Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Hate Week - FAU

This week the ‘Canes take their show on the road to face the FAU Owls.

FAU is a commuter school a short drive from the University of Miami. Their head coach is Ron Turner, the younger, dumber brother of professional tomato can Norv Turner, good for your Fantasy Team but poison for an actual NFL team. Last week they kicked off their season by taking out UCF, a victory which was significant but also lead to quotes like this from Turner:
"I literally pulled out my contract and looked to see if I had an out clause with all the off-the-field issues, and I didn't," recalled Turner, a former Bears offensive coordinator and Illinois coach. "I'd come home and vent, and my wife (Wendy) would be like, 'Stay the course, you're here for a reason, just keep going.' I knew that, but she kept saying it so I did. And I'm glad I did because right now I love this team."
Good stuff right there. Uplifting.  

The most famous game between Miami and FAU was in 2006, a 35-0 Miami win that was marred by an ugly benches-clearing brawl.

Other than that, FAU does not matter. They really, really don’t matter.

Know how I know they don’t matter?

Because all that stuff I just wrote was actually true of FIU, not FAU. Took you a second, didn’t it?

Boom…John Oliver’d.

FAU is actually in Boca Raton, a lovely place if you happen to be an 85 year old Jewish man from Massapequa.

If you are anything less, Boca Raton is a hellscape of old people who stopped being able to see 10 years ago and yet are still allowed to drive 60 miles an hour down Military Trail. 

It’s like a f*cking demolition derby filled with late model Lincoln Town Cars – only you have no idea you’re competing until it is too late.

FAU had no football program until Howard Schnellenberger, the man famous for turning the University of Miami into the most dominant program in college football history, decided he would like to build something from scratch. He made the Owls competitive in the Sun Belt Conference and got an on-campus stadium built, which is both impressive and at the same time the most Boca thing that could possibly happen.

Schnells essentially retired to a town filled with people who made him feel young, tried to recreate a piece of “home”…in this case a football program instead of a TooJay’s Deli…and then threw it in cruise control after creating something 40% as good.

 I can just see Schnells sitting in a rocker at his McMansion in Bocaire Country Club, puffing on his pipe, listening to the TV turned up to volume 80, pretending not to hear his pain in the ass daughter-in-law hassling him about the mustard in the fridge being expired.

On the field, FAU is pretty much as non-descript as they are off of it. They have an energetic young coach named Charlie Partridge, who was hired to replace Carl Pelini (of the Flying Pelini Brothers).
Carl was shit canned at mid-season a couple of years ago because of “admitted illegal drug use, the drugs in question being cocaine and marijuana”.

See? This is what being a young-ish man living in Boca does to people! You get so bored that you end up trying to recreate the final scene from Scarface at a split-level with a screened in pool off of Glades Road!

(Realistically, FAU’s brass is lucky that’s all that happened. This is the same Carl Pelini that apparently got run out of Nebraska because of rumors that he was sleeping with the daughter of a prominent booster.)

Anyway, FAU was the only team in Week 1 to score 40+ points and still lose. That’s a special kind of suck right there.

This should be a blowout for the ‘Canes, but similar to Bethune Cookman, if the expectation is blowout and we actually do it, does that tell us anything about the team?


Probably not. We will have to wait until Nebraska for that.

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