Big XII Preview – Kansas

Adolphe Quetelet, a 19th century Belgian statistician, created the BMI, or body mass index.  This is one tool we use to measure obesity.  A BMI of greater than 40.0 is referred to as class III obesity or severely/morbidly obese.

 

Obesity is this country’s number one health risk these days.  Government programs and the governor of California are trying to halt the obesity trend in this country.  Reducing trans fats and making kids take more hours of physical education are ways in which the government is getting involved.

 

The list of obesity induced health conditions seem to be never ending.  They include but are not limited to reflux disease, liver disease, gallstones, hernias, sleep apnea, hypoventilation syndrome, asthma, complications from general anesthesia, low self-esteem, dysmorphic disorder, social stigmatization,  stretch marks, acanthosis nigricans, lymphedema, cellulitis, carbuncles, intertrigo, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, chronic renal failure, and hypogonadism.  The increased strain on the heart and the body make living your life as a morbidly obese person a living hell.

 

Everyone likes the fat dude that tells a lot of jokes.  He’s a fun guy.  But the morbidly obese person that has a certain smell about him is a different story.  People want to avoid him.  They usually feel sorry for him.  There are surgeries to help that condition now, and there are numerous help groups available.  For anyone that is morbidly obese, it’s not too late to change his or her lifestyle to live out his or her remaining days in a somewhat normal state.

 

There are dissenting views on obesity.  In his book The Diet Myth, Paul Campos argues that the social stigma of being obese is the only real problem, that all the health issues reported by the media are insignificant.  This is hard to believe.  Have you ever seen an eighty year old morbidly obese person?

 

Mark Mangino is considered morbidly obese.  He is also considered to be one of the best coaches in the Big 12 conference.  His team’s run last year at a school that doesn’t even care about football was an impressive job of coaching.  His ability to squeeze into living rooms across the country and look parents in the eye and convince them to send their kids to Kansas is nothing short of remarkable.  If you were a parent of a talented football player and a 480 pound circular man taking up your whole couch told you that he would turn your kid into the best athlete he could be, would you buy it?  It’s as unbelievable as a Baptist going to Sunday school lessons at the home of a known Satanist because he thought the Satanist could teach him how to be a good Baptist better than any Baptist could.  Mangino is so fat that the Elephant man would pay money to see him.

 

Oprah has struggled with her weight in the past, but she’s never been morbidly obese.  With the help of experts, she has come up with a four step program for losing weight.  Don’t skip meals.  Skipping meals triggers something in your body that you’ll need to binge eat at your next meal.  Eat more, smaller meals during the day to keep your metabolism working all day.  For the smaller meals, or snacks, stick to one particular food.  A variety of flavors or a selection of different foods leads to gorging.  Don’t eat fatty foods and stick to low fat or skim dairy products.  Avoid comfort foods; the meals your mother fed you when you were growing up just don’t work these days.  Oprah has helped millions of people lose weight.  Mr. Mangino needs to spend more time watching Oprah.

 

Kansas is a nice team.  They’ll finish the season third in the Big 12 north and play in a minor bowl game.

 

Kansas Notes

Kansas won the basketball national championship in 2008 with an improbable and lucky comeback in the final seconds.  Bill Self came to Kansas in 2003 from the University of Illinois.  Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame attended Kansas.  Dr. James Naismith was the only Kansas basketball coach to amass a losing record.  Kansas basketball is important.

 

Deathburger

Big XII Preview – Nebraska

Nebraska had the most dominant run in college football in the past forty years.  Between 1994 and 1997 Nebraska won three of four national championships.  It’s really astounding that a school in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere could even field a competitive Division I team, but Nebraska was on top of the world in the mid-nineties. 

 

Their dominance and downfall coincided with Nebraska joining the Big 12 conference.  The Big 12 conference killed Nebraska, and they will never win a football national championship again.  Their national championship teams of the nineties were built on what were then called Prop 48 athletes.  Most conferences allowed schools only one or none of these so called non-qualifiers.  Nebraska built their team with these people and also gave scholarships to in-state athletes that wanted to play football at Nebraska.  It was called their walk-on program.  The Prop 48 athlete is now a thing of the past.  Supposedly, every team now operates form the same sliding scale, so athletes from Florida and Texas and California no longer have to go to the desolate children of the corn fields of Nebraska to play football unless they can’t graduate from high school.  Therefore, Nebraska is reduced to offering scholarships to 11 Texas high school running backs for next year’s recruiting class.  Hell, even TCU wouldn’t  just throw offers out like that.

