UNC Hate Week

Let me tell you the story of Devon Ramsay.

Devon Ramsay played fullback at UNC. When UNC went through its Academic Scandal back in 2011 and started holding players out, Devon Ramsay was one of the guys they suspended indefinitely.

UNC at the time was engaging in a practice of enrolling players in Independent Study “Paper Classes”, which essentially is a nice way of saying they were putting their kids in no-show classes that automatically rewarded them with A’s or B’s. It is a pretty well-known way of keeping kids eligible, and quite frankly I don’t really care too much about it.

(The NCAA, by the way, investigated and despite mountains of proof found no wrongdoing with this at the time, but then again that isn’t surprising.)

So, when UNC got busted for this back in the summer of 2011, the administration decided it had to cover its ass until they scandal blew over. One of the fall guys? Devon Ramsay.

He was tarnished as a liar and a cheat.

Only here’s the thing. Devon Ramsay never cheated.

He was a high school Honor Student who was one of the few guys on the team that was both a good player AND a decent student. He was in the business school and actually gave a shit about his grades, despite the drastic time restrictions placed upon student athletes at the NCAA level.

 He never participated in Paper Classes.

He worked with an academic liaison, or specialist, provided by the university. When he emailed a paper for a freshman sociology class to a tutor for editing, he didn’t think anything about it.

2 years later, he was pulled out of a practice, seemingly at random, and interviewed by the head of compliance.

To make a long story short, Devon couldn’t produce the paper in question (a 3 pager for a freshman lecture class) any longer, and no record of it existed with the professor either…because why fucking would it?

To make the whole situation even sillier, the head of compliance at UNC sent the case off to the NCAA Headquarters, where a bureaucrat decided that what was deemed an “inconsequential” amount of editing (in conjunction with a school supplied academic tutor) by a former North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice…who also taught classes at UNC Law School…was indeed academic fraud.

The “plagiarism” was so insiginifcant that the Student Honor Court, which hears such manners at UNC, didn’t even find enough standing for there to be a hearing, much less a disciplinary finding.

And yet, he was charged, tried and convicted, all in one day, all without representation, and suspended indefinitely. All because the university administration got caught doing something that was necessitated by their conscious decision to become competitive in football, and then once caught, decided they needed to make an example of someone. 

Instead of resigning and using THEMSELVES as the example, they sacrificed Devon Ramsay.

They didn’t strip away any of their cherished basketball championship banners, despite 2 of their championship rosters being filled with guys that participated in Paper Classes.

Those banners still hang and probably always will.

They didn’t fire the decision-makers.

They scape-goated one of the few kids in the athletic department that was actually doing it the right way, and then dragged his name through the mud for good measure.

Ramsay never got reinstated until Bob Orr, the former justice I mentioned above, took up his cause and helped him fight back.

But, as well all know, that doesn’t come close to making up for what happened.

Listen, I love winning. I am willing to turn my head and look the other way for a LOT of stuff. When Al Quadin Muhammad beat the shit out of his roommate, or Eddie Johnson puts a kid in the hospital after a fist fight at a party, or Gabe Terry gets caught dealing drugs, I honestly do not care. I get mad when the university kicks them out. Boys will be boys as far as I’m concerned when it comes to shit like that.

Even I think this was a sleaze ball thing for UNC to do.

And if a university is capable of that, then I think it is safe to say some pretty hateful things about them.

Fortunately, I don’t have to.

What happened to Devon Ramsay sums it up nicely for me.

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I am going to be in town for homecoming this weekend, and I expect to see UNC put up about 40 on our defense. The only question is whether we can keep to the blueprint we used so well against VTech:

Establish the run with Duke, Yearby and Edwards, and use the playaction game with Kaaya to keep the defense honest and steal a few big plays.

I have no idea because I have given up on figuring out this team week to week. I just want it to be a fun game.

Virginia Tech Hate Week

I hate Virginia Tech so much.

I’ve gone on and one and on about the things I despise about them:

Their awful uniforms.

Their coach who looks like he has another coach growing off his neck.

Their alcoholic defensive coordinator who OWNS us.

The stupid ass turkey bugle call they play a million times during every game.

Coming in to the stadium to Enter Sandman…actually that’s pretty cool.

The fact that they win one big game every year and I am jealous of that fact.

Blacksburg, Virginia.

“Beamer- Ball”.

The Vick brothers.

But you know what I really hate?

I hate that we are, at least in some way, responsible for it.

Virginia Tech used to be known as VPI and they were AWFUL.

They hired Frank Beamer who got them to play respectable football with his mix of good defense, ball control offense and dynamic special teams. But, again, they were respectable…nothing more, nothing less.

Then Miami got hit with sanctions in the Mid-90s. Virginia Tech started beating us during this period, which I guess we can call the “Second Dark Age” of Miami football. They beat us a lot. 5 straight times from 1995-1999.

