Monday, September 26, 2011

Beary Bad Ball

Writing about the plight of one's college football team is a lot like complaining about a persistent rash.  Friends tend to distance themselves and enemies exult.

So, the Colonel apologizes in advance to the dozen or so of you who persist in wasting valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon for subjecting you to the following. 

Yesterday at church, the Colonel sat with his pre-service coffee klatch and opined that he was actually heartened that after having been away from the cultural center of the universe here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere for 30 years, he had returned to find Ole Miss football right where he left it upon his graduation  --  mired in mediocrity.

Actually, referring to the current state of Rebel football as mediocrity is an insult to mediocre programs everywhere.

Ole Miss football is, well, just awful.

At times like these, and there are times like these all too often in the life of an Ole Miss football fan, the Colonel is reminded of something credited to Robert E. Lee and paraphrases it here: "It is good that Ole Miss football is so terrible, or else I would grow too fond of it."  

The Colonel could be boorishly snide at this juncture and point out that the gridiron slump coincides with the administration's evisceration of every tradition at the University of Mississippi in the name of political correctness.  But, he won't go there.

Okay, maybe just a short side trip over there.

Long-time Ole Miss mascot Colonel Reb has been banished and replaced by a bear.  Supposedly, finding the bear was the culmination of a free and open mascot search.  However, if one peeks out from under his tin-foil hat for a moment he'll have no problem recognizing the signs of a massive conspiracy that perpetrated this fuzzy fraud on Rebel Nation.  One needs look no further than the rallying cry that began to appear in print coincident with the disrespectful disappearance of Colonel Reb: "Be A Rebel!"

The Colonel will pause briefly to help the Alabama and LSU grads among the few of you upon whose screens this missive has materialized to catch up.  Look at the first four letters of "Be A Rebel."

Keep looking. 

Sound the letters out.

Okay, while the tide and tiger alums work on figuring it out, the Colonel will continue.

Back to the sorry state of Ole Miss football.  With a 1 and 3 start to the season (the one win being an anemic effort against an FCS opponent), even the most fervently faithful and perpetually positive fans are having a hard time calculating how the total in the win column will even match last year's.  (For those of you who mercifully don't closely follow the merciless misery that is Ole Miss football, the win total last year was 4 -- the same as five of the last ten years' result.)  

As a result, Rebel Nation is on the cusp of yet another winter of discontent wherein the following questions will be asked ad nauseum:

1. How much longer will the Harvard of the South (by reciprocal agreement, Harvard is allowed to call itself the Ole Miss of the North) be allowed by the Stalinist purveyors of political correctness to use the appellation: Ole Miss Rebels?  

2.  How much longer will incompetence and ineptitude continue to be the two critical criteria by which athletic directors and coaches are hired at the University of [name of school and state found to be offensive and hereby redacted pending politically correct replacement]?

3.  How much longer will the [offensive title of the author redacted] continue to expend his meager treasure on season tickets?

The [offensive title of the author redacted] loves [offensive name of the state redacted], and can think of nowhere else on [offensive reference to a possessive Deity redacted] Green Earth he would rather live.  It's just a good thing the [offensive reference to a militaristic organization redacted] provided him with lots of training at being miserable.       

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