“Anyone else need a drink right now?”

Before you get too worked up one way or the other about the results of yesterday’s scrimmage, here’s some valuable perspective from Roll ‘Bama Roll.

Kiffin watch: a spoonful of hubris helps the medicine go down

The Laner gets somebody else to write a piece (h/t The Wiz of Odds) about how special he is (if he ever leaves coaching, he’ll be a natural in PR), this time some rag called Men’s Journal.  The article is called “Crunch Time for Boy Wonder”.

Two quotes lie therein worthy of retort.

“I could sit here and say, ‘Why did Oakland happen? Why did leaving Tennessee cause the trouble it did?’ Those things happened to prep me for this, to be a stable manager in a crisis. My model was Obama and his coolness under fire, the confidence he projects during disaster.”

Nice touch with the Obama reference and all – you can hear Junior trotting that out on the recruiting trail, can’t you? – but wouldn’t it be better finding a model who avoided causing crises in the first place?

On how the NCAA-imposed sanctions will affect his players and staff:

“The players here now, they’ll barely feel it – they’ll play one game less a year and move on. It’s my staff that’ll take the hit in three years, when we’re down 30 guys and playing freshmen. That’s what burns me – those men and their families. How are they to blame for what happened?”

You know, I bet Derek Dooley knows just how Kiffin feels about that.

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Amen, brother.

You ought to read Austin Murphy’s paene to college football, which reflects an attitude I’ve had seemingly forever.

Here’s a nice encapsulation:

… How cathartic it must be for John Short, a middle-aged insurance salesman who was attending his 27th straight Georgia-Florida game when I met him, to don his foam Bulldogs helmet and bone-shaped Bite me, Gators bow tie, inflate the Hairy Dawg blow-up figure atop his van, then commence mixing his famed (and feared) 14-ingredient, antifreeze-colored “Gator-killer punch.”

These are the passions spawned by college football’s ancient feuds, which have no NFL equivalent, and which serve as border disputes and culture clashes all at once. Two of the best known of those — Florida versus Georgia and Texas versus Oklahoma — engender such hostility that they must be contested in neutral settings…

The season can’t get here soon enough.