That legitimized their program. It empowered them in the talent-laden “Tidewater” region of Virginia, allowing them to go in and get an athlete named Michael Vick, whom they previously would have had no shot at.

Since 1995, they have been a major pain in the ass. In fact, even in 2001 and 2002, when Miami possessed maybe the greatest compilation of talent in the history of college football, the Canes only won their 2 games against the Hokies by a total of 13 points.

Since 2003, VT has won 8 of 10 in the series. They OWN the Canes, particularly in Blacksburg, which is Miami’s little house of horrors.

Last year, when Miami played them at home in “special” gray uniforms (/throws up), they were 7-1. 

A win against VT would have essentially wrapped up a birth in the ACC Title Game for the Canes.

VT came in with a tight end playing quarterback who had CLEARLY regressed from his junior year, when Miami had beat VT handily. It was the worst Hokies team in several years.

So what happened? Miami got blown out 42-24. AT HOME, IN PRIMETIME.

Of course they did.

Ugh.

It was a comedy of errors, maybe none more poignant then a play in the 3^rd quarter (I think it was the 3^rd quarter, that feels about right) when VT had 3^rd and forever and Miami somehow managed to miss 4 tackles on a dump off screen pass and give up a touchdown.

But hey, Al Golden wears a tie and we have special uniforms so it’s all good.

Anyway, right now the ACC Coastal is in full meltdown mode. Everyone is losing to everyone else.

Virginia Tech looked really good in beating Ohio State on the road at the beginning of the season.

Since then, they have lost to East Carolina, Georgia Tech (who has lost 2 straight) and Pittsburgh (who has lost to Iowa, Akron and Virginia).

So yeah, Virginia Tech blows. Their quarterback, Michael Brewer, plays the game like he is constantly concussed. Their best receiver is a true freshman. Their best linebacker is Gregg Wiliams’ son (so he will be dirty and concuss a few of our guys). There is ANOTHER Fuller brother at corner, this one maybe the best of the whole Cot Damn bunch.

What does all of this mean?

We are going to go to their place, in primetime, with no other games on, and probably lose to this crapass team.

Because in order to have hope, you have to think that this Miami team will buck the trend under Golden, which means you have to be beholden to something other than cold hard science, which means you must think there is a Football God of some sort, which is CLEARLY not the case based on that FSU team continuing to win.

There is no Football God. There is no hope. There are only trends and numbers. And those state that once again, Miami is about to get stomach punched by a team with a much lower talent level.

Just keep in mind that, while it happens, we have ourselves to blame for it.

Cincy Hate Week

This was supposed to be Cincinatti hate week.

Instead, this is all I can muster:

Cincinnati is a slightly-below-mediocre football team coached by a once-almost-great mind, Tommy Tuberville, that the game may have passed by.

They are playing without their record setting quarterback and are coming off a thrashing at the hands of Memphis. Wait, that can’t be right. Memphis?

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Yep, they got blown out by Memphis.

Cincinnati is, and I may be wrong here, from the  Italian for “Crack Den”. This is a city with a major identity crisis…they have all the Midwestern provincialism combined with all the Southern racism. Border states, y’all.

Also, it is impossible to spell Cincinnati.

And while we are here, super F Skyline chili. Looks like cholera, tastes like cholera, is served on spaghetti. Mmmmmmmm.

Annnnnnd that’s all I got.

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Know what I really want to write about?

I hate watching our games these days.

I hate that our coaching staff can’t figure out how to stop a team from running the same god damned 3 plays for the entire game.

I hate that we take one step forward, 8 steps back.

I hate that we are trying our ass off to become 1980s Penn State because that’s when our coaching staff was getting mad drunk at frat parties and playing slightly above average football and jammin’ out to Motley C rue on the Shore.

Let me tell you something about 1980s Penn State. They played in a shit conference and got real lucky one time and stole a national championship from a team that paper-cutted itself to death. Other than that it was a bunch of slow, mediocre white dudes running around spouting the gospel of Joe Paterno, who in hindsight was just another sleaze ball head football coach who also dabbled in covering up child molestation within his program so that he could get just one more 10-2 record under his belt.

I honestly never thought I would see it come to this. We play cared football, and our coaching staff refuses to change, and meanwhile we fans are stupid enough to let it effect our lives.

We have literally become hostages on this train ride in to nothing.

And let’s be clear, the fans are the ones who lose the most here.

The fans don’t have a choice in anything. We can fly banners or not purchase tickets or whatever, but ultimately we don’t have a choice at all. We have no say at all, even though we care more than anyone.

So we sit here and continue to support this team, accepting whatever shit they choose to shovel down our throats, listening to shitty press conferences that insult our intelligence, hoping that next week will be the week that this team finally clicks.

Newsflash: it isn’t happening.

We will continue to suck on defense because our leadership has installed a culture in which making a mistake is only ok if it is within a certain structure, because making the mistake within the structure allows the coaches to scapegoat the player.

