Henne playing poorly. Oh, and our offensive coordinator being bad at life.

There's something to be said about healthy coping mechanisms.

So, more to the point, does Michigan actually suck or are they actually that top five team under some bizarre voodoo curse that will disappear once they drink the blood of a virgin... like a Catholic priest?

The defense actually sucks. The really sad thing about the Appalachian State game is that there was precious little trickery in their gameplan. They ran the same shotgun zone read handoff 21 times and gashed Michigan with it time and again. Against Oregon they were befuddled. The offense has a chance to be decent, though. They racked up a bunch of yards on both teams and only didn't score on Oregon because of a bunch of somewhat fluky turnovers and some cowardly offensive coordinating. The latter probably won't change but the former should. The offensive line has been pretty good so far, albeit against sketchy competition, and the run game has been good.

This matchup of Irish offense versus Michigan defense should be pretty hilarious.  What happens when the infinitely-resistable force meets the infinitely-movable object?

In this particular instance I think maybe the movable object? That offensive line seems to be the weakest unit amongst many, many weak units in this particular matchup, and one of the few moderately good performers the first couple weeks have  been Shawn Crable and Tim Jamison. Against a more conventional attack -- assuming Demetrius Jones doesn't make an appearance -- they should be more effective. Maybe. I hesitate to say anything positive about this Michigan team.

All hail Zoltan, our benevolent Space Emperor.

Except about Zoltan. Who is frickin' awesome.

He punted six Oregon guys to death last week.

And yet he is benevolent

If you bring him goulash, yes.

I'll be sure to prepare an offering.  He likes it served in the skull of his enemy, right?

Or upon the body of his newly acquired concubines. Like that sushi in Rising Sun.

Mmmm... fishy.  I say in the interest of saving both teams the humiliation of actually playing a game, we just have Geoff Price and Zoltan wrestle at midfield.  At the very least, it'll be letting the best players decide the game.

I would be up for that. At the very least we could get out of there in time to watch teams with, like, victories to their credit.

I take that back. Such an epic duel would probably take 77 years and 77 days.

And would probably destroy several surrounding villages. Millions would be homeless.


A village ten miles from the epicenter of the last Zoltan-Price fight that was completely leveled by the tremendous sonic boom.

And they would eat bears every once in a while

They've fought once before. Astronomers now refer to it as "The Big Bang".

We should totally set this up.

Severe danger of a punt knocking out a DirecTV satellite, though. And then what will the Big Ten Network do?

Late field goal block by App State, stop. Upset of century, stop. Pandemonium on the streets of Ann Arbor, stop.

Big Ten Morse Code.  Call your telegraph provider today and demand it for free!

Given the way the Appalachian State game turned out, that would do huge business in Michigan.

So... anyway. Jimmy Clausen: best swing-passing quarterback ever? How did you evaluate his starting debut? I was obviously a little underwhelmed.

It's obviously hard to make any judgment when your quarterback is either getting his head bashed in, handing the ball off for a negative gain, or throwing a swing pass.  With the combination of a clown car of offensive linemen in front of him and a pee-wee football playbook, it's a little early to make any judgment, positive or negative, about the wonderkid.  Of course, that hasn't stopped Irish fans and bloggers from raving about his "poise" and "composure".  I think a lot of that is reading a bit too much into the tea leaves.

That being said, I liked what I saw when he let the ball loose downfield.  The long pass to Parris where he scrambled out of certain death and threw a strike across his body on the run was a glimpse at what it is that made everyone drool over this kid in high school.  He also gets bonus points for walking out of Beaver Stadium without urine stains on his pants.  If that's not "poise", you tell me what is.

I don't want to make it seem like I'm writing the kid off, but I did think the whole poise thing was overrated. Several times he sat in the pocket until snowed under, taking an unnecessary -- but poised -- sack. Mallett, meanwhile, spent the second half of the Oregon game trying to friggin' kill his receivers by throwing it through their necks. Oh, and throwing balls 60 yards downfield. He was a little caffienated.

Only 60 yards?  That's a dump-off.  You're lucky he didn't throw it into Lake Huron

He looked a little pissed that the coaches were reining him in by not calling any of the routes that ended in Jackson.

Also tall. Pissed and tall.

He is big.  His legs are so long that he has two sets of knees.

He's Robot Paul Bunyan.

That's not a helmet he's wearing... it's an aquarium with wings painted on it.

I... what?

Ryan Mallett's customized helmet. Get it.. cause, like, he's got a big head and... nevermind.

Uh, he's big.  So big that it paralyzes the goofy metaphor region of my brain

Yeah, well, Clausen's so pointy he's, like, bad at football.

Take that.

