Every four years we hear the same refrain in politics: The public may like this candidate or that one, but in the end, Americans will vote for the candidate that they most want to drink a beer with.  Americans like leaders who are approachable, maybe a little bit messy, not too put together, even about to surprise (scare?) us. We like our leaders to be about this [] much unpredictable.

This preference pretty much applies across the board, and not just with politicians. Let me demonstrate: Name your favorite Star Wars character. You said ‘Darth Vader’ right? Or maybe you said ‘Han Solo’, but I guarantee you didn’t even think of Luke Skywalker. Why? Because Luke Skywalker is boring. Now, think of Gone with the Wind, and I’ll ask the same question. Rhett Butler right? Or maybe Scarlett O’hara, but definitely not Ashley or Melanie Wilkes. The Wilkes were kind, gentle . . .and lame. You see, we do like our heroes with a little bit of the Dark Side in them.

We like Mr. Hyde, not so much Dr. Jekyl.  Bruce Banner can be as cool and smart as all hell, but its the Verdant Colossus we’re dying to see. Sure we appreciated Liberaci, but we adored Jerry Lee.  We might respect Hillary (I said might, Buck), but Bill is the rock star.

Now to make it more relevant to the sporting world, which 70’s era quarterback is still making money in the business, upright Roger Staubach, or half-crazy common man Terry Bradshaw?

You get the idea.  Its a classic Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy. � Or, to put it another way, we want a leader that we can identify with on the most base of basic levels. Someone as twisted as we secretly recognize ourselves to be. We want a quarterback – to pick an example entirely at random – with a problem or two. Americans, I believe, want a quarterback they can drink a beer with.

Enter Stephen Achilles Garcia.

Before we get deeper in the analysis here, let me acknowledge a few things that are obvious about the Gamecocks’ erstwhile quarterback. The first thing is, of course, the hair. Its almost a mullet, in much the same way that Lake Murray can look like an ocean, but really isn’t. See, Stephen wouldn’t wear something as passe as a mullet, even if ironically. Irony is not Stephen’s rhetorical device of choice. No, instead Stephen opts for deep heartfelt stares as his mode of persuasion. And mullet or no, when he pinches his dark tresses back behind his ears, your ladyfriend sniffs the air gently and her love for you dies just a little bit. The hair might be cut tight now, but trust me, like Samson of old, Garcia knows wherein his power lies.  The hair will return.

Then there’s Stephen’s grooming habits. I hate shaving, don’t you?  Sure you do,but neither of us hate it as much as Garcia.  Needed twice a day, his facial swatch only gets a perfunctory swipe twice a football season. Oh, and don’t be thrown by the golf-shirt-and-eyeblack look in the post-game press conference. He did, in fact,take a post-game shower and change clothes, he just reapplied the eyeblack before the presser to remind everyone that he’s a warrior.

Then there are the statistics. He never leads in any category EVER. But he’s close man, he’s freakin’ close. And if you weren’t such an uptight, Apollonian nerdwad, you would appreciate the everyman poetry of his not-as-of-yet statistical consummation.

Yeah, the middle name throws you. And yeah, he’s got some crazy Greek word tattoed on his inner arm, but we all understand that the name and the tat are babe candy at, respectively, Athens coffee shops and Gainesville biker bars.  What kind of crazy crap have you done in the past to score some lovin’?  See, ol’ Achilles is right there with you.

Now some may say that Garcia comes with baggage. Some might point to his history with the team and say its time for Carolina to move on. Some may also point out that he has failed to demonstrate leadership and has let the HBC down.

To all of those naysayers I respond with a barbaric ‘Phfffttt!’ Garcia’s baggage includes a couple of too public beers, and couple of too public women, and one juvenile prank. Not exactly on par with Auburn openly paying for players, or Georgia having half their scholarship athletes arrested for felonies last summer. And time to move on? From what, the first quarterback to lead us to a conference trophy in my lifetime? HBC let down?  Heck, he’s been let down by every quarterback he’s ever known short of the one who’s initials are S.O.S.

I’m rambling around to arrive at a point, and the point is this: We love you, Stephen, and we want you back.  Not in August, or in a month, but yesterday. We want you back yesterday because we want to believe that someone just like us can succeed. You are just like us; just as flawed, just as promising. But it’s not as good of a story-not as American of a story- if you make your comeback at Louisville or  Marshall or some other God-awful place.  Stick it out here, make the comeback of all comebacks here, and I’ll join the throngs celebrating you as the greatest quarterback in Carolina history.

Heck, I’ll even buy you a beer.

You may have seen this video from practice yesterday. It’s recommended viewing, if for no other reason that to point out that the HBC is either A. Brilliant, B. The Man You’re Wife Wishes You Were, C. Bat-crap Crazytime Insane, or D. All of the above. (Note:this thing-that-really-happened is also probably relevant in the analysis)

Regardless, what we have here is an ersatz demonstration of what legal-types call a “Terry Frisk.” A Terry Frisk, so named because of the Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio 392 U.S. 1 (1968), which allows peace officers to stop and briefly detain an individual if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person recently has, or currently is, committing a crime. If the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the targeted individual might be carrying a weapon, then the stop can include a brief pat down search of the person in order to eliminate that possibility.

