Oblong Ball

Fred Taylor, the legendary basketball coach at Ohio State, used to have a favorite term of disaffection for America’s autumnal gridiron sport. He called it “oblong ball.”

In few other years has oblong ball worked better as a metaphor for the game. The past two months have been one big, strange bounce of football fortune, more uncertain than Tennessee weather, a wilder ride than the Dow.

Back in September, who’da thunk that Southern Cal would be out of the championship mix because of a loss to a 43-point underdog? Who’d have imagined we might be stuck with a title game featuring West Virginia? Who’d have believed that Notre Dame, in the leanest year for the Irish since the Potato Famine, would have to slop out victories over Duke and Stanford to avoid a 1-11 season?

Needless to add, if you put had $100 on the proposition that Kansas and Missouri would be playing for No. 1 on Thanksgiving weekend, you could retire to Costa Rica.

But you don’t even have to leave the good ole SE of C to find your fill of oblong bounces.

Barely a month ago, it looked as though not even another $1 million donation to the school—some folks dubbed it a “performance rebate”—could save Phillip Fulmer’s job at Tennessee. But after their debacle at Alabama, the Vols survived South Carolina, Vanderbilt and Kentucky, with escapes implausible enough to draw respectful whistles from the scriptwriters of 007 films. Now Fulmer has earned himself an extra-wide berth in the SEC Championship game and a reprieve from the hangman.

Barely a month ago at Alabama, Nick Saban still looked like the $32 million head coach-slash-savior who would restore the Bear’s kudzu-choked kingdom, ushering in a new messianic age in which lions eat lambs, the wolf devours the kid, and honking red elephants stomp everything else. Now, after four straight losses—including a mind-bending defeat at the hands of Louisiana-Monroe, a name Dan Patrick suggested was more befitting an exotic dancer—more than a few in the Heart of Dixie wonder if a performance rebate from their own coach might be in order. (Ousted coach Mike Price, for what it’s worth, would have known how to handle a Louisiana-Monroe.)

Barely a month ago, it looked like Vanderbilt might attain its first non-losing season in 25 years. Instead, while fielding arguably their strongest team of this long wilderness sojourn, the Dumbledores dropped their final four games to finish 5-7.

Barely a month ago, LSU looked like the best team in America. (Still do, actually.) But after an overtime defeat against Arkansas—a team with its own Top Five pretensions in September, before the caprices of oblong ball took their toll—the Tigers will meet the Vols in an SEC title match that, for the first time since Beano Cook wore short pants, has zero national championship implications.

Switching from the realm of paid amateurs to paid professionals, it was barely a month ago that the Tennessee Titans stood tall at 6-2, with a playoff ticket that looked all but punched. Now, after three straight weeks of what our younger generation of analysts would describe as “total suckage,” the Titans suddenly appear to have more holes than even the injured Albert Haynesworth can plug.

So many reversals of fortune have left folks a little bewildered (except in Vandyland, where breakdowns that turned three likely SEC W’s into L’s brought fans back to terra cognita).

Fans of Tennessee’s rivals, bummed by the Vols’ resurgence, found a silver lining in knowing they would continue to see Coach Phil on the sidelines, instead of a successor who might instill more fear in them. (My friend Don “Big Head” Pearson, a rabid Orange fan who claims to retreat to a trailer in the Rutherford County woods after particularly humbling losses, says Fulmer’s newfound job security put a little black cloud over an otherwise glorious weekend.)

And down in ‘Bama, Coach Saban, seeking a vocabulary to describe his team’s reaction to Louisiana-Monroe, invoked 9/11 and Pearl Harbor in one bad breath. He caught so much hell from the National Media that a spokesflunkie was compelled to issue a clarification.

I say Saban got an unfair bounce from people who don’t know just how serious football is in Alabama. Memories of 9/11, which happened way off in New York, will eventually fade; 21-14, a score that will live in infamy, was suffered right there in Tuscaloosa.