 

Not only did Nebraska build their teams with athletes that couldn’t get in anywhere else outside of Louisville and Fresno State,  they allowed them to stay on the team with multiple legal infractions including dragging young women by the hair down staircases.  This points directly at Tom Osborne.  He was lenient on his team because his team consisted of Prop 48 athletes that shouldn’t have been in college in the first place.  He needed to protect them because he knew they were incapable of college work and dragging a woman down the stairs by her hair was normal to them.  Remember, most of these athletes, and they were great athletes, were recruited by Nebraska and maybe some school like Fresno State.  Most universities would not accept more than a couple of the key players on Nebraska’s championship run.  Most schools required their players to at least have an SAT score.

 

Last year, Nebraska was pathetic.  They went 2-6 in conference and in non-conference games had lucky wins against Ball State and Wake Forest.  The team would give up if they trailed by anything.  This led to the dismissal of savior Bill Callahan and the hiring of Bo Pellini.  Usually, a team with the recent success of Nebraska wouldn’t take a gamble and hire a coordinator as their head coach.  But, after Bill Callahan drove the program into the ground, Nebraska was desperate to try anything.  Everyone outside of Nebraska knows that the reason for their recent failures is that they are located in Nebraska and that they can no longer admit players that can’t get into 100 other Division I schools.

 

To my knowledge, there’s never been a good looking woman attend the University of Nebraska that didn’t get beat up by a football player.  I don’t know this for a fact, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

 

In non-conference play, Nebraska plays four home games, and should win at least half of them.  They play Baylor killers San Jose State, the Aggies of New Mexico State, and Western Michigan.  They should win two of those three games.  They will get destroyed by Virginia Tech in Lincoln on September 20th.  They face Texas Tech in Lubbock and Oklahoma in Norman  and Baylor at home for their games against the south.  They will lose two of those games and the Baylor game is a tossup.  Deathburger predicts that Nebraska will beat Baylor for their only Big 12 win.  They will finish 3-9 for the season.  New coach Bo Pellini will be under fire after only one season. 

 

On offense, Nebraska has Marlon Lucky,  Joe Ganz will control the backfield, but the receivers are a weakness and teams will concentrate on the run.  Defensively, Nebraska has a decent line but needs to find some linebackers.  The main thing about this team is that they just gave up in games they trailed last year.  Maybe Bo can change this.  Maybe he can’t.  Deathburger predicts a humiliating loss to Iowa State and a team that follows the Callahan tradition of quitting in tough games.

 

This will be a down year for Nebraska.  The challenge for the Cornhuskers will be to pass Iowa State and not be the worst team in the north.  They seem to be way behind every other team in the north.  The will never finish consistently above Colorado in the north as long as Colorado stays in the conference.  A good goal for Nebraska will be to competitive with Kansas State over the next few years and remain above Iowa State in the standings.  The problem is that Iowa State appears to have hired a better coach.

 

Nebraska Notes:

Scott Frost and Tommy Frazier were two of the greatest quarterbacks to play college football since 1990.  Tom Osborne is temporarily running the show in Nebraska under different rules than when he could assemble dominant teams.  Johnny Carson and Warren Buffet attended Nebraska.  Nebraska’s overall sports programs used to be the best in the Big 12, but now they are mired in mediocrity.  Nebraska is now an afterthought in Big 12 championship discussions, and they probably won’t win another football championship in the next 30 years.

 

Deathburger

Big XII Preview – Oklahoma

The Oklahoma Sooners are usually considered one of the top football teams in the nation, and, since the unwarranted firing of super recruiter John Blake, have been at or near the top in the Big 12 standings.  The great tradition of football under the stoic Bud Wilkinson and loose cannon Barry Switzer continues today under Bob Stoops.  Oklahoma, more than any other school in the Big XII, pours all its resources into its football program.  Oklahoma State actually has a better overall athletic program, but, looking strictly at football, OU rules Oklahoma.