We will continue to waste the talents of Duke Johnson, who is on pace to break the school’s all time yardage record in roughly 2.5 seasons, which is the kind of crazy that you never even think is possible.

We will eventually fire Al Golden, and because our administration was stupid enough to give him a massive extension, we will have no choice when they cry poor and hire another unproven coach because that is all they can afford after paying a $10 million buyout.

Our administration talks a lot about wanting to win and yet has done nothing to support it. We talk about competing with FSU and UiF yet refuse to go up to the level which is necessary to actually do it.

And it is us, the fans, who suffer. I feel bad for the players, but right now I feel worse for myself, and my girlfriend, and my dad, and my friends Frank and Trent and Steve and everyone else who watches this team every weekend. We put so much of ourselves in to this freakin’ team, planning our weekends around watching the games, planning our bathroom breaks around the play of the team, wasting money one ever-increasing amounts of beer in order to cope with the performances we are watching, and get nothing back.

I am defeated. I will continue to hate other teams, and love ours, and write about it because I enjoy the exercise every week. But after 10 years of mediocrity, this past Saturday night has broken me. 

The specific moment was early in the 4th quarter. Down one score, we had them in 3rd and 16. A triple option team was going to be forced to pass, and everyone knew it. There was even a TV timeout before the play. EVERYONE knew what was coming. And what happened? 

Exactly what you think. Their Pop Warner quarterback floated a shitty pass to a 5'7" running back 17 yards down the field, and we had a slow linebacker covering him, and of course that didn't work, and they got the first down, and eventually scored, and we all knew it was over.

The worst part? I expected every ounce of it.

I have become a cynic about college football.

Thanks, Al.

Georgia Tech Hate Week

I hate Georgia Tech.

I went pretty hard on them last year, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Honestly I am pretty much out of ammo without repeating last year’s, so I am leaning pretty heavily on my buddy Trent (Atlanta native) and my brother Billy (Atlanta transplant) for material.

First, to recap, I hate this jabroni: 

That guy is the worst. F him.

He represents one of the two main groups of Georgia Tech students.

The socially awkward (and not in a funny way like the dudes on The Big Bang Theory who actually show up to work everyday in $300,000 import sports cars and cut me off when I am just trying to cross the street on the lot to go get my shitty overpriced salad from the cafeteria) and celibate, mostly because there are no girls at this school.*

*More on that in a minute

And then there are the WORST southern frat dogs you can imagine. Affluent, white southerners that think they party as hard as an SEC frat would (they don’t) and try their ass off to prove it at every juncture (it doesn’t work). However, they think they are better than SEC kids because they go to a “good school”…which is true, except they are all in the business school, which is the same exact meaningless joke as the undergraduate business school at any other university except for, like, Harvard and Stanford.

They wear bowties to football games, because #FRAT. They host the WORST kind of theme parties at their fraternity mansions, which is hard to do because pretty much any theme party is awful.

 They drink craft beer because they want you to think they are a cut above (they aren’t).

Back to the girls. There are roughly 5,000 of them at the entire damn university. They average a 4.5 in the looks department, and that is only because there are a handful of 7s and 8s bringing up the average. I don’t know why they go there, but to their credit, they look like 11s and 12s when on that campus.

Also, I went to The Varsity in August. The Varsity sucks. Boom. Suck failure, nerds.

Moving to their football program, they have been the redheaded step child to UGA for 20+ years in their own state. They have an on campus stadium that looks like it belongs in Dresden, and their program’s symbol is an effing Model T Ford.

And speaking of World War-Era shit, their coach is Paul Johnson, who still runs the Triple Option. In terms of looks, Paul Johnson makes Bo Pelini look like Bradly Cooper.

This dude is the head coach of one of the 2 major universities in one of the 5 best states for football talent in the country, and he runs an offense that went out of vogue 30+ years ago.

Literally any decent team that has more than a week to prepare for this offense shuts it down. Shit, Georgia Southern almost beat them a couple weeks ago.

Now, I’d like to say this should be a blowout, because they run a stupid offense and don’t have any athletes that can run with us (because no smart Georgian wants to play for Paul Johnson if they can help it). But then again, this team beat Virginia Tech, who has a much better defense than Miami. And everytime you think you have them out of the game, one of their o-lineman destroys the ACL of your team’s best d-lineman with a cut block (which should be illegal, by the way) and they open a big hole and score a touchdown.

Paul Johnson is such a dick that his entire blocking philosophy is “dive at their knees!”

I imagine this game will be pretty close, and could realistically go either way. If the Miami defense from last week shows up, we could turn it into a blowout. Everyone has to trust each other though. Defensive backs have to stay at home and not cheat up, linebackers have to make tackles on first contact, etc.

Otherwise, who knows? The way this defense played against Nebraska, Tech could actually run it up on us. Which would be a sad day, and maybe the final nail in Golden’s coffin.