Where the HBC faux-detention (and the Jadeveon Clowney cuffing it was based on) deviates from this common practice is with the unnecessary handcuffing. Terry does NOT stand for the proposition that an officer can handcuff you just for questioning. Handcuffing is more than a brief stop for questioning, and is more in the nature of an outright arrest.  Now if the surrounding circumstances warrant the cuffing, then this deprivation of personal liberty can be justified, but not when a single individual is surrounded by several officers, relatively docile, and completely cooperative.  A handcuffing in that innocuous circumstance is excessive and not within the conduct allowed under Terry and its progeny.

You still with me?

What I aiming at is that the Columbia Police Department improperly handcuffed Clowney and Dixon. That they did so in a public place betrayed that they either don’t understand or don’t care about the constitutional limits on their powers to detain individual citizens.  I suspect the CPD enjoys having the spotlight when Gamecock athletes are involved in relatively minor brushes with the law.  I also suspect that the CPD officers in this case knew exactly who they were detaining, and it made them feel all warm inside to bask in the reflected light of the nation’s number one football signee.

I would like to contrast, without weighing in on which is the more correct approach, the Columbia PD’s approach with that of another “C”PD – the Clemson Police Department.  That CPD takes a different approach insofar as they go to great lengths to protect CTU athletes from embarrassment or undue attention.  I’ve heard this approach articulated from the highest of CTU officials, and have seen examples ranging from not releasing the occurrence of an arrest until forced to do so, all the way to delaying the arrest and prosecution of a troubled athlete until after the player had all but exhausted his eligibility. The CTU �administration even has an employee in its Athletic Department who’s job description includes serving as a liaison between the department and local law enforcement. You’ve heard that CTU sells its recruits on the “family atmosphere?” Well, this engagement with local law enforcement is a large part of that purported family setting.

All we’ve got is the HBC doing a pantomime after practice.  Oh, and a police department that apparently gets off by harassing our players.

We’ve found him, witness the photographic evidence from the Marriott Lounge:

KABOOM-YOW! [noise of our collective TRC snarky cynicism being dropped]:

Hey, Coach, just how deep are you in it?

Earlier today I was watching the Daytona pre-race coverage on Fox while gently dozing on my couch.  I find that modern day NASCAR is best viewed in a semi-catatonic state, as it is both designed and marketed for a demographic that inhabits that mental gap permanently.  Regardless, somewhere through the fog of my snoozing I heard Darrell Waltrip seal-bark something resembling the following English-language sentence: “Imagine if your other favorite sport had its biggest event at the beginning of the season like we do in NASCAR.”

Now granted this sounded (perhaps due to my resting haze but more likely attributable to Waltrip’s Tennessee background) more like “imgn ifny odder fvorine sportin had stff at beg gginn liken we did in NNNNNNAAASSSCCCAARRRRR”, but the thought still hit me like a thunderbolt. 

What if college football started off the season with its biggest games?

The biggest games are the bowl games, of course, so what would it be like if we started the season with them? 

The concept got me to thinking.  It also ruined my NASCAR nap.  Excitedly I pulled out pen and paper and began fleshing out the specifics.  I first wrote down every marquee bowl game I could think of.   I left off the lesser ESPN bowls, the ones named after tires, or the ones played on blue fields, and although this was not my intention, coincidently eliminated any bowl that CTU has played in over the last ten years or could hope to compete in for the near future.

That left me with Orange/Sugar/Fiesta/Chickfila/Cotton/Rose/Gator/Outback and a couple of those western bowls that Notre Dame and the PAC-10 pretend to be excited about.  Instead of New Years Day bowls these all would, under my plan, become Labor Day bowls. 

It occurred to me that if we played all of those at the beginning of the year it would restore them to their original meaning:  nothing.  They would mean nothing other than providing us with a good out-of-conference tilt to open the football year.  No national title implications, no concerns other than having a few chambers of commerce trying to set up good ball games that would show well locally and to a TV audience.  The bowl games would be celebrations of the sports and of the teams, not diluted by larger implications.  Heck the Chickfila folks have already blazed the trail for us with their wildly-successful kickoff classic game.

What of the BCS and the polls and the search for a national title?  Keep them all, but keep them at the end of the year as a part of a playoff.  Conference champs only (probably should make the ACC and WAC have a play-in but that’s a blog for a different day) in an eight game playoff culminating with a national title game on January 1^st.

Best of both worlds.

Only shortcoming I can see is having a bunch of seniors fighting and clawing to earn a Gator Bowl bid, just to see the underclassmen enjoying it the following fall while they are out in the workforce.

Solution?  Comp them each with a couple of tickets and an Ole Miss coed.  Problem solved.

So the playoff/bowl controversy is solved at last.

You’re welcome, college football.

 

trick shot quarterback

delivers

mind blowing

video

but has no

statistics

as a redshirt

junior?