 

OU was established in 1890, which is seventeen years before Oklahoma became a state.  Imagine going to school in some territory that nobody wants.  Other than the nearly uninhabitable desert lands of New Mexico and Arizona, Oklahoma was the last state in the continental United States to actually become a state.  That is beyond bizarre since Oklahoma is almost in the middle of the country.  Something must be wrong there.

 

Oklahoma has gone to BCS bowl games four of the past five years and lost them all in embarrassing fashion, which makes the Big 12 conference as a whole look weak.  They were steamrolled by a school with a lame duck coach last year.  The year before, they lost to a team that plays on a blue field, a team whose best players were trying to marry cheerleaders during the game.  In 2004 they were destroyed by USC and the year before that LSU beat them in the Sugar Bowl.  Throw in some regular season losses to undermanned TCU and Oregon and Texas Tech and Oklahoma State teams, and there is cause for concern. Expectations are high in Norman, and these losses are calling in to question the coaching ability of Bob Stoops.  Was Stoops the mastermind behind the Oklahoma juggernaut, or were Mike Leach, Mark Mangino, Little Brother Stoops, and the rest of the side characters more responsible for Oklahoma’s latest rise to national prominence?  I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

 

Oklahoma has an easy schedule, playing the likes of Chattanooga, Cincy, and TCU at home in non conference games.  The only road game is against a horrible Washington squad that has been on a downhill spiral since Don James left after his third straight Rose Bowl appearance in following the 1993 season.  In conference play, they get Kansas and Nebraska at home and have to travel to troubled Kansas State.  Their only home game against a southern foe is with Texas Tech.  They are designated as the home team in the Cotton Bowl this year.

 

The lifeblood of the Oklahoma football program is the state of Texas.  They are recruiting more nationally lately, but they go after Texas kids hard.  After taking the top couple of kids in Oklahoma, they send their coaches to Texas and get Texas kids to cross the Red River and play for Oklahoma.  They have always done this, and will continue to do this because it has worked for them and will continue to work well.  However, to maintain their presence in Texas, they have to rely on some shady institutional practices.  For instance, they offer in state tuition to kids from the DFW Metroplex.  They actively recruit Texas kids that fail to get into Texas or Texas A&M due to poor academic performance.  The more Texans they have graduating from Oklahoma, they greater their presence will be in Texas, and the easier it will be for them to recruit football players from the state of Texas.  Is it wrong?  Academically, it probably doesn’t make a difference.  However, the fiduciary duty of the administration at Oklahoma University has been compromised by spending Oklahoma tax payer money to pay for part of the tuition for kids that grow up in another state.  Imagine that you grew up in Oklahoma and wanted to go to school at Oklahoma University.  You were denied admission, even though the school was bringing in a thousand freshman from the Dallas area that struggled academically and couldn’t get into the top ten percent of their class in high school?  It’s a slippery slope, but as long as the football team continues to win, I guess it is worth it.

 

On the field, Oklahoma is favored to win the Big XII, and Deathburger predicts that they will win the conference.  I believe they’ll lose one game, maybe at Kansas State or at Texas A&M or even the Bedlam game.  Then, they’ll roll through the championship game and onto another BCS bowl game where they’ll get their asses handed to them once again.  It’s not a pretty picture for Sooner fans who are expecting more this year.

 

Offensively, OU should have its best team in years.  They return the entire offensive line and sophomore QB Sam Bradford.  Defensively, they must replace most of their linebackers and both cornerbacks, but the cupboard isn’t bare.  They may slip a half notch defensively, but their offense has come a long way since the days of Nate Hybl.  All in all, this is a very good Oklahoma squad that will try to reverse a trend of embarrassing losses in big bowl games.  They will finish the season ranked somewhere near tenth with two losses.

 

Oklahoma Notes

James Garner and Van Heflin attended OU.  Norman is the third largest city in Oklahoma with a population just over 100,000.  The Sooners play Washington this year.  Their first game at Memorial Stadium was in 1923, a win against Washington.  There are at least nine auto salvage yards within twenty miles of Norman.  Bob Stoops appears to be in the bottom quartile of the Lip-Philtrum Guide 1.  Howard Schnellenberger is the only known gentleman to coach the Sooners, but he only lasted one year.  Oklahoma has a disproportionate number of residents that live in manufactured housing.  Oklahoma fans sometimes rip the testicles off of Texas fans.

Deathburger