Fatality.

Anyway, aside from being big and having the ability to throw the ball into another time zone, do you see him turning into a real quarterback while he's spelling Henne or is he still a ways off from being anything but a sideshow freak?

Can I retract something? I called Clausen "the kid". This is obviously incorrect. He's older than Greg Oden.

Clausen, Oden, and Muddy Waters all shared an apartment in Biloxi back in 1931.

I read that somewhere.


Actually, it wasn't an apartment... it was a tent in a shantytown. It was the Great Depression, of course.

Re: Mallett. I don't know. I was initially unimpressed by his debut, but when I went  back and reviewed the tape it looked like he threw a lot of balls that were accurate but, as mentioned, were thrown a million miles an hour into his receivers necks and were therefore dropped. The interception was going to be between Manningham's numbers on a post but Manningham fell down and deflected it upwards. Several of his incompletions were ridiculous longballs into coverage that Michigan was just throwing because it was third and very long and those were safe throws. Michigan obviously coddled him, running a lot, but also let him throw a surprising amount of stuff in between the hashmarks. I think there's a potential for effectiveness on Saturday.

There is also a fairly high probability of a couple interceptions.

But by god they will be really *moving* when they're picked off.

Go ahead and intercept my "broken metatarsal special"... if you dare.

Wait, Google reveals I mean to say "metacarpal"... not that any of our readers would ever find that out.

No problem. Mallett throws it so hard that when it hits your hands it breaks your foot.

---

Whoo, doggy. That's some good stuff. You can read the thrilling conclusion here, if you dare.

Blogpoll: I'm So Much Cooler Online Edition

Rank	Team	Delta
1	LSU	25
2	Oklahoma	24
3	California	23
4	Southern Cal	22
5	Florida	21
6	West Virginia	20
7	Oregon	19
8	Clemson	18
9	South Carolina	17
10	Texas	16
11	Wisconsin	15
12	Georgia Tech	14
13	Rutgers	13
14	UCLA	12
15	Nebraska	11
16	Penn State	10
17	Arkansas	9
18	Ohio State	8
19	South Florida	7
20	Louisville	6
21	Boston College	5
22	Texas A&M	4
23	Georgia	3
24	Washington	2
25	Hawaii	1

Howdy Doody, y'all. I submitted my ballot just under the wire, but I'm just giving you the full writeup today. You can check the final blogpoll and see what the blogsphere said. I'm a bit relieved to see that I didn't win any crazy voter awards, so I appear to be in my right mind, for what that's worth. Let's have a look-see...

• You'll notice that the delta is screwed up. Somebody was a little busy and didn't get his ballot in on time last week. Heh.
  
  
• LSU is Number One. What else can I say... after watching their savage beat-down of Virginia Tech, there's really nothing else you can say about this team. Okay, there is exactly one thing you can say about this team. But talk is cheap. A cartoon I frantically whipped up is worth a thousand words:



Geaux-rilla with a chainsaw penis. Our national nightmare has arrived.


• It seems like everyone else loves chainsaw penises, too. As the blogpoll at large also catapulted LSU into the number one spot above idle USC. Nothing against the fine program in Southern California, who dropped a few slots after eating cheeseburgers, but at this point, I'm more bullish on the teams who have really demonstrated their savagery on the field. USC's lone game is a kind of meh victory over Idaho. Worry not, because USC will be back on the scene making people look ridiculous soon enough, and their bump in the polls will follow. I think it's going to be a stormy day in Lincoln.



• Nonexistant Defense? Prepare to plunge. Decked from #8 in my preseason poll to #25 after an unbelievably terrible outing on defense against Louisiana Tech, Hawaii lost all the goodwill they had built with me by showing that a bunch of varsity cheerleaders could rack up 500 yards against them. Sure, Colt Brennan can fun and gun his way to a bunch of victories without any help from the "D", but you can only spin that wheel so many times before your luck runs out. Ditto Louisville. While Middle Tennessee State has an awesome fight song (it's "Take Me Out to the Ballgame") and a totally bad-ass Pegasus mascot, giving up a thousand points and ten thousand yards to them means you're not ready for showtime. It's only a matter of time before somebody ridiculous knocks off the Cards.



A man's mascot. Neigh, a man's man's mascot.


• Greetings, Tyrone Willingham! Your stay in the top 25 will be over quickly. You will not enjoy this. I am not your king.
  
  

Well, that's what I've got for you. Tomorrow afternoon I'll put up my scintilating tete-a-tete with mgoblog's Brian Cook, where we talk about the upcoming game, my legendary bedroom skills, Ryan Mallett's customized helmet, and other stuff I'm sure you're dying to know.